Re: technical terms overhaul
On Saturday 20 June 2020 08:07:31 Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Joe wrote:
> > What *ought* to be done is make the skin colour descriptions more
> > representative of reality.
>
> Correct observation. But i expect that racists would just replace the
> discrimination of "black" people by discrimination of those who are
> "darker than RAL 1015".
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Not in particular in reply to Joe:
>
> The original proposal to fix social problems by renaming reminds me of
> the short story "The New Reality" by Charles L. Harness of 1950. It is
> based on the funny idea that the evolution of scientific views on the
> world actually shaped the respective physical reality of their ages.
>
> But the world is not like this. Words shape verbal expression, not
> reality. To confuse both, one must confuse a library with the
> universe.
>
> Enslaving humans is abominable regardless of the name that is given to
> it or the means used to enforce it.
> Discrimination of humans based on their ancestry is not disestablished
> by reserving the word "black" to only positive contexts which involve
> people with dark skin color.
>
> So what about the two terms and the contexts in question:
>
> Is it immoral to enslave a deterministic program or device ?
>
> If i try to imagine a future civilization which looks back on our
> times and our coarse biotope of humans, machines and software, i don't
> see my relation to my computers less moral than a grazer's relation to
> the meadow. The true victims are the wood and the sea which suffer
> from the fallout of my readiness to buy hardware, to get or make
> software, and to supply power to them. That's injust to nature, but
> not injust to computers.
>
> Do blacklist and whitelist have anything to do with skin color ?
>
> A "black list" is nothing nice, but i find no indication that in
> english or german language it would be especially related to people of
> dark skin.
>
> So where - except the coincidence of words - is the connection between
> the fight against discrimination of black people and the terms that
> shall be changed ?
> Coincidence of words with widely different meanings is quite common in
> english language. Just lookup "race" and "serve" in a dictionary.
>
> In contrary, i think that the inavoidable connotations of the terms
> "blacklist" and "master/slave" can positively remind their users that
> there are still injustices in the world which go by the same names.
> I hope for times in which the bad meanings are dim history.
>
>
> Have a nice day :)
>
> Thomas
To further contribute to the spamminess of this thread, I might remind
folks that skin "color" is persistent Back in the analog days of color
tv, and I spent a conciderable amount of my working time in broadcasting
from the Chief Engineers service bench keeping several tv stations on
the air so I feel I can speak with some authority.
We used a monitoring device called a vectorscope as the final judge of
color accuracy. It decoded the color signal into a wheel with zero color
in the center, and the color of a subject was shown as a vector from
there, the longer the vector, the more saturated the color was. The
angle of the color changed according to the color.
And this device only measured the color, being totally immune to
brightness.
Human skin, regardless of race, is exactly the same vector, with only
minor variations in saturation, it was impossible to look at that
display and tell if the blob of green that was generated by a talking
heads face, was black or white, it was all the same angle from the
center. Think about that folks, because we are all the same color, only
the brightness differs.
The language we use to describe software should NOT be confused with
someones idea of being politically correct, so IMO it doesn't need
putzed with. Drop it.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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