On Saturday 11 July 2020 at 12:42:43, hospice admin wrote:
> Concentrating on the technical issues below ...
>
> I think there's a fairly wide consensus among those posting on this thread,
> myself included, that this does not 'make the technology better'.
>
> That's the point I was attempting to make about Mercedes ... painting their
> cars a different colour does nothing to make it better or worse ... just
> different [in a way that has nothing to do with practical support for
> diversity of any kind].
>
> For me, the risks of messing up Spam Assassin [or anything else] for months
> to come completely outweighs the benefits of a token 'tip of the hat'
> towards diversity.
Unfortunately you speak with the voice of reason, and that is never welcome
when people are bent on enforcing "political correctness" on the world.
Any dissenting opinion is regarded as "missing the point" or being
"insensitive to the oppressed", whether the situation in which the correctness
police are enforcing their views has anything to do with the oppressed or not.
I wish you luck in asking people to debate the real question of whether there
is in fact any problem to be solved, and if there is, what is the sensible way
to solve it.
For my part, until anyone can show that the use of words such as blacklist or
master/slave in technology has anything to do with racial references and are
therefore being used in an offensive way, rather than as standard terms for the
industry with no reference at all to human social groups, they're just
demonstrating themselves as stirring up trouble and heated debate where there
is no real problem.
Antony.
--
I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way
is to make it so simple that there are _obviously_ no deficiencies, and the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no _obvious_
deficiencies.
- C A R Hoare
Please reply to the list;
please *don't* CC me.
