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GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
Lest you think this is yet another CoC, the guidelines assure you that they are not a CoC.
Announcing the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines
The GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, initial version, have been published in https://gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html. On behalf of the GNU Project, I ask all GNU contributors to make their best efforts to follow these guidelines in GNU Project discuaaions[sic].
[ . . . ] The difference between kind communication guidelines and a code of conduct is a matter of the basic overall approach.
A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them.
[...] The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind.
[ . . . . ] I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action
The best way to avoid conflict and encourage diversity is to force everyone to voluntarily think alike.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday October 29 2018, @07:15PM (7 children)
>It never ends because they are not interested in the outcome but in the process.
I'm perpetually annoyed by that treadmill as well, but let me offer a different interpretation:
The Vocal Minority uses Negro as an insult so often that the insulting snear effectively becomes part of the definition of the word. So that term gets "banned" from polite conversation and replaced with Black as a courtesy to those who have heard it so often that they can't help but hear the insult even when it wasn't intended.
But the Vocal Minority doesn't want to be excluded from polite conversation, so they start using Black as well - only they also want to keep insulting Negros, so they keep heaping all the same insulting connotations that Negro had acquired on Black as well. Eventually Black becomes no better a term than Negro was, and the term gets changed again.
It a linguistic game of cat and mouse, where the people who want a word that means "a person with clear African ancestry" need to keep coming up with new words for that meaning, because the people who want to say "those damned dark-skinned subhumans" while in polite company keep corrupting the old ones.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday October 29 2018, @11:48PM (4 children)
You describe something that indeed happens, but then the elite deciding what you can utter or not, would stop trying after the first step because it is clearly a lost cause (failing theoretically and practically, no less). Any name is ultimately conventional.
Of course if you are offensive you carry the responsibility for the reactions. But what about being offended used as an excuse for thought control? Have we forgotten about Charlie Hebdo, or Dalai Lama's conferences?
And what about people who could not possibly being slave masters being forced to switch to different words to avoid offending people who were never slaves? Negro was a normal word in Italy till the first 70s. It became racially charged because people here monkey the Americans. OK. Now you get immigrants, who should nothing to complain about their hosts with p approaching 1, making a fuss about it so that popular songs lyrics are being amended. This is pure muscle flexing, and the correct reaction as far as I am concerned is, freedom first, you NIGGERNAZI COMMIEFAGGOT ATHEIST TRUMPTARDS.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday October 30 2018, @12:38AM (1 child)
It's not a lost cause though - you get years, maybe decades in which the new term serves its purpose passably well before it gets too corrupted. A whole generation of kids gets to grow up without *everyone* carelessly hurling unintended racial slurs at them.
I recall an anecdote about a fast food manager asking his boss why he should bother having the kitchen cleaned every night when it's just going to get dirty again the next day - to which the boss replies "You wipe your ass, don't ya?"
Also - what elites? And what thought control? As far as I've ever been aware, the new terms have generally started pretty close to grass roots, and eventually get adopted by more high-profile individuals, until a critical mass is achieved and most everyone assumes everyone else recognizes that the old terms have become a racial slur, and that the only reason to use them is if the slur is your intent. Nobody is trying to control your thoughts, they're just trying to talk to and about black people without hurling around racial slurs in the process.
Nobody is even trying to control the words you use - you can keep on hurling around the old slurs as much as you like - you just can't do so while pretending you're not racist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 31 2018, @10:33AM
> Nobody is trying to control your thoughts
LOL or they are pretty successful at it. Your model of the world implies grassroots efforts become mainstream and end up dominant. OK. Grassroots efforts are like noise. Then the media amplifies one frequency because it is useful to do so. This is my model of the world, instead. In fact we are discussing one effort, FOSS, in the process of being pwned.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday October 30 2018, @02:56PM (1 child)
People who weren't slave masters feel it reasonable to assert that they don't enjoy white privilege.
But really they do: if you look at the history of African Americans since the Civil War there have been constant efforts to keep them down. Consider that the entire time I was at Caltech, there was only _one_ black student out of eight hundred undergrads.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday October 31 2018, @11:02AM
Looking for equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity is so amazingly immoral and astoundingly foolish as to boggle the mind. It implicitly calls both effort and merit irrelevant and says you must accept people based on superficial characteristics.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by The Vocal Minority on Tuesday October 30 2018, @10:52AM (1 child)
I protest! You are spreading vicious disinformation. Check my posting history sir you will find no such language. ;)
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday November 01 2018, @09:17AM
> The vocal minority: "I protest!"
Here we go again
Account abandoned.