>Are you seriously arguing that slavery is not abuse?

No, I'm arguing if you're going to use the excuse that it is a form of abuse therefore the word should be verboten, then you have a lot of other words you need to add to your list of being insensitive to those who have suffered X or Y trauma, then I provided several examples thereof.

If you're really behind what people say they are, EVERY term that represents some potential source of physical or emotional harm at some point in their life should be on that list. People can be abused by siblings, parents, or authority figures; therefore these terms exist in the same slots that Master/Slave did. Yet there is no outcry over that when it comes to avoiding those words when there may be people who suffer from those words. I see no one clamoring for renaming the sibling axis of XML, or Child/Parent axes despite the child abuse association. Instead, those words sit entirely unmolested as they are not a shallow easy to achieve virtue signal in the current political environment, despite meeting the same hypothetical criteria of being a possible trigger of disclusion due to the emotional pain they might stir up in a hypothetical victim.

So what about those the hypothetically harmed people that won't win you political brownie points right now? Where is their inclusiveness tax going to be added? Or could it be that none of this was really about that at all and represented a desperate attempt to virtue signal in any way imaginable at any cost, even if it means having to completely rewrite decades of literature under the auspices of inclusiveness and pseudo-equality, and the firm insert of a wedge into a set of communities by a very vocal minority where there was previously no division?

I've no problem with conviction and dedication to a cause, however, if what you say you're about doesn't damn well line up with what you're actually doing prepare to be called out.

Issues of this type aren't handled by someone swearing off I.T. They are handled by acting like an adult and realizing that the only one responsible for buffering your emotional triggers is you. I remember during a Diwali celebration a couple of Hindi coworkers giving out swastikas as a good luck gift to everyone in the office; including a Jewish coworker. Did that coworker go running off to H.R. to have the Diwali celebration canceled? No. After a bit of awkward explanation between the Hindi coworkers and the Jewish coworker, it was smoothed over and life went on. That event made for some heartfelt conversation, and a great deal of empathy was traded between that coworker that day, but everyone left the encounter satisfied it was for the best that the issue was just dropped. Everyone still went back to work. Everyone still had their celebration, everyone was just a bit more mindful to run interference for that coworker afterward even if the Hindi folks just couldn't understand why someone wouldn't want their good luck charm. People coexist in spite of pain. In fact to do so is considered a virtuous act and a sign of growth, in that to do so is to transcend your history and circumstances and to become much more by inflicting the most terrible vengeance on an adversity filled origin: the vengeance of living happily and well in spite having come from those origins.

Everyone has the right to their pain. And it absolutely is not okay to willingly make pain worse once you know of it. However, it's not okay to completely turn the world upside down either because someone might get hurt; especially if in doing so you inflict pain on others. Arbitrarily deciding Terms-of-Art are suddenly verboten is just that. In a profession, the progression of language and culture surrounding the practice are just as near and dear to actual practitioner's as the day of the passing of the 14th Amendment may be to the previously disenfranchised. Hell, one of the first fixes I ended up doing when I was a teen with a freshly minted A+ cert was troubleshooting a set of miscofigured IDE drives. Understanding the importance of how the jumpers had to be, and that the term was meant to communicate that by way of analogy was one of the earliest times I felt like a computer person. To me, that knowledge and experience tied up in that Term-of-Art is intensely personal. To have someone come around and piss all over the term, ascribing to it meanings that were never more than a convenient illustrative analog and ascribing to those who dare use or value it for it's usefulness as a pedagogical tool over the years is painful, like it or not. It's painting with a broad, indiscriminate brush on the intentions and characters of a hell of a lot of decent people who at the time were just trying to be understood amongst each other. Equality states no one's pain takes primacy over anyone else's. It is not okay to inflict pain on one to assuage the pain of another. It is fine to take on that pain voluntarily, but that is a personal choice, and social pressure has no business being leveraged to force it to happen. In the name of just keeping drama to a minimum, it is generally considered the way to go when a Term-of-Art is being retired to not make a gigantic stink about it and assume the good-will of all involved. That characteristic has been notably absent from this entire movement, on both sides, but particularly on the side pushing for change. At no point has any consistency been shown or embraced with regards to the application of social pressure thereupon the rest of the community, who reflexively stay silent, just hoping the drama goes away. Now in the back of everyone's head is a censor wondering whether that phrasing is too risque. Whether that is too controversial to put into code.

You set out to right a wrong; to make a corner of humanity a "more welcoming place"; and yet all around I see nothing but contracts, codes of conduct trying to push ideals where before there was the implied understanding of "Don't break stuff, write code someone else won't unduly suffer to maintain, and leave it better for you having been there."

Where before, the only threat was having a patch rejected, is now the risk of being hunted down and having your character assassinated at the mere risk of someone taking a line of code expressed whimsically the wrong way. I've frankly never seen the online community less "free" than it has become in the last few years.

Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe I've lost the piss and vinegar of my youth, but the beautiful thing I once felt myself a part of looks far less friendly and welcoming to me than it was before. Which makes me quite sad, because I looked forward to contributing to it in a meaningful way once I felt confident in my skills, but the entire way it's morphed from "the faceless bunch that keep the bits flowing over the net" to Cult of Personnality: Developer Edition... I just don't want to anymore. Not for a community where it's more important to cause drama and unmake or make things harder, or to rewrite history in stead of preserving it. Not where you have to have a bloody document thrust in your face to tell you how to act because you're assumed to be a barbarian. A part of me I really liked has died after the last few years... That part honestly believed that the world was all about real equality, and not about brutal half-measures. Where people just trying to make something that works can be left in peace to do so. But that isn't how it works at all. Instead words are tortured and treated like instruments of mass destruction, stereotypes and prejudices run so deep I don't even know as I feel comfortable having really deep controversial discussions with other people I don't know anymore. This coming from someone who has previously entertained the counterposition that the State of Israel was founded in poor form given that it was previously promised to another group in WWII with someone who has more than enough reason to be offended at the mere thought, but still managed to engage in what to me was one of the most fulfilling, rewarding, and mutually enrichinching conversations of my life.

Anyway... This post kind of meandered into some places I did not at all set out to wander, but I'll leave it for posterity anyway. Take from it what you will. I just know I seem to be mourning and I can't figure out why no one else seems to be.

So in short. No, I'm not some evil insensitive racist fragile white bigot. I've been around the block more than once, and worked with all kinds and manner of folks, going out of my way to learn the of the value that even the most humble occupations provide, and the wisdom that underlies understanding before prescribing malice to every controversial term, and the skills that are learned by coexisting with, learning from, and teaching others the art of standing in another's shoes. In spite of all of that; there's still something that fundamentally rubs me wrong about how this entire chain of sentiment and events over the last 4 or so years have gone down. Because all of that I just mentionedseems to be completely absent now, and I don't know why.