More importantly, these recent events are being likened to the Chinese cultural revolution _by Chinese people who lived through it._ That should give you enough of a signal to understand that this is not necessarily benign and in anybody’s best interest.

I think the reason we use master and slave is simply that the words are short, equal length in both letters and syllables, and get the message across — cf leader/follower or primary/replica. I guess the last one is ok too.

Racism and inequality should be fought where possible. Variable naming is simply not such a place. Blacks will not be less repressed, women will not be less mistreated.

Slave is one syllable, master is two.

That’s true, slave is one. I guess my lazy counting vowel-consonant transitions is a bit of a bad heuristic in English. I personally blame the French.

Same thing with eastern european communism.

This is such a hyperbolic response that it’s hard to actually engage with it; I’m not sure that this is helping the conversation at all.

The reference to the Red Guards is indeed hyperbolic and extremely loaded. You are comparing someone making a technical change to a government sponsored paramilitary organization that murdered thousands of people.

It’s extremely hard to engage with the conversation when your position is that one side, if not stopped, will result in mass scale murder. If I make a good faith argument for this naming change, are you going to accuse me of supporting a proto red band?

He's right. No fucking engineer is being thrown inside a camp starving to death so yes the comparison is hyperbolic.

Flagging the guy's comments to make then disappear would tend to support the comparison he made, though.

I disagree; I see this as HN responding poorly to the form of the argument, not the substance.

If I were to go around and make comparisons between right wing policies and nazism, I would also expect a rapid downvote into oblivion. Would that downvote prove my point, or would it just show that HN disapproves of my invocation of Godwin?

That's not what I did either in form and in substance.

There is a worrying trend of trying to force changes of vocabulary (not only this one) and to purge history for ideological purposes and we're also seeing people suffering for not embracing that trend or, worse, criticising it (as I wrote this is getting close to "public denunciations").

These are dynamics very similar, albeit not as extreme, to what happened during the Cultural Revolution and other campaigns in the USSR/Eastern Europe during the 20th century.

Fighting racism is a good cause, of course. But arguably so what fighting against feodalism and the exploitation of the working class, and see what happened...

I did not call anyone a "Red Guard", I wrote that the current situation was "getting there", and I think it could, indeed.

If you guys want to censor that comment as well, go ahead, but then please acknowledge where this is going.

Because it’s easier to do a PR removing “slave” than to stop buying cheap things made in slave workshops.

>slave workshops.

It's "unpaid labour" now.

Your boycott won't change anything. Is the only avenue of political change that you can see through the lens of individual consumption?

I genuinely don't see boycotts as powerful as others, so maybe I'm missing something here. However, shouldn't all avenues be taken if you're attempting to change something?

>maybe I'm missing something here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boycott#Notable_boycotts

You're right that boycotts without leverage experience little success, but wrong if you think they are never successful.

They only work if there is a power differential in-line with a block of consumers. I don't see ZFS developers as being a large enough block to affect anything, so their suggestion largely seems to be saying, "just do nothing instead."

It's incredibly convenient we have a Boogeyman de jour to compare everything to. I don't quite know how the most reactionary elements of our crumbling society would vent otherwise. If history teaches us anything, it would be: violently.

How else could we possibly look at the current cultural moment? Self-critically? No, never, not when we can engage in orientalism and rebuild a red scare.

I wonder if the British were this terrified of being bumped out of the #1 slot. Maybe the Dutch would be a more apt comparison.

This is complicated. I have zero attachment to terms like "slave" so there's no reason to hang onto them. But I feel like this drives slacktivism rather than real change, which is hard when there's literal slavery going on all over the world.

See also: https://www.theclever.com/15-countries-where-slavery-is-stil...

It really feels like we're entering a new dark age. One without context, nuance, or wisdom.

I can only hope we find a way to resolve our differences before our cultural cold war becomes a hot one.

Here's what I understand about the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards:

- The Cultural Revolution was organized by Chairman Mao, the leader of a single-party state. The Red Guards were personally supported by him. Both were official government policy and could not be opposed.

- The goal was to attack people in power who were perceived as reactionary / "revisionist" and remove them from power, by violence if necessary.

- The Cultural Revolution had, as a goal, the destruction of remnants of pre-communist history. The Red Guards attacked historical artifacts and cultural sites so that there was no memory of them.

- Hundreds of thousands if not millions of people were killed.

Here's my understanding of this pull request:

- It was not ordered by any government. The current leader and current ruling party of the government under which the people involved in this pull request live are not aware of it or even the larger movement of similar pull requests / discussions, and if they were made aware of it, they'd almost certainly object.

- It was done by the ZFS contributors themselves, not by outsiders. Nobody tried to remove existing people in power from that power, certainly not violently.

- No attempt is made to erase history. History is right there in "git log." The pull request accurately points out that a change is being made, what the change is, and why. Older versions of ZFS remain published with the old terminology.

- Nobody is dying. Nobody involved has a weapon more dangerous than "git reset --hard," and they'll only hurt themselves with that one anyway.

I agree with you that we should be wary of government-imposed revolutionary fervor that seeks to destroy political opposition. I think, however, that if people involved a project have made up their minds freely about some topic and want to make some change, the way we should to guard against the dangers of things like the Cultural Revolution would be to encourage people to take actions they've decided upon in the places where they already have power, to encourage them to think for themselves, and to not try to portray folks with some very meager but nonzero power (like village mayors or ZFS maintainers) as dangerous threats to all that is good in the world who must be stopped by outsiders.

God forbid making concessions for the sake of empathy with people.

I think this is a new version of “think of the children” cliché, used to justify lots of questionable things for ages.

I've not met someone upset about the technical term. It's possible, but it doesn't minimize slavery (more than any technical term minimizes something by making it technical), slaves only follow the master.

Each individual concession seems small but the end result is that one must live life in fear of saying the littlest wrong thing, lest the angry mob come down on you. We're at the point where we can't even talk about any of these issues, only obey the barked orders of angry activists.

This is very very good advice.

Replying to an exaggeration by another one is not helping.

This view is also common in Chinese social media:

"One notable article, written by an immigrant in direct response to Huang’s letter, went further, accusing elite American educational institutions of 'brainwashing' the country’s youth and turning them into 'extreme leftists' who only care about identity politics. This view is common on Chinese social media, where users compare protestors and leftist young people with Cultural Revolution-era Red Guards."