Re: Master copy
"As someone else said, what's the harm in making the world a little better?"
This is making the world a little worse. It is spreading and pandering to a type of paranoia that says we must avoid offending ANYONE no matter how irrational their offence is. This is regressive and by its nature divisive. It also cheapens our language by stripping out all context and saying that *only* the most offensive possible interpretation for any word should be read into it no matter what the specific usage would indicate is the correct interpretation.
"And if changing a word makes you feel angry, frustrated, and powerless, imagine those facing injustices on a near daily, weekly or monthly basis."
"Those" injustices? What are "those" injustices here? That a word is being used to describe a relationship between two git branches? Which git branch is being oppressed? What are you talking about? This is moronic and again cheapens the reality of oppression among real people - you know, oppressed people who don't have time to prance around boosting their egos by making virtue points on Twitter.
The we come to the whole question of what is actually being achieved here: a white-washing of history where we can not ever talk about or reference things which we disapprove of today. The removal of everyday reminders of where our modern and very lucky lifestyles came from.
Slavery happened - and it didn't happen to you or me or the idiots pushing for these meaningless changes. The same idiots that want to "shine a light" on a very well-known part of history (who wasn't taught about this at school?), while doing absolutely nothing about modern slavery which is actually a problem - unlike things that happened 200 years ago to people dead before your granddad was born.
It's *good* to have streets named after plantations in Jamaca - if you don't know why they're called that then no harm is done and if you do dig in and find out then you'll learn something important about the horrors of the past that we are always trying to move away from. That certainly won't be the reasons the streets were named that way originally, but it's a useful purpose today nonetheless. Never forget the past, never stop learning from it.
This infantile movement is not about improving things - it's about instituting new taboos when we should be more open, it's about controlling what people can say when we should be making it easier to have free discussion, it's about making people ashamed of *things they didn't do* when we should all be trying to be more accepting of others and of our own failings, it's about hiding slavery when we should be exposing it.
It is absolutely NOT "making the world a little better".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
