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Banning words won’t make the world more just

theatlantic.com

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Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#681

Post by dzek69 »

lynx23 wrote: post #363

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

I used to work for a while with blind people. The boss of the local blind people community was shooting dad-like jokes about blindness all the time, I loved that attitude!

It helped to make connection with these people and we needed that, because I was developing some app that main audience was blind people and to actually understand their needs and problems you need to make a connection with them.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#682

Post by civilized »

Contemporary word fixation is a distraction. People should get off the social media hamster wheel, take a walk, and dream up a more meaningful way to help their fellow man (human / hxmxn / whatever).

It's blown up to the extent that we must now write essays about it, but it would have been better if we had never gone there in the first place.

This stuff is very not new. George Carlin did a rant about it over 30 years ago [1]. Seems like the only real effect is class signaling; those who invest in staying "with it" signal their willingness to pay lip service to the latest ideological fads.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#683

Post by cpursley »

dzek69 wrote: post #681
lynx23 wrote: post #363

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

I used to work for a while with blind people. The boss of the local blind people community was shooting dad-like jokes about blindness all the time, I loved that attitude! It helped to make connection with these people and we needed that, because I was developing some app that main audience was blind people and to actually understand their needs and problems you need to make a connection with them.

Decade or so ago I was once in a room with a group of people where one person was blind. An acquaintance of the blind person came into the room and said oh hey good to see you to him. The blind person replied back to them with one of the best comebacks I’ve ever heard in my life with “well I’ve never seen you” before” and had the whole room laughing.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#684

Post by kenjackson »

coldtea wrote: post #598
lynx23 wrote: post #363

What was it, 10 to 20 years ago, people started to be noticeably nervous when they were coming near a description of my disability. It used to be so simple. I am 100% blind, and guess what, I prefer the term blind because it is pretty descriptive and relatively short. But all of a sudden, people external to the community started to fumble around with "visually challenged", and all the nonsense variations of that in m…

> It is so weird, because it adds yet another layer of distance between "us" and the "normal" people. Yeah, and those "sensitive" people also don't seem to get what normal means. It just means "how the majority is supposed to be/the baseline fully functioning state regarding X". It's not a moral judgement if one is not in the normal group regarding some ability. > Its a weird phenomenon. The longer I watch all of thi…

This line is probably smaller than it may appear. The reason much of this language policing started is because of the dominant group using language to reinforce the inferiority of a less powerful group.

It’s always easier for the dominant group to say “it’s just words — no one cares” since the words are never at their expense.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#685

Post by causi »

_cenw wrote: post #486
JenrHywy wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There seems to be this weird erasure of women taking place at the moment. This is the crazy thing. After a century of legitimate struggle for equality, women are having the language of feminism turned on them to deny the existence of femininity. Honestly, I thought the lines would have been drawn with sport, but that fact that it's leaking into medicine is pure insanity. I've been somewhat worried about there not b…

[flagged]

That's a lot of moral panic about a very small group of people that don't generally win more often

Do you have numbers on that? Specifically, that the average transwoman athlete moves neither up nor down in her rankings compared to when she was a man? My personal exposure is purely anecdotal, but I have never heard of someone performing worse against women than they did against men unless they also changed their preferred sport at the same time.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#686

Post by jrd259 »

hutzlibu wrote: post #481
wonderwonder wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see it as unintentional discrimination. It's treating the people they are relabeling as children that need the kind progressives to step in and save them. It's so condescending. Minorities don't need white Knights to save them, neither do the disabled. If an individual wants me to not refer to them as x because they find it offensive, no problem. But a group of academics should not be able to sit around and decide…

[flagged]

I can't explain the downvotes. Visit https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous.html for a chronicle of some of the people who saved some of my people.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#687

Post by tgv »

gumby wrote: post #177
tgv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the lack of agency in being enslaved I don't get this, at all. It makes at least one fallacy, namely assuming that people are born free. They are not. Every newborn is restricted by parents, society, environment, etc. We must accept that: we can't think, act or sustain ourselves until much older. Thus, we loose our restrictions slowly, and we don't loose them all. Some people were actually born as slaves. That's th…

> Agency has nothing to do with it: suggesting that it does implies the possibility to avoid it That was the point of my referring to it: the agency lies with the enslaver, not the enslaved.

But the word is not about agency: it expresses a state. How that state was achieved, doesn't matter. Are we going to say "enprisoned people", "people who somehow and totally against their will caught COVID", "people who accidentally experience permanent, fully reduced hearing"? Do you still call people who once were, but not longer are, slaves, enslaved?

The assumption behind it all is that if someone can make a inference about your thoughts, no matter how far-fetched, those thoughts must contribute to an undesirable state, hence you are a bad person.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#688

Post by bilvar »

randomdata wrote: post #337
imgabe wrote: post #311

Wait, brown bag is subtle racism? Somebody needs to explain this to me because I know for a fact I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown and I have no idea what else this could possibly refer to. Edit: Looked it up: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/theres-more-seattle-bro... > "the phrase 'brown bag' does bring up associations with the past when a brown bag was actually used, I understa…

> I’ve taken lunch to school in paper bags that were literally brown Are you sure they weren't a certain shade of orange?

I'm colourblind so I'd posit that the people who banned the term brown-bag are ableist.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#689

Post by causi »

jimbokun wrote: post #319
low_tech_love wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an academic issue, ”a solution in search of a problem” as almost all the rest of academia is. As such, it never stops at a reasonable, meaningful equilibrium; it has to be kept pacing, moving forward towards more and more ridiculous extremes. An academic, in order to stay relevant, needs to keep pushing the invisible and mostly inexistent boundaries that they perceive in whatever field they are involved in. I…

It’s important to remember, however annoying they are, their side is losing. Look at Dave Chappelle, who was the attempted target of cancellation and Netflix and people buying tickets to his shows completely ignored it. Or JK Rowling, who has been cancelled over and over again, but the latest video game based on her IP is incredibly popular. Twitter doesn’t reflect the real world.

Don't forget that Rowling wasn't invited to the filming of the giant Harry Potter reunion special.

Re: Banning words won’t make the world more just

#690

Post by perilunar »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #663
Lazare wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My partner is disabled, and by chance and via support groups she is a member of, she has many friends annd acquaintences who are as well. And while it's by no means universal, she and all her disabled friends absolutely loathe the "people first language" currently in vogue (ie, "person with a disability" over "disabled"). And it's odd! Because while there are certainly disabled people who prefer one form over another…

Slightly related: in German, a strange thing happened at the end of the last century. Disabled people used to be called "behindert" (might be translated as "impeded" or "hindered"). I think the word was a good choice, because it took the blame away from people, and just described that they had to overcome bigger obstacles because of their situation. In the eighties or nineties, people started to use the term as a slu…

English has "handicapped" which is similar and also became offensive. I thought it was a good word because it allowed for more nuance than the binary abled/disabled.
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