There’s a clear campaign against the mentally ill with the global rise of fascism. Lots of it shows up in anti homeless rhetoric, but you can see it in the MAHA and anti vaccination movements.
There’s no reason to use the word “r-tarded” to describe someone. As someone who’s worked with the intellectually challenged, it’s an insult to them to compare them with people who are willfully ignorant.
That’s entirely assuming that there indeed is a sizeable minority that have reason to be offended and indeed are offended. In the cited example above, that wasn’t the case so there was significant controversy surrounding what was perceived as “performative activism” that benefitted noone.
“We’re switching from master to main” was controversial? My god, people must’ve been bored out of their fucking minds.
You know how a normal person would react to this? ‘k.’
A 1s websearch says this is false. BLM movement is definitely a “sizable minority” whatever that means.
I reacted like this too. But you I don’t think the opponents had invalid arguments to be honest. It was mostly:
Lack of an actual outcry to change it.
‘Master’ in git did not have any connotations to slavery, so there was no reason to be offended by it (different from eg master/slave databases or something).
The change was hamfisted through without the community actually finding consensus and agreeing with the change.
It invalidates 15 years of git tutorials, which is confusing for newbies.
The defaults for git mismatched with the default in github, which as a very large player put undue corporate pressure on the git project to go along with the change.
Changing the branch name does have impact on users, which without a good reason to change it is unnecessary.
And the big one: the rename is just performative. If you want to address inequality in tech, make sure people of colour get the same access and opportunities that white people get. Github in particular was ridiculed because they pretended to be so socially conscious, but as it turns out despite having black employees, not one of them had managed to promote into a management function at the time. They put up a smokescreen but did not make any actually impactful changes that improved the position of people of colour, and in doing so abused the BLM movement for PR purposes.
BLM didn’t advocate for this though! Microsoft/Github sort of assumed they would, so decided to change it. But I can’t find any actual outcry that it should be changed from those who were supposedly offended by the term.
Fair points.
Weirdly, that BLM source in wikipedia led nowhere. My fault for not checking.
However performative it may have seen at the time, I’m glad the terms are gone. Master/slave was particularly uncomfortable to use for me personally (I mainly associate it with BDSM)
Yeah I don’t mind it changing either, but unfortunately people who disagreed with the process here were imo unfairly criticised.
I certainly hope Big Tech will get properly scrutinized in future for this stuff, so that they take proper meaningful action instead of causing a ruckus like this.