[elmerfud]

Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon? I'm generally curious because I live in the US and I feel like this is very much culturally limited to the US, but I could be totally wrong.

I visited most of the world but as a tourist you don't always see deep cultural problems that may be present. I do know the US education system teaches a very United States centric view of slavery. It's literally as if they don't acknowledge that slavery was a worldwide thing and that even during the times of the primary civil rights struggle in the United States slavery of people was still an actual thing in other parts of the world.

So I have real genuine curiosity to know are we alone in the world in this hyper apologetic attitude to the point we cannot use terms like these in engineering context?

[chmod775]

It wouldn't be an issue in Germany for instance, which is why this "circus" (as some would call it) seems weird to us.

However we also have a set of sensitive topics - slavery just isn't one of them.

I can easily picture some naming schemes analogous to master/slave that would be considered unfortunate choices here...

In that sense it's a US thing, but also isn't.

[sennight]

Ironically the US is far less connected to the unspeakably offensive bla...not-white-listed word being cleansed here. "Slave" is derived from Slav - the people. What did the "master" look like? I hope you like surprise endings, because you wouldn't think this whole farce could get any more ridiculous - and then it does.

[jker]

Something tells me you wouldn’t call someone who insists on proper language a “grammar Nazi” in Germany.

[Zababa]

Small data point: I personally haven't heard anything about that in France. At work we use a self-hosted Github. Some repos have "default" as the primary branch, some have "main", some have "master". You can see some repos that are partially or fully financed by the French government here: https://code.gouv.fr/#/repos. When listing by stars, I see that most in the top 20 are using "master", which seems to be the default when they were created. I know that OCaml uses "trunk".

There are also some hits when searching for "esclave" (French for slave) and lots of when searching for "slave" in our internal doc. That's not representative of all of France, just a small data point of myself and a few things around me.

From my perspective, this seems like a "United States phenomenon" way more than a "western phenomenon". I've spent some time in school studying what we call the triangular trade in school (middle and high school), and I remember some English courses where we talked about slavery and civil rights in the US. But slavery itself is rarely a subject, even for people really invested in social justice (at least the ones I know/hear about). In my experience, people talk about racism, but not from the angle of slavery.

Again, fair disclaimer: I'm not representing all of France, Europe or anything. I'm just a French person and this is my perspective on things.

[krageon]

> Is this strictly a western phenomenon or a United States phenomenon

It is emphatically a US thing that irritates nearly every other culture (outside of some well-assimilated fringe groups). That said, the US exports it's culture far and wide in the guise of it's technological platforms. As such, you cannot escape it.

[Overtonwindow]

It’s a power phenomenon. I highly doubt that the word “master“ caused offense to anyone, ever. Unfortunately there are groups and people that look at any chance to be outraged as an opportunity to exert power.

Will it help anything? Absolutely not. However there’s a few people out there that can now say that they forced a company or a project to change its racist ways. In my opinion, it makes the decision makers of those companies look very weak

[DarkWiiPlayer]

It's kind of a weird situation.

I've seen many examples of Europeans attempting to copy american wokeism, but without accounting for the different history.

[soundnote]

It emanates out from the US for the most part, but the mentality has definitely infected most of the West.

In the UK, for example, police literally collect "non-crime hate incidents" and add them to people's criminal record. No due process, no actual convictions of crime, but you get a record of heresy accusations if you ask the government whether someone's broken the law.