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Comment by exabrial | Hacker News Reader

We could have a bunch of reform: from reducing the police force size and budget, to removing pointless offenses ("no victim no crime"), to reduce interaction with police, to eliminating all government programs so to eliminate financial dependency on the government (create a toehold for systemic racism)...

Yet, we're renaming git master to git main. The profound and widespread impact of this will surely sweep the nation and cure systematic racism. /s

Point being: Everyone is more than willing to say they support change, nobody is willing to do anything difficult, so they put forward crap PR moves like this that are completely non-consequential.

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Even incremental progress is progress. And sometimes, incremental progress can happen at such an obtuse angle that it becomes completely unmergeable back to `main`. But you can always point to the spirit of the branch.

I'm not sure this is incremental progress.

If we rename the branches beyond Github's UI lots of things will break. And will it really affect racist attitudes even marginally? I can't see it myself. In which case, rather than progress, it's a distraction from anything that otherwise could afford real progress.

^ exactly my point. It's a distraction.

>Even incremental progress is progress.

Is this progress, or the appearance of progress (aka masturbation)?

This is Microsoft, a trillion dollar company that continuously lobbies the government on issues much less important to society than systemic inequality. They've decided the proper corporate action in the wake of new civil unrest over racism is to change a variable name in an esoteric professional tool. A tool used almost exclusively by people smart enough to recognize the lack of active malice in the current name.

The proper response to Microsoft by anyone who cares about racism should be to recognize the insult to their intelligence.

This isn't all Microsoft is doing

https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/face-scans-police-microso... https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-ceo-pledges-to-fight-rac... & here's a post from March: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/03/microso...

Weeding out this sort of terminology was already happening before recent events

Full disclosure: I work for Microsoft

How we use our everyday language is incredibly important to fighting systemic racism. The words we use influence how we think. To use an extreme example, I've worked with and along side people who were in and around human trafficking, and I know that little things can have a very big impact.

To put it another way, for a very long time we celebrated Christopher Columbus as an American hero. How do American Indian peoples feel about the celebration of a genocide of their ancestors?

You’re essentializing races. First - how do you know first hand that any of these people care? Second - why would it be a 1:1 correspondence that simply being a certain ethnicity means you hold a certain opinion?

And beyond the essentialism, you’re arguing for a set of actions and policies that infantilizes and victimizes ethnicities. Not to mention, polarizes everyone involved in the discussion.

> First - how do you know first hand that any of these people care?

Because I talked to them and they told me.

> Why would it be a 1:1 correspondence that simply being a certain ethnicity means you hold a certain opinion?

Where was that claimed? That's a strawman.

> you’re arguing for a set of actions and policies that infantilizes and victimizes ethnicities.

Source? Do you have some studies that show these specific actions and policies infantilizes, just for example, black people in the USA?

Here is a source that shows microagressions cause psychological damage [1].

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161982749...

> Because I talked to them and they told me.

That's precisely why I'm saying you're generalizing entire races (not just black people either, which is even weirder that you claim all minorities are ravaged by "microaggressions") based on a sample.

> That's precisely why I'm saying you're generalizing entire races

No, your question was "how do you know first hand that any of these people care?"

I know that any of these people care, and first hand, because they told me. That's the opposite of your claim that I'm generalizing.

> you claim all minorities are ravaged by "microaggressions"

Another strawman. I never said that. You still have not provided a source that supports your claim about that these specific actions and policies infantilizes at least some people.

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