spot on. these are the outcomes of excess employment and printed money just sloshing around
It reminds me of the movie 300, where all Xerxes demands is that you kneel.
I find your comment fairly tone deaf and reeking of unwarranted victimism.
The problem of course is that many people couldn't stand to work in such an organization, and there's definitely suffering involved unless you are a certain type that loves that kind of work.
... wait.
Straight out of 1984.
Could be just me though
Did you read the lists in question?
At the end of the day, we really want to be holding people accountable on the meaning of what they write or say, not making lists of words that probably don't actually offend anybody but that someone thinks could possibly offend someone else somewhere at some point in time, maybe.
To be clear, this neans you also think banned word lists consisting only of racial slurs are bad?
The argument would go something like this: you can ban use of racial slurs without specifically making a list of them that are banned, as such a list both opens the door to further banned words and also comes with a maintenance cost, where it has to be changed. As an example "person of colour" is currently an acceptable term but when I was a kid I think people would have associated that term with "coloured" and find it insulting, so if you have a specific list you have to manage cases like this.
Secondly banning racial slurs altogether ignores that there are legitimate contexts in which they should be used (directly quoting something someone has said, discussing old media in which that sort of language is used, etc.), and these contexts are very different from referring to an individual or a group using those slurs. A list of banned words means those words can't be used even in those contexts, as opposed to just not using them as a pejorative or insult.
Reality is that life kind of sucks for people who take care of or interact with the mentally ill, and it definitely sucks more for the mentally ill themselves… No amount of progressive hand-wringing or administrative Band-aids is going to change that.
Banning the word crazy is silly, ineffective, patronizing nonsense that does nothing to help the mentally ill whatsoever, not even changing the perception around them nor making them feel better.
Plenty of people who suffer from a mental illness do well in life, but you’re right that they often have a harder time. So then why should we actively make their life even harder by attaching a stigma and dehumanizing them? I don’t think that’s progressive as much as just humanitarian.
Imagine a hypothetical scenario: two of your coworkers are in an office and one tells the other something shocking. The second says, “Wow, that’s crazy!” Do you think that’s a micro aggression, or worse, a slur?
Second scenario: you’re talking to a coworker and they say “Bob has been off recently. Some of the stuff he says is so insane. Yesterday he completely embarrassed us in that meeting!” Do you think this is any less hurtful to Bob because your coworker said “insane” instead of “crazy”?
My answers are “no” and “no”, and it seems pretty obvious why. In the first scenario there’s no intention to harm someone and even if harm is done, it’s extremely small. In the second scenario, your coworker is going to say something bad about Bob and it doesn’t matter how tightly you control the corporate Newspeak, he is going to express his opinion.
Grow a spine and realize the world isn’t for or against you, it just is.
master
blacklist/whitelist
crazy/idiotic/stupid
"skin a cat"
"black market"
"black box testing" / "white box testing"
"three amigos"
"war games"
?
These are the kinds of words people are talking about, not historical slurs.
I work for a very large company. These words are in a list of words we're "not allowed" to use. There are even more ridiculous ones (e.g. can't use "normal" to describe things)
What's the problem with "war games"?
the reasoning for "three amigos" is that it is "racially loaded language"
[edit] I won't even dignify the stupidity of conflating the Spanish language with a race - then its use with racism - with a response, except to say that such a view could only arise among the privileged children of racists in a very small part of the United States.
not that. Anything done above the lowest common denominator is ableist, according to one frame. And according to the other frame (expressed constantly here), everyone earns everything by their own merit alone, and it's always been so.
The flaw in both of these frames is their focus on language, as if language alone can make things what they are. It's a mistake that older people can always see in young people, that I couldn't see in myself but I can see in my younger self now; the idea that you will remake the world by changing the definitions.