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Banning words won’t make the world more just

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

#551

Post by pas »

wonderwonder wrote: post #352
lynx23 wrote: post #289

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 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…

... but ... are "group of academics [..] sit around and decide that a group as a whole needs saving"? (Yes, probably some are, academia always has a few truly crazy people.)

Mostly they parrot the same "old tautologies" (like language matters, structural issues are real, people's personal prejudices manifest in many ways, etc) in various new forms, shapes, phrasings.

However, that doesn't mean they are wrong. (Nor that they are automatically right.)

white knights are not academics, they are usually the walking-talking examples of severe Dunning-Kruger phenomena.

... I'm writing all this, because your post uses very broad and general terms like progressives and academics, and I think that's bad. (Because it forces my ego to reconsider the `progressive` label, that I used to apply to myself. Naturally without doing anything good/bad progressive really. :| )

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

#552

Post by andrewclunn »

Look into the entomology of the word "retarded." They keep changing the word, but whatever they replace it with becomes a pejorative, because the thing it's describing is intuitively understood to be negative. Preying upon people's sense of justice to promote censorship in the name of justice is... oh what's the word...

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

#553

Post by regularfry »

RobotToaster wrote: post #477
Lazare wrote: post #320

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…

Ironically it's the opposite in the autism community, the white Knights insist it should be "autistic people" for some reason. None of this is going to change anyone's material conditions, it's just a distraction invented by well paid "diversity consultants". At least the fad for "differently abled" seems to have died.

"People with autism" carries a connotation that the person and the autism are separable. Given the deep, dark, nasty history of autism "cures" that's a very raw nerve, and stamping out that type of thinking will materially improve conditions.

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

#554

Post by YurgenJurgensen »

KielFisch wrote: post #516
lynx23 wrote: post #289

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…

Recently I came across a discussion on Twitter where a selection of scientists were arguing that the long-used term "blind peer review" (i.e. where the authors do not know the identities of the reviewers, and vice versa) could be construed as able-ist and should be referred to as "anonymous peer review". I'm all in favour of using inclusive language, but at the time this discussion struck me as odd because I've never…

Wiktionary has attestations for use of 'blind' to mean 'concealed' or 'not visible' going all the way back to the 16th century, and if you follow the etymology it becomes likely that that was the original sense of the word, with 'sightless' coming later. This same disingenuous reasoning was used with Twitch with the phrase 'blind playthrough' (to mean 'playing a game without having seen any of it before').

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

#555

Post by wholinator2 »

madaxe_again wrote: post #475
wonderwonder wrote: post #352

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…

I have been told in no uncertain terms that the word “minority” is offensive, as it has come to have pejorative use. No alternative term was suggested, rather that one should refer to specific groups of people with their specific terms, and never generalise. Additionally, “white knight” I have also been told off for, for the reasons you might expect. In both of these cases (actually, almost every case I can think of)…

I feel like, Materially Unencumbered Birth Gives of Reduced Melanin, is approaching an actual usable acronym for the typical pejorative, Karen. I bet chatgpt could bridge the gap

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

#556

Post by somenameforme »

imoverclocked wrote: post #346
Sunspark wrote: post #287

In my life, I have been deaf, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, hearing challenged. I suppose at some point I will be acoustically disadvantaged. You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still deaf. It's true. I have limitations that others take for granted. If I can't see someone speaking or if I'm out of batteries, we aren't going to be communicating well. That's pretty deaf. I won't be offended, it's just realit…

> Character and intent is what matters. This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent. The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently,…

I would not take claims of something being a "dog whistle" at face value. The entire concept has largely been weaponized and bastardized, appropriately enough as a means of effecting language policing. A perfect example is over the past several years how the media spent quite a lot of energy dedicated to convincing people that "America first" was some sort of a secret dog whistle. [1] The "logic", so far as it can be called that, runs that e.g. the KKK also liked this concept and slogan. So if you like this concept and slogan you're therefore somehow secretly dog whistling for the KKK. It's just a mind-bogglingly stupid idea. If the head of the KKK really liked Honey Nut Cheerios then I suppose that also becomes a secret dog whistle?

It's simply a way to attack things without actually considering what's being said. I think if you polled Americans, white/black/brown/blue/green and orange, almost all would agree that the government should put the interests of the country and the people above the interests of other countries and the people of other countries. But in a world where political power emerges from divisions in society, that sort of unity is dangerous. So rather than attack the idea, which would be likely to backfire, they instead chose to attack our language. And it was successful. People who still believe anything the media says became cautious about advocating for things like 'America first', because they didn't want to be seen as e.g. endorsing the KKK.

By contrast those who are actively skeptical of the media, mostly disregarded what they did and continued to happily advocate for 'America first.' Now the members from the other group not only were no longer comfortable saying 'America first', but even began to see those as advocating for it as secret racists, or even KKK advocates. Divisions widened, policy destroyed (or at least made into a partisan affair), language policed, mission succeeded.

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/21/end-of-the-ame...

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

#557

Post by rayiner »

ShredKazoo wrote: post #282
rayiner wrote: post #173

The Sierra Club guide is hilarious: https://www.sierraclub.org/sites/default/files/sce-authors/u... . > People of color” has in the past served as a collective term for people who are not white. A preferred term today is “BIPOC” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color, which provides a unifying term for ease of use while still acknowledging the reality that Black and Indigenous people in the United States…

NAACP stands for "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People". Interesting how "Colored People" was an enlightened term in 1909, but "Colored People" is now out and "People of Color" is the new way to go.

No, “people of color” is now in the “past” as Sierra Club says. The “preferred term today” is “BIPOC” which acknowledges that black and indigenous people are more important than other “people of color.” I don’t remember Asians signing off on this change request; I doubt Hispanics did either.

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

#558

Post by account42 »

kenjackson wrote: post #520
coldtea wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which dominant group isn't subject to slurs?

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

#559

Post by docmars »

fleddr wrote: post #497

We should spend less time on the crazy outcomes of these institutes and more time on why they can even exist in the first place. They are somehow funded yet not accountable to anyone. Nobody asked for this, it doesn't help anyone, and it cannot survive the most basic scrutiny of the public or market. And yet it exists and even grows. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with outcomes, the underlying mechanism should be e…

Not to mention, the amount of violence committed by members of these outrage groups against whoever stands in their way - primarily towards the "offending" group or class they're prejudiced against, particularly whites, males, and straight sexual orientation.

Worse, this violence often goes unaccounted for with impunity, without penalty, because people are terrified of the consequences of criticizing these groups, whether that's losing friends, family, or jobs that are too closely attached to these justice movements, while quite blatantly refusing to acknowledge that these movements have grifted the crap out of our world, as we find that their leaders and spokespeople are everything from: disingenuous scammers using donation money entirely for self-serving purposes that do not advance their cause, all the way to being convicted child sex traffickers (Fox: BLM, reports from 2020).

But to condemn these movements for these reasons is nearly suicide in a society obsessed with staying in line with the "current thing", without scrutiny.

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

#560

Post by tpoacher »

imoverclocked wrote: post #346
Sunspark wrote: post #287

In my life, I have been deaf, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, hearing challenged. I suppose at some point I will be acoustically disadvantaged. You know what? At the end of the day, I'm still deaf. It's true. I have limitations that others take for granted. If I can't see someone speaking or if I'm out of batteries, we aren't going to be communicating well. That's pretty deaf. I won't be offended, it's just realit…

> Character and intent is what matters. This. I recently ran up against a filter on Reddit where I used a phrase that I was completely unaware of. My account was flagged for hate speech. The comment had no ill-intent. The problem with language is that we want individual words to have inherent meaning but as people adopt phrases to identify a movement, those meanings get carried along for the ride. eg: until recently,…

I find it highly unlikely that Scott Adams is a "dark dog whistle" kinda guy.

At best the most I'd believe would be that "some people who Scott Adams pissed off now like to say that when he says X he actually means Y".

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