The issue is that no one is taking my words out of context to get offended. No one is getting offended because I said things. They are getting offended because of their own situation, that I just happened to have brought up. If someone in the military had PTSD because someone yelled "Duck!" and then a grenade blew up right near them, so now they have panic attacks anytime they hear someone loudly say duck. That isn't them "taking the word duck out of context" that is "the word duck affects their brain differently." No one is saying that using the word master makes you a mean malicious person. No one is accusing you of being on the attack trying to hurt people when you use a word without realizing how it impacts others. If a military vet was like "hey I have severe anxiety when someone says duck, can we say 'leave early' instead of 'duck out early'". I would be like "oh shit, i didnt realize. my bad, yeah, of course" not "YOURE TAKING MY WORDS OUT OF CONTEXT I HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THOSE WORDS". If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you're on the attack because clearly you don't care that you are hurting people.

It's pretty easy to tell a good faith argument most of the time. You don't need to just blindly accept the opinion of all people. "Hey this word is heavily associated with slavery and makes people think of slavery" is pretty striaghtforward. Thats not a purely bad faith argument.

I don't know all who you think is "insisting" on the "master/main" change. Everyone I've talked to has been like "yeah, if we could that's cool." or likened it to more of a "its like if someone reminded you daily of that time you accidentally called the teacher 'mom' ... having it go away would be nice, but if it doesn't oh well." No one is crying over it or making demands. The only "insisting" is just people questioning why the slight suggestion results in so much pushback.

It seems like your only reason to not change is "because someone asked me to and I'm too stubborn and reject any decision that wasn't my own." At least "changing a branch name on the worlds largest repo has consequences" is a valid reason. But "I refuse to listen to others"... cmon.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you know the word hurts others and then you double down and insist on using it, then yeah, you’re on the attack because clearly you don’t care that you are hurting people.

That would be a pretty ok argument, if you wasn't extending it to all of the internet. But you are, so it becomes "somebody somewhere on the world has a problem with your words, you should adjust or you are a bad person". And no, that form isn't reasonable.

It's also not reasonable if that person that has a problem with "duck" then comes back and say "yeah, and I have a problem with 'early' too", and you change early to something else, and they come back and say "yeah, we have a problem with 'of', can you stop that too?". And it just happens to be the same people raising a lot of other demands on a lot of other contexts, to the point that some people are just leaving the group to avoid them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah. people raising complaints in bad faith is a problem. If they say "I have a problem with 'early' too" and the reason is just "i dont like it". then sure. I'd agree this is a person being a problem. This is a phrase that is directly traceable to master/slave via bitkeeper. Its not just "someone is grasping at straws trying to be offended at random words that are completely unrelated". And things can get stuck in your head. You might think of this conversation every time you git checkout master going forward. So a person affected by slavery, thinking of slavery everytime a word about slavery is used feels pretty understandable. It's not completely upfront, so if things don't change it's not going to cause someone to change careers. This is a VERY low impact change. It's going to make 1% of people's life 0.1% better. It will also make 0% of people's life worse at all. It is a net benefit.

A person with 3 legitimate complaints is not a problem. You gave an example of a person with 1 legitimate complaints and 2 random complaints.

To me, it sounds like you're saying "Black people complain about being oppressed too much, sure maybe they have some valid complaints, but the word doesn't bother ME so therefore this is just unfair whining." You don't see the severity of it, so therefore its not severe.

You seem pretty insistent on not wanting to change because you don't want to have to bend the knee and change just because someone told you to change. And I seem to think that this is a (very minor but nonzero) net benefit in the world, so the world gets better if we do it, not because we have to and someone is telling us to, but because why not. I don't think we're going to see eye to eye on this, so agree to disagree.