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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

#641

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

wonderwonder wrote: post #466
recuter wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to recommend a masterpiece of cinema to you called Blind Fury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Fury The realization that it would be pointless, alas, came to me too late. Let me just give you a taste: While serving in Vietnam, American soldier Nick Parker was blinded by a mortar explosion. Rescued by local villagers, he recovered his health and, though he remains blind, was trained to master his other…

Following up on this I wonder if Tropic Thunder (2008), a relatively new movie could be made today.

Someone asked Mel Brooks the same about Blazing Saddles once.

"Today? You couldn't even make it then!"

We overestimate the effect the this sort of thing has.

I imagine someone reading that line is about to talk about the cancelling of some so-and-so, but in almost all cases that is either just a lot of hot air from Twitter or the so-and-so in question is legitimately and obviously actually a bigot.

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

#642

Post by marmee »

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]

Jews in WW2 needed the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, they did not need Churchill to stop using the word Jew because it is offensive.

It is not similar, unless if you have the preconceived notion that 'language is action'

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

#644

Post by Joker_vD »

jimbokun wrote: post #305
jurassic wrote: post #54

The pendulum is swinging back because equity language censors took this way way too far. People-first language ("enslaved people" not "slaves") makes complete sense to me, but making a big fuss about how common English idioms like being "blind to a problem" is somehow offensive is going to earn you nothing but eyerolls from nearly everyone. Some of these, like "grandfathering", cannot even be understood without deep…

Hard to miss the similarities with Orwell’s Newspeak. The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.

Absolutely:

> Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor. The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion.

Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language":

> Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

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

#645

Post by SyzygistSix »

sertsa wrote: post #229
ok_dad wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I causally used the "r-word" and didn't even think anything of it You casually called someone a "retard" (I assume that's the word) and someone took that wrongly? Of course they did! Even when "retard" was an acceptable put-down, it was still a put-down. Maybe the way to avoid the "minefield" you speak of is to not put others down? Even deservedly! Just try to be nicer to everyone, even if they are not, themselves,…

I've never thought of retarded as a putdown, it was just the sound used to describe a certain group of people. Be careful assuming you are in possession of the one true way.

There is a difference. Retarded was used to describe a person's condition. It means slow. Retard the noun was more a slur or put down.

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

#646

Post by SyzygistSix »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #143
ryandrake wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The euphemism treadmill is a running joke, It feels more like a minefield than a joke. A minefield that gets new mines added every so often just to keep everyone on their toes. When I was younger, I used to feel like I could keep up with all the new taboo words, but it seems like it is happening faster and faster these days. You can unintentionally say something that turns out to be taboo, and you're done for. Some…

>in the 2010s it's become totally lingua-non-grata* I thought it was the 2020s. But it's too good not to use, and it's the last good insult we have. Mental ableism is the last bastion. I make my stand here. The slippery slope we're being forced down on leads to "don't be mean to anyone ever", and I, as a product of the era of https://youtu.be/C4dnCZSYmbY , fundamentally refuse to accept that.

I personally have replaced it with fucktard, just so there isn't any confusion.

Also I'm bringing back "special".

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

#647

Post by boredumb »

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]

You mean the home-country-challenged people living among THE biggest oppressors in history needed help after literally-hitler was about to unalive them?

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

#648

Post by sokoloff »

Joker_vD wrote: post #644
jimbokun wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to miss the similarities with Orwell’s Newspeak. The attempt to make certain thoughts unthinkable by removing the words that denote those ideas.

Absolutely: > Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually easier to say people with limited financial resources than the poor . The first rolls off your tongue without interruption, leaves no aftertaste, arouses no emotion. Compare with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language": > Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. [...] A mass of Latin words falls…

Further: Literally everyone has limited financial resources.

If you want to specifically talk about a problem relating to being actually poor, it’s probably better to use language that communicates that than language that spans being poor, being in the top 5% of US households, and having to sell $TSLA stock and borrow money to buy Twitter.

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

#649

Post by hutzlibu »

marmee wrote: post #642
hutzlibu wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Jews in WW2 needed the Allies to bomb Auschwitz, they did not need Churchill to stop using the word Jew because it is offensive. It is not similar, unless if you have the preconceived notion that 'language is action'

"Jews in WW2 needed the Allies to bomb Auschwitz"

I don't really think, the jews in the camp, would have welcomed to be bombed, on top of the daily routine.

Can you elaborate how being blown to pieces would have helped anyone, except maybe a lucky person used the chaos to escape (to where exactly)?

Also I did not say anything about language equals action and were just speaking in broad terms about helping minorities.

And "jew" is not offensive, but there are offensive terms for jews. And whether banning them would have helped, I did not made any statement about.

But I forgot, it is friday and probably not the best time to comment here.

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

#650

Post by zarzavat »

eru wrote: post #617
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sometimes feel this is some nefarious plan to reconstruct a new masculinity. It won't be as "toxic" as the old version, but we'll be back on top. I've heard "menstruators", "birthing persons", "chest feeding", "vulva havers". I've heard lots of debate about letting trans women compete. Debate about allowing trans women into women's toilets. Or arguing the sincerity of men who claim to identify as women as they are…

> No one is worried in the slightest about letting trans men compete in men's sport. By and large for most disciplines, there's no separate men's leagues or men's competitions. So women and trans-men and everyone else is mostly already allowed to compete in men's sports. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r > Traditionally, chess had been a male-dominated activity, and women were often seen as weake…

There's just very few sports in which the male body is not at an intrinsic mechanical advantage.

When you come from the extreme tail of the bell curve that elite sportspeople come from, that small advantage becomes a large advantage. When you move the mean a little, the tails move a lot.

This doesn't just affect trans women but also intersex women. There's a definite tension in sport insofar as we expect elite sportspeople to be abnormal humans far from the mean. For males this is unproblematic: an abnormally strong male like Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt is still clearly a male.

But for females nature does not provide for us a clear line but rather a smooth gradient between female and male. The difference between an abnormally strong female and an abnormally weak male is not a line that nature always provides for us, it's a line that has to be drawn artificially and is therefore open to debate and challenge.

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