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cheez0r

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[dead] 1 year ago

No, they couldn't, thanks to the Constitution. They have the rights of due process and habeas corpus.

I started on BBSes, helped build one of the first local ISPs in Louisiana, was on IRC in 1994, lived through the rise and fall of Yahoo!, had a GeoCities page, was a MySpace early adopter, etc. Feel free to ask away.

I didn't prescribe any solution- I'm not advocating tearing down the structures in a symbolic act to try and placate people. I'm pointing out the fact that all Americans stand today on the shoulders of an ancestry which enslaved peoples, and which we bear the onus of eliminating the traces of that power imbalance from our society, not just saying "hey, we don't mean master THAT WAY, you know?"

We are eliminating gender from our colloquial terms for the same reason. Serviceperson instead of serviceman; mail carrier instead of mailman, police officer instead of policeman. This is the same thing- just eliminating a term which injuries a different minority along a different identity axis.

This.

These changes to remove subconscious bias from our language are necessary. They are microaggressions which the average user doesn't even realize exist- but which do harms to some individuals in our society. This may be a minority group within our society- even a very small fraction of a percent- but removing biases which are perceived as harmful is one way that we as an organization demonstrate that we are being actively inclusive to all, instead of falling back on habits developed to favor, or carrying the embedded biases of, one social or cultural group.

I look at it like ADA requirements for language. If you have a curb a wheelchair user can't climb, that's a harm to that individual- and so we require actions, by law, to ensure that wheelchair users are accommodated in our society. 30 years ago the similar complaints were made against ADA ramps, handicap-accessible restrooms, etc.- that they weren't really necessary because the minority who were being hurt by their absence were such a minority, and weren't really the target served population of the organization, etc. That was anti-inclusivity- and so we passed the ADA and support accessibility for all in our organizations- and nobody these days chafes at it at all, for the most part.

Removing harms from how organizations execute their business operations is part of inclusivity. It's not cargo culting, it's not engaging in a self-pleasuring but pointless behavior, it's not a meaningless act that carries no value- it's ensuring that our organization does as little harm to folks as possible as we move forward doing business in the world.

Americans at large are heavily invested in ignoring the repercussions of slavery.

Our President still lives in a house built by enslaved peoples. Our Congress still legislates in a Capitol built by enslaved peoples.

That fact remains true, and is the prima facie evidence that all Americans have profited from our legacy of slavery, and that we aren't all that concerned with tearing down that legacy and eliminating the harms to folks that those monuments contain... instead a plaque or statue explaining the role of the enslaved peoples is enough.

Meh.

That sure sounds like what the tech industry always seems to prefer: walk the walk, not talk the talk; software, not slideware; etc. Be a strong tech woman and you don't have to advocate for them; your actions speak louder than words.

Just ask Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Yes- they are renting me an antenna in the locale the performance is being broadcast, and providing connectivity to that antenna. That is not a loophole- that is the letter of the law- that an individual can receive a broadcast performance of a work, but that it cannot be duplicated. It meets the letter of the law- unlike a system that received the broadcast signal, captured it, and provided the same copy to many users, which would violate the 'public performance' section of the law. Renting me an antenna makes it my individual private antenna, removing the public aspect of the performance, and making it perfectly legal.

The Supreme Court is wrong- the reason cable companies are treated as a 'public' performance of a work is that their distribution medium is shared- any subscriber can tune into that broadcasting of that work over a shared common carrier where one copy of the work is transmitted and many subscribers can view it. Aereo is different in that it only transmits the signal captured to a single subscriber at a time, removing the 'public' nature of the performance and hence invalidating their argument. How absurd.