A small, core group of people loudly make this a huge issue of great importance, while the rest of us just want to get our work done and stay silent so we don't get fired by the woke patrol.
Honestly I can't wait until retirement when I don't have to constantly be walking on eggshells at work. It's sad--I used to love working in tech but it's insufferable now.
In regular bikeshedding we spend a lot of time arguing over minor factors because everyone feels like they can have meaningful input and contribute. Then we gloss over the complicated stuff because it's too hard to get into.
In this case, people feel like they can push hard on relatively minor issues like uses of words and phrases because they can make a noticeable impact. Precisely because they feel powerless to effect actual systemic change. Widespread protest doesn't seem to change much, but targeted complaints can sometimes get someone fired.
There may be an argument that it could work as a ground-up approach similar to NYC's broken window policing, but I personally doubt that. I think the backlash will be a net negative.
Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.
Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.
So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.
On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).
All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.
This reminds me of people hiding and covering table legs in the Victorian era.
In practice, white list means these are good things, and black lists mean these are bad things.
Allow and deny lists are much precise since they only have the one meaning
I genuinely don't know because this aspect of English newspeak hasn't made it to my country yet.
Whenever any work-environment friction will arise, I'll stop using those words for sure, I value my job more than I value terminology.
Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.
In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.
I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:
>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<
>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<
https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of those Marxists. The cycle goes like this:
1. Liberals assert that henceforth all with be free and equal, and that these things are self-evidently desirable (i.e. using reason alone).
2. Some liberals observe that life is full of inequalities and lack of freedoms. Because everyone is supposed to have equal opportunities, and because liberalism is generally uninterested in historical or traditional justifications for things, unequal outcomes demand an explanation which they find in the assumption of oppressive hierarchies. These liberals become Marxists.
3. They demand affirmative actions be taken in order to rectify these supposed oppressions. Embarrassed by the existence of inequality and lack of freedoms after declaring that their society is meant to have neither, liberals agree to these demands.
4. Realising they got what they wanted with little resistance, and that inequalities and lack of freedoms still exist, Marxists return to step 1.
In this framework the cause is nothing as simple or skin-deep as bad PR or lawsuits. Perhaps fear of those does play a role, but the author argues that the core reason is that the university is staffed by people who are genuinely embarrassed and upset by Marxist critique. Lacking intellectual ammo or a coherent philosophy of inequality, they invariably cave in when faced with outspoken demands that appear to align with their own agenda of equality.
[0] Free read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
What's awkward is I've now read at least three apparently compelling and logical explanations for the left/right divide, but some of them contradict each other in various ways.
Weird enough, the article gets a lot right, the critique of liberalism is on point IMO, but I don't really see the point of bringing this to the table. Radical liberalism is self-defeating as the framework fails to acknowledge the power relationships, thus is not surprising that liberal principles can result on illiberal consequences when tried to being pursued. Marxism was not even a thing when the french revolution became a bloodbath, and you can even say taking this event in account, Marxism is more descriptive on the outcomes of revolution than prescriptive.
On my perspective, on the recent events, I see only liberalism eating itself, and certainly I see little Marxist relationship with clear marxist tenants like workers taking control of their economic results. That's unless you're a liberal writing on a liberal magazine, doing mental gymnastics to avoid seeing the failures of liberalism, then you can loosely define Marxism and blame it all on it.
Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication. There's a large population at least roughly familiar with what Marx believed and far more importantly, what happened everywhere his followers took power. The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews. It's not saying he invented the whole thing from scratch.
BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
It's pretty convincing when you read third party accounts of Marxism by right wing spokesman who have a lot to gain to equating what they don't like to Marxism. When you read either Marxists (plenty of others besides BLM) or the ones who you call Neo-Marxists, you find Marxists sighing when not Marxism is called Marxism, and the so called "Neo-Marxists" criticizing Marx.
>arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races.
Every classification is arbitrary, although you can argue about it's usefulness or consistency.
>A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Except the most essential part which makes the framework consistent. But hey, if you squint hard enough even a dog can be a cat.
>Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication.
Marx is known for a lot of things, to be honest I don't be surprised if some isolated community believes that Marx had babies for breakfast, this is an effect of being an ideological boogeyman. Regardless of what you think of communism, it should be hard to deny the depth of his philosophical and historical points, if not that it's a regular POV. With that in mind, adding more legends to the Marxist black legend should be considered the opposite of useful communication.
>The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews.
Yes, as mentioned this is exactly my main problem with the essay, the author even spells out my main point, but still framing this as a external factor "corrupting" liberalism.
>BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
I was not familiar with the writer, and mixed the liberal term with the more American Libertarian. My mistake.
Please speak up and, more importantly, please vote for old-school liberals instead of progressives.
The real solution is just awareness. As people see more examples of this sort of thing going wrong they will be more careful about it.
Anyone who thinks this is all purely organic hasn't been paying much attention.
The problem I have with that, is that for some problems you can't just fix it with incremental reform, you have to rip the bandaid off, and if you reject any reforms that aren't small incremental fixes to what we have, you end up fixing the small problems and leaving the big structural problems. Opinions will reasonably differ on how to deal with the problems facing society, but Obama's approach seems to me to be a little bit like vacuuming your living room while the house is on fire.
On the other hand, you have someone like Bernie Sanders, who isn't at all shy about advocating for significant structural reforms (similar in scope to the New Deal) and is about as progressive as anyone can be in American politics, yet at the same time he doesn't put any stock in identity politics either. I haven't listened to as much from AOC, but I get the impression she's the same way. In fact, I don't know of any major political leader who fits the mold of the "social justice warrior" or "political-correctness police" stereotype. I haven't run into very many of those people in my day-to-day life either, but my impression is that they're largely people without any great deal of power except maybe on University campuses.
Tl;dr: don't be afraid to vote for progressives in general with the aim of thwarting identity politics. A lot of prominent progressives aren't really fans of it either.
Lost that thread somewhat post FDR with the expansion of the executive "rule making" bullshit though.
The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).
At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.