Re: A contribution to ongoing terminology work

[Viktor Dukhovni <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2021 at 08:56:26AM +1200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> > Show me a recent (last 50 years) documentary, newspaper article, book, play,
> > film, in which someone intends emotional injury upon another by calling them
> > "slave"?  (Sorry, BDSM literature doesn't count).
> 
> "Intends" is irrelevant. It's the listener's/reader's reaction that determines
> whether there's emotional injury.

But, however imperfectly in some cases, intent is also conveyed along
with the message, and much of the potential offense is the perceived
intent, not the vocabulary used.  One can be quite offensive with
perfectly ordinary words:

    https://www.you-books.com/book/P-Jillette/Every-Day-is-an-Atheist-Holiday

And vice versa.  When there is clearly no intended malice and the
context is benign, it is infantilising to impute offense to a class of
readers, as though they are so simple, they can't tell the difference.
The people we're aiming to not offend are not unable to discern context.

> > Where are the offensive uses of those terms?
> 
> I don't know where you live, Victor,

Manhattan, essentially in Harlem. OK, Harlem is technically across the
street.  There's a Mosque outside my window, and people of all races
and ethnicities in a building complex with O(3000) apartments.

To the dismay of my conservative friends, I get much of my news from the
left-leaning New York Times and the Washington Post.  (Pravda-on-the-Hudson
and Izvestia-on-the-Potomac).

> but having lived for a couple of years in the US, and like most other
> people being aware of the deep impact of slavery, the Jim Crow era,
> and continued discrimination and racist systems in the USA, I have no
> difficulty at all with the concept that casual use of the word "slave"
> would distress the great-grandchildren of slaves.

Well, I've been here 30+ years, am aware of the history both past and
more recent, and don't find the offensiveness of "master/slave" at all
credible.

> That doesn't mean they'd tell you about their distress, of course.

They have much more important things to be distressed about than
master/slave copies of zone files.  Discrimination in bank loans,
profiling by police, ...  Nobody calls them "slave", and learning
about slavery is important part of their education.

> The USA isn't the world, of course, but it is a large fraction of the
> English-mother-tongue world, so it counts for something.

We're fighting the wrong battle.

> Nobody has, to my knowledge, suggested that. It's use of the master/slave
> metaphor that is in question.

I'm glad to hear it is in fact "in question".  For I'm very much
questioning the wisdom of imputing any issues to its technical
uses.

> > This whole exercise is mere posture.  It reeks of "Yes minister" logic,
> > we must do something about injustice, this is something, therefore we
> > must do it.
> 
> No. The logic is that we should do something about avoidable offence and
> distress. And that's an ethical "should", not a interoperability "MUST".

Sure, we should not use derogatory or slang terms.  We don't need an RFC
or a working group to arrive at this non-revelation.  Is there evidence
that the IETF's output has that problem?  Or are we manufacturing a
problem to be seen to be doing something for a just cause (I am with you
on the cause, but part ways on the means).

-- 
    Viktor.