[giancarlostoro]

As an actual American minority I'm a little upset that instead of someone trying to do something meaningful about racism they bikeshedded this solution. Git was made by a man from Finland, I find it highly unlikely he had nefarious intentions in naming the default branch 'master' and anybody who disagrees really needs to reevaluate everything we know about Linus. He doesn't care about people's attributes, he cares about code quality above all things, not to mention in the context of the project the word master can only fit under the simple context of a golden master. Context matters.

Will I lose any sleep over it? Probably not, because this changes absolutely nothing in the racism landscape. It just confuses some, maybe outrages others. They've made something that was never racist into something racist (at least in their heads).

Sidenote: I do wonder if the person who proposed the change wrote it up from their master bedroom.

[dingaling]

> Git was made by a man from Finland

... and deliberately named it using a word that's offensive in British English.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Git

If you said 'git' to someone in an English pub you'd be looking for a punch.

For USians it's roughly comparable to 'asshole' on the spectrum of offensiveness.

[tarboreus]

Git is a couple of pegs down from asshole. Better analogy in American English would be "jerk," without, perhaps, the implied sexual connotation.

[giancarlostoro]

The fourth definition does not sound so bad ;) I mean, yeah he did that as a punch to himself because he felt naming another project after himself would be bad. Heck some would argue the UX of git command line makes the name fitting.

[aaomidi]

As another American minority I welcome changes to our tooling landscape and updating out of date language.

No this doesn't do anything, but it significantly reduces the amount of time I have to say master in discussions related to code. Something I personally don't feel comfortable saying.

No this isn't going to fix systemic racism, but it is setting the precedent that our standards can and should evolve with culture and people.

[jobigoud]

But the word master has multiple meanings, only one of them is related to slavery. The fact that all the homonyms are tainted by just one possible meaning is strange and reductive.

Master has cognates in romance languages to mean school professor or music lead. Removing a entire cognate root from discourse because of one of its realization makes the language poorer inmho.

[tachyonbeam]

I myself am a minority as well.

I'm genuinely worried that all of this talk and social shaming related to "systemic racism" is actually going to create more of the monster it purports to try to defeat.

I mean, seriously. How do you think right wing people feel when they see left wing people on TV chanting that we should abolish the police? They clutch their guns even harder, that's what happens. By making an immense deal out of race issues, I think we might be making the problem worse.

In the 1990s, people generally had an attitude of "race doesn't matter", and now, it's become the opposite, "race is the only thing that matters". It's splitting us into factions and helping nobody.

[aaomidi]

I mean, I'm also for abolishment of police.

Police in basically everywhere of the world was made by the ruling class to keep people in order. This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves. This is the history of policing in the US.

I think what it generally comes down to is a LOT of Americans, and a lot of people in the world haven't learned the history of their own country. People probably know more about WW2 than they do about the history of abuse in their own country. I unfortunately was one of these people and until I decided to listen to people and start studying the history of America I understood a lot of the things I stood for were based on essentially lies.

I do think saying "lets abolish police" without the context of "why", or "wait what about the murderers?" is harmful. I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people, and assumes that they've also spent many hours reading and understanding and discussing history.

[tachyonbeam]

> I think people on the left generally assumes too much of people

I think it's perfectly legitimate to ask "what about the murderers, thiefs, rapists and criminal gangs? The obvious answer is that you need a police force. You can call it the flower-and-peace-corps if you want, but you need both enforcers and detectives to protect the population.

If what you mean is "reform the police", then don't call to "abolish the police".

[aaomidi]

No I mean abolish the police.

> The obvious answer is that you need a police force

Yes, you've been conditioned by society to assume that's the only answer to this. Again this is what I mean by people are uneducated about policing and state power.

[kjeetgill]

I suppose I have been conditioned. What are the other answers? I'm not sure I'm familiar with what the options here are.

[sheepz]

I've come to the conclusion that such inept statements can only come from people who have lived their lives in very safe environments where they have never needed police protection. Such environments do not represent the safety of the country or the world in general.

It strikes me as odd that someone as familiar with history as yourself would single out the US and the practice of slavery whereas slavery has existed almost everywhere in the world, including here in Europe. Yet nobody in Europe thinks that the formerly enslaved peasants' much temporally disconnected descendants are substantially worse off because of that or that this would somehow translate into today's policing.

In conclusion, abolishing the police is a completely stupid idea that the American people in general do not even support [1] that hurts not the tech elites of Silicon valley, but normal people living in high-crime areas.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dcBdhE...

[warmwaffles]

> This matter is even worse in the US that a LOT of police departments were literally made after the emancipation proclamation (or somewhat before), to capture runaway slaves.

This is going to need a citation. Cursory searching leads me to Sheriffs being elected in the early 1800s in Ohio. Ohio was also a free state in 1803 when it joined the Union.

[kemayo]

Near as I can tell, it's reasonable to say that there were organized groups of state-empowered people in the slave states back as early as the 1700s, whose job was to hunt down escaped slaves. There were also some similar groups across slave and free states who were empowered in part to guard against / control Native Americans.

These early slave patrols / night watches then fairly organically became the "police department" when that concept became widespread in the mid-1800s. I don't think it looks like said spread is really linked to emancipation, but rather (as with the creation of Peel's Metropolitan Police in London in 1829) in response to increasing urbanization / industrialization. Given that the industrial revolution also fairly-strongly caused the US civil war and thus emancipation, we could say it's more a parallel trend than the implied causation.

The cities going "well, we have a somewhat organized group of people whose job is to enforce some laws... why don't we wedge them into this new trend and have them enforce more laws?" gets us that link.

This summary seems reasonable, though I feel it elides the Peelite influence: https://law.jrank.org/pages/1640/Police-History-Early-polici...