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Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by narrator on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:39AM (#34064536)
The reason these kinds of rules are showing up everywhere is to get control of organizations by inventing grievances that can be deployed at any time to remove inconvenient people and quickly take over the organizations they've built. A variant of this is the WEF's Stakeholder Capitalism where outside groups can infiltrate corporations and then use invented grievances to quickly take control of these organizations.
Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by clcaev on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @07:33AM (#34064984)
I see this initiative differently, as a way to educate people how their choice of words can affect those around them. I don't see any hard "rules" here, so much as describing phrases that could be harmful, in context. I just now learned quite a bit from just reading words from the Abelist category.

Yes, this resource can be used to more effectively sanction individuals who consistently demonstrate behavior harmful to those around them. It can be referenced early and often, so that repeat offenses more quickly lead to dismissal. Even so, I don't see this as good or bad, a wrongful dismissal can litigated, no? Cannot this reference be used to better defend someone who uses a poor choice of words as their sole offense? There are so many words and phrases enumerated, it aptly demonstrates just how challenging and context dependent things are.

Re:Stanford's “Elimination of Harmful Language” Initiative by TeMPOraL on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @08:34AM (#34065622)
> Cannot this reference be used to better defend someone who uses a poor choice of words as their sole offense? There are so many words and phrases enumerated, it aptly demonstrates just how challenging and context dependent things are.

Have you ever seen this argument work?

The whole point of "arson, murder, jaywalking", of "motte and bailey" argument style, of mixing obvious cases together with the things you want to make otherwise indefensible claims about, is because it makes the argument work only in one direction.

The only valid counter is to fight the inclusion of "jaywalking" on the same list as "arson" and "murder", but once it's your company's HR department quoting a Stanford-published list of "bad words", it's too late.