The reason these kinds of rules are showing up everywhere is to get control of organizations by inventing grievances that can be deployed at any time to remove inconvenient people and quickly take over the organizations they've built. A variant of this is the WEF's Stakeholder Capitalism where outside groups can infiltrate corporations and then use invented grievances to quickly take control of these organizations.
I see this initiative differently, as a way to educate people how their choice of words can affect those around them. I don't see any hard "rules" here, so much as describing phrases that could be harmful, in context. I just now learned quite a bit from just reading words from the Abelist category.
I suppose this resource could be used to more effectively sanction individuals who consistently demonstrate behavior harmful to those around them. It could be referenced early and often, so that repeat offenses more quickly lead to dismissal. Even so, I don't see this as good or bad. At least the word list and rationale is explicit. A wrongful dismissal can challenged, or even litigated, no?
Cannot this reference be used to better defend someone who uses a poor choice of words as their sole offense? There are so many words and phrases enumerated, it aptly demonstrates just how challenging and context dependent things are. That quadriplegic, for example, is listed tends to undermine the validity of listing actually offensive phrases. Conversely, the explanation of "basket case" and "spaz" were quite informative to me; I don't use these words, but, it's useful to better understand why they could be offensive.
Addendum: I think this particular document is inappropriately broad, including phrases that have no business being here. That said, the same text with a conservative scope seems it could be helpful, at least for educating authors who may not be aware of the nuances some of these phrases have. For example, "going off the reservation" is quite offensive once you understand the history of this phrase. People may use phrases like this without knowing its ugly reference, when a better fitting phrase could be used.
> Cannot this reference be used to better defend someone who uses a poor choice of words as their sole offense? There are so many words and phrases enumerated, it aptly demonstrates just how challenging and context dependent things are.
Have you ever seen this argument work?
The whole point of "arson, murder, jaywalking", of "motte and bailey" argument style, of mixing obvious cases together with the things you want to make otherwise indefensible claims about, is because it makes the argument work only in one direction.
The only valid counter is to fight the inclusion of "jaywalking" on the same list as "arson" and "murder", but once it's your company's HR department quoting a Stanford-published list of "bad words", it's too late.
