And your experience is reflective of all folks who have OCD? I can absolutely imagine someone being pretty upset by seeing how casually "oh I'm just OCD" gets tossed around.
I'm queer, I would never presume to say that another queer person's challenges or trauma were the same as mine.
There's the problem, right there. A lot of these affronts are imagined, without actually getting input from people. A perfect example is the use of Latinx, which many Hispanic people have spoken out against, yet keeps getting tossed around because people _imagine_ that the word "hispanic" is offensive.
It's often used in a wild west sorta way, "we were surrounded by braves". It's super outdated, for sure, as are most words that mean "my enemy's warriors".
I don't read it as conflating, they just say these are all harmful, not that they are equally harmful. A hangnail is harmful and a car crash is harmful, I try to avoid both. I'm less put out by a hangnail and I go to great lengths to avoid a car crash.
Any list like this should be read as: "you are causing harm somewhere between a paper cut and a gunshot wound, you may not realize it. Be advised you might be causing that harm, in case knowing that would cause you to take a different course of action"
Surely it matters the extent of the harm, though? If I'm doing home wiring, it is not at all helpful to know "this could result in a slight tingle or kill you and burn your house down."
Ambiguity means I can wave off your complaints because clearly what you're complaining about is a hangnail. Ambiguity means I can punish you brutally, because how dare you not take my car crash seriously.
Stairs are really hard for people in a wheelchair, signage is really hard for someone blind, and fire alarms are really hard for someone deaf. Missing any of those ADA adaptions is more harmful to one group than another.
Harm can vary based on the person, so doing something "harmful" is person dependent. The goal is to recognize the harmful history of language when choosing words, because, thankfully all spoken words are newly spoken, so you can pick fresh each time.
In a huge portion of these cases the only harmful history is in the imagination of the author. "Tarball"? "Red team"? "Submit"? "White paper"?
All of these have very clear etymologies that don't have any offensive history whatsoever. The idea that we should avoid any term that uses the words "white", "black", "red", or "yellow" on the grounds that they once were used in some contexts to refer to people is absurd.
This policy is good, and this isn't even an edge case. This is a landlord who is about to spend a million dollars on more rental units and doesn't want to provide affordable units.
She wants to build 4 rental units on a lot in downtown. That's an apartment building. Why should an apartment building with 4 units be exempt from offering affordable housing? She will not be occupying those four units. She will be staying in her fifth unit.
If I paid rent to my parents in college would that make their house a 2-unit rental?
I am okay with a certain amount of gray area in the rental market, especially for informal or family situations. If these units ever hit the general market you can hit them with tighter rules later.
Again, in this case, she would not be exempt, she would pay a one time fee for the housing program.
… and doesn’t want to work within the regulations her community has to promote affordable housing.
Doesn’t want to pay anything—submit for an exception, or pay the Hollywood price to do what she wants.
I don’t see what’s unfair. It would be unfair if she could only build the larger building, and was required to have affordable units—or do nothing.
What _sucks_ is that while her and her family were dealing with these restrictions, there has been a world pandemic, and the economy took a swing towards inflation and higher interest rates.
The family is in a worse spot than if they had paid the 77k upfront.
I’m wondering why their story is getting amplified. I guess this is a turn against cities trying to create regulations promoting affordable housing.
So what? She's trying to build an addition and rent it to her kids. Even if she was going to rent to randoms, so what? Is it better she just keeps the property as a single family home?
Yeah, why should we do any planning or zoning at all! Every individual is equipped with all the knowledge and expertise to make good planning decisions that impact their neighborhoods! /s
Fred : Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I've been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I've read a lot, and...
Ted : Really?
Fred : And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about "subtext." Plays, novels, songs - they all have a "subtext," which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what's above the subtext?
Ted : The text.
Fred : OK, that's right, but they never talk about that.
A landlord in Seattle wants to spend $1m to build apartments, discount them for her children but not be on the hook to extend that discount to meet local building regs around affordable housing.
If you are building big enough to need to hit the affordable housing regs, then you should commit to either providing affordable housing OR pay to make sure someone else can.
This is a story about a landlord trying to avoid having to help their community.
