Is targeting "ideas rooted in fascism or bigotry" a bad thing?
The root of the problem is that it is basically impossible to defend yourself against the accusation that you are secretly a fascist. If you say yes, you admit to being a fascist, if you say no, you're a lying fascist. If you question why the accusation is levied against someone else, you're defending a fascist, if you speak out against the proceedings, you're defending fascism.
The only way to prevent accusations of harboring secret fascist sympathies is to deflect the accusation by lashing out against others with the same sort of accusation, thus demonstrating that you are not secretly a fascist.
This is a dynamic that has repeated itself many times, it's the engine behind countless actual witch hunts, but also metaphorical ones such as the McCarthy-era red scare, the ideological persecution under Stalin.
On the other hand, I don't have a strong attachment at all to naming a branch "master" and can easily rename it without a second thought.
I thought it wasn't a big issue until I saw how hard one side fought to keep the name "master".
After that I changed my mind and name all of my branches main and give a little push to projects I'm part of to do the same.
Plus, words do have power:
For the sake of argument, let's say I put forward the charge that the policy itself is rooted in bigotry. Can you prove that it is not?
My next move is to publicly accuse the committee harboring fascist sympathies. Your voting record is undeniable, and I am just appalled this stuff can go on in the 2020s and demand the committee is replaced with people who does not hold these bigoted beliefs.
I guess you're trying to pull an example from history. I don't doubt that authoritarian regimes can get accusatory, and nonsense can spiral. But we're not talking about authoritarian regimes, we're talking about open source software projects. I don't buy that they're at all similar enough to make this kind of connection.
God forbid a single implementation of popular software change a default in a fairly meaningless way. Especially since the older term hasn't been accurate in software development for like a decade. Does anyone even ship/deploy the "master" branch anymore?
But no, while we should dislike these folks for saying "we don't want a military contractor to sponsor our event", we should 100% get behind "this private company changed a term and I don't like that so obviously they are wrongthinkers"
Master craftsman? Master mold? Master copy? Head Master... Just because this word was used in relation to slavery doesn't curtail its use in language, removing it only serves to focus its "power".
Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Candidly, the erasing of words from language for any reason is very 1984, it's a book you might want to read, its a good primer to understanding how control of language is one of the features of fascism. You should probably read up on how linguistic purity was part and parcel of Italian and to a lesser degree German control of the people.
They only fight that hard because they know the people fighting to remove "master" are (as a group) acting in bad faith.
On this and many other issues they tend to lie about history and language, extort those who don't comply with threats of sabotage towards their projects and/or careers, and will equivocate and dissemble whenever confronted.
It's perfectly fine want to use "main" rather than "master" (that is probably my preference). And it is perfectly fine to suggest other people do as well. But if you suggest it others and they tell "no" (politely or not), the right thing for you to do at that point is to mind your own business.
Except none of those examples are relevant comparisons. It's well documented that the reason the default branch name was master traces back to Bitkeeper, which was using the master/slave nomenclature.
> Also, thats not how language works. At all. It is never how language worked. An Australian and an American are going to have a very different reaction to the word cunt.
Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.
If you're going to make an argument against this change on the basis of semantics, at least get your facts right.
edit: replaced 'feature' with 'scope' realized I typed an unclear word.
Git never had "slaves". And while no doubt that BitKeeper was a significant influence on Git's adoption of the term "master", can you say it was the only one? Are you arguing that Torvalds had never heard of the term "master copy", and that term didn't influence him at all (not even unconsciously)?
> Master and slave have universal meaning across all English dialects.
Even when a word has the same denotation across dialects, its connotations and associations can differ significantly.
Also, certainly for the word "master", there are senses of that word, and derived words, which are more associated with some English dialects than others. In the UK, it is common to call a school principal a "headmaster"; it is very rare in the US; in Australia, it is more common than in the US but less so than in the UK (and mainly associated with private schools). Similarly, "Master" as a title for the head of a university college is traditional in the UK (especially at its most prestigious institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge), I don't think any US universities use it any more.
Any other topic would've equally been as problematic. Is it a bad thing to target "terrorism" as well? How about "human trafficking?" Can't you please think of the children!
The PATRIOT Act is a terrible law. Opposing it doesn't make you a terrorist. But you would've been accused of being one nonetheless if you opposed it in 2001.
It's easy to see why many people wouldn't want to actively get into such a controversy. But even that is being used as grounds for kicking someone out.
It's easy only if you don't care about all the people who already cloned your repo.
Recovering from remote repos renaming their default branches is no fun.
In practice there's probably no facism either way, but it's an easy and loaded term to throw around.
But a lot of people get very defensive about it, not just for practical reasons but out of fear of the slippery slope or the consequences of a perceived angry PC mob that can utterly destroy their projects and careers.
Of course, there is a problem because mob mentality can be relentless.
How is what I said a "slippery slope"? And what makes it fallacious?
> Facism / bigotry are catch-all terms for a broad range of things
Why not then drop those terms, and replace them with more specific terminology?
Also, I brought up the PATRIOT Act because it's so strikingly similar. Any rule that is broad and vague can and will get abused. Any prior assurances otherwise have zero effect. Yet, looking at discussions in RFC 98, there was strong opposition to making the rules clear and well-defined in scope. It's no wonder the community was unable to reach an agreement. Also no wonder that the whole thing is blowing up even further because the moderation is effectively operating in this way regardless.