A very unfortunate outcome. Something technical people appear to be commonly prone to is not "reading the room" well, and it may be the honest entry point here is that they didn't understand how seriously something was being put, and their laughter was read as more than embarrassment, or casual (mis)understanding of humour.
But there comes a point where being asked to make changes on frankly poor grounds IS an attack on individual integrity. This feels like one of those instances.
I know nothing about the principals. There may be more complex issues around this, other competing aspects.
So taking this as an honest, if not dispassionate take on things, I think the committee made a mistake.
Maybe I misunderstood. How do you get from undefined behaviour to "the final programme" or something? whats the strong anti-semitic quality in "undefined behaviour" as a modern trigger term?
As I understand the issue is not with "undefined behavior", but with the phrase "the ______ question", due to its surface-level similarity to (one possible translation of) that Nazi-era buzzword.
Which is still kind of a dumb reason to get upset. Intellectually mature adults recognize that language is complex, nuanced, and multi-layered, and that a term can be offensive in some contexts, while being innocuous in others. Your logical mind should be able to identify, given the context, when no offense is meant, and thereby ignore false triggers.
The only way a demand to change the title on offensiveness grounds would be justified, is if a reasonable member of the target audience (and especially, in this case, one who is also Jewish) would take offense to it.
Did the committee actually consult a representative sample of Jewish people in the industry before taking offense on their behalf? Or is this just yet more speculative corporate ass-covering? I strongly suspect it's the latter.
You can disagree with the process, but the process does not care. He was given the opportunity to change the title. He felt like he should not have to. Which is fair enough, but the committee felt like he has to, otherwise they would not have brought it up in the first place. That leaves the committee with no option. He gave them nothing.
> whats the strong anti-semitic quality in "undefined behaviour" as a modern trigger term?
The issue is not "undefined behavior", but the other words in the title.
A title of the form "The _____ Question" will for some bring to mind the antisemitic polemics written around "The Jewish Question". That the article is concerned with ways to minimize or eliminate _____ only compounds the matter.
And for others will bring to mind "The West Lothian Question", or "The Karelian Question" or even "the $64,000 question" and won't bring to mind any antisemitic polemics whatsoever, and they'll scratch their heads as to how you can turn something as benign as "the X question" into antisemitism.
But it's a source of power to spot a means to punish a person for infractions, and to come up with a plausible infraction and get them pushed through that process. I think ultimately it stems from fear of a mob of riled people who could completely sully an organisation's reputation, and some organisations will accept the worst-possible intepretation of any statement and require mea-culpas, reparations, whatever, just in case standing their ground ires a mob.
The "west lothian" question[0] is going to drive all true scotsmen[1] crazy. It comes up on reddit scottish forums more and more. Ultimately I think it, and the Barnett Formula[2] are going to wind up this issues version of Godwin's law[3] (which isn't a law) -All conversations about Scottish Nationalism and Legitimacy of votes in Westminster become stupidly fractious.
Something of a side note, but the West Lothian question is mostly academic. By convention, Scottish MPs voluntarily abstain from votes on English-only laws and more importantly they're usually too small a bloc to affect the outcome of a vote.
The only times Scottish MPs have gone against their own convention, and their votes changed the outcome, was a 2003 vote on foundation hospitals and a 2004 vote on tuition fees.
In 2015, the government introduced English Votes for English Laws (EVEL), offically banning Scottish MP from voting on English-only matters, and repealed it 6 years later. The reason was, effectively, the 2015 government was teetering on the edge (only a coalition stopped it being a hung parliament) and needed every vote it can get, but by 2019 had a "thumping majority" (as is normal in FPTP elections) and could easily outvote Opposition + Scottish MPs on anything.
Much more common is that the UK Government does something in Scotland first -- such as introduce the Poll Tax a year before England -- or does something which negatively affects a UK region like Scotland, and MPs from that region _can_ vote on it, but they don't have the numbers to stop it being enacted, so effectively Westminster pushes its will on the region. Devolution has shifted the bulk of lawmaking to Holyrood, but there are still a number of reserved matters that Westminster retains authority over
But there comes a point where being asked to make changes on frankly poor grounds IS an attack on individual integrity. This feels like one of those instances.
I know nothing about the principals. There may be more complex issues around this, other competing aspects.
So taking this as an honest, if not dispassionate take on things, I think the committee made a mistake.
Maybe I misunderstood. How do you get from undefined behaviour to "the final programme" or something? whats the strong anti-semitic quality in "undefined behaviour" as a modern trigger term?