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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>Out of curiosity, why is this called Blacknurse?

I can only guess that it's a play on "black hat" hacking as opposed to "white hat"[1].

Since ICMP messages are related to network "health" by way of pinging & diagnostics, a good "white nurse" would use that to monitor the health of the patient. However, an evil "black nurse" would use the ICMP protocol against the patient to kill it.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat_(computer_security)

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They should have called it "evil nurse" or something less charged. Why even go there?

Because maybe not everyone projects their own racism onto innocent words such as black, white, and yellow. We should "go there", because thought-crime and "watch what you say" type ideas are much more dangerous to our society than the term blacknurse.

And you say that as someone who's suffered discrimination, obviously.

I don't think any harm is intended in this choice of words, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't try to be cognizant of the subtle cumulative effect they might have.

The problem is that it's really obvious, too. It's not like they used some term that just happened to have been used in the past as slang but is now a commonplace word without the same meaning. You don't need to get out a dictionary to spot the problem.

So is black metal music racist? Give me a break, people have associated black with evil things such as monsters stalking the night, plague, and death for 3000 years and probably before it. You are paranoid and overreacting. You're projecting your own racial insecurities onto the world where there simply is none, especially in this case.

Metal is not a person, but a nurse is. All the difference. My point isn't to suggest it's racist, but to ask why even go there? If they changed the term slightly no one would have to double think.

>So is black metal music racist?

Well, there are a lot of racist black metal musicians.

I didn't suggest any of this was racist. I despise the hysterical, wolf-crying, race-baiting PC police, but that doesn't mean that we can't try to make the word a better place by avoiding to pile on the black=evil association in our culture and in the English language, especially when coining new terms. It's not a horrible moral failing not to do so, but it would be nice.

I think the reason that Black Nurse might be particularly bad is that during slavery, black women were forced to feed their owners' children instead of their own.

Just because you don't see something as problematic doesn't mean that it isn't.

I haven’t thought of the term in that sense until reading your post. Not because I am unaware of black issues, but because I’m not an American and my context simply lacks the implied connotation for the term in question.

The political correction you ask for is USA-centric. I don’t know if the people behind blacknurse.dk are American, but, if the domain is an indication, they may not be.

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