Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Yoav Nir <[e-mail]>]

> On 27 Jul 2020, at 15:50, Salz, Rich <rsalz=[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>>     And I'm telling you that if you that the bar to compel speech is 
>>    considerably
>>    higher than rank assertions and fallacies.
>> 

> Nobody is compelling anything,

The subject of this thread is “IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language”. Someone is definitely tryiing to compel people to not use what they consider to be oppressive and exclusionary language.

> unless the IETF comes to consensus to not use language that some find problematic.

This is empowering “some” to compel everyone to avoid what they consider problematic. As an example, I know I’m an outsider in the US, but to me words like “folks” and “y’all” in US English (no connection to German or Dutch origins) express the contempt that intellectual elites feel towards less educated people. The latter term is specifically a fake southern accent, while the former is always associated with a lack of education. Consider terms like “folksy” and “folk wisdom”.

> I think you have made it clear that you are opposed to that consensus. Calling it compelled speech is clever and I salute your linguistic ability.

IETF consensus is usually achieved by a small group of people who care about a particular subject. That works fine as long as the people who care about automated certificate issuance and renewal participate in ACME, and people who only participate in the IETF for routing protocols don’t ever read the drafts. We’re fine with saying that the documents have “IETF consensus”.  

This doesn’t work here. Like every other topic, only the people who care about word usage are going to participate in the discussion, and maybe Dan and two others will be the only voices there against it. The people who don’t care so much, or the people who think the whole thing is just silly are not going to participate.  Yet this will end up in an RFC that is binding on everyone.   

The potential for a small but motivated group to hijack the process and dictate policy is great, and the argument that the process was open to everyone is not convincing. We all have limited time, and arguing language policy at the IETF is not a good use of time for most of us.  

For me, the “master/slave” terminology is something that I believe should be phased out, because it was never a good metaphor: The interaction between human masters and human slaves is not one where the slave copies the master, so it was always a poor term. But “blacklist” and “whitelist” are terms that have been used widely for decades if not centuries, and nobody can really give a good reason as to why someone would consider it offensive.  Perhaps whitespace is also offensive? Red/Black trees?  You don’t have to walk in anyone’s shoes to consider that silly, and yet a working group would be very likely to add all of those to the list of prohibited speech, and that will affect us all.