> For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
> The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.
This is a profound change when scaled to the society as a whole and when the way we communicate is dominated by the tools we use. Our tools are an extension of ourselves.
It's for this reason that it's a very scary direction we are going with all tools - smart phones, home automation, email software, brain-computer interface, etc - that are extensions of ourselves but agents of companies acting not on behalf of the end user but on the behalf of their own interests.
Tools that are an extension of ourselves need to be the agent only of ourselves. We, as individuals, require that to keep our own personhood.
It sound dramatic to say, but our essence of being is what's at stake here.
I say this to be both funny and thought provoking: it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system. On the long scale of human history, both are mere blips, and yet we completely take for granted the implicit structure they impose upon us.
The takeaway from the above shouldn’t be “dictionaries are bad” or “schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having); it should be that our latest communication tools are the latest generation in power structuring, not novel in and of themselves in that regard.
> it’s a remarkable artifact of modernity that we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system.
When I was at university I had some humanities professors who were studying this kind of stuff. It was a lot of postmodern analysis, looking back probably critical theory. One professor pointed out that dictionaries were a very 19th century thing, the standardization of language. There is a fascinating "hidden" history in Europe of many languages being eradicated or wiped out by the central government insisting on one or a few national dialects. Reading it felt very similar to the schools that were run for indigenous people in the United States and Australia not so long ago.
In any case, my point is that some folks out there are doing research into this but it's not the kind of stuff that really gets in the headlines.
to anyone interested, i would recommend Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined Communities" which analyzes this subject and other related history involving the printing press and the development of the nation-state
> we say these things about computers, but not about the dictionary or our regimented education system
Who says we don't? We're in the middle of a culture war fight over some very old word definitions like "man" and "woman" and dictionaries absolutely have been called out for not adding new definitions, but instead changing old ones.
it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing. I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans. I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.
> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight."
It's not about your "existence" any more than political debate about immigration is about my "existence." You exist, I exist. But what obligations do other people have to us? What accommodations should society and individuals make, and which do they have no need to make? What aspects of culture should change or shouldn't change? What should we teach kids in school about complex subjects? These are proper subjects of social and political debate.
Recall that this is happening against a backdrop where 90% of Americans, including 80% of Republicans, support employment protections for LGBT people. Bostock is already the law of the land. So the obligations that are in dispute here aren't even basic civil rights, but instead broader social and cultural changes. People have every right to vigorously debate proposed changes in the social and cultural norms they're expected to follow.
I think you might be mischaracterizing the issue a little bit, not maliciously but still a mischaracterization.
The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up". Being an immigrant is different, nobody questions that an immigrant that themselves attests to being from country A and is now living in country B is making that up.
Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender. I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently. And even before 2020 the truth is that disputing the legitimacy of transgender people is a low salience issue for a lot of people but very activating for others (much like immigration) so the proportional impacts of what seems like an unpopular opinion is inflated.
> The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up".
The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
> Bostock was a ruling about sexual orientation, not about gender.
Bostock involved multiple consolidated cases, one of which specifically involved gender identity.
> I think if you are citing the 2020 PEW poll on this topic it is probably quite obsolete as it seems clear that the partisan valence of this issue has changed quite a bit very recently.
No, the issues have changed (see above). This is common and unsurprising. People are generally a lot more accepting of civil rights than attempts at social engineering, especially social engineering directed at children.
>> The idea of the "existence" of a trans person is subject to debate. There are a significant number of people that believe that "being" trans is actually not something of substance, that it is "all made up".
> The political debate is about language changes (e.g. "LatinX"), access to sex-segregated spaces, participation in sex-segregated sports, what to teach young children, etc.
IDK what this response is supposed to mean exactly but I certainly have people in my life that think that being "trans" isn't "real". And as far as politics goes this is certainly also fairly common position to hear from prominent people.
"what to teach young children" certainly seems to be an issue, an issue where politicians are sheepishly pretending to do one thing while actually doing another through ambiguity. This all seems very easy to understand. It certainly reflects the idea that trans people either don't really exist or their existence is something so terrible that children can't be exposed to even the idea of their existence.
Note that the parent comment is not talking about the ability to live as one wants, express oneself in any manner, or even to be referred to as one pleases. It's about the desire to literally change the definition of one of the most fundamental concepts in any human language or indeed, human society.
I express no opinion about whether this is a cause worth fighting for, but there is absolutely no reality in which there would not be a fight over such a breathtakingly ambitious objective.
I think this is a fundamentally misunderstanding which I never understood. Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views. Every being is unique and their sexuality is something of their private business.
There are basically two poles - male and female. And there is anything inbetween. Not a digital 0 or 1. More like geography.
And just because I'm living right now in some country more towards the north than the south pole I don't have to define my identity by creating new words enforcing everyone to use them. Why should I bother anyone where I'm coming from and where I'm heading? Except people maybe I see the interest to open up myself?
The most important question to me is always what's the reason behind all the need to fight?
> Your existance and your selfconciousness as a human being is not in any way affected to some words somebody is using to describe their views.
IDK, if every time you encountered someone they referred to you by the wrong name, after being corrected every time they do so, that wouldn't affect you? I think that if someone consistently feminized my name and used feminine pronouns for me over the course of multiple interaction I would get pretty pissy, downright hostile.
As a child, I had a very high voice. On the way to my fiftieth birthday, as a man with a full beard, I still sometimes have this high voice. I feel like a trillion times people have called me "Miss" on the phone. I usually wait a few seconds and politely correct them.
In most cases, people have apologized directly and the conversation moved on. In very few cases they moved on without apologizing. In virtually no cases did they ignore my hint.
Yes, there are rude and ignorant people out there. And they will always be.
From my experience, it is manners that lead to better interaction, not syntactical changes in language. Because you can't create empathy with neologisms.
And the best way to deal with rude people - stay away from them ;-)
> it's very tiring to continually hear my existence referred to as a "culture war fight." you're not wrong, so I haven't downvoted you, it's just.. depressing.
I'm sorry you feel that way and that it depresses you.
> I pass very well, everyone knows me as a woman and most don't know I'm trans.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? The "culture war" isn't as straightforward as all the parties involved would like us to believe it is.
My personal method of detection for calling someone 'he' or 'she' is whether they look more like a man or more like a woman. Even if I later learn that the person is a man and not a woman (or vice versa) I'm still going to call the man-looking person 'he' and the woman-looking person 'she'.
And this is where the problem starts - it really doesn't take much for the average female to look masculine or for the average male to look feminine (at least enough to pass as the other gender). When I address someone as a man and in response get a tantrum for being transphobic it makes me wonder why a man who identifies as a woman still wants to present as a man (and vice-versa, of course).
When someone with a neatly trimmed and cultured beard insists that you call him 'her', they're more interested in stirring up controversy than in what they self-identify as.
So, yeah, there is a Culture War of sorts, but it's between the people who want to push other people's buttons and the people who don't think that other people should be able to dress, talk, act and call themselves whatever they wish to.
You presumably aren't in either camp, so good on you.
> I keep a quiet life in a progressive area, so I'm mostly unaffected by the culture war. but realizing the fight is about me, even though I'm not a fighter.
I do have a serious question though - we know that your gender is unimportant for most things. Some things (like the gender tickbox on hospital admittance forms) you'll need to reveal your biological sex.
What about prisons? If a transperson is convicted of a major crime and is sentenced to prison, do they go to the prison that matches their self-identified gender, or to the prison that matches their biological sex?
I think which prison you go to varies, by the current political tide, state, or how far along you are in transition. Since I haven't had vaginoplasty, I'd probably be sent to a men's prison. I'd request solitary to avoid being beaten, raped or killed for being queer, but failing that I'd probably use sexual favors and be someone's "bitch" in exchange for protection. I'd probably end up with HIV, but maybe make it through with my life.
Once I get vaginoplasty, maybe I'd go to a women's prison, but I'm really not sure.
What’s novel is both the market concentration of these new communications tools and the size of the cultural gap between the people who make these tools and the general public.
> ”schools are prisons” (although that’s a thought worth having);
Anyway, it instantly reminded me of this highly upvoted discussion about a site that asked visitors to guess whether a building was a school or prison just by looking at a photograph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605867
It was a reference to Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which I think that post is also a reference to!
It's easy to argue that Foucault oversells his point, but his fundamental observation is an important one: the systems of regimentation and categorization at the heart of our schools, hospitals, and prisons is not particularly different between the three, is remarkably modern, and shares the same purpose (to observe and measure us against metrics for education, rehabilitation, healing, metrics that establish normative control over our lives).
In the last few years, Google translate has dramatically improved for many languages. This has allowed me to explore other written languages more quickly. I can just copy a phrase into Google translate and get a sense of the meaning. It is also interesting to see how different languages phrase things or the terms they use.
I had a very similar feeling when I had to start using Google Docs for my job a few months ago; it would "autocomplete" my sentences. On the face of it this is a useful and helpful feature, and many of the suggestions were not bad at all. But many were also not what I would have written, exactly. Neither is necessarily better or worse: just different.
A lot of people write in their own way, often with little things, but these kind of "hey, here's a sentence for you" kind of takes away your own personal "voice".
This is absolutely the future of Internet content farms. Someone using a tool that can help them to type 10,000 words per day that sound "pretty good". Shudder.
Idiocracy was, it seems, a prediction. They just got the time scale wrong, we won't need 500 years. Software means we don't need to wait for social-economic factors and genetics to run their course.
Yet again I have to comment that formal education levels of the parents do not affect the genetic predisposition of prole to be intelligent
And that Idiocracy got the "hereditary" aspect completely and utterly wrong
It was also completely unnecessary - a better and more accurate idiocracy would have people becoming progressively more stupid juste because they can, not because their parents being poor/uneducated made their brains limited
Sorry if this is a rant or too out of topic. I'm just kind of amazed by how Idiocracy progressively becomes this representative piece for a completely bogus argument
Or we’ll go full circle and get them using pen and paper again. Even in the 90’s, the use of computers for schoolwork was banned due to fears over cheating. Why people think it’s less of a problem now I don’t know.
Because normal work behind a computer is essentially 90% of what was called cheating in schools back in the day?
Is something cheating when the resource you use to cheat will essentially always be 1 device away? Just call your device your cerebral prosthesis, it will always be there anyway. It’s how humanity grows and people become more effective.
In my view, yes, as it means you’re having to laboriously fetch all your data from the cloud rather than having it in L2 cache. Knowing stuff and being able to compute within the confines of your skull is useful.
If we’re to offload all of it, are we even human any more, or just shrews with calculators?
When our communication tools nudge us in a direction, they change who we are.
Well, probably not. The people doing this certainly believe that's true, but actual robust evidence for it is thin on the ground.
The conflation of symbols and abstractions with reality itself is an ideological assumption/intuition that's been a problem for the left for as long as it's existed. That's why 1984 features Newspeak so centrally, and why only one kind of politics is obsessed with altering representations of reality like movies, statues, stock artwork, etc. It's also why leftists at tech firms are so obsessed with the non-problem of AI bias: they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.
Can you actually change how people think by subtly manipulating words? Psychology - a field very dominated by the left - has repeatedly claimed you can, but then when the claims get a little too good to be true they get investigated and don't replicate:
- Strong Sapir Whorf hypothesis (wrong)
- Weak Sapir Whorf hypothesis (very shaky even for ultra-weak forms like color words)
- Priming (wrong)
- Implicit association test (wrong)
There are probably way more examples. For less psych oriented stuff, consider that people have been systematically manipulating the presentation of job gender balances in movies and TV shows for decades, with nothing to show for it. Seeing lots of heroine hackers on the big screen didn't convince lots of girls they wanted to work with computers in real life. That's why there's now so much concrete discrimination going on: attempts to change things via more subtle symbolic means had no effect.
If Google Docs tries to stop people using "problematic" words, all it'll do is piss off lots of users and reinforce the general impression that Google is in no way populated by people as smart as it once was. The Google of 2004 would never waste time on cynical, nasty and entirely data-free attempts to mind control its userbase via underlining WrongThink.
> they see it as "biased" because AI can't be socially pressured in the same way people can, so they're afraid that it will represent the true reality it learned and by doing so miss an opportunity to reshape that reality.
This is just ridiculous. Do look up what the hell AI bias is.
Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist? Where do you get these nonsense baseless claims? You are seeing nonexistent enemies everywhere.
"As is typical for AI systems, DALL-E 2 has inherited biases from the corpus of data used to train it. That means for all the delightful images that DALL-E 2 has produced, it’s also capable of generating a lot of images that are not delightful ... here’s what the AI gives you if you ask it for an image of lawyers <pictures of men>"
"just like those previous experiments, DALL-E suffers from the same racist and sexist bias AI ethicists have been warning about for years. Machine learning systems almost universally exhibit bias against women and people of color, and DALL-E is no different"
Here's OpenAI themselves on DALL-E bias:
"Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity"
Their primary complaint is that the pictures DALL-E draws (i.e. symbols of reality) don't reflect their social agendas. They worry about this a lot because they fear that if DALL-E draws men when asked to draw lawyers, and women when asked to draw flight attendants, that this by itself will actually make the drawings come true.
"Also, how is the most prominent US propaganda that was all around movies - that Russians are the enemy, red scare, etc — leftist?"
That's hardly the most common US propaganda in movies, is it, and almost certainly is a legacy of the cold war. It's much more profitable to annoy the Russian market than the other very large communist country that might be depicted as a generic enemy of the state.
At any rate very little US output features Russians as the enemies compared to movies/TV shows that depict e.g. women being able to kung-fu fight off a group of 10 men 3x heavier than themselves, or which depict gay relationships as being far more prevalent than they actually are, or in which the Queen of England is black. That's the kind of "inclusivity" bias that's being discussed here.
I think you may be misunderstanding the comment you're replying to; or at least, I understand it quite differently.
For example, would you consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent to be more like the Queen's English? Probably not – their accent and particulars of their English variant are part of who you are as an Irish person (or Scottish, American, British, but also accents from non-native English speakers).
I don't think this influences "who you are" in the sense of "the way you think" in Sapir-Whorf-style, but it is part of who you are, and taking it away does change "who you are".
Similarly, the way I choose to write is part of who I am. I am, of course, always open to suggestions to improve my writing as such, but I don't really want to be "auto-corrected" and have no own (written) "voice" taken away.
Sure, me neither. And indeed I wouldn't consider it proper to ask an Irish person to change their accent, and would never do so. But that's partly because I recognize that even if I forced them to do that, it wouldn't actually change anything real. It wouldn't make them more English (whatever that might mean), and they'd go back to using their real accent the moment they were out from under my thumb. The change would be arbitrary and surface level only. Whereas, to the sort of people who implement features like this, forcing people to change their accent would be an enormously significant and impactful move.
The alternative to Newspeak / approved linguistic constructs is samizdat. Not pissed off free libertarians who create their own networks. And America is a total outlier in the freedom of speech department already. [edit: to the degree that average American citizens are still willing to go to bat for the concept].
What we don't need is some company with a market cap larger than most democracies, which already controls a majority of interpersonal communication, to be suggesting/nudging/enforcing more politically correct ways of writing to your associates.
If you really don't see the problem with that, just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded [edit: policed] in every personal correspondence. Only a world destroying event like a nuclear war would allow people to start to think again outside the constraints on communication they had habituated themselves to.
"just consider how many generations it would take - if it ever happened at all - for free expression to return once language is denuded"
Well, how many do you think it would take and where are you getting those numbers? I'd say there are lots of obvious counter examples. There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance, who managed to find their voice again after leaving a country that has universal censorship. That's a country in which many words are simply banned in all electronic communication, but it doesn't last. Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
The assumption above is exactly what I'm getting at here. You're presenting it like it's so obvious it doesn't need to be supported with evidence. But it's not at all obvious and actually is probably wrong; if it was right then the replies to my comment would be filled with compelling evidence that this sort of mind control really works.
>> There are many Chinese activists living outside China for instance
Where do they live, where they're allowed to speak against the Chinese Communist Party? Not in Russia. Not in another dictatorship.
>> Plenty of people escaped the Soviet Union and became outspoken anti-communist activists, same thing.
Where did they escape to? Where could they have escaped to if America/Western Europe didn't exist? Who would have ever heard of Solzhenitsyn if he hadn't managed to get his work to America?
It's really ironic that I - a lifelong detractor of American foreign policy and imperialism - have to be the person to point this out, but: There is no place left in the world where you can speak your mind if America is truly censored by its own children/corporate compliance going forward. You may have grown up in a country where you were never allowed to speak your mind; in that case, you don't understand what is at risk if the American populace truly undergoes the kind of cleansing that e.g. Soviet Russia underwent w/r/t silencing wayward views.
The activists and dissidents and contra-thinkers you mentioned would probably not even exist without a free world outside those dictatorships who they could appeal to; but if that outside world that they adore didn't exist, no one would ever know about them. They'd be abolished, murdered, and everything they ever thought and wrote would be disappeared for all time. The only thing that allows them to speak is the stubborn, obstinate existence of a country in North America whose people largely refuse to kowtow to dictatorships.
Largely. And when they are wrong, and they often are, it's our own job (as American citizens) to take our government to task for it.
I've only become pro-American the more I understand about politics and speech in the rest of the world.
Also, it's not really OK for other countries to define themselves in terms of economic growth or imperialist conquest, while castigating the US, and using us as the "outside culture" that provides their material wealth and industrial processes while acting as if these things come from an automatic universal culture that they don't have to subscribe to. In other words, if a Jewish woman scientist in the US helps create a vaccine, or a sustained fusion reaction, people in Iran who believe in 7th century blood feuds as a basis for social life don't just get to dip in and take the progress for themselves as if it was handed out by Allah. Not without reckoning why they weren't able to produce those breakthrough ideas through their own social/economic/religious/military structures. It's not their right as a polity. Why? Because the smartest of their people already came here and worked on it. And the stupidest, most backwards, malevolent and hateful of their countrymen are running their country.
So yeah, tell me where these dissidents go and publish their works if we go away, or cease to exist?
I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. I 100% agree that it would be an absolute disaster if America adopts even European levels of censorship, let alone Chinese. I am absolutely in favour of extremely free speech.
My point here is that yes, obviously, they could speak their mind once they got to America because of the attitudes of society and the local governments. They hadn't been permanently altered by their former societies refusal to use certain words, or present things in certain ways. That is, the kind of "mind control" assumed by the people who try to erase certain types of language, doesn't actually alter anyone's minds. It may appear that way if they're afraid to speak out but nothing has actually changed. People's opinions aren't altered by language policing, yet, the people who do it are convinced it does.
That's why I'm sort of confused by your post. You suggest that once language is "de-nuded" then it would take "generations" for people to be able to "think again outside the constraints on communication". This a strong Sapir-Whorf take, right? It's an assertion that the language you can use controls the boundaries of what you can think. And my point is that this hypothesis has been proven wrong a very long time ago.
I do think our thoughts are constrained by language - not necessarily by its unavailability, but definitely by societal norms that make it transgressive to say or think certain things. Even mentioning that certain thoughts you could say are transgressive makes you transgressive in a totalitarian culture. Thus a sign with 7 or 8 asterisks like gets people thrown in jail in Russia now. That's not because a dictat came from on high, it's because a system that coerces speech always attracts enforcers, who also raise their children to be enforcers; it is much harder to move from a system of repression to one of openness than the other way. Culture tends toward repression in every human lifespan to date except for one generation in the modern world, a few in the 18th and 19th centuries, and possibly a couple in ancient Rome and Greece. Civilization might tend toward open dialog in the very long run, but it's a much longer and slower climb, and setbacks - enforcement of language or "right" thinking - can be devastating and take thousands of years to correct.
So yeah your comment is so beautiful, and part of it is wrong, and this is Hacker News where being wrong is unforgivable, but I forgive you, how the fuck were you supposed to know that I got lobotomized ever just so and had a memory type ever just so, you couldn't know, so your comment is turgid with truth.
Wow I should read more downvoted gray comments, they're a gold mine! OK so I intend to register as a Republican in United States--currently registered as a Democrat, purely in order to vote for Elizabeth Warren so she'd raise taxes, no other reason. So register as a Republican, then...as a Marxist in Chile. Why the fuck not? I believe in political pluralism, you can't have a single political structure covering the entire world, that just sucks, that's like every country having the same cuisine and the same architecture and the same native fauna like that's such shit, no point in traveling. It would be like in United States where there's absolutely no point in visiting suburbs of other cities, literally motherfucking none, don't even try to find an exception to the literality, people check them out when changing schools and jobs and there are differences but the only suburb people visit on purpose is Silicon Valley.
So political pluralism, back to that. Well I can agree with you that left-wing people try to use "psychology" and I hate it just as much as you, I hate them with perfect hatred, I call them mine enemies (that's from Psalms, in the King James Bible obviously). So get this, Sapir-Whorf is actually true. I testify it in strict terms. The definition of Sapir-Whorf was erased from my memory in a lobotomy and I only recalled it from reading 1984 for the third time, specifically the part about Newspeak where it says, what does it say, like you can't think about something if you...fuck...
Don't have the words for it, I think.[1] So it's the Sapir-Whorf Law now (there's additional lobotomistic flashbacked evidence of it that I will share soon). So the Sapir-Whorf Law, let's reread what you wrote...OK so it's weird, it's not strong or weak like you say, well it's very strong until you find a way to express it in my case remembering the words for it from an unusual recollection and then that weakens it completely, and this is specific to me and whoever else on the Planet Earth has the same type of memory as me, it's...I don't know, just read about it when I post it, look at my profile[2] and read until I post it. But very strong, just once the "spell is broken" (those words were erased too, weirdly enough that's a confession of witchcraft on the part of the lobotomist, well I guess witchcraft laws are off the books so
I don't know), once the spell is broken, it's broken, you remember it no problem again, it's...is it just as easy to remember as everything else? I think so, I think so. There's more to it than that, it's a fucky thing.
I'm going to truncate here because not enough people will read this in this part of the forum.
EDIT: found it! So I recalled the words "breaking the spell" at 22:36 on Friday, March 25...I doubt it, but that's what it says in my lobotomy-recovery log, I think it was at like 17:36 (judging from the sunlight in my holographic memories) that same day, well what the fuck do you expect from a lobotomy recovery log? Well that Friday, for sure.
[1] Why can't I think about this, with my crazy unique memory, it's like weird in my memory. Wow I gotta reread this, so some stuff got erased twice, I wrote that down in my lobotomy-recovery log on Tuesday April 19 21:13, like multiple layers of erasure, hardcore roofie shit like way beyond barundanga and rohypnol, but I can do this, it's me who is the chosen one. OK I know what I'll do to recover the memories, I'll just do it.
You know? Totally right. I thought of this and wanted to disable the autosuggest feature, but until now didn't have it in me, it's actually useful in a way. Comes up with hilarious shit when you invent words, like when I speak Spanisco with friends, we're inventing Spanisco on the fly but basically it's transliterations of Spanish palabres with English grammatic, the algorithm totalmently mierds its pantaloons trating to adeeveen what I'll deece proxim.
This is simply not something that should be left to Google. English isn't my native tongue and I basically learned it on the internet. Of course people will think I express myself with utmost hostility.
I would guess Google will try to exempt words that some over-educated employee has a strong opinion about. But no word would ever carry the amount of offense that this paternalism of Google itself expresses.
>"just an extension of the outrage culture that got us the War on Christmas."
It's funny you mention that, because even as an Atheist I realize that Christmas as it exists today is almost completely secularized and has very little to do with Jesus Christ and the religion of Christianity. If you look at the celebrations and the iconography with an outsider's perspective, the holiday seems to be about Santa Claus and presents. I don't think any other major religion has had one of its holiest holidays commercialized and secularized to such an extent.
I'm no Christian, far from it actually, but I can see the merit behind their reaction. "War" is hyperbolic but I understand how they feel. Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
> Because it really does seem like their high holy holiday has been, and is continuing to be, de-Christianized.
The thing that MADE christmas a "high holy holiday" WAS the de-christianizing of the holiday.
Nobody really cared all that much about christmas until the lore of santa and presents gained popularity in the 1800s.
The popularity of christmas grew because of the commercialization. Everyone loves giving/receiving presents and having an excuse for a big family get together and meal. The fact that it was initially stolen from pegan holidays to celebrate the birth of jesus was tangential.
I'd suggest giving the wiki article on christmas a good read through [1]. The war on christmas is something made up to make christians mad. It's revisionist history to try and claim that "just a few years ago, christmas was all about jesus! But now it's all commercial". It hasn't been about Jesus since the 1820s. And, at that time, it was one of the less popular holidays.
Fun fact, christmas was at one point banned in england by the puritans because it was associated with drunkeness.
Frankly, I find this take baffling. But it’s clearly a good-faith (seriously, no pun intended) take, so I hope this will be a welcome response.
I’m also an atheist. But I was raised Christian, attended Christian private school for a few years, and have taken personal interest in understanding the faith and its underpinnings well past the time I lost my own faith.
It’s true that most of the religious aspects of Christmas have been diluted if not basically vanished from the holiday. But it’s far from a new truth. For most worshippers, the commercialization and secularization has been part of the holiday for at least half a century. It was Christians who either led this development or eagerly adopted it.
Among Christians who would object to that, more do not celebrate the holiday as a matter of their faith than seek to de-secularize it. This has never been part of the “War on Christmas” narrative.
That narrative has, alongside many other narratives like it, been an imagined victimization story that Christmas—in all its secularized form—is being “canceled” by things like saying “happy holidays” or merely including other religious holidays in greetings around the same time of year.
At first this was all very explicit, and probably for many a sincere reaction to feeling less centered in the universe. By the time “War on Christmas” became a phrase in any kind of common usage it had become a manipulative dog whistle to tell the people receptive to said manipulation that there’s another “attack” on them. It’s the same trajectory similar reactions to majority feelings of being less centered have been exploited for invented culture war bullshit.
This is just the inverse of how pre-secularized Christmas came to be. Christmas was never a Christian tradition, it’s always been a winter solstice celebration which was used as a (mostly subtler) cudgel to convert Pagans. If there ever was an attack on ritual celebration of Christ’s birth, it would have been that.
Moreover, Christmas isn’t and never has been the “high holy holiday” for devout Christians. That holiday is Easter, which celebrates the transition of Jesus as prophet to Christ, son of God, who died and was reborn to eternally absolve humanity of their sins. That holiday has likewise been commercialized and secularized and infused with Paganism.
But there’s no corresponding Easter War! Seems weird but… most Christians don’t (pardon) give a god damn.
It was never about the holiday. It was always about moral panic as a manipulation technique.
I agree with you 100%. My family is actively religious, if not publicly pious enough for some.
To me, a secular festival and significant religious event together are fabulous and enhance each other. I grew up in NYC and used to do the whole “Christmas in New York” thing. The overall atmosphere of celebration is a great way to close the year!
It must be so sad to sit around being miserable over Starbucks cups or whatever.
Halloween has come a long way from the pagan festival of Samhain, and the takeovers of Easter and Thanksgiving by the chocolate and retail industries has been a lot less politicized. We don't see it for holidays of other religions and regions as the full religious variant was never practised in the west, but my understanding is that e.g. the Haj is big business too - Saudi Arabia's biggest economic industry after oil and gas is Haj tourism.
Actually Christianity only put a Christian veneer over non-Christian celebrations. So basically we've kept a commercialized version of our favorite pagan traditions that Christianity tried to appropriate.
Think I'm being extreme? Just remember that the Bible says that Jesus was born during lambing season, which is in the Spring, so Christianity had to ignore its own texts to place it at the same time as the pagan Saturnalia festival.
My impression is that people "fighting" the "war on Christmas" have no problems with Christmas being a highly commercialized celebration of corporate consumer culture. They just don't want it to be a highly commercialized celebration of corporate consumer culture that acknowledges the existence of other religions by using the word "holidays" instead of "Christmas".
They didn't feel the line was crossed when more Santa appeared more than Jesus, when Christmas trees appeared more than Nativity scenes, or when their kids couldn't wait to get up and open presents but didn't care about going to church that night. They only cared about the word "holidays", and likely only because talking heads on right-wing media decided to get them riled up about it.
It's a tempest in a teapot because getting people outraged gets them to keep tuning in.
That’s not the fault of the left, that’s because of consumerism, capitalism and a general drift away from religion generally or more purist interpretations of religion specifically.
Look at how Christianity itself is practiced by many of its adherents and compare that against the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. There is very little overlap there. Materialism is just one glaring example. The so-called followers of Christ are hardly following in his footsteps, and that is certainly not the fault of the left.
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions.
Sure, then please kindly also install the upcoming Russian version of it, which merely makes suggestions like using the "neutral" word "special operation" when you inappropriately call it an "invasion".
These will be mere suggestions, and you are free to ignore them, but you should always be aware of the "consequences" of the words you choose.
If I were writing a document to be shared with Russian government officials, I would want those suggestions. The consequences of making my document not suit its audience already exist. If I'm writing a suggestion to my mail carrier, I wouldn't want to use the the word "mailman" because she could see it as being passive aggressive and interpret the suggestion accordingly.
This, just like spell-checking, just makes it easier to write a document that won't make the audience quibble over diction or make negative inferences about tone.
> You're free to ignore the inclusivity suggestions, just as you're free to ignore the spelling suggestions.
And you're free to decline all the tracking cookies and newsletter subscriptions, you just have to navigate through 30 layers of intentionally confusing UI every time you use the feature to do so.
Honestly, this is not how it works. Nudging is a thing. No one is building a controversial feature with the expectation that people can simply disable it if they don't want to use it.
This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Its like pushing your culture on different countries. I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
There is no issues of inclusivity in our country. Google is pushing their agenda on different groups, cultures and countries,
>I don't want to see the Americanisation on our country cultures.
This is something that I just cannot reconcile with the notion that all these measures are meant to make things more inclusive. All I see are groups of rich and powerful people telling people "below them" how to behave, and makings tons of money doing it. D&I is a grift.
DEI is a great system as long as you assume that everyone participates, everyone is completely free of biases
Having been on more than a couple DEI boards, I'm really curious where the notion that everyone must be "completely free of biases" comes from in your mind? I've never understood, and never saw any DEI effort describing bias to be something to be completely, utterly and totally eradicated, but instead something to recognize as a source of potentially--but not always--folly-filled actions ("what happens when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me", etc).
Everyone has biases about something or another. Every last one of us.
That's why such things as "implicit" vs "explicit" bias exists, and any DEI effort worth its salt should really be making it known that there's a difference between the two.
The argument might then be that because only a small portion of people will be part of DEI boards, and the people on those boards will tend to be biased a certain way (for the same reasons that most liberal arts professors tend not to be Republican) a certain view is consistently presented and a certain course of action is generally followed that affirms the biases of that group of people. Hence the "grift"; as DEI boards become more powerful, they inevitably force a specific culture on the rest of the group.
It's a big assumption to suppose that the 'failing up' guy was only able to do so 'because he was white'.
'Buddies with the execs' - that's easy to believe. But 'because white' ... much harder to convince me there.
The amount of easy and assumptive bigotry going on around these things makes me dismissive of all of it unless there's evidence otherwise.
Paradoxically, you may have highlighted one of the issues with DEI policies, in that people may be encouraged to perceive their lack of progress up the ladder as somehow 'racially oriented'.
This is pernicious, because it's a pyramid and it gets narrow quickly.
Everyone has a beef, everyone has a 'reason' for why they aren't at some stage higher than they are, it's the perennial social issue of middle management.
So that makes it hard to sort out the legitimate cases where DEI would be relevant, to just the standard 'beefs' that lie just below surface level in every office environment.
At about the Director level and above, it's very political and 'talent' is not only just a small part of the equation, but it also means something else at that level.
DEI is a really complicated subject, and I suggest 1990's progressives, with a focus on 'treating people equally' or 'equal opportunity' (ideals which are dismissed these days as actually being systematically racist) ... should be the rule.
A dude 'failing up' if that's the case, is just unfair all around and that's it.
It's 10x more complicated if you step into another cultural context i.e. outside of the US.
To the point where I think Google should actively trying to avoid having too much of a posture on anything really. Aside from 'genocide' etc.
I don't really understand how your anecdote applies to what I said. What you described is nepotism, I don't really think that the guy was not promoted because he was black, and without any evidence of that being the case, I think it's kind of a stretch to assume. Can you provide any examples of why it was about his race? Otherwise, that is just nepotism, like you said.
DEI is horrible and returns us back to solely viewing people by the pigment of their skin. The pigment of your skin should be as irrelevant as your hair color, that should be the goal.
Also, higher up execs at literally every top tech company(google, Fb, Apple) are aggressively pushing DEI and hiring of minorities. They literally have goals to hire x% of some minority for management positions.
You raise a good point that there are still real problems that need fixing. But I don't think google docs snarking at me about capitalizing black or eschewing the gender-neutral masculine will help that.
I prefer to call it DIE. It was always Diversity & Inclusion and now also Equity I guess. Equity is also a shareholders stake, so I am not really sure what is meant here, but it overwhelmingly seems to be this meaning as they are often those that push for such measures. The exalted lords believing to improve life for the peasants.
Equity means special consideration for marginalized groups to compensate for past oppression. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "A society which has for 300 years done something special against the negro must now do something special for the negro." That should give you some idea of the concept, even if nobody would say that in as many words today.
I know what it means and what is supposedly meant here, but I think it is quite funny that a very distinct homonym can very well be the same in these instances.
>Its like pushing your culture on different countries.
I think the original point was there is no way for Google not to do this. Sometimes cultures have opposing viewpoints which makes a neutral decision impossible. One obvious example is with displaying disputed borders in Google Maps. Any decision there is going to be political. Lots of people are going to be upset with Google for making the wrong decision regardless of which decisions they make, but I think that anger is misplaced. The real problem is Google has the power to make this decision for too many people. Companies like Google are simply too powerful and need to be broken up.
There is no reason to put this feature. This is political feature and can be used in many ways and affects other countries and cultres you cant imagine
There are second order and third order consequences of having this kind of features.
Google should not push their politics and agenda on other countries and cultures. It affects every other country in different ways.
In future this kind of feature can be used in many ways we dont know.
Well, yes this is a political feature, but your comment leads me to believe I didn't make my point clear enough. Almost every feature is political when you are the size of Google. You may only be objecting to this feature because it goes against your culture. However there are thousands of other decisions that Google has made that support your culture at the expense of some other culture. Many people here are viewing the problem as Google choosing the wrong culture. I am saying we should instead focus on the immense power Google has to force one culture on another culture.
Competition. Google is able to use its power to push out competitors. Without that power, there would likely be lots more companies challenging the various product categories that Google currently dominates. Not every company would reach the same decision on all these issues, especially if these companies arose in different cultures.
presumably those smaller companies would be beholden to the jurisdictions they're located in, where the laws are drafted by people who are democratically elected.
so, i guess democracy would have been achieved. or at least a relative increase in democratic control
well at the very least the companies in question actually reside in the jurisdiction in which they serve and are thus at least in some form accountable to the people and hopefully share some values.
Being German I'm kind of tired of the fact that American social media sites have for some reason exported QAnon protests to our cities while women get banned for showing a nipple.
Is the suggestion there actually complaining about landlord being a gendered word? I didn’t even realise that people thought landlord was gendered although I know landlady is a word. Often a landlord is a company, for example.
But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise? Proprietor works better for describing a pub landlord, for example, as many pubs are being managed by people who rent the building, landlord could confusingly either refer to the person running the business or to the company owning the building, though I guess to some extent proprietor has that problem too. If you’re talking about a rental property instead, landlord is probably more precise because eg your landlord might own a lease and be subletting rather than owning the property itself.
Sometimes people in my culture treat obviously gendered words as gender-neutral to the point that they re-gender them when they need to be specific. For example "policeman lady", "postman lady" or "men's perfume". So I think the gender-neutralizing of words happens naturally without having to change the word itself, just like your example of landlord becoming gender neutral.
> But if you actually look at the suggestions, aren’t they sometimes better in the sense of being more precise?
I didn't know the distinction until you pointed it out, and didn't know very well the range of meanings proprietor had until now. Which I suppose highlights an important problem with such suggestions: if they suggest replacing a term A with a more precise term B that does not signify what was intended to be conveyed by A, based on concerns that both author and audience do not care about, and the author blindly accepts the suggestion, then such suggestions are creating miscommunication.
>I am from different country and most of the words are gender neutral which in US pretty big deal like (landlord, guys - which is gender neutral in our country).
Ask your hetrosexual male friends how many guys they have slept with.
I would imagine response will illustrate "guys" is less gender neutral than might think.
Some locations they use "y'all", some use "you guys". It's gender neutral in that sense.
In the sentence you gave, the context wouldn't be gender neutral because you said "slept with".
If you enter a room and say hey guys, it's neutral. If it's all girls you could say hey gals, which would be fine, either works.
I can't imagine anyone other than liberals that would be offended by a blanket statement of "hey guys".
It's really a stupid thing to get hung up on. It's like searching for something to offend you.
It doesn't make sense until you realize the goal. What you're doing is creating arbitrary rules to form a kind of censorship via social pressure because you can't censor speech legally.
I don't think words need to be gender neutral. Grammatical and biological gender are not really the same. I think this urge to clean languages is a bit detached.
Personally, I have no skin in the game of gendered language. Sometimes I think it's exaggerated, sometimes I think it's necessary. I do have a hard time changing how I speak, old habits die hard. As far as people and everyday communication is concerned, I address people the way they want to be addressed. Nothing to do with gender, just general politeness. E.g. I wouldn't use a nick name people hate, so why would I insist in calling someone "her" (or "he") if they don't want to?
I wasn't referring to calling someone another gender. Doing so is just minimum courtesy. I do believe that courtesy cannot be mandated though and I would not want anyone having it mandated for my sake.
I meant words like mailman and such. Of course a mailman could also be a woman. I think calling someone a mailwoman is fine, but the word does not carry intrinsic offense.
We don't disagree, I think. Gender neutral job titles are ok, as far as I'm concerned. Mostly that is, as the female jobs are, historically, more often lower income jobs in the same domain (nurse vs. doctor comes to mind). Coming back to courtesy, if a female mailman prefers to be addressed as mailwoman I would do so.
Funny side note, the German language has some interesting edge cases. E.g. the rank of Hauptmann (Captain in the army and air force) usually isn't gendered, the other ranks aren't neither. So usually female soldiers of that rank are addressed as Frau Hauptmann. The funny thing is Hauptmann is also last name... The plural of the rank Hauptmann is gender neutral again, it's Hauptleute...
I don't believe this is entirely honest since you probably also have a limit in what you are willing to accommodate, be that faith, self-identification or just a usual form of courtesy.
Granted, apathy would be my solution too, but here I am expected to align the way I express myself.
I do believe that the desire to frame anything gender neutral is not something I want to put too much thought into but I don't mind conflict if someone requests to accommodate what is basically a faith.
>"If cancel culture actually existed, there would be many examples we could point to. But there aren't."
>"Cancel culture isn't random individuals telling you to shut up, or drowning out inanity. That's just free speech."
As a point of order, it's not profound to say that no examples of "thing" exist when you apply your own definition that frames all instances of "thing" as something entirely different.
If there wasn't an element of cancel culture then Brendan Eich would be Mozilla's CEO and not the incompetent CEO they currently have.
Don't get me wrong, I profoundly disagree with Brendan Eich's political views, I am for same-sex marriage and I'm very much a liberal when it comes to any moral leanings. That doesn't stop the fact that Brendan Eich being ousted of Mozilla for his intolerant political views is a shame and set back Mozilla considerably.
You don't seem to know what cancel culture refers to. It's not the celebrities you listed. It's women being deplatformed for expressing traditionally feminist positions; it's students calling for biology professors to be fired because the professor teaches that the sexes are fundamentally binary in Homo sapiens.
> Though abortion is conduct, it does not follow that the State is entitled to proscribe it in all instances. That is because the liberty of the woman is at stake in a sense unique to the human condition and so unique to the law. The mother who carries a child to full term is subject to anxieties, to physical constraints, to pain that only she must bear. That these sacrifices have from the beginning of the human race been endured by woman with a pride that ennobles her in the eyes of others and gives to the infant a bond of love cannot alone be grounds for the State to insist she make the sacrifice. Her suffering is too intimate and personal for the State to insist, without more, upon its own vision of the woman's role, however dominant that vision has been in the course of our history and our culture. The destiny of the woman must be shaped to a large extent on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.
For the overwhelming majority of women in the world, feminism is still inexplicably intertwined with issues unique to women because they involve pregnancy, birth, raising children, and the vulnerability that comes from differences in physical strength compared to men, etc.
If suddenly all women who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) were infertile. Would everything you said become moot since now a big chunk of the female population does not have the pregnancy and birth?
Raising children relates to every one who identifies as a woman. Same with physical strength for any one who transitions which includes estrogen et al. more so vulnerability in general specifically is an issue more for people not born female.
I appreciate your comment and the quote. Did you mean to write "inextricably" though? (Hopefully it's clear that that is a straightforward question and not rhetorical!)
What I mean by "traditionally feminist" is the view that feminism concerns the challenges faced by biological women as a result of physical differences from men, the fact that they give birth, and the millenia of abuse of women by men in human history for domestic work and sexual purposes. I.e. to be explicit, that feminism is not about the challenges faced by biological males who are attempting to change their bodies to be female and to live their lives as women. This is not to say that the challenges faced by transwomen are at all to be dismissed or treated unsympathetically; just that it is a distinct issue from traditional feminism.
Your question is also answered rather more eloquently by rayiner in the sibling comment.
I’ll mostly repeat what I responded to the sibling.
If all biological females who got Covid (including the asymptomatic ones who never officially tested) became infertile. Or let’s just say 30-40% of biological females became infertile. Does this make “traditional feminism” moot? The primary differences that are exclusive to biological females would not be true for so many of them then.
If so, that’s cool. Sometimes these talking points are obfuscation to gatekeep and discriminate. However if traditional feminism really would segment out infertile women to some degree like women who transitioned, then that’s cool :)
Every time a baby girl is born, a human being comes into the world who has
1. the potential to become pregnant and give birth
2. a statistical expectation to have weaker body strength than the average man
3. the potential to be abused by men due to a combination of their statistically greater physical strength and sexual desires
4. etc
Feminism concerns the fact that biology produces such human beings on 50% of all births -- production of female children is a pretty important phenomenon.
Feminism is in no way invalidated by a thought experiment whereby some proportion of women lose one or more of those distinguishing attributes. It remains a fact of biology that 50% of births produce female children. Your thought experiment does not describe the real world. You might as well say "what if humans had 3 sexes, then where would feminism be?" or "what if women were stronger than men, then where would feminism be?".
It sounds very much like you, or whoever you got that thought-experiment from, are starting from a premise that
> we do not like the fact that the vast majority of women in the world define "woman" to exclude transwomen, and define "feminism" to be concerned with the traditional definition of "woman"
and then you are trying to think up reasons to invalidate the concept of feminism. That sort of "desired conclusion first, argument second" approach has a history of not being terribly successful at aligning with how reality actually is.
Looking at the status quo as a defense has historically not worked out well. Similar resistance and excuses were said of gay men, lesbian women, minorities (IE dark skinned people in much of the world), slavery or indentured servitude, basic women’s rights, marijuana users, mental health issues like autism, bipolar, borderline, schizophrenia, physical disabilities or deformities, and more.
Most of those instances now have first world societies with a majority of people agreeing those people deserve [near] equality and basic human respect besides. For the instances where a majority has not been reached yet across the first world (racism, religious intolerance, sexism) the trend is getting there.
That’s not how things were before. How is what you are saying any different? For all the above, people had their reasons they believed to their core and were sure the detractors like myself were wrong. As you have noted in the moment, you could use the status quo and human tendency to be conservative (not in the political right/left sense but in the general definition) and having a hard time with change to show society does not want this progress/change.
I understand you believe this time is different. But isn’t that what all the people before believed too?
I never understand this question being used as a gotcha. Yes a sterile woman is a woman. Pregnancy and birth are just examples demonstrating womenhood. There's also lots of other things: XX chromosome, menstruation, bone structure, physical strength, and emotional intelligence just to name a few.
Obviously a male -> female trans person cannot menstruate. Are you pointing out that a female -> male trans person can menstruate? Yes, they can, because they are still biologically female. I didn't get your point re. menstruation here.
I mistyped. I meant can get some of the symptoms. I was wrong to write menstruation. I know this isn’t the exact pr or topic but since the overall point is about how the lines are blurred more than “tradition”, intersex people can menstruate and some have almost or every biological female issue. Intersex people are not a part of “traditional” feminism.
To my bigger point I sent to the other commenter, the status quo and how things have historically been for issues like identity, gender, sexuality, end up not being looked upon favorably and first world societies have consistently albeit slowly progressed on them.
I realize I am committing some fallacies by not sticking to the exact comment/topic. However I saw you edited your comment from being aggressive to respectful/kind so I thought I’d go for it.
There are many countries this could apply to. For example, landlord, as in someone who rents out a property is considered gender neutral here in Ireland. The term landlady exists, but is only used for female publicans, and only rarely, as publican and vintner are both used more frequently in that context.
"Guys" is mostly male oriented, but wouldn't be unheard of for a mixed gender group, and similarly "Lads" here is often gender neutral despite it being the most male of working class male stereotypes in the country that is our nearest neighbour.
Here in Australia, “guys” is generally used in a gender neutral way. Even when hanging out with groups of only women, I’ll use it and so will others without batting an eye. Eg, “What are you guys doing after this?”
Years ago I had an American friend tell me “guys” was sexist. I’ve been thinking about it for years since her comment. I think in an Australian context she’s wrong. And I think we move in the direction of gender equality by making words less gendered. Not by inserting gender bias where there was none.
You make “landlord” a gendered term by policing it as such. What a waste of a good word.
This one is still widely argued; many women say they don't care and are happy to be included in the guys, and others consider it a real terrible thing to say. I have to conclude that it's unlikely that stopping using guys as a gender-neutral address will truly move the needle in equality.
Yes, even in the US. But of course, given enough influence, you can make absolutely anything non-inclusive. And social pressure will make everyone have to accept it.
I also find it baffling that inclusivity folks find a term that used to be male exclusive becoming applicable to both male and female as problematic. Wouldn't they want something like this to happen?
I don't see this as too baffling- in their logic, if you have two alternatives (landlord and landlady, say) and landlord gets picked, it's evidence of patriarchy (because it defaulted to male). They would prefer "landperson", or perhaps "rent seeking capitalist"
When I rented a room from a woman in Atlanta, the other tenants and I always referred to her as "landlord" and nobody batted an eye. The only time I hear "landlady" is when One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer plays on the radio. So that's my datum.
Why does e.g. Ireland's poor treatment of the travelling community mean we need to defer to American interpretations of language? Is America such a shining paragon that everyone needs to copy their every action?
If the starting position was "America's diversity concerns are not [e.g.] Ireland's concerns" I'm more sympathetic! In fact I think having software that tries to do this is fundamentally broken! But the starting position is always "we don't have any problems here" which is an even lazier, and wrong, argument.
In that case you're as equally arguing against an argument I didn't make. I did not say that Ireland has no problems. I said that Ireland does not have problems related to the gendered implications of landlord, guys, or lads, due to these words having much less gendered implications in the Irish context. (and elsewhere in the thread, that the south eastern Ireland usage of "boy" does not have the racial implications that it does in certain contexts in the US).
Nowhere did I say that Ireland has no issues with inclusivity.
You started this reply chain on a response to a post claiming India has no issues with inclusivity, and mentioned instead we should also be considering Ireland for some reason! What are you doing?
This is pretty scary. Inclusivity fine but what else can they push and censor.
Inclusivity is fine, as long as you're not encouraged to be inclusive? Are you sure you think it's fine?
It's certainly fair to say that you feel that inclusivity has gotten out of hand and that it shouldn't change the way we talk. But it seems disingenuous so say that it's "fine", but think it's scary when it's suggested to you.
This is why I'm concerned about the word "inclusive" in the original tweet. I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.
I worked at an Australian tech company that expanded its offices into USA tech hubs. Very quickly our American staff started complaining about non-inclusive phrases commonly used at the company - phrases like "guys" instead of "folks". In Australia "guys" is a gender-neutral term when used collectively. It's very commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know. But of course they forced the change and the word "guys" was effectively retired from conversation there.
Is it more inclusive to force an Australian company of largely Australian employees to adopt an American culture because of a few easily offended Americans on staff? Or is that less inclusive? It seems like forcing people to drop their own cultural affectations and assuming that your American ones are the de facto correct ones is (in a small way) rather imperialist.
Yes this is a minor example on the scheme of things. But I think it's illustrative.
I totally agree. When I started at my current job there was one primarily English speaking person in our weekly teams meeting. For her (an Australian) guys was always inclusive. She used it all the time even for purely female groups.
Color me irritated when we at the company were advised not to use it anymore by our inclusiveness people.
When people talk about a term being "gender-neutral", that doesn't just mean "people use this term to refer to people of all genders"; many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered". For instance, using "guys" to refer to a group emphasizes the idea that "guy" is the default and "not guy" is the exception not worth noting.
"not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know" does not mean "not considered non-inclusive by any Australian". You've just given an example of the type of response that you and potentially some of your colleagues might give to people attempting to raise this issue. How many people you know might accurately predict that that would be your response, and thus not raise the issue because it would cause strife?
Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue, nor is it a matter of being "easily offended". Someone raising this issue to you may not be expressing offense; they may be expressing a desire to include people.
(This is not an argument specifically for "folks"; I fully agree that you shouldn't necessarily adopt a specific replacement term if that term doesn't make sense locally. Perhaps there's an inclusive term that does make more sense locally, to avoid having something that feels like a loanword.)
That's a good point, however, the original point still stands.
The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.
In much the same way 'landlord' is not materially a non-inclusive term either.
If you want to split hairs, it's a never ending problem, the sweater will come apart.
Some people draw the line at 'hey guys' - some people draw the line at 'landlord'.
And FYI - your statement about 'Inclusivity is not an American problem' reeks of ugly cultural Imperialism. Though there's surely a kernel of truth, more than likely the applied manner will boil down to 'Americans version of everything at the remote office' - which is paradoxically might be 'exclusionary' of other cultures, like those in Australia.
A better approach might be to let Australia figure it out on their own.
> The term 'hey guys' may very well be materially 'inclusive' enough that it doesn't warrant intervention necessary.
That's not a decision made unilaterally by speakers and writers of the language; it's a decision made by those listening and reading, as well. You can't decide how your words are perceived; you can only choose what words you use.
> Some people draw the line at
Some people don't think of language in terms of "lines", as though saying "fine, this far, but no further". Language is a living, changing thing; every piece of it is interpreted in varying ways by different people, and those ways change over time. Using it, like many other human interactions, is an exercise in modeling others around you, and the net effect you want your communication to have to its many audiences, and the environment that communication will create, and all the connotations it may convey. When trying to record that in a dictionary, it may round to a few broad buckets or categories, but the language as it lives in people's heads seems more continuous than discrete.
That's true of all communication, not just specific words. If you tried to plot individual words or phrases in meaning-space, some of them would have fairly sharp well-identified points where the majority of people agree, and some of them would have fuzzier boundaries, and some of them would have multi-modal distributions. And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
This pattern applies in many different cases, and people do it all the time: predicting whether your audience is likely to know a particular piece of jargon from your field and comparing that to the value of the jargon or the need to define/explain it; accurately conveying levels of confidence/certainty/uncertainty; considering whether your audience will know a meme; attempting to come across as professional; choosing the right vocabulary level for the audience; making a new piece of terminology; naming a program or project; making a pun.
Yes, that's the usual argument that comes up at some point in those discussions: "Language has always been changing", etc etc.
What this glosses over, in my opinion, is that there are vastly different ways how language changes. Language is always changing on its own, simply because the way people talk is constantly evolving: Today's slang might become tomorrow's high language and todays high language will probably feel hilariously stilted and old-fashioned a few generations on.
It's something completely different to deliberately alter language: Encourage or discourage certain words or even languages, replace words with others, etc. Historically, that has always been closely tied to politics, power struggles and battles between opposing narratives, and I don't think it's different here.
> And even that oversimplifies, because it's entirely possible to model people at multiple depths, "this is what the speaker means when they're saying it, this is what parts of the audience are hearing, this is what other parts of the audience are hearing", such that your own model of some communication is a mental model of many interpretations.
Fully agreed, and I think you should always tune a presentation to your particular audience - but I think especially then, it's telling that Google Docs isn't even asking what your audience is. They are giving suggestions that they believe to be absolutely true, no matter which audience you are writing for.
Yes, sometimes language changes happen deliberately, sometimes they happen accidentally, and everywhere in between. Some changes that are perceived as happening naturally were deliberate. Affecting language deliberately vs accidentally is more-or-less entirely orthogonal to which side is correct. The involvement of politics doesn't eliminate the possibility of a correct side and an incorrect side, or a more-correct side and a more-incorrect side.
The strife is an ongoing American cultural war, however. Other countries generally have much more important ongoing local battles. It's a good political angle to hew in the US because it's very hard to attack - it's structurally similar to many past moral panics.
> do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered
How other people feel is not something anyone can control. If someone is clearly addressing a group you are a part of, and clearly means to include you in their address to the group, and you decide to feel "othered" because of this term or that term, that is your problem. You need to re-evaluate how you feel. People feel all sorts of ways about everything. Sometimes your feelings are wrong.
> many people also mean "do people of all genders, upon hearing this term, feel included, rather than othered".
Yes, but this is a vastly more fuzzy criterion than the original one. What does "feeling included" mean? Who has the authority to declare how a group "feels" about something? Who even belongs to that group?
E.g., it might very well be the case that australian women did feel included when the term "guys" was used, because that was what they grew up with.
My (Australian) partner opens WFH group meetings with "hey guys", while working with mostly other women. Don't know any one that has taken offence to guys personally, either.
> Inclusiveness is not exclusively an "American" issue
Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.
It is the US that’s out of step here (colour me surprised). Stop trying to force US English on the rest of the world.
> Guys is used as a generic term in all English speaking countries except the US. It’s used by women to refer to groups, including exclusively female groups.
This is true in large parts of the US too. There are regional dialects where this is not true, but it is not a general feature of American English.
Yeah, it's mostly the people who tried to push "LatinX" on us that demand guys is sexist. They a very small, but extremely vocal minority on twitter and then internet in general.
Because the people demanding this are wildly, disproportionately aggressive, and the number one priority of basically everyone at those firms these days is to just keep their heads down and stay on the gravy train. Even the CEOs.
It doesn't help that it's all phrased in moral terms. Managers there don't get any sense of morality from their work so they're extremely vulnerable to being told that they have to do X to be a moral person. They don't know how to push back and say "actually, my behaviour is moral, your behaviour is immoral, unacceptable and you will now be fired for it". Also: firing is a decentralized process and means fighting HR.
This is a wild hypothesis, but many people believe it including me. Woke politics and culture war is essentially modern day version of bread and circuses [1]. The biggest scandals in America last decade was illegitimate Iraq War and 2008 financial crisis. But in the decade of 2010s the biggest issue is how many genders and pronouns are out othere. So go figure. Bonus point if you can invent a new gender and pronoun for yourself.
US is bombing some Middle Eastern country which has nothing to do with 9/11. But the issue of the day for Americans is how inclusive is "guys". US was funding a lab in China where COVID might have come from. Don't worry, the issue of the day is whether a 4 year old should be able to transition to another gender. So some Americans can feel good about their moral superiority.
This destruction of culture and language actually has the potential for a lot of short term gain by consumer facing corporations (Here's a good summary of how this sort of thing works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bRhMLhc8wQ)
Given that they can get away with practically whatever they want otherwise (look at how many people are still running Windows despite the completely unacceptable behavior by Microsoft) why wouldn't they do things that result in profit?
That video is awful. I made a good faith attempt to watch it to get an opposing point, and I made it right up to the 11 minute mark where he starts explaining that the woke agenda is anti-white and "they want to replace people of European descent in their own lands with a servant class who is lower IQ, easier to control, works for lower wages, and is driven entirely by material consumption."
To sum up for anyone else who wants to avoid it, the whole argument is that culture drives consumption, and it's better for the elites to have a homogenous population who all consume the same things, and that "woke capital" is an attempt by the elites to coerce the populace into homogenizing.
It's basically the "gay agenda", but now rich people are behind it.
Definitely ends in ɛks. But that’s an English x being grafted on to the end of the word. For a Spanish x it ends in eh-kees for equis the Spanish pronunciation of x. I personally find it rather amusing how culturally insensitive the ‘culturally sensitive’ are.
I think you are spot on about this. Different communities and regions have varying definitions for words, and there are probably thousands of such cases. Trying to dictate one "correct" usage for each is extremely arrogant and disrespectful.
Not to mention that meanings can evolve over time a great deal. If these types of corrections become common place I'm not sure what all of the ramifications will be but I suspect they will be bad on the whole.
FWIW, "guys" is the default gender-neutral collective term commonly used in large parts of the US, including the west coast, even when the speaker and the collective are all female. The term "folk" has connotations such that it isn't always appropriate, and sounds a bit old-fashioned regardless -- it is not a suitable replacement. If the intent is to gender the collective because it is germane, the common term varies quite a bit with region (most of the women I'm around, raised in big west coast cities, use "girls").
I've lived all over the US and learned to code switch the regional dialects. I've never seen anyone get upset about someone not using the local default collective term in good faith. Trying to get Americans to speak the same version of English is a futile task.
There is not always a counterpart. "Guys" can be used as a collective noun to address a group of people regardless of the genders of the individuals in the group. That's the point.
There is a counterpart to "guys". People, not infrequently, say "guys and gals" which means that the guys is gendered.
"There is not always a counterpart", means that you recognize there is (at least) sometimes a counterpart. And in English, (unlike say, French or Spanish), the fact that so few words are gendered means that it's actually relevant when they are. Guys is masculine, Gals is feminine.
There are actually unambiguously non-gendered plurals "y'all", "them", "yins". Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".
Is the word "actor" a problem then? It has had historical male implications, and has a female counterpart, actress? Yet actress is slowly falling out of favour, which is why you have awards now called e.g. Best Female Actor.
Gals comes across as even more old fashioned than actress in my region - it's a term that feels like it walked out of a movie old enough that it had to advertise that it had colour.
Sometimes, as the world evolves, gendered terms get replaced by new gender neutral terms. Sometimes the meaning evolves in different ways (e.g. doctor and nurse are no longer gendered equivalents of each other, as the division in roles has continued to be useful even after the gender stereotypes as to who does those roles slowly fades). And sometimes one term just subsumes the other.
And sometimes, these changes happened many decades ago in other countries that are not yours. It's not very inclusive to expect those people to defer to American expectations of those terms.
Would you be okay with people making a title Doctress? That's a better analogy, to me, for actor->actress, than guys vs. gals. Someone created a gendered term where one didn't need to exist (as demonstrated by the lack of other professions that had this distinction). Where the distinction did exist, is a case like you've pointed out where women were explicitly, or implicitly barred from certain professions for thousands of years. So when we opened up those professions, it seems reasonable to say "no we just want you to call us what you call everyone else", and actress is the exception that proves the rule.
The phrase "you guys" is attempting to be evolved, by parties who use it currently, and don't want to change their behavior to be explicitly inclusive. I'm not going to speak to what's okay in other countries, but the English definition of Guys is from Guy Fawkes, and is intended to mean a man. I would be surprised if the etymology of that weren't the same for Australia, which was also a British colony.
But the last thing I will point out, is that it's not on the in-group "men" to say whether or not they're excluding people. It's the people who are being excluded who get to make that determination for whether or not they feel like there are barriers for them. So when men say "you guys" is inclusive, they're saying "I don't want to change my behavior, so this now includes everyone." And the thing that's being ignored is that there are people who don't agree that they are included in that phrase.
> Some of these are colloquial, but their existence also points to the fact that there are groups that weren't served exlusively with the gendered "guys".
Most of the replacements you cited are regional:
- Y'all is Southern/AAVE.
- Them is third-person, whereas "you guys" is second-person.
- "Yinz" is from Pittsburgh.
- I'm gonna throw in "youse," one of my faves, which is from New Jersey/Philly.
"Guys" is clearly gendered, whereas "you guys," I'd argue, generally isn't--especially in the Northeast US. I frequently hear cis women refer to groups of entirely cis women as "you guys."
This isn't meant as a view of what the ideal state of the English language is (bring back "thou!"), but these discussions frequently involve people talking past each other, and conflating "you guys" (second-person plural, arguably gendered) with "guys" (third-person plural, usually gendered). Effectively replacing "you guys" is a more challenging task, since there isn't a universally agreed-upon alternative, at least in the US.
I'll leave it to others to figure out what that alternative should be, though I will note that I, as a WASP from the Northeast, sound completely ridiculous saying "y'all."
I don't think you can say that a gendered word is not gendered in all contexts.
The recognition that "Guys" is gendered, means that "you guys" will read as gendered to people. And that it will be necessarily exclusionary if you don't identify that way.
It's worth noting that "you" is gender neutral and plural on its own. So it's hard for me to accept that adding a gendered word to a non-gendered one magically takes away the gendering.
Also, the only people I ever see complaining about having to change this are people who fall into the group that's definitely included in "you guys".
Me <- WASP from Northwest that adopted y'all later in life, because it's just fun to say, and completely unambiguous.
Where I am nobody says "gals" unless they are trying to talk like an old timey gangster. Like the cartoonish "wise guy" dialect where they add "see" at the end of every sentence
Being asked to use "folks" in Australia was frankly bizarre. It's not a word anyone uses over there and would be considered a severe Americanism. Pretty sure that suggestion came from our Texas staff, not the Californians.
I can’t hear ‘folks’ without thinking of Neddie Seagoon from The Goon Show. Probably not what proponents of the word are going for, the show being from the 1950s and in many ways ‘of its time’.
I think your understanding is mistaken, or at least regional. While it can mean "parents" when used in the plural with a possessive ("my folks", "your folks", sometimes even "the folks"), in modern American English it's as commonly just a synonym for "people".
Using "folks" (especially in the plural) to mean people can be rather "folksy", though, and I wouldn't be too surprised if some textbook or dictionary mentioned just the "parent" definition. Did you learn it this way as a second language, or as a native speaker somewhere non-American?
Folks has been used to describe a group of people in the southern US for a long time. In pop culture it was used like that by Porky Pig at the end of Looney Toons with "That's all, Folks!" (i couldn't remember the how the stutter goes though)
The English language doesn't offer many gender-inclusive alternatives, like the Spanish ustedes or the German ihr. With no good phrase for the plural of 'you,' the plural term 'guys' ended up evolving into the colloquial alternative to refer to a group of people, regardless of whether group members are male or female.
However, Reuters Graphics explains that “people who speak languages with stronger gender associations tend to have stronger gender stereotypes, a 2020 study of 25 languages found. A 2021 study in Israel showed that when women were addressed in a math exam using male pronouns, their scores were low. When they were correctly identified with feminine pronouns, scores rose by a third.”
But many people quite fairly still see 'guys' as a gendered word—the dictionary defines the singular 'guy' simply as 'man.' Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor at the University of North Carolina, discusses in her 2002 essay Why Sexist Language Matters that gender-specific language like 'guys' can affect even children:
"I worry about what people with the best of intentions are teaching our children. A colleague’s five-year-old daughter recently left her classroom crying after a teacher said, “What do you guys think?”. She thought the teacher didn’t care about what she thought. When the teacher told her that of course she was included, her tears stopped. But what was the lesson? She learned that her opinion as a girl mattered only when she’s a guy. She learned that men are the norm." - Sherryl Kleinman, Why Sexist Language Matters
Even though most people who use the term don't do so with the intent of it being sexist or exclusive of women, it can and often does cause women to feel left out of the conversation. Imagine you used 'gals' to refer to a room full of men and women—do you think the men would respond?
Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?
> I don't want to see the Americanisation (or worse, San Franciscoisation) of all Western cultures.
I've started observing that fixes for American problems are rolled out globally. For instance, the default branch of VCS repos being recommended to be changed from "master" to "main". Totally out of context where I'm from.
> Isn't it ironic that in the name of inclusiveness, certain words are excluded?
No, because the point of inclusiveness in this context is to be inclusive of humans and human cultures, not words. Excluding words which themselves exclude humans leads to the inclusion of those no longer excluded humans. It isn't difficult.
I thought the etymology for ‘guys’ was a group of children dressed like Guy Fawkes at events in England. Boys and girls did it so the term was gender neutral, informal, and endearing.
I'm sure they will add controls to select which "english" to use just like Grammarly and others. You can then submit correction to colloquialisms if they come up.
> commonly used and not considered non-inclusive by any Australian I know
That argument has been used to defend all sorts of terms, some worse than others. The example you choose "guys" as gender neutral is also common in US english. But being common does not mean it is correct (racial and homophobic slurs were also common for a long time).
- Group of women === "girls"
- Group of men === "guys"
- Group of women with one guy === "guys"
- Group of men with one girl === "guys"
The "guys" as gender neutral is clearly the result of patriarical society. But does that make the word _harmful_? Hard to say. I lean towards "no". But I'm not in the adversely selected group.
It's an American term (and as far as I know, an American regional term), that also seems to have had a decline in the US as people here mostly encounter it in older US movies?
The way languages are used - common usage is almost certainly correct. Correct is whatever is agreed upon by conversation participants. Correct in one group ain't necessarily so in another.
Yeah, it's belittling from what I heard. I don't really fully understand anymore since the golden rule has long gone out the window (I wouldn't be offended if someone approached me and me friends and said "Hey, boys". Maybe be a bit uncommon but I wouldn't think much of it).
My hometown in Ireland has "Well, boy" as a colloqial greeting people use between each other. We had neither the empire of other european countries to bring black people here against their will, or the economic appeal to attract them willingly, so this is a term that evolved in a world relatively devoid of black people.
But, bring that to the US and greeting a black american with "boy" has a very different connotation. And there's totally valid reasons to do with local historical conditions that means that this is inappropriate to use in that context.
Does that make it wrong for people in my home town to greet each other like that? I don't think so. I think it's very uninclusive for Google to impose an american context where there is none.
The golden rule is a good starting point. As an abrasive person who doesn’t mind when people fight or argue at me, I tried to live by the golden rule and realized people want to be treated how they want to be treated, not how my autistic ass wanted to be treated.
In the same way the term “boy” is never really used insultingly, but people use “girly” or “stop being a little girl” as an insult all the time. So it makes sense that you wouldn’t be offended by the similar term, but some women may not like girls so much. I think this is reasonable and treating people how they want to be treated is the ultimate goal.
There’s a movie with Natalie Portman where she’s offended by a boy calling her a lady. She thinks she’s being called old.
There’s also what I’ll call the Jeremy Clarkson ooo hello ladies, reserved for fancy done up groups of ladies in nice dresses and hats for example from the country woman’s association.
Distinct from the oooo hello ladies of a group of prostitutes making their grand entrance from the back of a hummer I recently saw in the breaking bad movie.
Boys I’ve seen used a lot referring to groups of men in the examples of dogging the boys at a construction yard, pulled the boys for an scv rush in sc2, hello boyyys for Roy and HG implying something rude.
There is no issues of inclusivines in our country. Why US always want to push their culture on other groups and countries.
We have no issues regrading inclusivity. Most people are very polite and dont have issue. Please (Google, Big Tech) stop pushing your agendas on other countries.
I guess it's maybe because we've had different experiences. For example, I could see me saying "Hey ladies" to the group of girls that I went to school with. I couldn't imagine addressing women on the street or in work with that phrase unless I developed at the very minimum a friendly relationship with all of them.
But that's just me, you are totally correct I've seen lots of people do it without any complaints what so ever.
I was responding to the statement that a group of women are to be referred to as "girls" colloquially and not "guys" and that this is somehow, rather amazingly, a patriarchal structure.
Equally, I can not say "hey" and just say what I want to say, so what? I can also say "hello" instead of "hey". Your point proves nothing in this context, though I'm sure you like to think it did.
Note that responses are, well, responses, hence there is the handy "parent" feature. But thanks for illuminating the world of possibilities that speech holds!
Furthermore:
"Hey everyone" - Too formal, I want don't want it to sound like an instruction to the group, just who cares to listen in that group of women
"Hey there" - Might be mistaken for a specific person if I happen to glance at them, I want to refer to the whole group (if they want to hear it)
There's an organization, the "East Cut Community Benefit District", promoting this. Their main job is homeless removal.
Google used to choose map markers by population. The map of Rio de Janeiro showed all the favelas by name, and ignored the tourist areas. This annoyed Brazilian authorities.
Yeah, the East Cut is definitely not an example of real estate taking their cues from Google, but Google taking their cues from the real-estate sector. San Francisco's realtor-defined neighborhoods have always been a little off from the colloquially described one.
The cost of living here has contributed to a homeless problem that has gained national notoriety. But it is less evident on the surface because luxe apartment building security has worked to clear the streets. The CBD says it helps with the homeless problems and says it has gotten 2,300 calls for homeless outreach assistance from January through October 2018. But a recent study from UC Berkeley found that some CBDs (also called Business Improvement Districts, or BIDs) in California have contributed to the rise of anti-homeless laws across the state by lobbying local governments. “Our key finding is that [CBDs] exclude homeless people from public space through aggressive policy advocacy and policing practices,” says Jeff Selbin, the director of the Policy Center and UC Berkeley School of Law, at a press conference in September about the study. “This finding raises important legal—and I would say moral—concerns.”
You may also find a shi--y content farm piece from www.businessinsider.in that reads like a copy-paste job from the FastCompany article and a bunch of PR from East Cut CBD. No need to add a reference for that article... :)
> I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.
Personally, even if they could accurately decide what are the "correct" word in some sense, it didn't make it less dystopian for me. I would rather make my own mistakes, be wrong, and have some regrets rather than having to put up with the constant holier-than-thou browbeating and woke-scolding.
To be clear, its the best comment because "...it has always been big sibling"
These approaches have a way of wiping the past clean off the slate. There's no problem with the words 'big sibling' - I, as a big sister, am in favor of it. The problem is that the internet is a snapshot pretending to be all of history.
Can it be turned off? It sounds like a fine optional feature and an annoying required one. If I'm writing something, I certainly don't want the word processor constantly throwing up modals ruining my train of thought. Reminds me of Clippy.
Defaults matter because few people change from it. If everyone zigs because the dominant software defaults to it and you want to zag, you're fighting against that current.
Real world example: Twitter got even worse once they bullied everyone into algorithmic feeds by changing it back from chronological until people gave up and left it.
I haven't seen anything I would consider "culture war" in the popular representations of fictional characters today, so I'm not really sure what you're talking about.
Spelling errors usually have an objective fix and are isolated to a single word. Warning about an improper word depends on the surrounding context and is highly subjective. The latter case requires a great deal more cognitive load to deal with and I think it will be much more distracting.
Well, nowadays. Keeping in mind that the only reason English spelling is standardized in 2022 is the waves of intentional English language spelling standardizations that occurred in the 17th, 19th, and 20th centuries, each of which was supported by dictionaries, education programs, and a general messaging that it would be the intelligent thing to do to get on board with the standard.
I can't help but wonder if people decried the idea of standardization back then. "It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word." ~Andrew Jackson, 1833
(... typing these sentences has triggered my spell-checker three times. I have accepted two suggestions and taken the liberty of disagreeing with the third, after a cross-check with my dictionary to confirm my spelling). ;)
Next thing you know there will be actual laws that ban what can be said in schools, books being banned, and laws that allow drivers to run over protesters.
Fortunately the people who are vigilant about Twitter moderation policies and word processor features are acting in good faith and will be outraged by actual government attempts to stifle speech.
So if you are referring to the "Don't say gay," law, you should actually read it.
Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
>books being banned
Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned. Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries. Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum? No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.
>laws that allow drivers to run over protesters
I don't think that is a free speech issue, plus you are misrepresenting this legislation as well. It's not like a democrat can run over a GOP protestor or vice versa, I believe there has to be an actual threat involved like a group encircling your vehicle baseball bats.
Here's the issue with your argument, you are arguing with an imaginary person. That's like a GOP person saying something like, "libs are socialist!" It's a huge generalization and mis-catagorization. It's an emotional, misinformed argument rather than a rational one, and you are doing the same thing. You're consuming too much news / opinion. Take a break from it, most of it isn't that great for you. I fell into the same trap when I was younger.
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.
Such a suit probably wouldn't be successful in terms of winning a judgment. His disclosure wasn't "classroom instruction" after all, and most people probably would consider it age appropriate. Winning isn't necessarily the point though; creating a chilling effect such that teachers have to pretend queer people don't exist seems like the likely goal to me.
Indeed, the teacher in question is quitting teaching.
>What's problematic about it is that it's enforceable by private litigation. In one recent example[0], shortly before the law was passed, a group of Florida parents demanded action be taken against a 6th grade teacher for disclosing that his marriage was to another man after taking time off for his wedding. Had the law been in effect, it's likely one or more of those parents would have sued.
Thanks for the article. Assuming it's accurate it sounds like only the school districts are able to be sued. I assume teachers themselves would fall under qualified immunity which applies to all government workers. Florida teachers also have (albeit weak) union representation. Unfortunately in the US anyone can sue anyone else for any reason, so for the individual there doesn't seem like anything would be legally different. Having said that, many Florida schools are absolutely horrible at education outcomes.
>Parents will be able to sue school districts for alleged violations, damages or attorney’s fees when the law goes into effect July 1.
This whole enforced by private litigation trend is troubling, I wholeheartedly agree. Texas is doing something similar with abortion clinics. I believe some democratic states (CA maybe?) is doing it with gun shops too. Hopefully when enough people lose in court and lose their attorney's fees, it will cease to become a thing.
> I don't see how this is problematic in the slightest.
Because it's part of a new trend to de facto ban stuff the governing party would like to ban despite it being theoretically constitutionally protected by creating new civil offences and encouraging vexatious litigants to file nuisance suits. In this case the outcome is, as the state which passed the bill intended, that homosexuals are being harassed out of their jobs.
Regarding the state circumventing constitutional protections to make references to the gender of their partner a potentially career-limting move for certain minorities as less problematic than a company adding suggestions to avoid gendered language as a [clunky] grammar checking feature of its software is a point of view, I guess....
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.
Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation? Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.
Just a couple of days ago, my wife, who is a school librarian, told me a story about this. A teacher was in her library, doing story time with her kindergarten class, and for whatever reason the subject of parents came up. This kid stated, “I have a mama and a mami” (it’s a French school in Canada), and the woman said, “no, you have a mama and a papa”. No, the child insisted, “I have a mama and a mami”. And the teacher tried to argue the point, with this five-year-old. Of course the five-year-old knew what she was talking about, and the teacher was being either clueless or bigoted. But that right there is a “teachable moment”, and one that is completely appropriate for children of any age.
>Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?
Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex. What I don't get is how this became controversial. Probably because of the internet, again, amplifying the worst takes and the worst interpretations of any given event.
>Kids live in modern families! Banning discussions like this is to ban the reality of lived experiences of millions of people.
The overwhelming majority of kids do not, but that's besides the point and saying "we should wait to discuss sex and sexual orientation until kids are old enough" doesn't "ban reality" in any way. It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
I strongly believe that even if we'd accept the notion that this awkward conversation needs to be sidestepped, it's completely inappropriate to do it by invalidating the reality of that child's family and requesting them to agree to a ridiculous lie ("no, you have a mama and a papa") which insults their family. Arguing about this topic is entirely opposite to sidestepping the issue, it's the teacher explicitly starting the awkward conversation and failing at it.
Furthermore, while that indeed is not the lived reality for the majority of the individual kids, it's IMHO relevant for very many classrooms or teachers which will have at least one family like that; with 20-30 kids in a classroom, a 1% "rare case" will be represented in 20-30% classes and in almost every school.
Also, it's my understanding that the traditional family model is not even the majority in quite a few places where less than 50% of kids are raised in a marriage with both their parents, due to divorces, remarriages, deaths in family and simply single parents; so a kid may have a "mom and two dads" (i.e. the biological dad and mom's husband) or many other family structures; I recall hearing an (tragic?) joke about a particular class observing that there the majority kids were raised by two-woman family, namely, their mother and grandmother; etc. So it is important for teachers to acknowledge the diversity of actual parenting, you can't assume that "a mom and a dad" families are universal because so many families are not like that, those are not rare edge cases or exceptions, and they can't even be treated as deviation from the norm because in current society the nuclear two-parent family is not that dominant to be considered a true norm.
> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.
> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
That's a strawman argument. Sexual orientation and gender identity != sex. Nothing about this conversation needs to be awkward. "Oh, interesting, NAME, you have two moms? Well, everybody, that's true, you can have a mom and a dad, or two moms, or two dads. Some people have one parent, and some are raised by their grandpa or grandma or someone else. Does anyone else here have two moms? Does anyone have two dads? Or a single parent?" Blah blah blah. It's not awkward, it's not sexual, and it normalizes the experience for the great many children who live in "non-traditional" families.
> It's instructive that you assume the teacher was "clueless or bigoted" and not, ya know, trying to sidestep an awkward conversation about sex in front of five year olds.
This is exactly what people are talking about, by the way.
"I have a mama and a mami" is a potential awkward conversation about sex that needs to be sidestepped. "You have a mama and a papa" is no problem.
If we accept that as a premise, don't you see the issue with the law?
Are we going to pretend that LGBT parents are somehow completely incapable of explaining to their kid(s) that their parenting situation is somewhat unique, and that this must be offloaded to teachers?
> Because it's creepy and weird for adults, who are supposed to be teaching math and so on, to have conversations with young children about sex.
If kids don't learn about it from the good adults in their life, they're going to learn about it from the dangerous adults in their life. CSA thrives on the culture of silence imposed by those who think any discussion even obliquely related to sexual relations (and you're the one saying having two moms is "about sex"!) is inherently "creepy and weird".
Kids have a need to learn words to describe things which might be happening to them, and a right to see their self-image, family structure, and any proto-romantic/sexual feelings acknowledged.
> What, exactly, should the school be teaching the kids in that moment
How about this: "There are lots of different types of families, and among those many types, there are ones where there are two moms or two dads, and that's okay". [1]
> and how would this law prevent it?
IANAL but according to this analysis [1], 'Classroom “instruction” could mean eliminating books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or historical figures. But “classroom discussion” is broad. That could discourage a teacher from speaking about gay families with the whole class, even if some students have gay parents.'
In other words, precisely the scenario I just described. This is a gag law that prevents educators from having the kind of conversation that should have happened in the library at my wife's school.
1: The first part of this lesson is a simple fact, and the second part ("that's okay") is a value judgment, but given that gay marriage is legal in FL and constitutionally protected, and that same-sex couples can, for instance, adopt children, that value judgment seems to be not just ethical but legally enshrined.
> How about this: "There are lots of different types of families, and among those many types, there are ones where there are two moms or two dads, and that's okay".
“That’s okay” is non-neutral moral judgement that exceeds the teacher’s purview.
“People are different in many ways; in this classroom, we treat everyone with respect regardless of our differences” is a content-neutral restriction on speech that does not exceed a teacher’s purview.
> IANAL but according to this analysis [1], 'Classroom “instruction” could mean eliminating books with L.G.B.T.Q. characters or historical figures.
The law is not tied to any particular sexual orientation (or gender “identity”); if that analysis were true, the law would also eliminate books with straight characters or historical figures.
> The first part of this lesson is a simple fact, and the second part ("that's okay") is a value judgment, but given that gay marriage is legal …
“That’s legal” is a statement of fact; it’s very different than “that’s okay”.
We could easily get into semantic or philosophical weeds here, but maybe instead of that, let me ask you: is it okay? Is it okay that this particular five-year-old has a mama and a mami? And if that’s okay, why should it be a crime to say that?
> 4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.
This is not a simple matter of “inclusiveness.” The nature of men, women, the purposes of marriage, is a fundamental moral and religious concept. In my part of the world, it has nothing to do with “two people who love each other” but is instead a fulfillment of Mohammad’s exhortation to get married and have children as a central moral obligation of life. It’s deeply intertwined with what God’s purpose is for us on earth.
The reason people want to talk about this in school is to counterbalance the influence of the world’s largest religion and alter the moral views of children on a question central to religious morality. The very reason they want to do it is why it’s not a legitimate purpose of instruction in public schools.
NB: As a convert to mainline Protestant Christianity, I happen to think it’s okay. Most people in the world, including the world’s fastest growing religion and the religion followed by the fastest growing minority group in the US, do not think it’s okay.
> The very reason they want to do it is why it’s not a legitimate purpose of instruction in public schools.
The interface between church and state in the US is always friction-filled, because the separation of church and state creates an immediate contradiction: we must separate people's faith-based morality from the conduct of the government, yet we recognize that morality is an inextricable part of every individual.
In this case, these children are growing up in a society with laws that recognize the dignity and value of every one of those families. One parent, two parents, four parents, same-gender parents, different-gender parents... Regardless of the lessons children learn at home, it's the responsibility of the school to teach them that the law and the culture they're living in consider those families all equivalently correct.
So it's clear for the state (via the school) to have a say in this. That leaves the question on the table "is kindergarten too early for that say," and I'd argue it's not because kindergartners already have to interface to the society and sometimes have questions on these topics. My largest concern with this law is it badly ties the hands of educators if such questions come up organically. And that does a disservice to every student in their care, and harms the state's interest in educating its citizens about life in the state.
(To be more clear: when I say "badly ties the hands," I don't mean to imply there should be no constraints. Rather, the enforcement mechanism of opening up private lawsuits creates a situation where what should be a collaborative process, the education of children, is structured adversarially; the law doesn't encourage collaboration, it gives parents a cudgel to try and beat school systems with. That's bad law because it creates perverse incentives counter to the goals of the education process. Parents, too, have a vested interest in their children learning how to live in their society; how well do we imagine that will go if the process is "If I don't like what you're teaching, I will harm you financially?").
> The interface between church and state in the US is always friction-filled, because the separation of church and state creates an immediate contradiction: we must separate people's faith-based morality from the conduct of the government, yet we recognize that morality is an inextricable part of every individual.
The American notion of "separation of church and state" refers to pluralism, not secularism. It's a nation founded by groups of religious nuts who sought to create a system where we could leave each other alone. We're not a country like France where there's a secular "civic religion" into which everyone must be socialized: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/france-...
> In this case, these children are growing up in a society with laws that recognize the dignity and value of every one of those families.
Our laws require equal rights and equal treatment in various contexts: government services, employment, etc. They don't say anything about "value" because in a pluralistic society people have different values.
> Regardless of the lessons children learn at home, it's the responsibility of the school to teach them that the law and the culture they're living in consider those families all equivalently correct. So it's clear for the state (via the school) to have a say in this.
Law, culture, and morality are separate domains. Americans share law. They don't necessarily share culture or morality. Public schools can teach about the law and behavioral expectations. But they aren't permitted to intrude into the domain of what's "correct"--i.e. moral right versus wrong: "The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions."
Asserting that schools get to socialize kids into "culture"--whose culture?--is the off ramp where you lose lots of parents. (Note that this law has strong public support in Florida, from a population that also strongly supports same sex marriage.) What’s the scope of this principle? What other aspects of sexual morality do teachers get to tell kids about? When I got married, my (Bangladeshi American) mom told my (white American) wife: "You know, we don't get divorced." There's lots of things that Muslim Americans accept as legal and part of white American culture over which they maintain distinct moral standards in their own families and communities. I suspect though I can’t be sure that Hispanics in Florida are in a similar boat. Pluralism requires respecting those boundaries.
> The American notion of "separation of church and state" refers to pluralism, not secularism
It's both. Agnostic or atheistic belief is one of the many faiths understood to be supported and protected by the separation of church and state. If a person can have faith in one god or many gods, they can have faith in none. It isn't French-style, but in a country where, for example, interracial and same-sex marriage is legal (in direct contradiction to the teachings of several religions), there are times where the state must step in to protect its citizens from having their rights stripped by organizations acting as a formal or informal arm of religion, so it can sometimes look like a state-sponsored secular faith.
The question is complicated and has gone the other way too; some religious ceremonies of native American cultures involve the use of psychedelics that are federally banned. Most Christian churches' celebrations of their covenant with God involve the imbibing of alcohol by people under the age of 21. In some cases, federal lawsuits have been involved to determine when the state is overstepping its authority to impose behavioral constraints on people.
> Our laws require equal rights and equal treatment in various contexts: government services, employment, etc. They don't say anything about "value" because in a pluralistic society people have different values.
In my mind, dignity and value are synonymous and the law definitely protects the dignity of those families. I'm unaware of a non-synonymous way to treat those terms, but if there is one I agree with your take on the law.
> "The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions"
The United States has never recognized the UN's full authority over its own laws or the interpretation of same. In the case of that quote, it's sourced from the ICCPR. The ICCPR was adopted by the United States with a declaration and proviso that fundamentally give it no force of authority here (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/text_blocks/28885). In other words, the ICCPR is, at best, a declaration of morality and has no force of law, so if the US shares no morality or culture, you can't use it in this context to make an argument about how the US should act.
... which highlights the problem with the logic that the US shares no morality. Of course it does. We figure out what our shared morality is via the process of democratic election, debate, and construction of our law. That law reflects the shared morality of its people, which grows from our separate but overlapping faiths.
> whose culture?
The culture decided upon through the interaction of the school board and the election of the board by the people. With an overlap of the federal Department of Education. It's a complicated process, but it's there. There's definitely a culture to a school; without one, one cannot explain any proviso of any student handbook.
> pluralism requires respecting those boundaries
It absolutely does, and if a kid came home crying because their teacher told them they were living in sin with two fathers at home, that would be a major breach of trust on the part of the educator and we already have processes in place for dealing with that. But if the kid comes home crying because one of their classmates has two dads, the teacher said that's okay and the parents had told that kid it isn't? Then we have a clash of religion and the consensus culture of the country, and the school is correct in terms of its duties to teach students how to live in this country. For the law is clear, and the law is a reflection of the consensus morality. In this place, in the public square, in the streets, workplaces, and halls of government, it is okay to have two dads. This does not impinge on what one's heart says is okay.
My faith has an old saying, passed down from its prophet, which sums up this dichotomy nicely: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's."
> It's both. Agnostic or atheistic belief is one of the many faiths understood to be supported and protected by the separation of church and state.
Pluralism is fundamentally different from secularism. Pluralism accommodates agnostic/atheistic beliefs as one of many protected belief systems. Secularism turns over the public sphere to agnostic/atheistic beliefs and relegates religion to a private role. In the U.S., a Muslim is a Muslim all the time--in school, when they vote, when they hold office, etc. In France, Muslims must be agnostic/atheistic in public, and can be religious in private. Thus in the U.S., banning a Muslim girl from wearing hijab would be a civil rights violation, while it's the law in France.
"Separation of church and state" thus operates fundamentally differently in the two systems. In the U.S., it means a narrow procedural framework to allow Christians and Muslims and atheists to get along. The government can't establish an official mosque. And the government can't discriminate between Muslims and Christians or play favorites. In France, by contrast, it means the creation of a parallel agnostic/atheistic belief system to govern public affairs, to which everyone must subscribe and into which children must be socialized. That's not the American system.
> It isn't French-style, but in a country where, for example, interracial and same-sex marriage is legal ... there are times where the state must step in to protect its citizens from having their rights stripped by organizations acting as a formal or informal arm of religion, so it can sometimes look like a state-sponsored secular faith.
It's important not to mistake American tolerance for shared American morality. In a pluralistic system, people can often believe that other people should be able to act according to their own conscience. That's wholly distinct from a shared secular morality or agreement about what's acceptable and not acceptable that can be taught in public schools. For example, 60% of Americans think it's immoral for teenagers to have sex, and 90% think married people having an affair is immoral, but nobody is trying to ban either. At the same time, people would probably object to teachers commenting on those issues. Muslim Americans are a stark example of the difference between tolerance and shared morality: a large majority support same-sex marriage, but virtually no mosque in America will perform one: https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/us/lgbt-muslims-pride-progres....
> The ICCPR was adopted by the United States with a declaration and proviso that fundamentally give it no force of authority here (https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/text_blocks/28885). In other words, the ICCPR is, at best, a declaration of morality and has no force of law, so if the US shares no morality or culture, you can't use it in this context to make an argument about how the US should act.
While the ICCPR is not legally binding in the U.S., religious pluralism is a fundamental right in our Constitution. The ICCPR is an important and widely adopted articulation of what religious freedom means and how it should operate. In that understanding, freedom to socialize your children in your own moral and religious beliefs is a core principle.
> The culture decided upon through the interaction of the school board and the election of the board by the people. With an overlap of the federal Department of Education. It's a complicated process, but it's there.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the organic statutes of these entities giving these bodies the power to declare and evangelize a "shared culture" or "consensus morality." This attitude also confirms why the Florida law has such strong public support. Educators really do believe that they're champions of what you call this shared public morality and that it is within their ambit to socialize kids into that moral framework. That's exactly what people are afraid of.
I have to say, in all sincerity, that I respect your logical explanation of your position. You've clearly articulated where the disagreement lies.
> I'm pretty sure there is nothing in the organic statutes of these entities giving these bodies the power to declare and evangelize a "shared culture" or "consensus morality"
Children spend easily half their waking day with their educators five out of seven days a year, about eight out of twelve months. The power is there by default because the school has to have a functioning micro-society out of the immediate purview of the parents of the students. For example, classrooms can teach stealing is wrong (and enforce it via code of conduct). They're not brainwashing the youth with a belief in the value of private property and societal protection of it when they do so. Nor are they brainwashing the youth into believing in the correctness of division of labor if they hang one of these in the classroom (https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Helping-Hands-Pock...).
Similarly, if it comes up in conversation that someone has two dads, a teacher isn't brainwashing the youth when they say that's okay. It's certainly not conduct where a private lawsuit is appropriate against a person doing the job they've been entrusted with.
> That's exactly what people are afraid of.
That's an excellent concern for parents to have, and school boards are usually excited to hear feedback on the curriculum if there is a perception that students are being taught a morality that clashes with their parents'. Building a curriculum that benefits students as much as possible is a collaborative exercise.
> Children spend easily half their waking day with their educators five out of seven days a year, about eight out of twelve months. The power is there by default
That's exactly what people are worried about--schools using their monopoly over children's time and attention to exceed the scope of their mandate.
> For example, classrooms can teach stealing is wrong (and enforce it via code of conduct). They're not brainwashing the youth with a belief in the value of private property and societal protection of it when they do so. Nor are they brainwashing the youth into believing in the correctness of division of labor if they hang one of these in the classroom (https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Resources-Helping-Hands-Pock...).
That schools have the power to set and enforce rules, and explain to kids what's socially "allowed" and "not allowed"--e.g. bullying, for any reason, is not allowed--is not in dispute, and doesn't require teachers to opine on disputed moral issues.
> That's an excellent concern for parents to have, and school boards are usually excited to hear feedback on the curriculum if there is a perception that students are being taught a morality that clashes with their parents'. Building a curriculum that benefits students as much as possible is a collaborative exercise.
Public schools and parents don't "collaborate" on the moral education of children. That's squarely in the domain of parents. That's one of the basic bargains that allows pluralism to work, and a key reason why America has largely avoided the disaster with integrating Muslims that France has brought upon itself.
Again, it is impossible for schools to have no say in the moral education of children when children are spending about half their waking hours there. Children are sponges and they will learn what is right and wrong from the observation of the environment they're in; there's no realistic understanding of how children learn that indicates a way to turn that off.
So collaboration is the best-case scenario, because the alternative is a fight. I dislike that this law seems crafted to say "Yes, a fight is the correct approach." That puts children in the middle of an adversarial situation and is therefore unwise.
> Again, it is impossible for schools to have no say in the moral education of children when children are spending about half their waking hours there.
That's just an inherent tension when you combine a Constitution that guarantees robust religious pluralism with taxpayer-funded public education. You have to think robustly about how to give effect to pluralism in the face of practical necessities.
> So collaboration is the best-case scenario, because the alternative is a fight. I dislike that this law seems crafted to say "Yes, a fight is the correct approach." That puts children in the middle of an adversarial situation and is therefore unwise.
Whether there is collaboration or a fight often depends on whether the parties clearly agree on their respective rights and roles. If you build your house partly on my land, my response is going to depend in large part on whether you acknowledge the boundary line or attempt to deny it.
A fight is brewing here because there's a disagreement as to rights and roles. In Tinker, the Warren court wrote that educators could exercise their in loco parentis to prevent conduct that would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school." It may be that there are incidental moral teachings that bear on that function. So long as we all agree about the limited scope of that authority--only as need to maintain discipline, etc.--we can collaborate on the details.
If educators insist, however, that their role--by virtue of their profession and education--is to teach kids about their view of evolving "secular morality," and displace the moral teachings of parents, then collaboration is not possible and a fight is in order. Because that's a sweeping expansion of educators' role. And it jeopardizes the compromises that a lot of people have made with the larger society. As my mom told me growing up, "just because your American friends can do something doesn't mean that you can."
> "just because your American friends can do something doesn't mean that you can."
That's an excellent example, and I would hope the public education system would teach you that you have exactly the same rights as every American, in contrast to the incorrect information you are receiving from the home. For as Jefferson once said, the purpose of public education is "... To enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom."
> Why is it inappropriate for young children to be present for educational discussions about gender identity and sexual orientation?
Because kids’ brains aren’t fully developed until age 25 and sexuality is a complicated and potentially damaging force that parents try to insulate their kids from until they’re old enough to understand what it is and what it isn’t.
Also, more fundamentally, because many parents are just fresh out of trust: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/planned-parenthood-st-loui.... There’s a vocal faction of the left that’s obsessed with sex. These are the folks who thought same-sex marriage was a bad thing because they wanted more sweeping changes to sexual and gender norms. These folks are always trying to sneak in the door behind people advocating for equal rights, and right now we’re in a phase where the broader center left doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to them.
I would argue that saying, "some people have two mommies," is arguably age appropriate, but adding, "because some women like to have sex with other women," would not be. The teacher in question should have just said, "ok," or something and not tried to bring in a deeper discussion about sexual preferences.
The problem is that a reasonable reading of the bill bans both the latter and the former, so either the law was incompetently crafted, or it was not intended to serve the distinction you've laid out.
As I pointed out in my other comment, re-read that sentence, it's two separate clauses joined by or. As in, it bans {any discussion of the topics {K-3 OR not "age appropriate"}}.
>may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 *or* in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.
That "or" is pretty crucial, and any lawyer worth their salt will point out that this will not limit it to K-3. It bans ALL discussion of the topics, "age appropriate" or not, from K-3, AS WELL AS opening the way for private litigation for discussion that some parent decides is inappropriate for ANY grade level.
Per the New York Times:
>The impact is clear enough: Instruction on gender and sexuality would be constrained in all grades. But its language is vague and subject to interpretation.
>The language highlights the youngest students, but the “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate” provision affects all ages. Those terms are highly subjective, and parents, school staff and students are likely to clash over the ambiguities.
As to whether the topic "is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader" I recall kindergarten discussions on students who might have two mommies or two daddies, which would be banned by a reasonable interpretation of the law.
I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner.
I'm confused. If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?
Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these? Young families that I know now own some children's books with "non-traditional families" (yuck, I don't know a better term -- please suggest!) Of course, the books are age-appropriate.
The point is to normalise gender and sexuality diversity as early as possible. Generations before had to learn much later.
>If a child has two parents of the same gender, or a parent that is transitioning gender, or is friends with... or has reletives that... etc.? What if a child wishes to present as a different gender?
>Why isn't it appropriate to discuss all of these?
Totally fine with that in the home. This topic is not appropriate for public school teachers instruct to their students in a K-3 setting. If, as a parent, you feel it is appropriate with your children at that age, instruct them at home.
Look at it this way, by allowing it, you are essentially forcing parents with teachers who want to bring up the subject to have their kids instructed on gender topics in K-3; a subject the parents didn't opt-in for either. Not only that, there's no guarantee some Math or English teacher is even qualified to teach the subject. That's definitely not cool.
>Is the topic of a child having a biological mother and father at home appropriate for K-3?
No, man. Kids are learning colors and how to spell basic words and basic math and how to interact with each other. Some kids don't have parents, some kids only have grandparents or only aunts and uncles, some kids only have a single parent, some kids have step parents, some kids swap between divorced parents, some kids are adopted and some kids have parents who abandoned them because of drug use, or are dead or in prison. You wanna broach the subject of same sex parents, you gotta cover all that shit and you've opened a can of worms way bigger than you thought. Teachers shouldn't bring that shit up. Allow them a little time in their lives to be innocent and not worry about that shit. Spread your politics to adults, leave the kids alone.
Life doesn't leave the kids alone though. Those families you've described were all my fellow students in kindergarten.
Can't help but wonder how much damage we did to them by reinforcing they were abnormal when we talked about mommies and daddies and they didn't have those. Guess we take talk of nuclear families off the table too, for everyone's safety.
... And then we've made a strange world where kids can't talk about their parents at school.
>Those families you've described were all my fellow students in kindergarten.
Yes, it's quite common unfortunately. I've always heard it referred to as "a parent or guardian," by schools which is a pretty good approach in my opinion.
>... And then we've made a strange world where kids can't talk about their parents at school.
No, you're misrepresenting the opposing argument. The law only concerns classroom instructions by school personnel or third parties. In my mind, this would be akin to, "today's lesson is about LGBTQ studies." The law doesn't apply to what kids are allowed or not allowed to discuss amongst themselves.
>Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties
> In my mind, this would be akin to, "today's lesson is about LGBTQ studies." The law doesn't apply to what kids are allowed or not allowed to discuss amongst themselves.
The problem is that the teacher is the source of truth, so that discussion is likely to end up in the teacher's lap. What do they do then?
What I'm afraid this bans is the teacher being able to respond with something like "Yup, some people have 2 dads. And some have 2 moms. Some people have families that look nothing like yours, but it's not a big deal."
Basically I would hope for explanation and normalization along the same lines as divorced parents. Nobody is expecting them to explain why people get divorced, or what sexual orientation is. Just an acknowledgement that it exists, and it's fine, and little Timmy isn't a weirdo because his parents are gay or divorced.
Maybe on Pride Day they read a children's book where the parents are just incidentally LGBTQ. The "Timmy goes out to play in the rain with his dog, and comes inside muddy. His moms/dads are mad that he tracked mud all over." Doesn't have to be a whole lesson gay identity and culture, just a reminder that not everyone has the same kind of family. They honestly should do the same thing with single/divorced parents; I don't feel like they exist in children's books either.
>Basically I would hope for explanation and normalization along the same lines as divorced parents. Nobody is expecting them to explain why people get divorced, or what sexual orientation is. Just an acknowledgement that it exists, and it's fine, and little Timmy isn't a weirdo because his parents are gay or divorced.
Yes, I don't think the law bars that discussion, especially if the child initiates it. I would hope it wouldn't. Of course it will be up to the courts to interpret what classroom instruction means.
>Maybe on Pride Day they read a children's book where the parents are just incidentally LGBTQ. The "Timmy goes out to play in the rain with his dog, and comes inside muddy. His moms/dads are mad that he tracked mud all over." Doesn't have to be a whole lesson gay identity and culture, just a reminder that not everyone has the same kind of family. They honestly should do the same thing with single/divorced parents; I don't feel like they exist in children's books either.
I think on Pride Day, they should teach colors and math and reading just like every day to K-3 kids. Why introduce this to the curriculum? Why introduce the concept that some kid's parents are drug addicts? It just doesn't belong. Parents can do that if they feel it's important for their kids to learn, not the public schools.
Also consider the kid who's parents are gay could certainly feel that this whole discussion is singling them out and not like having the teacher bring it up. Just because a teacher intends the discussion to make someone feel inclusive doesn't mean it won't have the opposite affect in a child's mind. Kids can also be cruel, imagine during the discussion some kid says, "Ha ha, Jimmy has two mommies!" followed by snickers and laughs. That's certainly not the outcome you are imagining, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Now the kid feels like an utter outcast, the exact opposite of the intent. Best just to stick to the basics of elementary education and not let teachers go, "off script."
> Yes, I don't think the law bars that discussion, especially if the child initiates it. I would hope it wouldn't. Of course it will be up to the courts to interpret what classroom instruction means.
That might be the disconnect for us; I think it will end up being pretty broadly defined. The term doesn't seem to be legally defined (in this context), so the closest I can find is Florida's legal definition of a teacher:
"(a) Classroom teachers.—Classroom teachers are staff members assigned the professional activity of instructing students in courses in classroom situations, including basic instruction, exceptional student education, career education, and adult education, including substitute teachers."
Given that it doesn't separate out discussion, I would guess that effectively anything that happens in the classroom is "instruction".
Only time will tell, I could totally be wrong.
> I think on Pride Day, they should teach colors and math and reading just like every day to K-3 kids. Why introduce this to the curriculum?
Kids at that age are learning what normal is, and by the end of it are starting to judge things as not normal. You can see it in those stupid Children React videos; those kids already have an idea of normal and not. Or if you were to offer an American 3rd grader some kind of cultural delicacy. They'll say it's gross and weird, meaning it doesn't fit into their definition of normal. Kindergarteners will happily eat it, because they don't have a sense of normal just yet.
The purpose is to help them realize it's a normal thing. We still teach them what pigs and cows are, even though most people will interact with far more gay people than pigs or cows. If pigs and cows are taught as normal in an urban area, why would it be so weird to introduce the idea of gay people? It's certainly more pertinent.
> Why introduce the concept that some kid's parents are drug addicts?
I probably should have gated that with "loving and healthy parents". The goal is to teach children that there are other normal family arrangements, not to drag 2nd graders into a discussion about the nature of evil.
> Also consider the kid who's parents are gay could certainly feel that this whole discussion is singling them out and not like having the teacher bring it up. Just because a teacher intends the discussion to make someone feel inclusive doesn't mean it won't have the opposite affect in a child's mind. Kids can also be cruel, imagine during the discussion some kid says, "Ha ha, Jimmy has two mommies!" followed by snickers and laughs. That's certainly not the outcome you are imagining, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility. Now the kid feels like an utter outcast, the exact opposite of the intent. Best just to stick to the basics of elementary education and not let teachers go, "off script."
That would be traumatic, but also basically the default outcome unless you somehow believe that children are kinder to each other when the teacher is gone. If the kids are going to snicker and laugh while the teacher is there, I can't imagine they'd be any kinder if they found out on their own.
I don't think it will always be perfect, but I don't think leaving the kids to figure it out themselves is going to lead to a better outcome.
> That's the actual text. I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner. The partisan hyperbole around it is ridiculous on both sides.
The way it's being enforced is the issue. I don't see any issue with discussion of gender identity with kindergardeners or 3rd graders. If they can understand that mommy and daddy love each other and got married, they can understand that daddy and daddy or mommy and mommy did too. The law's intent is to allow the first, but prevent the second (and we see evidence of this due to age-appropriate books featuring gay characters getting removed, but not age-appropriate books with straight relationships).
> Like Huckleberry Finn? Agree, books shouldn't be banned.
No, Huck Finn shouldn't be banned.
> Well maybe Mein Kampf and The Turner Diaries.
No. If they're taught they should be taught in context (and admittedly you're probably not going to read Mein Kampf cover to cover outside of a college course), but if it's relevant to the curricula, sure (and I'm sure there are excerpts in some euro-history textbooks!)
> Maybe some shouldn't be taught in public schools, right? How about the Bible? Should that be excluded from the public school corriculum?
No, there are obvious contexts where the bible should be taught as part of the curriculum! When we discussed world religions came up in my high school history we absolutely read bits of the Bible and Quran, as well as some Vedic verses and more.
> No screening of A Birth of a Nation you'd agree with? It's not like they're removing them from public libraries or the internet. What is taught in public schools vs what is allowed to be said in a public forum are quite different things as well.
I watched clips from Birth of a Nation in my HS history classes, again: as long as it's contextualized well, sure, in fact more than sure! Yes, we should encourage well-contextualized viewership of shameful things from history.
Also as a bit of an addendum, if the worry really is primarily around "grooming" and childhood sexual assault, some age appropriate instruction about sex and specifically how and what is inappropriate for adults to do is one of the most effective things to keep children safe. If a kid doesn't have the words to describe what was done to them, or the understanding that it was inappropriate, they're much less likely to report.
> I don't see how you could possibly think that is an appropriate subject for a 3rd grader, much less a kindergartner
My brother was born when I was in kindergarten. When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction, the topic of men and women being attracted to each other is already on the table which means that the fact that not everybody has that attraction is also on the table.
My main problem with the law as written is the clause "in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students." The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate. This law takes something that should be addressed on a case-by-case basis by the parents and teachers who know the students best, puts a cudgel in the hands of one of those parties, and says they should be set against each other. That's profoundly stupid.
>When there's about to be a new family member, how that happens and where they come from is a natural topic to discuss. And if you're going to discuss reproduction
You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.
>The science of education is less than 100 years old, and modern child psychology is younger than that. I don't think anybody has any idea what is or is not age appropriate.
> You should not be teaching reproduction to kindergartners as a public school teacher.
As it did no harm to me, I cannot agree. In fact, I have yet to hear one instance of a child coming to harm learning that knowledge in a healthy way at the kindergarten age.
My position is that is a case-by-case question. Does it need to be on the syllabus (what passes for a syllabus in kindergarten)? Maybe not. Should parents be able to sue if the topic comes up organically? No, that's quite disruptive to what should be a collaborative process. And given how little we know of the hard sciences of either child psychology or mass education, bringing force of law down on this topic is severe government overreach.
By “ban” you mean the government that is providing a taxpayer-funded service choosing what content is provided as part of that service by taxpayer-paid employees, right?
I think they mean the government providing a taxpayer-funded service letting citizens bring private lawsuits instead of going through the regular channels for addressing errors if deviations from curricula occur because for some reason those channels (which are also government-defined) are inadequate, yet cannot be improved.
We'd best not pull the thread on why they can't be improved.
Who is suggesting that Google employees be restrained?
Also, the complaint about Google employees is a liberal one. It’s about a small, wealthy, highly unrepresentative group of people having outsize power over society and culture.
As if I haven't read thousands of "these companies are public utilities" arguments ever since conservatives embraced Trump's politics of total war against perceived enemies.
> Trump's politics of total war against perceived enemies.
Trump was a Democrat for most of his life, after all. You know, the folks that turned on a dime to defend corporate free speech the moment the big corporations were on their side. I'm too nerdy to stomach the hypocrisy, but it's hard to fault someone for playing to win.
Nothing is being censored here; it's a simple recommendation. If they start censoring personal correspondence, they open up a huge opportunity for another option to disrupt them. It's not an impossible scenario, but it's an unlikely (and more importantly: self-correcting) scenario.
Self-correcting because frustrated users will simply start their own Google? Even if that happens, their second generation of employees will start a revolt if their company doesn't follow the latest DIE best practices.
I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem has a chance to resist these trends.
Self-correcting because Google already has competition in the cloud editor space. Office suites are valuable software with an obvious business model for monetization.
> I honestly think that only the Russian/Chinese model of a nationalized IT ecosystem
That wouldn't solve the underlying problem if the nation decides some words are inappropriate (in fact, if we're thinking anti-censorship you may have chosen two particularly bad examples ;) ). It's power structures all the way down.
You can turn it off, but would you. Would you risk turning it off at work where everyone else that looks at your doc sees the purple and you never even got a heads up.
If Google were to affect search ranking for something like that, it would be much simpler to just affect it based on the presence of the actual keywords that would have been underlined than retaining some metadata about the configuration of the editor when the document was written.
Spoiler alert: Google already has a deny list of words that will cause a page to not show up outside of focused queries for it. Most people have no idea how much porn is actually on the internet.
If you like the username, you should listen to the song.
The punchline is that the protagonist spends his life paranoid about shadow organizations watching his every move. In the end, he ends up dead in the trunk of a local strongman who gets away with it because there is no greater order in the world to save or harm him.
I use Chrome. I like it better than the alternatives. But, I turn off Google completion suggestions. To see what I mean, go to Google.com in English and type "tr" in the search box (do not press enter). Suddenly things I don't want to see are suggested to me. The same is true in Chrome's address bar unless you opt out (PS: I get most people might find it useful or not care and I'm in the minority). I get if I actually did the search I'd get google's suggestions but something about it completing with pictures to partial input feels more off for some reason.
But, even more, the default home page of Chrome shows the day's Google Doodle. I often like Google Doodles, but, at the same time, often the Google Doodle is some celebration of a person and while that's semi innocuous, one day it suddently felt like someone else's propoganda in front of me. I quickly changed my new tab page to something without Google.
It's scary to me that a few people at Google get to choose each day what to make a ~billion people look at. It seems different than say the NYTimes because the browser is a tool to me, it's not the source of content itself. Sure if I go read the NYTimes they get to choose what's on the front page. But I can choose not to go to the Times. But, by default, Browsers are a source of content (Except Safari? Though it does by default promote 10+ company's sites). Even Firefox, by default, shovles content someone else selected, in my face, intentionally or un-intensionally pushing their agendna on me.
> a concern which is not necessarily distilled down to "big brother" or "corporate overlords".
My first thought was the time that Google banned a genocide researcher and froze their Drive account because it contained images and video of warcrimes for their research. I can only imagine this `feature` going the same way over time. This is going to affect people who are legitimately studying social problems, more than it is likely to help fix the problems they're studying.
For example, the Nuremberg Trial transcript probably contains some pretty choice words. If Google starts suggesting edits, or worse auto-applying them like they do with spelling, we run the risk of whitewashing documents like this unintentionally.
It wasn’t just google that wanted the name change though.
> The East Cut was established in 2015 by residents and business owners as a community benefit district. The goal is to provide this neighborhood its identity separate from South of Market and South Beach neighborhoods.
I used to work on Rincon Hill and the East Cut thing happened after I moved away, so I had long wondered whether it was an old name being revived (it kinda has a gold-rush ring to it) or another real estate scheme like calling the Tenderloin “Lower Nob Hill.”
Going by the article maybe you can just pay a branding company and they’ll get Google to rename your neighborhood whatever you like?
Eh, I don’t think that’s the point the OP is making and is something we’ve heard ad nauseum during the pandemic.
Google controls what appears on YouTube. That’s not really very surprising. But the idea that Google’s choices (over words or neighbourhood name) spills out into the offline world and alters it… that’s something else.
Google's choices spilling out into the offline world is exactly what the GP was getting at -- by choosing to expose Youtube users to a specific type of content, Google has chosen what escapes into meatspace.
That’s like saying that the New York Times editors’s choices spill out into the offline world because they choose what appears on the pages of the newspaper
YouTube's primary function is to be open to the public. Anyone can go there, anyone can post videos there. They are like a mall or other privately-owned-but-publicly-open place. Google should not be censoring speech there, beyond already-illegal stuff and other content that is broadly prohibited in public places (porn, etc.)
For example they removed some videos that said the virus spreads via aerosols. Now, one and a half year later most agree this is true and good ventilation could have saved a lot of people.
Not really, at the time the science suggested that was the best path. Youtube is a private enterprise and has every right to remove material that they consider dangerous based on their research teams. You were perfectly free to make a video and release it on you own website or peertube or via torrents/usenet. You have a free voice but you don't have the right to mass distribution, that is up to you (the hypothetical generic "you") to see that it happens.
> at the time the science suggested that was the best path.
Science is not a monolith. I can find a hundred distinguished scientists who disagree with that statement.
... that is an especially controversial statement for anyone who remembers how (1) SARS was airborne and (2) masks did help, contrary to the public position of the WHO/CDC.
This cognitive bias is something that is really ingrained in the population by pop-sci media, usually ones that start with "Scientists now say that ____". Technically it's correct that "(some) scientists say that ____" but laypersons can easily misunderstand that "(all) scientists say that ____".
Yes, legally YouTube is in the right.
Morally, society needs to solve the problem of the private platforms that are quasi-utility services.
Can you imagine when/if your power company, water distributor decides to cut you off because you disagree with the official record?
As far as I understand, at that time the science did not suggest that this was the best path - at the time the science was inconclusive with reasonable support for both aerosol and droplet options; and the blocked videos had just as much, just as good scientific basis as the official position. They were blocked purely because of the WHO political decision to promote one option over the other, and that WHO decision did not have a proper scientific backing - and when that was challenged in public, the response was to block the scientific arguments which were valid and reasonable already at the time, and some time later turned out to be conclusive.
Furthermore, there was a long gap of many, many months between a scientific consensus that the WHO position was literally wrong and the changing of that position - and during that gap any blocking of these videos was not only without a scientific basis but even directly going against what science suggests.
Not activists and not entirely black, but I know that Youtube works with the Metropolitan Police in the UK to remove drill rap videos that the Met considers too violent (violent content, of course, being one of the things that is against Youtube's TOS).
(As always, content removal is a controversial topic, and that includes this topic.)
Youtube has been stung by various "scandals" in the past where advertisers temporarily "boycott" (or, at least, raised a ruckus) when an ad appears next to content the advertisers consider objectionable (such as, as I recall, child exploitation content and al-Qaeda / jihadist groups several years ago). As an ad supported platform, I do think that Youtube certainly should have the right to monitor their platform in order to remove content that they believe is bad for business, including protecting advertiser brands from content they don't want to appear next to. Youtube also has legal requirements to follow (eg copyright law) and may do some things more to manage their own brand, or even perhaps manage legal liability. It would be nice if Youtube was more transparent about the whys of their content management, but as a private company they are not obligated to do so.
Youtube is not the last word in streaming videos. There are several platforms dedicated to hosting videos that would fall afoul of Youtube's content policy. Many of the ones I can think of are not funded by advertising, though some platforms are big enough where "niche advertising networks" are possible (eg big adult video networks like Pornhub).
As an aside, I think login to, but it’s weird. It can be separate, joined to ‘log’ as in login or in some contexts with ‘to’ as in into. Perhaps it should just be ‘loginto’?
> rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
There was briefly some gentrified name for the area between Soma, Portrero Hill and Mission, around where the Muji was and the highway overpass still is.
I remember it rhyming with SomaSopa from that one episode of South Park, but even more ridiculous because it concatenated 3 words alluding to each of the 3 adjacent neighborhoods. Does anyone remember it?
EDIT: Huh, they've seen to have settled on 'Showplace Square' now. That's new.
It is interesting about the Maps thing. We have a similar one in our city, where part of the CBD is designated 'Frog's Hollow', which was the colloquial name for a small area (basically mostly a slum) for a time in the 1800s. It makes it look like that's the actual name of half our CBD!
But it hasn't slipped back into actual use, it's just a curiosity. Interesting that it's been like that for years and they still haven't fixed it...
I think what is most difficult is the inability to attribute this change to a clear intent, which can be then be clearly opposed.
What's likely happening under the hood is a Google PM thinks this a good idea bc they have an MBA from a good school, see the market research on grammarly (sp?), knows it nods to helpful social movements sometimes, and decides to roll it out as an OKR from a team of a sub-team of a product of Google of Alphabet.
Who do you push back on against this? Putting aside the massive network effects GOOG can wrangle to roll this out and have it standardize.
The same thing happens with an Amazon warehouse in Rural PA that is doing shady things with workers and data tracking, a Walmart in Montana. The city council decides to do something about it. Who exactly do they complain to with actual impact? There is no one really.
The village name, from the village next to my village (in Switzerland) is wrong on Google Maps since ever. But it seems, nobody does care or is impossible to reach somebody on Google to correct it.
Have you tried clicking on 'Send feedback', the very small link on the bottom right of the map?
I did when Maps was failing to route through a junction near where I lived in London, because it thought going straight through wasn't legal (it was). It was fixed a few weeks later.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google but nowhere near Maps, and my experience of correction predated my employment. And I don't speak for Google.)
Where Google Maps has a dedicated way of providing corrections, you can get things fixed quickly.
Where it doesn’t, and you have to use a more generic feedback form, my experience is that it never gets corrected. Zero times out of perhaps a dozen that I’ve tried, for several different types of errors (misplaced town markers, a missing consonant in the Bengali spelling of a road name, can’t remember what else off the top of my head). I just don’t bother now. Most seem to get fixed some years down the line, probably incidentally as part of some other more generic data or processing algorithm update. The only time I’ve had any sort of prompt success was when I reported something on a Google Maps-related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23367961. The fix in that instance was evidently done as a one-off exception, but looking at a few places in Google Maps now, I think the underlying systemic issue is finally fixed (for now).
As far as I can tell, that feedback goes into a black hole. I've sent many corrections there, not a single one has been adopted, including ones where entire streets didn't exist (i.e. they exist on Maps but have never existed IRL).
In the city I used to live, they had to put signs up at the entrance to a street, warning people to ignore Google Maps. It tried to route people the wrong way up a one-way street, and the government had failed to get Google to fix it.
I think “allowlist” is oppressive and humiliating so can you please stop using it altogether?
It’s all about demonstrating that you have the social power to control other people’s words, even when (perhaps especially when) your justification for doing so is completely and obviously nonsensical to everyone involved.
I think it qualifies as an oppressive form of social violence.
If you at all cared about the lived experienced of the folks you’re oppressing, you’d stop using it.
There is nothing humiliating in it, so I'm going to politely ignore your suggestion. In practice, though, the "gentle suggestion" is a thinly veiled threat to report heresy to inquisition.
I identify as non-binary. Your erasure of my identity is just as problematic as your use of social violence to compel speech and oppress marginalized and under-represented groups.
Your responses and refusal to acknowledge the effects of these words only demonstrates you being insensitive about the pain of many of your brothers and sisters who find the echo of social injustices in the seemingly insignificant word like “allowlist”(white) and “denylist”(black). You may even understand why they feel one way or other about it , it is just that you choose to not acknowledge it.
A world where a corporate entity (or any entity for that matter) tries to interfere with the way we communicate is not "better". As someone wrote in this thread already, tools we use are an extension of ourselves, and we should be able to form whatever thoughts and opinions we want, without any sort of "influence", no matter how minor, even if it's optional. People go for defaults and this seems like a giant slippery slope.
They are auto suggestions. If you don’t want the feature disable it. But don’t ask society or the majority to agree with you. Most people agree with what google is doing and find it helpful otherwise they would simply turn it off.
The majority of society will not even be aware of such a change, because the majority goes with the default settings provided to them. Also source on people agreeing with BigCo being helpful, please.
Google is so large that any stance they take, no matter how minuscule, has immense influence.
Case in point, from this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/technology/google-maps-ne...
> For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
> The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google’s map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
My point is, it might seem like a small, inconspicuous change. But at Google-scale, this actually has an impact on the real world, and personally I don't feel confident with Google deciding what words are the correct words.