[pmontra]

I'm entering troubled waters but hey... The master to main issue is an accident of the history of the USA, still unresolved in its consequences, when most of the world was not practicing slavery anymore. The typical reaction outside the USA is rolling eyes and hope that all the ethnic groups inside the USA will finally get along. If the IT and economic powerhouse of the world were India instead of the USA and Indians would have picked master instead of main despite the British colonial period, this would be a non-issue: the USA could use a different convention (like for units of measurement) and the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

BTW, every country had its expansionist and genocidal and slavery moments (I'm from Italy, think about the Roman expansion inside Italy, then the empire or our colonial wars 100 years ago.) The USA is one of the most recent examples. It takes time and I understand that master vs main is important inside the country.

The issue of Wacom branding is different because it's a business dynamic and businesses don't want to work for competitors no matter the country, no matter the history. They can work together or an equal footing. So rename to libtablet or whatever.

[bee_rider]

It seems most likely to me that this particular sensitivity to any sort of social controversy and the status of the US as the sort of… de-facto default place of doing international business for a long time, are probably linked. The US corporate culture’s default stance is probably a learned reflex. Better to look a little over-sensitive, than to scuttle a deal by blundering into somebody’s cultural trigger.

[chrismorgan]

It seems to be very popular in the US to take offence on behalf of others. For example: one hears of US people getting upset about “cultural appropriation” on behalf of others, when said others are actually actively happy about their culture being shown and appreciated. You can definitely take things too far in either direction.

[tadfisher]

There's a concept called "allyship", part of which means listening to marginalized people expressing negative reactions to certain popular demeaning acts and acting on their behalf to stop those acts.

In recent memory, you see this in response to last decade's trend of white people wearing Native American headdresses (particular to certain remaining groups of indigenous people in North America) at fashion shows and public events. This was practically the definition of cultural appropriation; in the cultures which display headdresses, one must earn the right to do so, and here you had the descendants of those who committed actual genocide wearing these symbols without even an attempt to understand their significance.

This is in a country that not only practiced genocide, it stole the children of native peoples, ostensibly to educate them to European norms, to cut them off from their hereditary culture; including their language and clothing. It's also a country that continues to ignore its own treaties with indigenous nations and erase their history through "termination" (the policy of un-recognizing individual tribes to eliminate their status).

So maybe it's popular here because this country is particularly terrible at appropriating culture. There's a ton of nuance you might miss if you don't live here and talk to people.