I have some good friends who are either for banning terms that are claimed to offend others, or at least consider it not a bad idea because it placates people.
I know their hearts and intentions are good.
Which is exactly what makes it so painful to try and show them what that attitude and those actions have always lead to, in human history.
They refuse to consider the problem in long term, and they refuse to consider that their own attitude could be wrong.
I've mentioned the tribalization and seeing humans not as individuals but as groups is a fundamental source of the problems, and I do believe some of the responses to that are a proof of how vehemently opposed even otherwise good-intentioned people are to consider the inevitable effects over their intentions. Wishes are not actions.
I have now come to the conclusion that there is no way to engage these people in a beneficial manner: there is nothing to be gained by talking with them. They will not reason, and they will not think; they will not provide any new insights, as they can only repeat their ideological programming.
This is painful, because these people have good intentions, and some of them are dear friends. Yet, it is exactly their actions and demands that are driving wedges into the society. You cannot treat individuals equally, if you insist on "positive" discrimination through a class-based system; you only perpetuate a class-based approach of people relating to other people. At some point, the pendulum will swing again, and it'll just be a different group being discriminated. Nothing changes, except new individuals are fed into the grinder.
What to do?
![Confused :-//](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/confused0024.gif)
On one hand, let them live life like they want to. On the other hand, they're ignoring their own behaviour and the effects of their own behaviour, and simply telling others how to behave, because they feel morally superior. They're being destructive assholes, but with good intentions.
They claim that "master" and "slave" are offensive to people who have never been slaves themselves, but have built themselves a self-image based on their assumed progenitors being subject to "slavery". This is utterly ridiculous, because there are
currently as much real slaves right now than the entire total population in Nordic countries,
and these people are not willing to do anything about that – except to tell people to not talk about it. (Possibly because slavery is prevalent in South Asia and Africa, and forced marriages and honor violence in Middle East; and because people connected to those regions are in particularly protected groups, mentioning this is a bigger crime than slavery itself.)
This is not theoretical in any way, by the way. In Finland, the exact same happened with regards to prostitution in the last decade or so. In order to reduce street prostitution, the laws were changed in a way that resulted in significant increase in human trafficking (especially for prostitution). But, because the trafficking is underground, and out of sight, and does not involve the politicians' own daughters, this situation is widely considered more preferable. Out of sight, out of mind. Clicking "thumbs up" on a social media post is now more important than actually helping your neighbor carry a heavy load, because the former is visible, the latter invisible in the social world.
In all Nordic countries, honor violence and forced marriage is a huge problem, because the legal system lacks any tools to fight against this. Any attempts to do so, are countered as "islamophobic" and thus utterly racist. Women who have a fatwa but still talk about their own experiences and why something should be done about this are shunned and "disinvited", because they don't fit into the narrative. They don't get silenced, just shadowbanned.
And herein lies the true core.
Just like "Codes of Conduct", redefinition and banning of terms will only enforce the divides between people. This is particularly visible in technical mailing lists, where it can be difficult or even impossible to get any of the maintainers to react to a difficult situation, because any negative reaction has huge negative social impact, but
ignoring people is utterly safe.
It is also increasingly visible in scientific research, where delving into a new topic is frowned upon, and doing the same research others are doing is easiest to get funds for. "Do not rock the boat."
The true core of this, and I believe even Karl Marx was well aware of this, is to
divide et impera: to categorize people in groups where inter-group interactions are frowned upon, because such groups – especially when ostensibly "anti-authoritarian" – are much easier to control completely, than individuals.
(As a trivial example, consider traffic patterns. We can model traffic flow very precisely using very simple models, except they all fail at the individual motorist level. Groups are modelable and controllable, individuals much less so.)
So, it is truly not about not offending people: it is about teaching them to limit themselves to intra-group interactions, and avoid all inter-group interaction as dangerous.
(You can see this already popping up in the various popular movements: if you aren't
X, bend the knee and be silent. This space is for
Y only.)
I do not believe there is a fix to it that does not involve massive amounts of suffering and destruction.
I am seriously contemplating dropping all my academic endeavours – even though I made a very hard decision 15 years ago to drop business and switch to low-level physics research and simulator development –, and instead move to a small city or a large village, and limit my interactions to a group the size of humans have evolved to deal with (~ max. 2000), and to hell with the rest of the world:
humanity is not sane. But, on the level of individuals, a good example, a good pattern, has at least a chance to spread.