I think they mean the very fact that people have to be conscious of their words and view them critically through the lens of hundreds of years of oppression is meaningful all by itself.

They said that "mindlessly employ[ing] a brutal term that stands for horrible abuse in a completely unrelated area, just so" trivializes it, and that's what I took issue with. If they only intended to say that thinking about slavery is meaningful, I am happy to agree.

Exactly.

The rethoric techniques you are trying to use here are called "slippery slope" and "appeal to ridicule" .

The rhetoric technique I am using is called good faith discussion. I am asking you for evidence that the casual use of the word 'master' trivializes slavery in the minds of the speaker or listener. The questions you're calling slippery slope are genuinely intended to help me make sense of your position, because I don't see how they wouldn't follow from it- presumably from your response they do not. There is no intent to ridicule.

> There is no intent to ridicule.

Just asking for proof would have sufficed to prompt a response on the subject matter, it's the examples that make me question your good faith. Alas, I'll take your last sentence at face value.

I must admit I'm not strong on that trivialization position. The "thinking about" part is more what I'm aiming at when I say it actually had an effect (maybe even the intended one).

As for trivialization: not a linguist, so I can't cite sources here. The mechanism I think is called semantic satiation. It's employed for nefarious reasons too, in the form of "buzzword fatigue" or "buzzword burnout" and I'd argue if this wouldn't be effective, it wouldn't be part of political parties' playbooks. Other examples: Apart from holocaust trivialization (which is actually a felony in my country), another attempt to avoid a similar effect that I find interesting is the protection of the symbols of the Red Cross.

I feel like a comment that just asked for a source would be less substantive and more dismissive. Adding examples of how it goes against my intuitions serves to justify the request. But we can agree to disagree there.

I could be convinced to restrict freedom to prevent harm, but doing so just to have a positive impact goes against me on principle. I get the sense that this is a common principle because all of these lists specifically discuss harms, but it may just be an American thing. So I'm going to talk about trivialization, but it's fine with me if you'd rather argue against this paragraph (or ignore me entirely).

The closest I can find to semantic satiation having significant effects beyond the short term is in helping stutterers, where the meaning of the words would be irrelevant. I may not be using the right search terms though.

An important distinction re: political parties is that they are using the relevant meanings. A master git branch, as far as I'm aware, does not refer to someone controlling someone else but is used in the sense of a master recording. In any event, US Republicans talk about CRT and US Democrats talk about fascism, both ad infinitum. Neither side is trying to normalize or trivialize their attack words, so that's a point against 'if it didn't work, it wouldn't be in their playbook'.