But where is the actual list? The only bit of information marginally interesting in this stupid drama is the list itself, yet it is nowhere to be found! Moreover, how can a "list of best names ever" be so troubling, let alone racist? I don't understand.

I imagine people are wary of circulating the list because it's private data - people's names - from the Basecamp client list. It also sounds like those names might well be easy to Google, so they wouldn't even be anonymous. They shouldn't even have been shared internally, let alone externally.

The idea that it's racist is that the names were only funny to English speakers, because they sounded like English words they consider funny, from the reporting I'd guess things like butt, dick or fart. That feels really condescending and exclusionary if you're on the receiving end of it.

> The idea that it's racist is that the names were only funny to English speakers, because they sounded like English words they consider funny

This makes no sense to me: aren't native English-speakers of many races? Aren't there non-English speakers of many races also? Moreover, this happens with any pair of languages. I'm not a native English speaker and there are some English names that sound extremely hilarious in my language. I see myself compiling such a list just for fun. I wouldn't expect English people to be offended by this silly thing, which is inevitable: when there are different languages, there are word collisions and some of them are funny.

> people's names - from the Basecamp client list.

Ouch, this is different, then! I did not pay attention to this detail. Now I understand why the list of names does not circulate (but still, I don't get what could be so bad about it).

According to their response, it seems some of the names on the list (according to the founder, something like 6 of the 72) were phonetically funny in English but Asian in origin (as opposed to the rest, which were mostly European and phonetically funny because of suffixing "son" to something that sounded funny). The implication as I understood it, as when this was pointed out as to why while it was an inappropriate list it wasn't necessarily inappropriate in a racial way one of the employees responded by initiated an HR discrimination case against founder, is that the people that saw it as a racial issue are not happy to have it classified as not one.

>but still, I don't get what could be so bad about it

Making fun of people in a way that isn’t offensive is a tight line to walk interpersonally and best avoided altogether in professional circumstances. This is particularly true if you’re making fun of people for fundamental aspects of their identity, like names. How would you feel if your name was on a list somewhere and people were laughing at it and cracking jokes about it regularly? Some people might be okay with this, but I think others might be rather offended by it.

> I wouldn't expect English people to be offended by this silly thing...

I imagine it depends to a large extent on whether you've heard the same shitty joke about your name - hur dur your name sounds like butt! - from far too many people in your professional life. Remember, this is a list of client names that was created solely for the purposes of ridicule while being passed around internal Basecamp networks. In terms of racism, I'm white and British, and it definitely has a flavour of the cultural racism that was prevalent during the British Empire which, for all its differences, America inherited.

>there are some English names that sound extremely hilarious in my language.

I'd love to hear some, that sounds great.

Hah, cool.

https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-names-that-sound-f...

So the fact that the Chevy nova didn't sell in spanish speaking countries because the name means "no go" is racist too, then, right? I'm just applying the same logic.

> A popular but false urban legend claims that the vehicle sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because no va literally translates to "it doesn't go". This has since been debunked, however, as Nova (one word) means "nova" in Spanish just as in English. In fact, the car actually sold quite well in Mexico, as well as many Central and South American countries. Nova was also the name of a successful brand of gasoline sold in Mexico at the time, further proving that the name confusion was not a problem.

—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Chevy_II_/_Nova#Urba...

You won’t find Mitsubishi Pajero in the Spanish speaking countries though…

Or Mazda Laputa, or Nissan Moco.

Super racist!

I dont think the relation "best names ever" -> "no politics at work" is that straightforward. There had to be a lot of escalation in the discussion internally, and then political issues were raised.

Ya, it almost seems like once the criticism of the list took on a somewhat political component (people saying it was racist), that the critics were silenced with the no politics rule.

This is basically what happened according to available info [1]. DHH, one of the co-founders, admitted the list was a mistake but aggressively pushed back on the political assertion by some employees that the list and the people involved were contributing to genocidal attitudes. As DHH pushed back, he went so far as to dig up old employee messages and repost them publicly to argue that the employees making accusations about genocidal attitudes were themselves hypocrites. Less than two weeks later, Jason Fried announced the new company policies.

[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...

According to the summary articles posted upthread, that seems to be what happened. The list was reinterpreted in the context of Stop Asian Hate to be racist. Which is not exactly fair given that the list is 10 years old. One should judge by the standards of the time, not the changing standards of today. And reading between the lines, that's essentially what the Basecamp founders said too: (paraphrasing) "this was a joke in bad taste made by people who aren't even at the company anymore. we're sorry that it happened, but it's water under the bridge." Then someone filed a racism complaint with HR against the founders and it escalated from there.

These are personal details of actual people. I sincerely hope it stays as confidential as possible.

The fact is we don’t know what actual behaviour this is about. I can imagine circumstances where circulating such a list was questionable but harmless fun. I can imagine circumstances in which it involved egregious and tasteless taunting and offensively derogatory behaviour. I just don’t know.

>Moreover, how can a "list of best names ever" be so troubling, let alone racist?

Well I imagine the list had a lot of people from certain ethnicities...

It didn’t. See DHHs blog post for numbers.

> Out of the 78 names listed on the last version we were able to recover, just 6 names appear to be Asian.

Really? DHH mentioned the vast majority of names were Nordic or English. Isn't that racist against the Nordic and English people?

Most people don’t consider discrimination inside European / Asian / African groups as racism - rather, discrimination between those groups.

I don't think the posts specified the ethnicities of the people who made the lists. Are you sure it is intra-group and not inter-group?

It's likely Basecamp demographics match the US, where Europeans are the majority ethnicity.