On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 02:49:32PM -0400, Joel M. Halpern wrote: > You are free to disagree about the claims by many individuals that the uses > of the terms master/slave are offensive. > The claims are not absurd, and attempting as you do to dismiss them as > absurd is inappropriate at best, and possibly worse. Assuming for a moment that that is exactly what Viktor was doing, I don't agree that making such claims "is inappropriate at best, and possibly worse". And by the way, "worse" sounds to me like a possible hint that next up is Viktor getting called a racist -- I hope I'm wrong about _that_, but we should all edit ourselves to avoid giving the appearance of making threats, something that would be not unlike not using the terminology in question. > In my view, we all have claims to relevance for the discussion. Please do > not claim that being Jewish gives us special rights to dismiss other > people's concern. It doesn't. I don't think that's what Viktor was doing. Please let us not trivialize each other's arguments. > With regard to the particular documents (which may or may not have been > removed, I haven't checked), reading the Les White drafts, I had assumed (we > all do make assumptions) that they were a troll's attempt to stir up > trouble. Knowing now that they are from Dan, I believe that he intended > them as a means to point out his concerns. I don't know if they should or > should notbe( have been?) removed. (I do not think they helped any aspect > of the discussion or development of the community. But that in and of > itself is not a reason to remove them.) I do know that doing so is not > egregious and falls well within the judgment calls we expect our leadership > to make. I agree with this. > One of the things I find important to keep in mind is that the denotations > and connotations of words evolve. It is not easy to tell when they have > changed and how. However, if they have changed to become offensive to a > significant group of people, we should pay attention to that fact. The fact > that as far as anyone involved could tell they were not offensive at some > time in the past does not give the terms immunity. Nor does it make this > process simple. Heck, as evinced from some of the earlier conversations > even figuring out what sources are appropriate to use to make judgments > about the problem is hard. That does not free us from an obligation to try. A few things: - the desired effect has been had -- no RFCs will be published with the terms in question henceforth - I've long said that I have long avoided (some of) the terms in question in my professional life and that I'd be OK with publishing a BCP about this, but that I object to draft-knodel-terminology specifically, especially ascriptions of racism to the community (I don't care how theoretical they might be, and in -04 they were certainly not theoretical) - I object to the IESG's heavy-handed approach (for a partial list of incidents see my earlier post providing context for why participants might have felt the need to reach for satire) - I also object to the tenor of the arguments of some proponents Trivializing the debate does us no good. That said, obviously we should move serious debate to the terminology list -to which I admittedly have yet to subscribe-, not because the audience will be smaller there, but because that is what process currently demands. I fear debate on that list will be as polarized and filled with trivializations as it has been here and on gendispatch, but we should make an attempt to make and consider serious arguments. I do also expect consensus calls to be made that ignore or trivialize those that get left on the rough side of consensus. These expectations are due to the behaviors I have seen so far. Nico --
