'Master' and 'slave': Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

[Cerebus]

Why is master/servant never even considered as an alternative? Minimum change of meaning, minimally invasive. This works in all contexts instead of just a subset like most the other alternatives ... so why not?

Why do you hate maids so much that their feelings mean nothing to you?

You little sexist so-and-so, assuming that all servants must be female.   

I've met hundreds of female domestic servants, but I can't remember ever meeting a male one. So, while male ones may exist, they are outside my lived experience.

You know I was joking, but surely you've encountered male servants - bell boys, concierge, porter, waiter... You don't have to have posh friends with butlers to have encountered male servants.

[pepelevamp]

ultimately i believe these people feel helpless and are desperate for something they think they can do, and desperate for a villain they can force to change. real change is hard, but this is easy.

i have never seen this issue come up online without it also coming with derogatory comments about people who disagree. and scrolling through it, its almost exclusively white people wanting to do this.

personally I don't have screw all against renaming my master git branch to something else, or using a different term for something i already know. i do it all the time. everyone here already does. what is getting my goat is that im suspicious of the motivations of people behind it.

i would feel like a right tool saying to some black mates 'hey look, i did something that benefits you' by renaming my git branch. what a fucken tool. all i can imagine is being told i have my head up my ass & that this is a surrogate for an actual effort towards an actual problem.

[wraper]

And what am I supposed to do with my male and female connectors?
I'm going to have to start using gender neutral or trans DB9 connectors?

Normally I would suggest that somebody says these things as a great prank joke.
But unfortunately there are people out there who take the idea seriously.

Call them Partner A and Partner B.

Found a better suggestion on the internet:

Penetrator/Receptacle?

"Hi I'm after a cable for my TV, Penetrator to Receptacle please"

[cliffyk]

30 years ago I attended a management seminar in which the presenter told us of the effort to replace the supervisory titles "foreman" and "overseer" with terms lees connected to the agricultural old south. For some reason "foreman" survived this silliness, but a new title "supervisor" was introduced to replace "overseer".

Supervisor = "over" "seer"...

Returning to this immediate discussion, and leaving silliness aside, the terms "primary" and "secondary" are quite common in today's technologies--just give it time and "master" and "slave" will go away--just as slavery would have gone away during the industrial revolution; just as tractors replaced work horses...

[nuclearcat]

I did such statement on my page, after arguing with some people on subject. Forgive me for my english, its obvious its not my native language

I'm from Slavic ethnic group, because our nations was enslaved during medieval wars - our "ethnicity" name became source of word "slave".
(Please read etymology of world slave)
I am against any attempts to remove word "slave" from technical terminology. In short - they are trying to erase part of our history. IMO majority of Slavs(Slavic countries) will agree.
Our ancestors did not suffer that some techies with their specific perception of "social justice" can just erase each mention of this word, imitating fight with slavery, while slavery exist right here and right now in real world. Their actions will make things only worse.
Word and its history should be a reminder to future generations - that humanity should not repeat the mistakes of the past.
Please solve REAL problems and REAL slavery, don't try to be decorative knights.

Feel free to use my opinion, if it is handy in debates
And my personal opinion is that those who change these words really want to get a reputation as a “hero, fighter for someone rights,” but they don’t want to do anything that help real people, solve real problems of those who feel injustice, for them it is much easier to make a storm in a teacup, calm it down and claim themself as hero of the day.

[engrguy42]

Coincidentally, the other day I was listening to a clinical psychologist who was discussing his views of the real motivations behind those who get so emotionally involved in these types of "social justice" issues. And he seemed to echo what my view has been after being around people for many decades. He postulated that people who feel bad about themselves (low self esteem, for whatever reasons) avoid dealing with those things by adopting "pseudo-moralistic" stances on whatever big social issues they can find, solely to look good to their friends and neighbors, thereby building their own egos.

And I think social media is greatly amplifying this effect. Now you can tweet to 10,000 people about how awesome you are, and you can build a huge demonstration showing how noble you are with few selfies. It's never about facts and data, and identifying real problems and finding real solutions. It's about emotion and ego by people who don't even understand the issues, much less how to effectively deal with them. Nor do they even want to understand the issues. 

And sadly, I think the social media amplification effect is now affecting our corporate and government leaders, so now even they cave to the loud, emotional voices so they'll stay popular. That's really what's changed, IMO, in recent decades. The "adults in the room" have now caved to the shallow, emotional shouting, mainly because social media is so prevalent.

We're doomed.   

 

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

Jordan Peterson ?

[cliffyk]

Coincidentally, the other day I was listening to a clinical psychologist who was discussing his views of the real motivations behind those who get so emotionally involved in these types of "social justice" issues. And he seemed to echo what my view has been after being around people for many decades. He postulated that people who feel bad about themselves (low self esteem, for whatever reasons) avoid dealing with those things by adopting "pseudo-moralistic" stances on whatever big social issues they can find, solely to look good to their friends and neighbors, thereby building their own egos.

And I think social media is greatly amplifying this effect. Now you can tweet to 10,000 people about how awesome you are, and you can build a huge demonstration showing how noble you are with few selfies. It's never about facts and data, and identifying real problems and finding real solutions. It's about emotion and ego by people who don't even understand the issues, much less how to effectively deal with them. Nor do they even want to understand the issues. 

And sadly, I think the social media amplification effect is now affecting our corporate and government leaders, so now even they cave to the loud, emotional voices so they'll stay popular. That's really what's changed, IMO, in recent decades. The "adults in the room" have now caved to the shallow, emotional shouting, mainly because social media is so prevalent.

We're doomed.

I have also heard this put forth, and my empirical experience backs it up. My issue with social media is that like "call-in" talk shows, 99.44% of the population has nothing meaningful to add to almost any discussion..

[cliffyk]

No need to apologise; your English is far superior to my ability in any other language except maybe C++...

[pepelevamp]

i have noticed this trend as-well. its easy to beat down small villains on twitter than actually go after corrupt officials or march in the street.

now after this evening i do know roughly first hand of at least a handful of cases where yeah, someone felt kinda shit having to stare down master/slave in code bases each day. one example was a teacher who taught youths.

but it took me all night to find.  and ive also found african american people on twitter who think its stupid & dont care. the over-whelming majority of posts about this and people talking about it are white.
so yeah there's some reasoning behind it, yeah, but between you & me - renaming/refactoring code is trivial, & i have no emotional attachment to master/slave ICs - its the attitude pushing this which I am critical of.

ive found its basically impossible to find a tweet mentioning this which doesnt instantly critique a perceived opponent of it. and its damn impossible (so far) to find a non-white person bringing it up. my conclusion is like all these things - there may be some backing logic somewhere - but the real push comes from the ability to beat down on somebody else for not being woke enough.

its just like the cops. given even the smallest ability to beat down on your fellow human, some people will take it & beat beat beat.

[magic]

This is considered news?

the best you can do is ignore the fuckwitts and put them in their places when they come out with this SJW bollocks.

That's just name-calling that's guaranteed to foster an "us and them" attitude on both sides. Whenever I encounter someone using "SJW" as an insult I'm prompted to think "Why are they opposed to this?

Ironically, that's typically because they are themselves incurable SJW liberals who think they know how to unite everybody under the sun (by kicking the can down the road and hoping shit "will work out") and that the bloody activist kids are ruining decades of their progress.

Ergo, all forms of liberalism is cancer

[Mr. Scram]

This is considered news?

the best you can do is ignore the fuckwitts and put them in their places when they come out with this SJW bollocks.

That's just name-calling that's guaranteed to foster an "us and them" attitude on both sides. Whenever I encounter someone using "SJW" as an insult I'm prompted to think "Why are they opposed to this?

Ironically, that's typically because they are themselves incurable SJW liberals who think they know how to unite everybody under the sun (by kicking the can down the road and hoping shit "will work out") and that the bloody activist kids are ruining decades of their progress.

Ergo, all forms of liberalism is cancer

Cerebus asked the pertinent question: what's so good about being illiberal?

[cliffyk]

The really ironic part is that it is the unprecedented freedom we have in the U.S.--as established by our founders and fought for by our fathers--that allows them to behave as they do. They cannot deal with it because true freedom requires responsibility, something they were never before in their lives called upon to exhibit.

My plan is to just sit back and watch their anarchistic shìt-show self-destruct; unless of course they try to bring the carnival to my neighborhood where I and my neighbors are quite well armed... 

[Cerebus]

This is considered news?

the best you can do is ignore the fuckwitts and put them in their places when they come out with this SJW bollocks.

That's just name-calling that's guaranteed to foster an "us and them" attitude on both sides. Whenever I encounter someone using "SJW" as an insult I'm prompted to think "Why are they opposed to this?

Ironically, that's typically because they are themselves incurable SJW liberals who think they know how to unite everybody under the sun (by kicking the can down the road and hoping shit "will work out") and that the bloody activist kids are ruining decades of their progress.

Ergo, all forms of liberalism is cancer

No, all forms of ideology that categorize people by labels are cancerous. Once you've labelled a person "liberal", "fascist", "jew", whatever, you're one step closer to treating them as a thing, an object that must be removed as an obstacle to the success of your ideology. Just add a natty uniform and a bit of marching and you're there.

[magic]

Don't forget to add "illiberal" to your list.

This post is exactly my beef with 20th/21st century liberalism, since somebody was curious to know. I can respect 1776 "I'm free because let's kill anyone who says otherwise" liberalism, but modern liberals are nothing but crybabies eternally worried that "they" will "come for them".

Fear of the nazi is the reason why liberals put up with that ever-evolving newspeak (and grow suspicious when somebody questions it), fear of the nazi is why liberal women put up with men winning women's sports, fear of the nazi is why homeless in liberal cities are used to committing crime with absolute impunity, and I could go on but meh. Bottom line, fear of the nazi is all the liberal can think of. Fear of the nazi overrides everything.

[cliffyk]

Radicals and zealots of all flavours become inevitably thin shells filled with nothing but vitriolic hate. This hate is all-consuming, and displaces all rational thought and action with immediate mindless and vengeful lashing out at all perceived slights and villains.

Should real villains be in short supply they will be created, of whole cloth if necessary. If any of the fabricated boogie-men are found to strike a chord they will be retained, "fertilised" from time to time with heaps of B.S.; and then summoned up as remindful demons as needed to nurture the group's hate.

I.e. they become that which they despised in the first.

Here and now, the "liberals" are the fascists, though too consumed by their self-righteousness to realise it...

[bd139]

Indeed. Cerebus said it nicely above. Give any extremist (either variety) a uniform and legitimacy and you’ve got a problem. Usually the same problem

[coppice]

You know I was joking, but surely you've encountered male servants - bell boys, concierge, porter, waiter...

Those are employees of businesses, who happen to be employed in a service role. Real servants are domestic servants.

You don't have to have posh friends with butlers to have encountered male servants.

None that I can remember. All the people I've known with servants had female ones, and I've met hundreds of those.

[madires]

No, all forms of ideology that categorize people by labels are cancerous. Once you've labelled a person "liberal", "fascist", "jew", whatever, you're one step closer to treating them as a thing, an object that must be removed as an obstacle to the success of your ideology. Just add a natty uniform and a bit of marching and you're there.

Unfortunately we won't be able to change that because it's human nature to simplify things, e.g. by sorting people and things into drawers.

[Doctorandus_P]

Next thing on the list are gender neutral connectors.   

[Cerebus]

No, all forms of ideology that categorize people by labels are cancerous. Once you've labelled a person "liberal", "fascist", "jew", whatever, you're one step closer to treating them as a thing, an object that must be removed as an obstacle to the success of your ideology. Just add a natty uniform and a bit of marching and you're there.

Unfortunately we won't be able to change that because it's human nature to simplify things, e.g. by sorting people and things into drawers.

Agreed the human need to label is unstoppable, but there's a significant difference between ideological labels and mere collection making. The acid test is probably "Is there a group who uses this label as an insult?" and double points if the 'label word' is neutral or positive in meaning in ordinary usage. Where the line is crossed is when the label is used derisively. Intent is everything, and it becomes a problem only when you see only the label and not the person.

Edited to add:

And let's be clear, we're all guilty of it to some extent. Who, working in engineering, hasn't used "sales", "marketing" or "HR" derisively.

[madires]

Yep, your definition of the borderline makes sense. And don't worry too much about the other departments, they are also talking very nicely about awkward engineers.

[SiliconWizard]

Next thing on the list are gender neutral connectors.   

Do you really think it's not already part of the deal? https://forums.mrplc.com/index.php?/topic/36753-gender-neutral-electrical-connector/

[Zero999]

The one thing I don't understand is how the terms "master" and "slave" can ever be deemed to be racist. Anyone who believes they are, is ignorant about history, especially African history.

The black lives matter campaigners are upset about how African history and the atrocities committed by the British Empire are not taught in UK schools, which I agree with: African history and the gross human rights violations of the colonial era do need to be taught in school. If you actually take just a few minutes to research the real history of Africa, you'll find is that slavery was endemic to the continent, long before the white European invasion. Black people enslaved other black people, the same as white Europeans enslaved other white people, way before the colonial era. Africa was not some peaceful, eutopian, harmonious, continent, before white people took over and ruined it. There were wars, atrocities and empires for thousands of years before European conquest.

I'm not defending my ancestors, who profited from slavery and should have known better, but no one can take the moral high-ground regarding slavery. The only reason why Europeans managed to dominate and pillage Africa was because they were technically advanced at the time. We saw a similar thing in Africa: look at how successful the technically advanced Egyptians were.

We need to eliminate racism, xenophobia and bigotry from society, but changing technical terminology will not make any difference and will only promote current misunderstandings of history and slavery.

[Cerebus]

The black lives matter campaigners are upset about how African history and the atrocities committed by the British Empire are not taught in UK schools, which I agree with: African history and the gross human rights violations of the colonial era do need to be taught in school.

Bloody hell, British education has gone downhill if that's true. We were certainly taught about the history of slavery in my school, and that's in a highly conservative boy's grammar school in the 70s (which had precisely *one* non-white pupil out of 600 odd).