On Mon, 15 Jun 2020 at 20:05, Lynn <kja...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 7:46 PM Alain D D Williams <a...@phcomp.co.uk> > wrote: > > > It is very easy to take offence when none is meant at all. One needs to > > look at intent. > > > > Hi, > > I'm going to disagree here. It's not about intent, it's about impact. You > can have the best intentions with the worst results. > > When I read the replies here, it makes me sad. The comments come from a > place of white privilege and I'm sad to see that's how people think about > it. > > Regards, > Lynn >
What saddens me is that these terms are non issues, and think they do something for "good" when it's just a pat on the back without doing any tangible change to the world. Case in point, from what I've seen mostly going around in the French community [1] is that the people who are actually concerned think it's woke and completely nonsensical. And I could argue the white-privelege here is to discuss these matters and imagine they would improve something. For blacklist/whitelist the benefit of changing it is that we can use more descriptive terminology such as deny/block/disallow and their opposite depending on context, which probably is more accessible to non-native English speakers. And if one wants to change it this should be the angle. However, I would argue that *if* when someone hears the word black the first thing which comes to their mind is race, then that makes them more of a racist and not the other people who use this with the well defined meaning. As such I would argue this is undermining the meaning of the word and pushing us towards an orwellian [2] state of the world. Moreover, black does not always mean something is "bad", see martial arts where a black belt is synonymous with experience and a white belt means that you are a novice. So instead of taking offence on behalf of a whole group and proposing changes which don't affect said group in any meaningful way while causing BC. Because if we decided to accept doing this, I shall start being offended about the usage of the word string as in French string means a thong and I imagine French women to be outraged that we (predominantly white males) casually talk about splitting or comparing strings. Best George P. Banyard [1] https://twitter.com/jesuisundev/status/1269260740894117890 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe64p-QzhNE
