Comment by interesthrow2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by interesthrow2 | Hacker News Reader

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> If we can be more inclusive with the labels we choose, that's a good thing.

You are claiming these words are "not inclusive" at first place, which is purely a matter of ideology, not semantics. Words have different meaning in different contexts. If you can't understand that, off course you will find everything "offensive".

Starting with the word "inclusive" itself which basically is newspeak at that point. You are right, language changes over time, and it's being manipulated by people like you to steer controversy and division, to deem this or that racist, sexist because you willfully ignore context for pure political goals. There is nothing confusing about "blacklist" or "whitelist". anybody can look up these words in a dictionary, if your "engineers" are incapable of doing that, maybe you should hire better ones. "allowlist" on the other hand is a useless neologism only driven by the need to effectively control the language to force your ideology on others, under threat of being deemed "not inclusive".

This is a political stunt, nothing more, you are asserting control over others, in the name of "inclusiveness" which is rather exclusive as a matter of fact...

> You are claiming these words are "not inclusive" at first place, which is purely a matter of ideology, not semantics. Words have different meaning in different contexts. If you can't understand that, off course you will find everything "offensive".

But "blacklist" could be seen in a negative light in at least some circumstances whereas that's not possible for "blocklist" in any circumstance. So why not use it? What's the harm?

> There is nothing confusing about "blacklist" or "whitelist". anybody can look up these words in a dictionary, if your "engineers" are incapable of doing that, maybe you should hire better ones.

You're misunderstanding their point. They are not saying "whitelist" is too confusing, just that "allowlist" is equally as good and in some cases maybe even slightly better.

> you are asserting control over others

Just because someone is criticizing something you've done doesn't mean they are "asserting control" over you.

Well, who decides what is deemed "not inclusive" now? you?

> So why not use it? What's the harm?

The harm is you likes with your intimidation and harassment tactics on social media trying to force your morals and political beliefs on everyone else in every possible circle and the insane finger pointing at those who refuse to fall in line because they don't agree with your ideology.

Antirez, author of redis has something to say about it, given the pressure he was victim of under the threat of being "casted out" of the open source community since the verbiage of his project was deemed "non inclusive". And he is not the only victim. You've gone too far.

> You're misunderstanding their point. They are not saying "whitelist" is too confusing, just that "allowlist" is equally as good and in some cases maybe even slightly better.

A word already exists for this, "whitelist" and it has nothing to do with race. You chose to make it about race, because you subscribe to a specific political framework, not out of "good intentions". You chose to deem it "problematic", because it's just another political battle for you and any victory is good to take. This is madness. Do you want me to list the groups across history that used the exact same dirty tactics? Although I'd rather not.

edit: there is an obvious sophistry in the act of complaining about racism yet furthering racist "idioms" by claiming a word that has "black" in it is automatically associated with race, or the idea of "slave" is automatically referring to European slave trade thus it hurts the feelings of people of African descent. This rejection of semantics and context itself is not "language evolution", it's straight out language hijacking. Now of course, you're free to believe in whatever you want, but we are passed that fact, we are now in an era where people who don't subscribe to that same ideology are harassed, intimidated and coerced into submission.

I don't know why you're strawmanning me into being responsible for every act of suppression by a person who claimed to be acting for social justice. I am not deeming anything any which way. I am just saying that there are obvious conceivable negative interpretations of the terms "whitelist" and "blacklist" that don't exist with the terms "allowlist" and "blocklist". And the work required to change the language that you use in this case is very small, so it's worth considering. That's it, that's the entirety of the argument here. Nobody is demanding suppression of anyone's ideas.

> I don't know why you're strawmanning me into being responsible for every act of suppression by a person who claimed to be acting for social justice

You are the one claiming "no harm done". I proved you wrong. Otherwise I would have absolutely no interest in that issue.

You gave some examples of how social justice overreach can be used as a guise to suppress people. Which is not really what I asked. I asked what the harm would be of you adopting the more sensitive language in your own usage. I didn't ask what the harm would be of you becoming a crusader against anything that could be perceived in a racial way.

> I asked what the harm would be of you adopting the more sensitive language in your own usage.

"sensitive"

sensitive according to whom? what morals? what ideology? I'm not hurting my own feeling as a black man every time I use "blacklist" or "slave" in a specific context that is even explained in a dictionary, why are you trying to force your political beliefs (because that's what it is) on me? why are you constantly patronizing me? that I indeed find it offensive. I'm not going to change the canonical definition of the words I use to please you.

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