Re: A contribution to ongoing terminology work

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 05:31:10PM -0400, Viktor Dukhovni 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.

Intent certainly matters to a large degree, and has to, certainly to
-for example- determine guilt and punishment, because Mens Rea is a very
good principle.

Also, if intent never mattered then we could never have satire, let
alone Swift's "A Modest Proposal", or any swiftian "modest proposal".

Complete disregard of intent cannot be a good principle, as/and it
cannot lead us to good outcomes.  On the contrary, then any claim of
offensiveness has to be equally accepted no matter how implausible.
Objective standards go out the window then and the only thing that
matters is who is most offended and loudest in their complaints about
it.

> 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:

Exactly.  Intent must matter at least some of the time.

>     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.

+1

This is partly why I object so strenuously to draft-knodel-terminology:
the rationale given is weak and patronizing, which in itself is
offensive.  It would not be hard to find existence proofs of people
being offended by that infantilization either: just go out on the street
and interview random people.  You can find such videos online, I'm sure.

I'd settle for a BCP that just merely indicates that these terms are now
not seen as polite, or something very dry.  I'd also settle for no BCP
since the effect of rendering these terms unusable in future RFCs has
been obtained.

> > 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.

+1

Our world is full of suffering.  Physical suffering.  Deprivation.
Poverty.  Hunger.  Political imprisonment.  Torture.  Sovereign crimes.

About these we have no proposals before us, therefore... we must
obviously not care!  And this lack of caring is offensive, and as is our
caring so much for much more trivial issues offensively trivializes much
more serious ones.  Ergo we should close down the IETF.  Or... accept
that we must pick and choose our battles, that the IETF is not a social
engineering entity and is a morally neutral tool (as tools are), and
hope that technology improvements lead to better societies (though there
is no guarantee of that), or at least some societies to be better even
if not all of them.

Nico
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