An excellent illustration of the beginnings of an SJW dystopia. Not just the list itself, but the general feeling of fear they want you to feel while speaking. One can draw a link between any word and a possible harm - something that a few comments have hilariously shown with some examples. So if the goal was protecting anyone from every possible harmful word, the list fails.
But this demonstrates real evil that hides behind compassion and empathy, because preventing harm is not the real goal. The real goal is the assertion of power to police speech. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want with it to build a utopia where people aren't allowed to say things you don't think should be said. Even SJWs have to decide: what's worse, letting people say "lets bury the hatchet" without realizing they are "appropriating native culture", or putting an arbitrary group of unaccountable people in charge of what everyone says, in full knowledge of how that power can and will be abused?
Good heavens this whole thing is astonishingly stupid.
This list is incredibly stupid. However, I don’t think this “Statement of Solidarity and Commitment to Action, which was published by the Stanford CIO Council (CIOC) and People of Color in Technology (POC-IT) affinity group” (using the words off their own website) is some mastermind plot to eventually subvert freethinking in America.
Instead, I think it’s just a group of busywork, incompetent administrators who have been hired to “come up with ideas”. The number of administrators in academia has absolutely exploded in the past few decades, and this is the kind of dumb stuff they do.
For example, say, the people involved got four weeks to do this -- and they were done in a day, but then continued adding more and more words anyway to fill the time. Or because more words would give a more serious / competent impression.
I'd like to assume good intentions or incompetence / laziness / selfishness & don't-care, rather than giant conspiracy theories
Don't we have the same problem with in house lawyers and designers, who, if idle, want to sue someone, or want to redesign a "perfect" app and just make it worse
Or software devs who add pointless stuff to the tech stack
Maybe Parkinsons law should be amended:
> "work expands to fill the time allotted for its completion [with pointless things you'd be better off without]"
> some mastermind plot to eventually subvert freethinking in America
Hitler did not start off with a mastermind plot to become the sole decisionmaker in Germany either. "There is no conspiracy, they're just acting in typical self-serving ways" is a counterproductive and even subversive objection when the enemy is demonstrably at the gates.
Here is a movie plot. Priests of the dark temple, the so called "brothers of shadow", worship their deity Ktulhu that feeds off fear. The priests know that fear physically radiates away your energy in a low frequency spectrum, and their demon can collect this energy. The demon rests deep under the ocean in a particular place that acts as a natural parabolic anthenna for the fear waves. Since the dawn of the mankind, the only mission of the priests has been invoking fear in the masses. The movie ends with the rise of the demon, who promptly sucks all the life from anyone who can fear, those priests including, and then starves to death. However, as it turns out, a tiny group of people weren't suspectible to fear, as they didn't hate, so they survive and begin the new golden age, free of hate and fear, at least in the beginning. The final scene in the movie shows the demon, hibernating deep in the ocean.
I meant utopia from their perspective, ironically. Although I think we all have a subjective utopia in mind - if no-one ever spoke again about certain subjects, I personally would consider the world a better place! But I recognize that my opinion isn't the only one that matters, people are messy and still somewhat barbaric at heart, and its an exercise in futility if you think you can legislate your way out of that state. The "greatest ethical minds of our generation" have agreed amongst themselves to embark on this SJW adventure, for realsies. It's an experiment in techno-utopia based on the dogmatic presentism and a confused, crude model of historical value production, and a grossly oversimplified cure. This "cure" depends entirely on synthetic moral reasoning motivate, and power-by-fiat to enforce. It is almost a parody of left-wing extremism, as described by the right:ivory tower reasoning foisted on the rest of us without our consent. Essentially the right wants the freedom to be a bad person if they want to, a racist if they want to, and the left really doesn't want to allow that, but has to tiptoe around issues of freedom of expression.
Personally, I miss the days when the Jewish-led ACLU would come to bat for neo Nazis when local police would violate their free speech rights. This is correct. We must give people the right to be bad people, and say bad things, because no-one can unambiguously define good or bad. This disciplined, principled approach to a notion of freedom seems to have disappeared completely, and within my lifetime! That makes me feel incredibly guilty because, right now, my kids have a much harder road ahead than I did, my son in particular.
But this demonstrates real evil that hides behind compassion and empathy, because preventing harm is not the real goal. The real goal is the assertion of power to police speech. Once you have that, you can do whatever you want with it to build a utopia where people aren't allowed to say things you don't think should be said. Even SJWs have to decide: what's worse, letting people say "lets bury the hatchet" without realizing they are "appropriating native culture", or putting an arbitrary group of unaccountable people in charge of what everyone says, in full knowledge of how that power can and will be abused?
Good heavens this whole thing is astonishingly stupid.