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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

The funny thing is, I don't think very many people thought of "bad stuff" before this idiotic culture war planted it in everyone's mind, even if in a negative light.

I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.

Wouldn't it have been better to just let the words outgrow their history? These words were already dead or dying as racist terms. Not any more.

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I think the point was to generate a lot of noise that distracts away from the whole awkward "selling software to concentration camp" thing.

And, policing language generates a spectacular amount of distracting, harmless (to Microsoft) controversy.

> I would bet that most people didn't have any idea that words like "grandfather" or "blacklist" had (or didn't have) any racist history.

Faulty pattern recognition machine at blame.

I don't know, but it seems plausible that awareness of the term's origin might well be considerably higher among those whose own father or grandfather was disenfranchised by one of the original grandfather clauses.

I at least was intellectually gratified to learn about it.

The idiotic culture war is media led: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...

> In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

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