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Comment by huygens6363 | Hacker News Reader

Guys, I know you hate change, but if these terms were all so innocuous and innocent, why the hate against this small change?

I’m from Holland and we have this weird thing called Sinterklaas where we dress up as black people and basically make fun of them.

However, don’t tell them this because they will tear you a new one. How dare you touch these sacred traditions.

I feel the same way about master/slave and gendered bullshit. It’s not the end of the world and let’s not make it bigger than it is, but sometimes you at least just have to admit things are fishy.

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Agreed entirely. The substitution in the article didn’t cause much inconvenience to the readers, even if it was new to them (it was new to me). But people sure seem to have an appetite for complaining about it rather than the substance of the article.

> why the hate against this small change?

Because it's not "this one small change", it's friction added everywhere where you're trying to communicate, while also implicitly (and sometime explicitly) being called evil for using well-established language.

It's also not 1-2 terms, people come up with new, increasigly far-fetched reason to ban new terms every year.

I'm trying to submit a patch, but instead I have to deal with a linter telling me that "blacklist" is evil, so I'm now supposed to either refactor the existing software or tell some vendor to please change their URLs.

I'm trying to understand something, but I now first have to guess what a term is supposed to mean, because each keyword with a well-established meaning has now been replaced with half a dozen of new terms.

I'm trying to push a git repo to Github and things break because different parts got updated to the politically-correct "main" instead of "master" at different times.

It's a no-win situation, either you just silently take it and put up with it - but that makes the problem worse, because people come up with more bullshit, or you push back. Either way you're stuck dealing with this, as you call it yourself, bullshit.

We have got: master/slave, blacklist/whitelist, master and now person-in-the-middle.

I’m sure we’ll find a few others.

You’re telling me these few changes and new terminology are too confusing?

It’s not like we are rethinking all of language. It’s a couple of terms and minor tweaks in ways of thought.

The amount of pushback is IMO disproportional to the minor inconvenience caused by learning a thing or two.

Remember that a lot of jargon that I cannot even repeat here used to be common vernacular not so long ago. My parents (and even I) for example were brought up with timeless children’s songs such as “nikkers dansen de troelala” en “hanky panky shanghai”. I’ll leave those for Google.

It’s better to move on sometimes.

Broadly, my objection is that these linguistic changes have had no positive impact on anything meaningful, and instead act as a corporate smoke screen for real issues.

> being called evil for using well-established language

That's not what happens most of the time. The term is being criticized, not the person who used the term.

Also just using the term because it's common and actually opposing any fix are to widely different stances.

> far-fetched reason to ban new terms every year

Slavery and gender equality matters are far fetched? Or do you have examples of actually far fetched reasons?

Of course if you are telling people those things are far fetched, not everyone will see you with a good eye.

Nobody is out there trying to censor the language and ban words for not reason / for the lulz.

For context to the above comment: "things are fishy" is a translation of a Dutch phrase "het klopt niet", which was thrown around during the pandemic, farmer's protests, a short lived qanon phase and other conspiracy thinking waves. It's an empty statement and feels tacked onto the above comment without explaining what exactly is fishy.

The push against making the Sinterklaas character of Zwarte Piet less of a racist stereotype is another culture war, provoked by shady organizations. Remember that there's foreign powers in whose interest it is to get people really upset over issues like this; they don't care who "wins", as long as people get upset over it and feel threatened by a boogieman.

Dutch people demand to know what is fishy about making a black face, dressing up in colonial clothes and acting childish. They think this is “empty talk”. There is a long, long list of these kinds of “cultural” behaviors. Especially the rural area is particularly backwards.

I don’t know what to say. Meet some people outside your bubble. It certainly helped me.

Anyway, the Dutch and their deep-rooted racism are only superficially related to this issue.

My main point was to say that there exists the possibility that you may be wrong about holding on to outdated norms and changing things might be a good idea. Sinterklaas is just a particularly obvious one, but as you show, a lot of people still have some way to go.

> the Dutch and their deep-rooted racism

ouch

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