Someone sent me these points for me to use in this discussion. But to be
fair, I'm kind of done so I will just paste what he sent me directly:
Don Goodman-Wilson said:
> My feelings generally are: if you have to explain why it isn’t
> racist, then there’s probably a better alternative.
Now this is already problematic as there is the idea of reversing the
burden of proof: he shouldn't point out that you have to explain why
it isn't racist, instead he should explain and prove himself that it's
racist and offensive, since he's the one making that claim and asking
for change in the first place.
All the sources I've seen linked in the thread are either Wikipedia,
that anyone can edit, or Twitter, where anyone can post anything, or
unspecified and unverifiable anecdotal evidence of the type "I've seen
people getting offended by it." This is not okay.
Perhaps the best argument you could make is that if and before changing
the name "master", there needs to be measurable proof of how many and
how much people are actually offended by the use of "master", and an
assessment of how many people would be offended by other proposed terms
or by the new chosen name, and a measurable assessment that changing the
name would actually reduce the amount of offended people, and have a
positive impact worth the effort.
In software development, people often say that if you can't measure that
your change in the code actually makes a difference and has an impact
going in the right direction, then you shouldn't bother writing that
code to begin with.
