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Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by woodruffw on Friday April 01, 2022 @10:54AM (#30878634)
In what meaningful sense of the word is a third-party, anonymously-created (and apparently buggy) bot "authoritarian"?

This reeks of artificial engagement. HN should avoid buying into it.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by xeromal on Friday April 01, 2022 @10:59AM (#30878731)
You don't want to wait to the last minute to stop something. If you see an accident forming from afar, you start reacting now.

This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police and the author should be sternly reprimanded.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by maxbond on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:26AM (#30879124)
So, what appears to have happened is, someone who views political correctness as stifling made a troll bot to paint their opposition as absurd.

And you are asking us to treat this as a representation of a real threat to free thought, and not only to respond, but to respond as it were an emergency or natural disaster.

Do you hear how absurd that sounds to my ears?

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by dragonwriter on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:23AM (#30879089)
> This bot may be a "joke" but it represents the thought police

It represents the thought police in exactly the same way that anyone having any opinion represents that.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by cato_the_elder on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:02AM (#30878770)
Well, if we pretend that it's just this single instance, it probably isn't.

But this is part of a cultural phenomenon, unless you want to argue that wokism doesn't exist.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by woodruffw on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:11AM (#30878929)
This is what I meant by artificial engagement: we're now in the "complain about vague cultural phenomena" segment of the program.

Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by cato_the_elder on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:18AM (#30879017)
> vague cultural phenomena

It's not vague at all.

> Besides, there's nothing particularly wrong with cooking on a Wok.

Lol, I had to look up what a wok is. Blessings of learning English as a second language.

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Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by psyc on Friday April 01, 2022 @12:06PM (#30879689)
This is the No True Hipster fallacy all over again. I am firmly on the left and I know damn well which cultural cluster “wokeism” refers to. And so do you. Saying it doesn’t exist is a transparent gaslighting tactic.
Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by stjohnswarts on Friday April 01, 2022 @12:51PM (#30880374)
I am far from alt right but I use woke-ism all the time. I believe in liberty and the first amendment with as few limits as possible. Woke-ism is an attempt to control thought and language by a minority of people, no matter how admirable their reasons are, it's wrong to try and control people through authoritarian systems of belligerance rather than education. You will never get the bigots to bend to your will and then there are people like me who don't mind using gender neutral terms when requested because I don't care what gender you want to be or who you want to have sex with or identify as, that's all cool with me, I think we're human first and foremost and equals, I will push back every time when someone tries to control me and says "this is the one and only way". I think LatinX was another one that is great way to prove one's point on this. It's fall from grace was kind of cathartic if you dislike woke-ism.
Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by cato_the_elder on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:47AM (#30879435)
That's certainly an argument you can make. I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence, but unfortunately that's not necessary for cultural movements.

Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by dragonwriter on Friday April 01, 2022 @12:36PM (#30880137)
> I kinda agree with what you imply about the lack of logical coherence

I didn't imply anything, I explicitly stated that the term “wokism” as currently used, doesn't refer to either an actual ideology, cultural phenomenon, or even a set of ideas or groups of people more connected than that they are things the dominant faction of the political Right disagrees with at the moment of the use of the label.

> Don't you agree that there's a relationship between having pronouns in the bio, reading Ibram X. Kendi, being "intersectional", believing words are violence, and sporting purple hair?

No, I don't. Believing (certain uses of) words are violence seems to be common across the political spectrum, though which uses of which words varies, purple hair is pretty orthogonal to politics (as is the more common feature used in this context, blue hair), intersectional isn't something a person can be, and while the first two things do correlate with political positions the Right opposes they (and the political positions they each correlate strongly with) don't correlate very strongly with each other. (In fact, that's a perennial complaint of the group that represents the intersection of those two communities.)

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by leereeves on Friday April 01, 2022 @01:00PM (#30880481)
I'm afraid you're wrong about this one. Let's review how the word was used a couple years ago:

> In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...

That was written in 2020. Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago, and some claim that "wokeness" is a fiction invented and used exclusively by the right, obscuring its true history: a term invented by BLM and used as "a shorthand for political progressiveness" by progressives themselves as recently as 2020.

(We might almost overlook that two other terms Democrats are also trying to distance themselves from were casually used in that quote: "a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory". Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.)

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by dragonwriter on Friday April 01, 2022 @02:25PM (#30881610)
> That was written in 2020.

And...it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate then.

> Now, as Democrats fear a red wave in 2022, it seems they want to distance themselves from the ideas they embraced just two years ago,

Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct, you would be making the common mistake of associating the center-right Democratic Party with leftism. Within the left, there is debate over whether supporting the Democrats is acceptable or counterproductive, and the Democratic Party itself is generally anti-leftist and pro-corporate-capitalist, though arguably not as strongly soa s the Republicans (arguably, OTOH, more strongly so, as the Republicans culture war positions compromise the advancement of corporate capitalism.)

> Before right-wing criticism of these ideas became overpowering, they were all widely embraced by the left.

The original meaning of both terms is still widely embraced on the left, even after they’ve becoming meaningless epithets in the mouths of Republicans. They’ve never been embraced by Democrats as a whole, and the Republican use of term (which generally is not attached to anything vaguely resembling a criticism) doesn't even refer to the same thing that people using the terms positively refer to with the term.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by leereeves on Friday April 01, 2022 @05:24PM (#30883468)
> you would be making the common mistake of associating the center-right Democratic Party with leftism.

No, I'm recognizing that even the centrist New Democrats embraced woke/progressive ideas in 2020, or at least didn't dare to challenge them. Now they're distancing themselves from those ideas, so they avoid the terms as well. As Clinton strategist James Carville said: "Wokeness is a problem and we all know it."

> Even if the articles description of the use of “woke” as an encapsulation of leftism were correct

It is correct. It may not be how you use the word, but it is how many people, including Democrats, use the word.

Here's another example in which CNN uses the term to encapsulate the Green New Deal and open immigration along with Defund the Police and the culture war, while advising Democrats to distance themselves:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/12/politics/woke-green-new-deal-...

> it was confused, muddled, and largely inaccurate

Here you're just descending into insults instead of substantive debate, while dismissing contrary evidence without any reason. You might try to open your mind and realize that your opinion doesn't encompass or limit all human experience.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by dllthomas on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:02PM (#30885525)
I think it's the case that there are clusters in social-cultural-idiological space where we could find pretty broad agreement that "woke" is an applicable (if perhaps derogatory) label.

I think it's also clearly the case that some segments of the political landscape are using it principally as a slur for anyone who seems to be disagreeing about whatever.

Mo Brooks (Republican congressman from Alabama) was just prominently labeled "woke" by Trump for not falling in line about election stuff. I don't think very many people would place Mo Brooks in (or near) any of the clusters described above.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by smegsicle on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:47AM (#30879433)
> reflects no coherent ideology

it sure is incoherent, but it sure is persistent

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Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by woodruffw on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:00AM (#30878734)
Nobody is stopping you from thinking the word "man" or "woman." There's no point in making such a ridiculous claim.

This is clearly just a badly programmed bot. However, if you look at one of the (less) buggy PRs it submitted, you'll find an actually helpful change[1]: replacing gendered pronouns with neutral ones makes sense in the context of documentation, wherever that documentation is in fact gender-neutral in disposition.

[1]: https://github.com/moby/moby/pull/43441

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by blindmute on Friday April 01, 2022 @07:18PM (#30884297)
"They" is not a gender neutral singular pronoun to begin with, so the entire concept is wrong
Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by woodruffw on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:02PM (#30885523)
Sure it is. If it's good enough for the Bard, I think it's good enough for you and me[1].

[1]: https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neut...

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by blindmute on Saturday April 02, 2022 @09:28AM (#30888102)
Merriam-Webster chose "they" as its 2019 Word of the Year based on the number of dictionary lookups, and the singular "they" was added to its online dictionary in September.

In other words, the dictionary added it 3 years ago due to political pressure. It's never been correct English, and it still isn't.

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by woodruffw on Saturday April 02, 2022 @10:46AM (#30888663)
“Correct” English is a very silly thing to get hung up on. I’ll repeat myself: if it’s correct enough for Dickens and Shakespeare, the two of us can probably suffer it.

(I’ve also never heard any English dictionary make a claim of linguistic completeness, so “it’s not in Merriam-Webster” doesn’t strike me as an important standard.)

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by at_a_remove on Thursday April 07, 2022 @11:00AM (#30945314)
It isn't an important standard for really obscure words. However, if Merriam-Webster forgot something like "him," you would look askance.

We both know this. Why pretend?

Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by mongol on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:21AM (#30879060)
It is not badly programmed. It is badly intentioned.
Re:Inclusive Coding Bot on GitHub by starkd on Friday April 01, 2022 @11:06AM (#30878839)
Controlling language is how you control thoughts. It's the chief function of propaganda.