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L.A. County Bans Use Of "Master/Slave" Term
SlashChick writes "In an interesting twist on political correctness, L.A. County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave' (commonly used to denote hard drive arrangements.) According to Snopes.com, 'someone within the County bureaucracy... had taken offense at "master/slave" references and complained to the board.' L.A. County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references. Incredible. Read the full story."
Funny that my first instinct was to check Snopes, and what do you know but that's the provided link. Shows how patently ridiculous this story seemed at first.
Hasn't this obsession with sanitizing speech become a total farce? What's next? Will we not be able to have male and female ends on our 1/4" audio cable for fear of offending the transgendered? How the hell am I supposed to shop for wires now?
It's not an "interesting twist" on political correctness, it's just another example of it.
graspee
I think this whole practice of political correctness should be done away with. It is twisting our language too rapidly and preventing the free exercise of speech. Politicians have to grow and pair and get some thicker skin. They must realize that a language develops because people make new terms and apply new definitions to existing words based on events with which they are familiar. You cannot force us to speak differently just so a puny minority will not be offended.
Politicians, I think it is YOU who are offended, not the minority which you claim to represent!
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
This is sad and funny at the same time. I can see where someone could potentially be offended to merely hear the terms used, but use some common sense people! Hasn't anyone heard of context? When political correctness stretches so far as to have government offices relabling hard drive configurations to imply that while some drives may not be as gifted as others, all are created equal...I laugh. I've been through my share of drives in my day, and I can guarantee that not all are created equal.
How pathetic have we become? Something like this can only be laughed at, and never really measured.
Pathetic.
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Seriously... what the hell are we supposed to call them? Master/Slave is the most accurate way to describe the damn things! Maybe to be PC they'll just call them the dominant and submissive drives instead?
LA County has banned the use of the terms 'Master/Slave'
Is this the same LA County that has rampant police corruption and brutality problems?
The one in the state, California, that is facing a massive deficit?
Glad to know they have their priorities right.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Even so, it's a pointless request, and if enforced would probably mean that LA County couldn't buy hard drives at all, since most drives have clear labels on how to set the "master" and "slave" jumpers.
Uh oh, this post is probably officially data non grata in Los Angeles COunty now.
Someone you trust is one of us.
one of these days, prison is where all the thinking people are going to end up and run the outside world from. and our prison utoptia will be the land of guarded walls and milk and honey and high speed internet, and we'll all hang out all day reading books and surfing the web and writing more laws to keep us safer from the outside, while they slave away paying to keep us incarcerated, blissfully unawares of their own capture, as the walls grow outwards and the outside becomes the inside. and our uniforms will regress to suits and the the mobius strip will turn once again. btw im drunk
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
"L.A. County Bans use of Master/Slave Term. ...
LA County now requires that vendors working with the county remove all 'master/slave' references."
Contrast this to the snopes article, which says: The County of Los Angeles has requested that equipment vendors avoid using the industry term "Master/Slave" in product descriptions and labelling.
There's a big difference between request and require. And banned? Hardly. I doubt anyone's going to get fined or sued over this.
I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS CRAP!!!! (felt like I was on A O hell there for second) I can not believe how far political correctness has gone in this country. What next a ban on using the terms male/female?
Except that the primary/secondary notation is already used for the cable arrangment. Currently it's the:
...
Primary Master
Primary Slave
Seconndary Master
Secondary Slave
Tertiary Master
So we should be calling them the Primary Primary drive?
bananas like monkeys.
Gang warfare, poor policing in the Sheriff's department, a school district that produces idiots, and a fire department in the highest wildfire area in the world that doesn't own a single airel tanker. Yep, those board supivisors are earning their money alright. They have eliminated a benign yet useful bit of global computer nomenclature to sooth the feathers of some psycho religious county employee.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Using "Parent/Child" would indicate that a "parent" is exercising direct control over the "child". This will definitely not do. Children are unique, individual little people and must be free to choose their own path and discover their own inner potential!
If we are going to be PC we have to go all the way :-)
I say, refuse to sell them drives until the "whiner" is identified and held up to public ridicule. That goes for the bleeding-heart bureaucrat who took this whiner seriously instead of telling them to "grow-the-hell-up!"
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
If you are offended, it's your fault, fuck you. For example, nothing you can say can possibly offend me. If you are offended by something, then there is something wrong with you, and that is the problem. Stick and stones. It's just freakin' words man. If you can' understand that when I call drives master and slave that I am in no way referring to actual slavery then you are fucked up and need some help.
Nowhere does it say you have the right not to be offended. But it does say I have the right to free speech. Free speech comes before everything else. So there's no way in hell I'm limiting my speech because you get offended. You and everyone like you who gets offended or tries to avoid offending people are part of the problem of society. Just get over it and deal, stop being a pussy.
And yes, if you noticed my language in this post is purposeful, if you were too slow to catch on you dumbass.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've been doing this for years, myself.
No you haven't. Master/Slave is the industry standard, and it wasn't even an issue until JUST NOW! JUST NOW! JUST NOW!
Furthermore, you can't be offended unless you WANT to be. Language is symbolic: all meaning is decoded by the receiver. There is no intrinsic meaning to any word, only the extrinsic ones we apply ourselves. Thus, if you are offended, it's YOUR fault: not mine.
I reference the following article (Happiness is a Warm Brick: page 7)
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
Here's a test for you. Try using the word "niggardly" in a sentence and see how many thin-skinned feebs decide to tar and feather you for being a racist.
People need to get over their accute desire to be offended at every stupid little thing and just get on with life. And governements, of all sizes, need to stop wasting time and taxpayer money on useless, pointless bullshit and work on real problems.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Sure, go ahead and change the labels. And charge 3 times more for everything your relabel. Make it not worth their money to do it.
-Foxxz
... Right. I suppose we should all smile and nod when our co-workers or bosses catch on and start calling us stupid shits, crackers, niggers, ho's etc. The fact that this instance crosses from progress to idiocy doesn't mean insisting on professional workplaces is a bad thing.
Seems to me the terminology is descriptive and easily understood. Why should the use of slavery as a semi-descriptive term for a particular technology be offensive?
We also have "dead man switches", "sacrificial electrode", "vampire taps", and "kill switches", and a lot of other terms in technology that refer to things that, when they happen between humans, are unacceptable. It seems to me that the use of such terms to describe the relationship between inanimate objects or even non-human animals does not mean endorsing those behaviors for humans.
I don't get it.
You, sir, are an idiot. "Master-Slave", while applicable to the US slavery situation, is also applicable to, oh, say 5,000 years of human history. I hate to break it to you, but it does not "directly derive" from anything on this continent. This is exactly the wrong kind of thinking that caused this mess. American history is not the only history, and Master-Slave is not about the American South. If you want to say that "Master-Slave" propogates a concept which is undesirable, okay, you're still goofy, but you at least have some validity. To say that the white man is trying to keep the blck man down by this term is ludicrous
This is exactly the problem that is happening in LA County. There is no reason that just because somebody decided to call something master and slave, to define the relationship between the drives, means that that person was in anyway refering directly to American Slavery. Those terms have been around for thousands of years, well predating our own country. Those two things are WORDS that have several MEANINGS. They chose those words to decribe a situation which seemed to follow that relationship. Every useage of these words does not in anyway refer to the enslavement of millions of Africans.
"Imagine if the "Trashcan" on your desktop were named "Auschwitz" by some clever computer scientist"
That is quite a stretch to go to that from Master/Slave. Auschwitz can only really bring up one meaning, the slaugtering of the Jews (who by, were oppressed horribly for thousands of years, compared to the relatively short time in which Slavery existed in the US, and no I'm not Jewish, I just know a little about history)
. "and you are not at all bothered by the Cleveland Indians mascot".
Although I am not bothered by those teams, I understand that somebody who is a Native American Indian could take offense. Again however, those teams mascots are direct references to a certain set of people, where the terms Master and Slave are about as general as White and Black.
Doesn't everybody love femtoseconds?
the term "master-slave" still directly derives from the American slavery experience
Believe it or not, the term "master-slave" does NOT derive from the American slavery experience. In fact, slavery was invented thousands of years earlier in the middle east and northern Africa where human beings are from (remember Moses and the Egyptians? There are plenty of even older examples). By the way, for future reference, slavery existed far earlier in the entire African continent (between all the peoples living there) than it did in the United States. And, it still exists there in the full sense of the term.
While ANSI may have coined the term "master-slave" to refer to computer parts, the Middle East and Africa invented the concept (and practiced it repletely) before any other culture in the world. Where do you think other cultures learned it from (considering that humanity's roots are all in the same Mesopotamian region)?
Did you tell them that all their vehicles
have master and slave cylinders?
They have not BANNED the word, that means one thing. Not allowed by law, that is not the case at all. Maybe someone should check their facts and try not to hype up stories like this!
There's a difference between political correctness (dumbass term) and using racial slurs. The former is an overreaction to a potential slight, the latter is an attempt to offend.
And yeah, I know it was probably for effect.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
The thing that no one has yet commented upon -- and the thing which makes all of this even sillier and more moot (if that's possible) -- is what's going to happen when all of these vendors simply ignore this stupid memo? What's LA County going to do, refuse to contract with these thick-headed, insensitive troglodytes? Refuse to buy their products? In the case of drive manufacturers that doesn't exactly give LA County a wide range of alternative sources, now does it?
And in the case of documentation, perhaps we should just come up with a XML filter that switches terminology from normal readable text into PC-babble. It'd make a great ongoing document versioning contract... and if LA County complains then we can heap loads of negative press upon them claiming that they really don't have any interest in being a beacon of sensitivity...
Actually not, the Master does not tell the slave what to do.
However the S&M community has faced this same problem long ago and come up with the terms 'top' and 'bottom'.
Levity aside, there is a serious issue here. There is a lot of Political Correctness talk that is trivial, some that is serious and some that is downright evil.
The trivial stuff is mostly harmless. Sometimes what appears trivial on the surface is actually a major cause of resentment. The word 'redskin' was used in pretty much the same way that 'nigger' was. If you know that you can see how a football team called the Washington Redskins might be unpopular with native americans the way a team called the Atlanta Niggers would be unpopular with african americans.
I recently had someone make me rewrite a paper on spam control to call 'blacklists' 'blocklists'. I objected because changing the terminology obscures the connection between blacklist type activities and McCarthy type activities which is actually central to the debate as I see it.
The downright evil use of PC is when it is used as a partisan gottcha. The 'niggardly' episode is a case in point, the use of the phrase was not the reason the person got sacked, it was merely the excuse. The extreeme example of this was in the UK where the campaign agains Rushdie and the Satanic Verses began as a PC type protest, a small bunch saw the opportunity for self-promotion.
There is also the downright evil use of PC card in the reverse direction. Take the recent advert from the Republican National Committee that equates disagreement with the President on any grounds with 'support for terrorists'. Forgive me, but I would be astonished if any of the Democratic Nominees is running on a platform of support for Bin Laden. It is not clear exactly which policy consistutes 'support for terrorists', it could be beleiving in the constitution rather than John Ashcroft, it could be beleiving that the Iraq war was and is a mistake, for that matter it might even be believing that war profiteers like Halliburton should be investigtated. We don't know because the President's party isn't making it clear. What is clear however is that they seem to be bringing us a sort of fusion McCarthyism, part Lenin (originator of the line 'whoever is not for us is against us'), part political correctness, part opportunism, part desperation.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Master/slave is just the latest. California is a minefield for this kind of crud, I should know I live in the Bay Area inside the Politically Correct triangle formed by Marin, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. I want to be as sensitive as the next bloke, but sometimes I pick up the paper and read something that just makes me want to puke. My wife is of the same mind and we rail against the PC fascists most mornings listening to public radio and browsing the newspaper.
;) while others wave the flag of immigrant seeking fairness, or are non-English speakers, while others have been abused as children, or are incest survivors, or are food or chemical or medication sensitive (so don't wear perfume or cologne to the office, or bring a PBJ sandwich for your own lunch, or you'll kill them on the spot and just see if you don't) or had absent fathers, or absent grandparents, or didn't have cable TV when they were young, or are dyslexic, or corpulent, or are in some other way special and are a victim and not "part of the problem" created by the oppressive power elite (who BTW are increasingly Native Americans, immigrants, pagans, GLBTG, food/chemical/drug/fat/bilingual/disabled awareness lobbyists and for all I know family pets.)
PC fascism extends to pets, races, bums, unwed mothers and sexual deviants (not to lump anyone together...trying to be PC here as you can see...) who must be correctly refered to (respectively) as fur friends, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, single mothers and GLBTG (for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered crowd, though we used to call them all by the PC term "Gay" rather than homosexual but recently they each wanted in on the game so now we have this horrid acronym which I guess is itself more PC than PC. Barf).
Our everyday lexicon is scattered with taboo words and topics. Unless they are white the authorities cannot refer to a suspect criminal on the run by their race not even to facilitate apprehending them. And a vicious dog is never a dangerous animal that needs to be destroyed (as opposed to being a family member needing therapy) and you cannot discuss GLBTG "gay rights" issues in any manner other than as a political movement for justice even if that means they can demand the opportunity to explain their lifestyle choice at whatever level of detail suits them in front of a classroom of 13 year old children (to the horror of many who can do nothing to stop it...which is why increasingly we homeschool or private school and leave the public schools to the activists).
A middle class white person has to keep their head down. The best approach is to join a splinter group and start claiming your rights as a minority as loudly as you can. Some claim to be suppressed Native American. Others claim to belong to suppressed religions like Paganism (I happen to claim both, but that is because I happen to be both
Though it seems democratic and diverse, ours is a culture of identity politics and is rife with narrow interests. Nobody pulls together except within their narrowly defined identity group (though I can't imagine how the GLBTG manage it.) You cannot believe how much it sucks. It's a wonder there can be any progress at all on anything important, and it appears that more often than not there is no progresss at all. Where it is all headed I cannot imagine.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Then those Americans are ignorant.
Slavery -- human slavery, I mean, not the machine kind -- is a curse that has afflicted humanity throughout its existence, and continues to do so today. To limit one's viewpoint of the word to a specific period in the history of a young nation is to pretend that the suffering of the (at a guess) tens of millions of slaves throughout history who were not black Americans has no meaning
Two-thirds of my father's family died in the Holocaust, but you don't see me acting as though genocide is something that only happens to Jews.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The US has still to this day not come fully to grips with the absolutly horrific cultural of racism and slavery in it's not so distant past. Racism is still prevalent in the US even today. A look at inner city projects and the penal system is just the most visible testament to the level of racism that persists.
It seems almost grotesk that a nation that engaged so fully in the slave trade and still has the very people who have decended from that enslavement living within it's national boundries would except and use langauge that could so clearly salt wounds that, frankly, have never been properly dressed.
So maybe an IDE subsystem is not the best place to make a stand against racism. But if I am working with a black technition who was perhaps decended from a slave that was raped by one of the USA's founding fathers and states that they would prefer that I not use the term "master/slave", F it, I'll use another term.
How 'bout "primary/secondary".
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
The team on this project was about half black and half white. I was having an animated discussion with another of the (white) programmers when a couple of the (black) programmers came in. They watched the discussion for a little while. I looked up at them, and one said, "Don't say slave."
"No?" I asked.
"Nuh uh," he replied, with just slightly too straight a face.
So I bet my career: I turned to the other (white) programmer and said, "Fine. So the Massah machine needs to hold record counts in the array so it can..." and everybody cracked up. We discussed terminology a bit, and decided to call the controlling box the "controller" and the indexing boxes the "indexers." About 70% of the folks actually using our application were black, we figured, and not too savvy on computer terminology, so fuck it: we caved, just to be on the polite side.
Moral: we all had a good laugh. Here in Atlanta proper, there are more white than blacks. In state government, there is plenty of minority representation. And we all get along pretty damned well---I was voted the second whitest white boy in the office by the (mostly black) administrative staff (and damn was the whitest white boy pissed).
I'm increasingly convinced that the people we're trying desperately not to piss off are not minorities, but liberal white jackasses who think they're under some sort of obligation to rescue all those poor defenseless minorities from oppressive words. Most actual black people can look after themselves, and, having better things to worry about, tend not to give a damn.
This is not my sandwich.
As is web weaver for god's sake. A good change? Ha. A master does not imply evil doings. A martial arts master or a master carpenter generally don't have slaves. Master implies that they the best at what they do. Yes, it also implies authority, but not cruel domination. Gah. People drive me insane. Some of these offended groups are probably the same ones that burn 'inappropriate books.' Pooh on them.
I'd rather have lived a hundred years ago. Except of course, for all my grumbling about rampant political correctness and other hogwash, I'd be much more pissed about the lack of women's suffrage, real racial inequality, and the other issues of the day. The moral? There isn't one really.
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
In informal contexts, I always use the singular "they". Fuck, it's been part of the English language for seven centuries. Just because Latin-misinterpreting prescriptive grammarians didn't like it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
Alright who is going to rewrite all the BIOS screens to make them politically correct?
Got Code?
I think several things need to happen here:
First, I encourage anyone and everyone to write to all the hard disk manufacturers you can think of, and strongly discourage them from changing this naming convention. Politely explain that the entire world should not change because of one person's lack of familiarity with the master/slave relationship of hard drives. (This terminology is actually used in other fields besides hard drives, to denote any mechanism or device in which this relationship of control is found.)
Second, if you've gone as far as doing that, you should consider writing to the county of Los Angeles to let them know how ridiculous and silly their request is.
I do not usually interfere in things like this, or ask anybody to do so, but I strongly believe that this is a frightening trend that is growing in too many areas. For example, a book called "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn" by Diane Ravitch gives example after example of things that school textbooks cannot say because they are politically incorrect. If you read this book, you'll eventually ask yourself, "Well, what exactly can you talk about?" That's the problem. If the entire world needs to change each time one person (or a small group of people) is offended by some terminology, then we will eventually live in George Orwell's nightmare.
As other Slashcrackers have noted, soon you won't be able to call a connector male or female, because somebody with an as-yet unknown gender (like an alleged child molester named MICHAEL JACKSON, though it's unlikely you've heard of him) will be offended at that.
For millions of Americans, the "master-slave" relationship means one thing and one thing only: over 200 years of institutionalized, legal American slavery.
Yeah, nevermind the Egyptians had slaves, or many African tribes that made slaves of the captured members of other tribes, or the Aztecs, or the Incas. It was only the Americans that ever had slaves.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
This is ridiculous, because the notion that women should be allowed to choose whether or not to wear a dress is a completely Eurocentric philosophy, and is certainly considered offensive to those from more traditional cultures. Such practices are discriminatory to those from a traditional Vietnamese, Korean or Chinese upbringing, where women are expected to wear dresses. This blatantly violates their right to have their own cultural identity.
You see? You can pick any extremist point of view, whether you actually believe it or not, and justify it just as these people have, whether it's liberal or conservative. The pendulum swings both ways, babycakes.
Read his(their) post again- he mentioned that English speakers have been using "they" to refer to single subjects ambiguously for seven centuries. When pretty much everyone makes the same "mistake," in the same way, for 700 years, that pretty much makes it not a mistake.
True in formal writing or speech... for now. Check back in a century and I'd bet you'll see the singular "they" accepted. It's easier than formulating a new, concise, elegant approach to "he/she". And rant all you want, but the world is never going back to the default "he".
Nor, IMHO, should it. Language evolves and no language does it better than English. The language expresses the needs of the culture -- if the culture as a whole (or even in large part) decides the old way is inadequate, the language will change accordingly.
Or, to put it succintly, the only languages spoken "perfectly" are dead ones.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Damn, you sure showed bigotry and intolerance in your description and assumptions about this girl. Maybe she misheard and embarrassed herself, but it turns out you are, in fact, an asshole.
Wow. Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on and jumped to conclusions about those.
*SHE* assumed that my friends and I were racists.
*SHE* demonstrated her naivete and hypersensitivity.
*SHE* is the one who started screaming at me.
*SHE* learned that I am, in fact, an asshole. And proud of it.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Interestingly, there are, in fact, more people in slavery in the world today than there ever were in the United States.
Well, you know, the shoe would have been on the other foot if I'd overheard her talking about the coloring books their mid-terms are based on
Wow, I think that is about the third time in this topic you make the assertion that arts subjects is about coloring books and crayons. Lots of easy karma points from dittohead Slashdot moderators when you pick on strawmen. You must be a very smart man in comparison, studying these incredibly difficult engineering subjects.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
I am distressed to find that some women friends (fortunately not many) treat the use of the impersonal masculine pronoun as if it showed intention to exclude them. If there were any excluding to be done (happily there is not) I think I would sooner exclude men, but when I once tentatively tried referring to my abstract reader as "she", a feminist denounced me for patronizing condescension: I ought to say "he-or-she", and "his-or-her". That is easy to do if you do not care about language, but then if you do not care about language you do not deserve readers of either sex. Here, I have returned to the normal conventions of English pronouns. I may refer to the "reader" as "he", but I no more think of my readers as specifically male than a French speaker thinks of a table as female. As a matter of fact I believe I do, more often than not, think of my readers as female, but that is my personal affair and I'd hate to think that such considerations impinged on how I use my native language
The colour of his skin was relevant to the story.
I think they treated the woman who was obviously the victim of a misunderstanding quite poorly, but I wasn't there. Maybe her initial remark was quite aggressive, in which case she probably deserved to be wound up. It might stop her from leaping in with both feet on the basis of incomplete information in future.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
What doesn't surprise me at all is that someone found an (arbitrary) word to be offended with. Happens all the time. What does surprise me (or hmm, maybe it doesn't) is that this was picked up by some committee and acted upon officially. Where does it end?
We (here in Holland) live in a very diverse culture, with lots of different people crammed into a tiny country. Anything you do or say is bound to offend someone else. Politicians here preach tolerance until we're sick of it... they think being tolerant of other cultures means to adapt yourself so that you will not offend members of those other cultures. Not only is that impossible, but one cannot help but notice that this requirement to adapt is somehow never applied to the minority groups. Ie. I cannot say anything offensive about Muslems, Jews or other minorites (just an example!), but if they do or say something that offends me, I'm called racist or intolerant if I comment on it, and I will be sternly reminded that I 'should respect their culture'.
Tolerance is a two-way street, people. On the one hand, you should be aware of the fact that some things you find normal are going to piss other people off, and you try (within reason) to minimise that. But on the other hand, you (and especially the minorities and politicians) should accept that other groups will do things that'll offend you. Rather than expecting everyone to change to suit your world view, accept that you'll be offended from time to time and do not make a big deal out of it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
When people of the same sex can marry each other, transsexuals can marry anyone (at the moment they can't marry anyone at all) and intersexed babies don't have their genitals mutilated at birth (or their parents told to lie to them about their condition), then we can talk about wording.
Faggot is spelled with two g's whether you are using it as slang for a homosexual or to mean a bunch of firewood, so your joke doesn't really work.
In British english both faggot and niggardly are slightly old-fashioned, but they definitely aren't archaic. Anyone with a reasonably broad vocabulary would know what was meant and wouldn't take it as being homophobic or racist (they'd almost certainly know the US slang meaning for faggot as well, but would discount it unless the speaker was American or the context meant that there was a clear intention to use it to mean a gay man).
Regards
Luke
#include witty_one_liner.h
You're such a fucking bullshitter, BBM.
The problem you describe is that we no longer mean tolerance when we use the word tolerance.
If I merely tolerate your differences, I recognize that you are different and take no action to change you. In "classic" tolerance, I don't have to agree with you, encourage you.... in fact, I don't even have to like you.
In the "new" tolerance, I am not only required socially to tolerate you, but now I must celebrate the things that you value. If I refuse to *celebrate* your viewpoint, I am labeled as "intolerant" - one of the greatest condemnations within modern culture.
This new definition is no longer tolerance, it is the borg of social interaction. "I am {minority view} of BORG. You will be assimilated."
Talk about thought police! We are no longer permitted to think or discuss that which might be upsetting to someone somewhere.
This cuts both ways, and while it may seem to further minority viewpoints in the short term, in the long term we all pay because we are not afforded the protection and richness that is freedom of expression. Over time it becomes unacceptable to express ANY views.
This is, in my opinion, far worse than the "old world order" where tolerance meant that I allowed you to have whatever kooky issue or belief or practice you want, and you allow me the same. (Within societal boundaries of course. Other than Sparta, I'm not aware of cultures where Mr. Jackson's alleged behavior is celebrated.)
Respectfully,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you want to know more, please email me.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
while I can agree and sympathise with much of what you said, I do feel there is some bias - indeed - towards the 'gay' community. The silly acronym is one thing, but implying they don't have the right to explain their way of life to other persons, just sounds like you ARE intolerant in that respect.
You try to make it seem 'worse' by saying it goes into 'every detail', but that's ridiculous...and by saying it's to 13y olds...so?
The problem I have with this is, if it were heterosexuals explaining the 'core family-unit' way of life to 13y olds, you would hardly make all these comments about it. It reeks of hypocrisy.
I really don't see any validtion for not talking about other sexual attractions, ESPECIALLY to 12 to 13y olds entering puberty. Unless you think gay feelings only pop up at the magical age of 18?
No, sory, I can follow you on the stupid PC-policy, but it does not follow that other ppl should get less rights or respect. It's not in the name, but in the action...
Plants don't have central nervous systems. Plants don't feel harm.
:)
Your supposition doesn't necessarily lead to your conclusion. Many organisms do not have central nervous systems but do respond to stimuli that are harmful to them.
YOU are starving your fellow man.
Are you accusing me of eating someone else's steak?
A quick look at the human physiology (eye placement for binocular vision, types of teeth in the jaw - canines and incisors as well as molars and bicuspids, etc.) all indicate that humans are omnivorous by design. That means that humans were designed to eat both "meat" and "veggies". The choice of whether or not to eat from either classification of food is just that - a choice - because you *are* designed to take from both categories of foods, regardless if you like that fact or not.
I wonder what the vegetarian community thinks of the Atkins Diet
I do agree with you that no one should be considered an idiot because of their education. Unfortunatly the spread of PC, especially in the humanities, has caused many students in the US to leave University acting like complete asses. And no they do not show any respect for anyone who disagrees with them in the least.
Which brings us back to the idiotic LA story about master/slave IDE drive designations being objectionable and now illegal in LA county.
She went in there looking for a fight and the store failed to give her one. Then you gave the cashier a victory they weren't expecting. Good one!!
Seriously - some people need to grow thicker skin or something. I go into almost any place, find the one or two things I can eat, and go with it - no picking fights with the staff and no attempts to convert the people I'm with.
Let me paraphrase; never attribute to a conspiracy what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
> her reaction simply means that she feels passionately about the issue. Hopefully you will agree that that isn't a bad thing.
No, That is a very bad thing. If she's so sensitive, she didn't seem to worry about the sensitivity of BigBlockMopar (although I'm sure he can handle an insult or two if necessary).
> What bugs me is the assumption that she is worthy of ridicule for not knowing calculus terms
It's not about Calculus. What is worthy of ridicule is her jumping into a conversation she has no part in, and assuming the context is of bad intent. That is pretty arrogant, unlike retaliating in kind, which was BBM's response. So he was perfectly justified for pointing out that she's a stupid bitch.
> it's perfectly okay for YOU not to know much about HER major.
Yes, it is. It's perfectly OK for her to not know anything about his major. If he would have misheard or misunderstood something in HER conversation and jumped on her about it, then yes, he'd be a major asshole (not that he isn't now; I can't say, since I've never met him - not my problem anyway). BUT he didn't.