Comment by raganwald
11 years ago
Your point has been raised elsewhere in this thread as well as many, many times in the last fifty-plus years when debating the effect of language on exclusion. I don't think I can add something new to the debate, so I'll direct you to do some research and find out why people do not accept your argument as axiomatically true.
Furthermore, the point that you're replying to says little about whether 'bro' or even 'white power' is offensive, it says that the debate about 'white power' was a distraction to a point about CoffeeScript.
And thus, my advice to the project authors is to change the name. Agree or disagree with whether it's offensive, it wasn't written to provoke you and I into discussing exclusionary language, it was written to help people be more productive.
The name works against that. Fair, unfair, what's the difference if your goal is to make people more productive?
I agree about the distraction. And I am not saying that nobody can ever complain about offensive language. What I am saying is that there are two parties in any disagreement and it cannot always be the case that the person who speaks first is always wrong and the person who judges their speech is always right. Sometimes people take offence for bad reasons, or in bad faith, and they create just as much of a distraction as those with legitimate complaints. So we cannot say that the mere existence of a distraction should cause the author/creator to change their product in order to avoid further distraction.
There needs to be some commonly-accepted understanding of what constitutes legitimate grounds for offence. You appear (though I don't think this is what you really mean) to be saying that anything that is found offensive by someone capable of causing a distraction over the issue should be accepted as such and removed.
To be honest, 'bro' is not an important word to me. But I worry about what it means if we can't use even such a silly word, as a fairly cheesy pun, without it causing such controversy. It feels like rather than bringing people together and making them more tolerant, discussions like this are just dividing people, over what is really a pretty trivial thing. Are we all so desperate to tell each other how to think and act that we can't let a silly pun be just a silly pun? Do we have to accept that even perfectly reasonable people, capable of giving good reasons for their actions (such as your blog post title) ought to have to self-censor rather than ask others to take the thing in the spirit it was intended? A little charity on the part of the critics would be nice.