The Go Language was rid of blacklist/whitelist and master/slave
go-review.googlesource.com
go-review.googlesource.com
I've never thought master/slave offensive in the context of computers. Those words imposed their inoffensive meaning in the culture of computer users for half a century. Now they just ruined it, they actually changed the context to make those words offensive again. Sometimes you just have to fight the cultural battle.
If you have seen a word used in a certain context enough it can become difficult to ignore that context in other uses. Similarly, after watching an actor play a role well it may be hard to separate them from that role while watching other movies.
It may also be useful to imagine master/slave replaced with words that are offensive to you to imagine what it’s like for someone else. For example, if they were called pimp/bitch servers I’m sure others would find that offensive.
Different sets of words will be offensive to different individuals. I’m sure we could find 2 words which are less offensive to all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting#Origins_of_the_...
What's next, blackboards and whiteboards? What about red-black trees? Do we really need to shuffle around well established non-offensive terms just because they have a color in their names?
If there was some truly offensive embedding in our nomenclature im all for removing it but this seems like a silly PR stunt. We're turning completely benign ideas into something offensive.
(1) There's no particular reason to start using the terms in a new project
(2) Leader/follower is much more accurate and clear than master/slave in basically every way
(3) It's a lot less difficult than I originally thought to fix legacy docs and code with nicer language
(4) The fact that master/slave has never bothered me personally has absolutely zero bearing on whether I should support their continued use.
That said, leader/follower and allowlist/blocklist are both better than the older terms in every way. The represent the actual mechanisms better and they're less metaphorical.
I’m a guy, so I can’t imagine the pain of pregnancy? I had a large kidney stone once. The female doctor who had two children of her own told me that I experienced was more painful by a good bit than a pregnancy.
I’m also Hispanic, from a super high crime rate country. You think I don’t know what fear is, fear of random government kidnappings, fear of cartel kidnappings? Trust me, I do. Racism? Check. Genocide? Check.
Now should I be able to tell my white friends they can’t imagine what I’ve felt? Bullshit. I suppose SpaceX couldn’t imagine a self landing rocket either. They absolutely can imagine it.
Maybe some people can’t imagine it. Maybe some people are so closed off they really can’t try to put themselves in that position. But everyone? Nah.
It used to be guys were told they couldn’t imagine what it was like being a woman. It was their reserved space, so the gatekeepers claimed. Then trans became more of a thing. Suddenly it was politically incorrect to say these guys couldn’t imagine being a woman when they had been thinking about it for years.
I agree that "leader/follower" might be easier to grasp for someone who has never encountered these terms before, but it is also true that it causes a bit of confusion for more experienced engineers.
For example: if I am reading documentation about a hardware controller and find the "leader/follower" terms I would wonder (and, in fact, this has happened to me in the past) if they have the same meaning as "master/slave" or if the author has decided to use these other terms because there is some particular behavior quirk that applies to this hardware that I should be aware of.
All in all, you have to compare cons and pros and, for this particular context (engineering), I think correctness and lack of ambiguity is more important than "feelings"... but this is (obviously) just my personal opinion.
Experienced engineers are used to handling new and changing terminology. It’s the nature of the job.
Also, when I'm working in a corporate hierarchy, I don't want to see the words "leader" and "follower" all day. But perhaps that is an intended side effect of that change.
Master/slave was chosen on purpose because it is very clear, clearer than the alternative you suggest, and is no more offending that using Knight, gladiator, etc.
Sometimes we must realise that an issue lies with the people who are offended by anything and everything, not with what offends them.
Master/slave hasn't made sense since consensus algorithms came on the scene and started "taking leadership"
Master/slave is a very clear analogy and is used extensively for example about hardware interfaces.
The point here is the same as in 1984. It is aimed at suppressing 'incorrect' thoughts. It is totalitarian and we see society moving that way more and more.
There are a million terms that have negative connotations but are used in technical jargon. It would be endless to account for them all in case someone somewhere finds it disagreeable.
It's much more logical to ask why 0.1% of people are taking offense and seem to draw such stretched interpretations rather than asking 99.9% of people to change for them.
Not for me. A master is to me much more controlling than a leader. A follower is to me much more independent than a slave.
Again, take say i2c where the master is the only one who can initiate a transaction. Being an "i2c follower" doesn't convey to me that the follower is prohibited from initiating a transaction.
The controller/worker suggest by others is much better than leader/follower, but "worker" doesn't work very well in all cases IMO.
As for blacklist/whitelist, my first thought was that I'd change it to allowlist/blocklist and sure enough that's exactly what they did.
There's nothing wrong with this change. If you have a problem with it you need to look deep inside yourself and reexamine your own biases. That's where the real problem lies.
But primary/secondary doesn't mean the same as master/slave.
Consider master/slave from say i2c protocol. Switching to primary/secondary would completely obscure what is going on, you might as well call them apple/orange, while with master and slave it is very clear.
The renaming from master/slave to pty/procTTY might be a good change in that specific case.
Sure you can nitpick about how strict the leader/follower relationship is, but master/slave doesn't necessarily tell you that accurately either.
Some combination of bus-controller works ok, bus-arbiter, or bus-writer vs bus-reader or bus-listener, or bus-consumer.
We also have the idea of having two units 'slaved' together. Which I guess would just be 'synced' or 'chained' though 'chaining' in this case is still probably the same metaphor as 'slave'.
Overall I'm not so big on these sorts of efforts. The euphemism treadmill has been going on forever with little apparent impact on the underlying inequities of the world.
To me it feels like the act of changing the language is a way to feel good about doing something without actually doing the hard work of changing the actual beliefs and actions of racism.
That said I don't think it matters all that much: terminology falls in to and out of fashion all the time, and we end up forgetting where most of it comes from (which could be used as an argument for either side).
So uhh long-live whatever!
This meaning for master and slave is not clear at all. It’s merely familiar to you.
Primary/secondary has a clear meaning to me, same with leader/follower. Both are very different from master/slave.
I'm not saying we must at all cost continue to use master/slave, I'm not married to that piece of language. But I'm struggling to find cases where primary/secondary would be a good replacement for master/slave. That's assuming master/slave was a good fit in the first place.
Yes, you could.
A master controls slaves using through ownership and punishment. In computing that ownership aspect is usually very weak or not even relevant to the task at hand. I2C is a good example. Its about who controls the bus. So for "control" plenty of other concepts are applicable and likely more accurate. Since when does I2C need to punish? A little in / all in: if you want the concept use the entirety of the concept. But really you don't need to. Its actually unnecessary.
Supervisor/worker etc etc. Plenty of more accurate concepts exist without even needing particularly politically correct angles. Even Controller/controllee could work. I'm sure Head Ewok / lesser ewok might work as well if you want to go too far.
The resulting binary as presented to the processor is likely not particularly impacted. Isn’t that the real purpose of most code?
> If you have a problem with it you need to look deep inside yourself and reexamine your own biases. That's where the real problem lies.
So if you are not happy with established terminology you change it but if someone else is not happy with the change he is biased?
There are valid reason to be bothered by the change itself, even if the new words are OK. For 1) from the leadership, it is intellectually weak/calculating and fear-based appeasement move to a vocal extremist ideology group; there was nothing wrong with those terms in those contexts. For 2) the change and the associated power play has divisive and desintegrative effect on the project. For 3) it is a nasty manipulation of decent people, unaware of the political power game that is the real motivation behind these calls for new, better terms.
So I guess it's "take it or leave it".
Sorry but I must disagree. The U.S. slave era was not uniquely American. Who operated those slave ships to "import" the blacks from Africa? It wasn't the Americans. No, the Dutch had a big role, as did other cultures.
And as the protests around the world have demonstrated, racial discrimination is a global issue with similar problems in many countries to what you see happening in the States.
For example, as an European, when someone says "slave", I immediately think about ancient Rome. To think that in the USA you had slaves only recently always strikes me as really strange. To say nothing about the segregation period quite recently.
In any case, I still wonder: you can remove these words from software and try to banish their current metaphorical usage. But will it really make a difference to your history? These seems like nervous attempts at "making everything right" in a situation where no right can be made - at least there is no easy way to do so.
I share this sentiment entirely. It all feels so ham-fisted.
And also like throwing someone a proverbial bone thinking that it's all good now because we changed a name of something somewhere.
Ah, the good old "you can't be racist towards white people" mantra. As an example, all of ex-Yugoslavia would like to disagree.
> But will it really make a difference to your history? These seems like nervous attempts at "making everything right" in a situation where no right can be made - at least there is no easy way to do so.
And worst, sometimes these precautions are used by corporations who mean no good other than signalling wokeness to turn up a profit.
As such, you can therefore talk about the racism of the English towards the Irish, even though both are considered "white" by modern standards (though at that time, the English prided themselves as being in the "Anglo-Saxon" race).
And you can certainly use that framework to talk about the genocide of Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats targeted by the Bosnian Serbs with who had local power in the areas controlled by the Army of Republika Srpska.
So to summarize the argument as "you can't be racist towards white people" comes across as a complete misunderstanding of the actual argument.
It's certainly possible for someone who self-identifies as "white" to be discriminated against on the basis of race. But if you want to also call that "racist" then what term do you use for something like Jim Crow laws in the US or apartheid South Africa where racism was truly and without doubt systemic?
Why should it, though? Nazi Germany racism was infamously based on the notion that it's the Jews who are in power and favour their own.
The very concept of ant-zionism today puts the people it's racist towards as the oppressors with political power.
It's a common technique - hype people who don't have much power into some sort of super-villain, unite the rest of the population against them, and leverage that into political power.
Nazi Germany racism was also based on US racism, including its treatment of Native Americans. See https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hi... with PDF at https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/upload_documents... .
My fossilized-antisemitist relative once told me that the reason there existed people in my country (Poland) who would help nazis was that, and I quote, "before the war everyone owed the Jews some money".
Also a large part of islamic antisemitism stems from wars lost to the Israelis.
Basically there are instances in history where whole ethnic groups are hated because they are dominant.
The section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury#Judaism gives more context:
> As the Jews were ostracized from most professions by local rulers during the Middle Ages, the Western churches and the guilds,[30] they were pushed into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending. Natural tensions between creditors and debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains.[31]
> ...financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to non-Jews, the unpopularity—and so, of course, the pressure—would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practiced it were excommunicated. Catholic autocrats frequently imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favor, and became identified with the hated trade of moneylending.
I surely agree with the other statements you made. (As another example, apartheid South Africa's and the unrecognised state of Rhodesia's minority white population were far from loved by the rest of the population.) I don't, however, understand the relevance.
Unless the definition of racism was based on bigotry, intolerance, prejudice and stereotypes based on race which is how the majority of the world understands it. This also includes the possibility for whites to be racist against whites, and allows systems to be racist. it's actually a more encompassing definition.
They could be prejudiced, discriminatory, Anglophobic, and more. But not racist.
That you - and yes, many others - disagree with that argument doesn't make it fundamentally wrong in the way that can flippantly be rejected by "of course people can be racist against whites."
The definition I gave includes the possibility for whites to be racist against whites .. though "white" is such a nebulous term. Would the 1800s Irish or English call themselves "white"? The latter preferred "Anglo-Saxon race", for example. See my parallel comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449545 .
No, it's fundamentally wrong because only a minority of people use it in this way. Check a dictionary.
But for the past decade or two, sexism and racism have been taught in universities as "systemic sexism/racism" rather than the classical meaning. If you've seen any debate online about academia "indoctrinating" youth, and creating "social justice warriors", this is basically what they're referring to.
So now anyone that doesn't immediately accept these newly moved goalposts is themselves a racist or a sexist. This has obviously led to quite a degradation in social discourse.
One way to recover is to try to understand the argument and reject it on its own terms, rather than call it a mantra.
The goal isn’t to improve discourse, the goal is for Us to beat Them, even if we do it by redefining the word “beat” :(
If "Us" is "those fighting against centuries of race-based oppression" and "Them" is "those who benefit from the current racist system so much they even refuse to acknowledge the continuing racism" and "beat" is the creation of a new system of racial justice and equality then I agree with you 100%.
They don't believe discourse changes society, they think change necessarily follows conflict. "Conflict" is taken too literally IMO, but I suppose we'll see.
As someone else pointed out on this page, whomever came up with identity politics is a Machiavellian genius.
Since that doesn't happen, it means one of two things: 1) most individuals are actually uneducated about the debate, or 2) it's not actually a re-definition.
My (admittedly light) reading of the scholarly literature says that "racism" generally requires some sort of power imbalance, suggesting that it's #2, which further suggests your interpretation isn't correct.
I don't know what you mean by "not the correct skin color or gender you don't get to speak your opinion on certain topics". Could you explain further, perhaps with examples?
Identity polities is indeed Machiavellian genius. It's as old as the Bible. I think the current form in the US has its roots in European colonialism, where a small number of foreigners managed to convince a larger minority of a foreign country to act as their muscle. (Eg, the origins of the Rwandan genocide because of German racial theory which place the Tutsi over the Hutu, or the techniques the English used to rule India.)
The early US history starts with the colonialist views (English but also Spanish) of superiority over the indigenous peoples. The current white/black identity polities started in the early 1800s when white supremacist ideas grew as a response to the abolitionist movement. After the Civil War, it developed further as a way to keep poor whites in line with the power structure of rich whites, rather than their black and free economic brothers and sisters. "Better poor than black."
I therefore don't think it can be pinned to any one person, but like I said, my knowledge isn't that deep.
Nope, this is precisely the modernized, bastardized, wokenized definition of racism which gives ground to the "can't be racist against whites" because, in this narrative, "whites are in power". Which is so wrong and so tied to a specific point in the history of the US that I am wondering if you re-read your comment before posting.
The bosnian genocide was mostly a military coup. There's no structural and systemic bias in place here.
We have "murder" and "manslaughter" - two forms of homicide. Wikipedia tells me the distinction goes back to at least the 7th century BC.
In US law, both have multiple nuances; first- and second-degree murder, and voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
I interpret the argument as wanting to reserve "racist" for systemic and institutional racism.
We already have other terms we can use. For example, the law talks about discrimination on the basis of race and color as well as national origin, sex, or religion.
So, why not use "discrimination on the basis of race" or "racial discrimination" for the non-systemic kind, and reserve "racist" for the systemic one?
Even better, there's no reason to use "reverse discrimination on the basis of race" because that's identical to "discrimination on the basis of race."
FWIW, in my understanding of the issue, as I described above, I'm perfectly fine describing the US treatment of Mormons as racist - "white-on-white" racism - being also highly aware that Mormon religion was itself highly racist against blacks.
But the concept of "can't be racist against whites" isn't meaningful for even 100 years ago, because "whiteness" is such a slippery social construct. Finns were racially discriminated against, as the "Finnish race", and derogatorily called a China Swede, even though in the modern sense they are very "white".
As for "mostly a military coup" ... a genocide is by definition affecting a protected group - more specifically a national, racial, ethical and religious group. All of those are also protected groups under US anti-discrimination law.
If you want to argue that racism should be treated as a broad term, then genocide is a type of racism.
If you are arguing that my definition is wrong - congratulations. I'm a programmer, with only a lay understanding of the topic. My point wasn't to give an exactly correct definition but to point out an apparently deep misunderstanding of the issue at hand.
Because it is already the other way around, why swap definitions to create more confusion? "racism" is broadly the discrimination on the basis of race. Any nuance should get a new definition. Period.
I don't understand what "the other way around" means. What's an example of something which is racist but not racial discrimination? [1]
If you instead see them as synonyms, why not personally use "racial discrimination" knowing that it's the definition with less diversity in interpretation?
FWIW, US law doesn't seem to use the term "racist" or "racism" but does use the terms "discrimination on the basis of race" and "racial discrimination", which I interpret as meaning that those terms are more well defined.
[1] Here's my thought experiment. The US Constitution requires that racial discrimination be allowed in some circumstances, such as private clubs. I find that I prefer to say that the Constitution allows some racial discrimination, rather than saying that the Constitution allows some racism. Which makes me think that "racism" is an emotionally stronger and more specific term than "racial discrimination."
If so, what's the motive?
If not, what term would you use?
Being racist has nothing to do with laws or power structure. It is believing that people of some other race are inferior.
Racism supported by laws/government is called ultra-right-wing state, nationalism, segregation, apartheid.
I think this is a view from the 90s. Today's view is that the're not inferior but different, and that race itself is a social construct.
> Today, some scholars of racism prefer to use the concept in the plural racisms, in order to emphasize its many different forms that do not easily fall under a single definition. ...
> Garner (2009: p. 11) summarizes different existing definitions of racism and identifies three common elements contained in those definitions of racism. First, a historical, hierarchical power relationship between groups; second, a set of ideas (an ideology) about racial differences; and, third, discriminatory actions (practices).
Your "believing that people of some other race are inferior" falls under the second of those three.
But compare your "nothing to do with laws or power structure" with "historical, hierarchical power relationship". Clearly there are different definitions.
On the same page:
> Scholars also commonly define racism not only in terms of individual prejudice, but also in terms of a power structure that protects the interests of the dominant culture and actively discriminates against ethnic minorities. From this perspective, while members of ethnic minorities may be prejudiced against members of the dominant culture, they lack the political and economic power to actively oppress them, and they are therefore not practicing "racism".
Which leads us back to the reason I joined this thread in the first place - that perspective was dismissively summarized earlier as the '"you can't be racist towards white people" mantra.'
I don't agree that your definition of racism is useful to discussion. It is a redefinition that confuses people into false and harmful beliefs, such as the idea that "people of oppressed minority race cannot be racial oppresors" or the idea that "an action/belief against white majority cannot be racist".
What are the false and harmful beliefs?
More specifically, what are some examples of an oppressed minority race becoming racial oppressors while still being subordinate in the power structure? How are they able to oppress with little political and economic power to do the oppression?
What are examples of where it's important to say that an action against a white majority is "racist" when we cannot equally well say it's "racially discriminatory" or "racially bigoted" or other terms?
Yes, there are many terms with differing definitions. We need only look at the differing definitions and understanding of what "rape" means. (Or the "evolution is only a theory" crowd.)
But that doesn't mean (going way back to how I entered this thread) that it's correct to describe this more scholarly-based interpretation as 'the good old "you can't be racist towards white people" mantra'.
If minority is a requirement, then some examples are:
1) Jewish Nazi collaborators killing Jews, 2) Black gangsters killing black people 3) black/latin-american SJW agents manipulating authorities for more discrimination and cancelling of their white enemies.
> How are they able to oppress with little political and economic power to do the oppression?
In cases 1),3) by having elevated power granted and supported by even more powerful groups. In case 2) they are organized violent people with guns - they have substantial power.
1) Apartheid South Africa gave special status to Japanese people - honorary whites. This doesn't mean that the Japanese people could control their own status; it was a special status given to them by the white supremacists who wanted Japanese trade deals.
Similarly, your 1) is for people were granted special privileges by the racist Christian Germans because of the services rendered for the racist power structure.
But the racist power originated from those Christian Germans, not Jewish Germans.
So, great, you've discovered that some black slaves avoided whippings by helping their white slave masters keep the other slaves in line. With as much sarcasm as I can muster: If only those black slaves hadn't been so racist.
2) How is this racism, any more than white gangsters killing white people? So if a black business owner shortchanges a black customer, that's also racism?
3) Are you effing kidding me?
Everyone who is outraged at, angry with, or otherwise against the police violence against black people is an SJW.
I am an SJW. 60% of Americans believe that ’Racism is built into American society. The assumption of white superiority pervades schools, business, housing, and government.’ according to a recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll. 52% agree that "President Trump is a racist." The majority of Americans are SJWs.
If you are not outraged .. why not?
Drop the nonsensical "SJW" rhetorical label. Demand social justice and equality.
Now, back to 3) By "example" I don't mean some abstract story. Because I remember the lying stories Republicans used about black welfare queens in order to harness good old American racism to shrink our social safety net.
"Agents"? How sinister! You know you could have left it as "SJWs", right?
Your terms have been so over-used by right-wing extremists that they have acquired new meanings.
Your "more discrimination" comes across like those people who insist that "feminism" means not "gender equality in the public sphere" but wrongly that "women should be in charge, and men should be hated."
While your "cancelling" bring to mind all those people who think "cancel culture" means "no one expressing bigoted ideas should ever have to face consequences."
Such examples can be found as well, if we change the target group to be a different race. Nazi Germany (whose population became oppressed minority in Europe after being defeated in WW I) was becoming more racist towards most of the European nations south and east of them (majority) - including Slavic nations, Romas and others. More recent example, after WW II, Israeli settlers (most of which are Jews, an historically oppressed minority) became racist towards Palestinians (majority).
> Everyone who is outraged at, angry with, or otherwise against the police violence against black people is an SJW.
That's another misunderstanding of terms on your part. Almost everybody who saw that video and other police transgressions since then was disgusted by those policemen actions and are against such police brutality. That includes many racists, bigots, right-wingers, libertarians, traditional left, progressives and others not so easily categorizable political agents.
That does not make them SJW's. "Social Justice Warrior" now has a very specific pejorative and derogative meaning: a vocal activist pushing and fighting for ideology of political correctness, for positive discrimination, favouritism of people of minority groups, limiting freedom of expression by policing words and inventing and enforcing new words, and generally using any means available, including racist or bigoted or factually incorrect or logically flawed arguments about race, power, history or biology. They are very attention-seeking and uppity. They care more about winning rhetorical arguments and political battles than about being right and fair.
People who really care about society and people of all races/groups having their fair part in society are very different from that. They do not try to annoy, divide or cancel people of other groups, they do not push ideology, instead they try to work with those people towards common goals.
Once a country has weapons and can defend itself, its citizens are not really subordinate in the power structure, is it?
When you write "against such police brutality", what does "such" refer to?
Because most of the people I've seen/heard on the topic are specifically against racist police brutality. (And they aren't arguing that police brutality against whites should increase.)
Where's the long list of white people killed by police brutality that matches what we've seen on video for black people?
> now has a very specific pejorative and derogative meaning
Based on my observation, its most common meaning is simply a derogatory term for progressive.
Are NASCAR officials SJWs by banning the traitor's flag at their events? Are they "politically correct"? ... or simply "correct"?
You do know that "uppity" is traditionally used as a way to put down women and blacks who supposedly didn't know that they were supposed to be lower in the social hierarchy, right?
Whether it works really well depends on cultural loading of the concepts in the audience, that's the nature of metaphor. Choosing terms whose cultural loading has less intense variation will result in more consistent effect.
Hah. Exactly.
I, as a human, love being a master to my computer slaves.
In essence, I am against the policing of language to police the mind.
No. It does not. It most definitely does not. This is a lame excuse, and also a blatant lie.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You've unfortunately been doing it a lot, and we've already had to ask you to stop.
Why is it me who is supposed to shut up, and not the other guy?
That sounds like taking a political stand to me.
Or are you going to try to claim that "oh those minorities are such whiners" is apolitical, but "no they are not" is not?
You allow lots of inflammatory and political opinions on the site. But you don't allow people to stand up to them or challenge them. That is pure hypocrisy.
Whoever promoted it, was a machiavellian genius. People can't rebel if they keep each other in check.
> Whoever promoted it, was a machiavellian genius. People can't rebel if they keep each other in check.
That is exactly what I wanted to say too but you said it better.
I'd point out that there are possible hundreds if not thousand other software that use the terminology. It doesn't offend me at all.
$> man -k slave grantpt (3) - grant access to the slave pseudoterminal grantpt (3p) - grant access to the slave pseudo-terminal device jack_netsource (1) - Netjack Master client for one slave kdeinit5 (8) - Launcher for applications built with kdeinit support, ... ptmx (4) - pseudoterminal master and slave pts (4) - pseudoterminal master and slave ptsname (3) - get the name of the slave pseudoterminal ptsname (3p) - get name of the slave pseudo-terminal device ptsname_r (3) - get the name of the slave pseudoterminal Tcl_CreateSlave (3) - manage multiple Tcl interpreters, aliases and hidden c... Tcl_GetSlave (3) - manage multiple Tcl interpreters, aliases and hidden c... unlockpt (3) - unlock a pseudoterminal master/slave pair unlockpt (3p) - unlock a pseudo-terminal master/slave pair
$> man -k master agentxtrap (1) - send an AgentX NotifyPDU to an AgentX master agent getpt (3) - open the pseudoterminal master (PTM) gnutls_session_ext_master_secret_status (3) - API function gnutls_session_get_master_secret (3) - API function gnutls_session_set_premaster (3) - API function jack_netsource (1) - Netjack Master client for one slave mmafm (1) - creates AFM font metrics for multiple master fonts mmpfb (1) - creates single-master fonts from multiple master fonts ptmx (4) - pseudoterminal master and slave pts (4) - pseudoterminal master and slave pulseaudio-ctl (1) - Control pulseaudio's basic functions such as the maste... RAND_DRBG_get0_master (3ssl) - get access to the global RAND_DRBG instances SSL_get_client_random (3ssl) - get internal TLS/SSL random values and get/set... SSL_get_extms_support (3ssl) - extended master secret support SSL_get_server_random (3ssl) - get internal TLS/SSL random values and get/set... SSL_SESSION_get_master_key (3ssl) - get internal TLS/SSL random values and ge... SSL_SESSION_set1_master_key (3ssl) - get internal TLS/SSL random values and g... Tcl_GetMaster (3) - manage multiple Tcl interpreters, aliases and hidden c... Tk_GetImageMasterData (3) - define new kind of image unlockpt (3) - unlock a pseudoterminal master/slave pair unlockpt (3p) - unlock a pseudo-terminal master/slave pair WildMidi_MasterVolume (3) - sets the overall audio level of the library. xapian-replicate (1) - Replicate a database from a master server to a local copy
If I had to hazard a guess, we are all a bunch of technologists/engineers/tinkerers who deal with technical stuffs; not some societal driven definitions and constraints that supposedly define what `man` is in this context. We bloody well know what `man` is in this context - manual pages. For some odd $deity fore shaken reason, please don't try to bend the meaning of it.
Which means this is NOT ABOUT YOU. The fact that something does not bother you has absolutely zero impact on how other people feel about that same thing.
Anyway, allowlist and blocklist are more self-explanatory than whitelist and blacklist, so this change has negative cost.
No, it does not. All changes have cost. They just can't see it now, or chose not to see it now. Aside from the obvious cost in the very same patchset.
It's a selfish and unjustifiable situation to be in, where one group of people casually uses language that describes a different group in questionable terms without considering how the other group might feel. It's trivial to implement. Questioning it is a hair's breadth from defending it.
Why bring "current slavery" into it then, if this is what you mean? Personally, I'm pretty sure that slaves care about slavery, not language in Go documentation, but that's speculation of course.
> without considering how the other group might feel
Have you asked a slave in Saudi Arabia how they feel about the usage of the word Slave in Go documentation?
Because it was mentioned in the post you replied to.
> Have you asked a slave in Saudi Arabia how they feel about the usage of the word Slave in Go documentation?
Why Saudi? Slavery exists globally. You know someone whose ancestors were bought, sold and died as slaves. Ask them how they feel about it.
Maybe because it's easier to Google and find supporting evidence? You should give it a try.
> You know someone whose ancestors were bought
Sure, rather than the 40 million living it first hand.
The parent post links to global slavery information, here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23446390
The original post was about choice of language in code repositories.
I've no idea what you're objecting to.
I'm out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn
Deeply hypocritical, but it of course is easier and cheaper to focus on historical injustices. How about stopping business and censorship in China?
Who would Google have done business with in the 19th century?
Is blacklist/whitelist inherently racist, or does it have racist origins? Try as I might I don’t see inherent bias in it.
black is bad everywhere, probably because of its physical properties. ditto for white.
Those who wish to see a racial relation are just racists, and racists should not be fed.
Changing these words is a feel good thing, that does nothing to address our internal biases, prejudices, and racism. It wastes time that could be spend on writing your senator, politician, or being active in a political party.
It's a zero effort, zero stakes thing, that makes privileged people feel personal accomplishment, while allowing them to relax into complacency.
"I make a million a year, and work for a company that makes money off of algorithmically radicalising people into right wing conspiracy theories, but I don't use the word white- and black-list anymore, because it reminds me of race. I did my part!"
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism this is traceable to the Ancient Near East and listed in the Pythagorean Table of Opposites for example, so it goes much further back than the Atlantic slave trade.
I do not think that it would be possible to rip this metaphor out of our thinking.
By the way, a really great linguistic book about how much of our thinking is in systematic metaphors in general, is "Metaphors We Live By", by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.
But this is exactly what certain people are trying to do. And it's not a fringe group anymore, this is starting to touch different aspects of our life that have no any real relation to racism or skin color. If "black" in "blacklist" is offending you today, tomorrow you will be offended by Master's degree.
You can argue for the replacement of black- and whitelisting with allow- and Blocklisting because it removes the intermediary step of having to know that the color white/light is usually seen on our culture as something representing good, while black/darkness is seen as bad.
Different cultures may see those differently, such as white also representing death and mourning in Japan, which may cause confusion.
But this change likely came from current events and has nothing to do with the above other than someone on Twitter thinking "blacklisting -> black people -> that's racist" and getting upset about it.
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I mean, if it was a library or a DB sure, but these seem to be more in the language core.