I think, definitely not. I personally learned about the terms “trans man” and “trans woman” within the past couple months, from my participation here in ATMB. From your own cite, some 70%+ of Republicans believe gender is binary, even as over half of them would be somewhat comfortable having a friend come out as transgender.
In my personal experience, people here are hardly aware enough of transgender issues to stop using slurs. At work we have thousands of patients. Exactly one patient, in twenty years of practice, is identified as transgender.
We have an active lesbian community nearby. Ten years ago that community did not exist. Even today they do not stray from their enclosed neighborhood, although I think they have some sort of lesbian bowling club (in their neighborhood bowling alley). I doubt homosexual men feel welcome here.
There are people of color, too. They do not live in the largest community, they live either in the suburbs or the hood. The public schools which I attended were F- and D- rated, with a diverse student body. The charter school in the nearby community was A- rated and stereotypically white. Kids were putting “no colored people allowed” on water faucets in my schools and leaving tied nooses hanging over the school guardrails.
Of course part of that reason is that many of the transgender patients feel it is unsafe to be so identified. They are there. It is really an observation that somewhat supports the other argument. The need to create spaces that are not perceived as hurtful.
I don’t need nor want you to agree with me. I want the people with actual power here to.
Sorry, I believe there was a part there that I took as read, but apparently not - “it” there was the specific case I mentioned, not whatever general case you could squeeze out of an analogy.
Does it? Cite.
Yes, it is, when you do it in a forum where PoC (especially vulnerable PoC youth) can read your words. Same with being told you shouldn’t, or don’t exist for LGBQT youth.
I’m not so sure that it’s forbidden, but I will do my best not to modify your quotes in the future.
I don’t understand what you mean here. I was saying, if you are stressed out by reading threads on subjects you find objectionable, don’t read those threads. I don’t know what injustices are perpetuated by you staying away, unless you mean that the bigot goes unchallenged and therefore continues being bigoted. But if that’s what you mean, why would closing the thread stop the bigot from being bigoted?
I’m not trying to be either. I am trying to rationalize your opinion, and the opinions of other people in this thread. The people who say things like, ‘we shouldn’t allow bigoted discussions to take place here at all’.
If you mean leaving a bigoted thread unchallenged results in allowing the people in that thread to remain bigoted, I agree. In my opinion, that’s how it’s supposed to be. If someone has an opinion that you disagree with and you simply ignore them, that opinion isn’t going to change or disappear. Maybe you can stop noticing it but it still exists.
If you are concerned that bigotry itself makes you unsafe, because it exists in general, then shutting down discussions is not going to make you feel any safer except in some superficial “out of sight, out of mind”. Such a policy will only make this forum yet another safe space, but it doesn’t address the root problem.
Learning and teaching is stressful, especially when dealing with sensitive subjects. I come here to learn, and if I’m lucky, to teach. I don’t come here to relieve stress (maybe in the Cafe/Thread Games forums). Again, maybe you see these message boards as having a different purpose. That might explain the apparent lack of daylight between us.
I think you and I went through this before. You were saying, and appear to still say, that bigotry is bad faith so we shouldn’t even entertain bigoted threads and posters. My response to this was and still is to address the bad faith instead of the bigotry, because I reject the premise that all bigotry is bad faith.
This recent back and forth between us came out of a discussion between thorny locust and I. In that discussion I was trying to understand why she believes allowing discussion of bigotry is harmful.
I apologize if I misrepresent you or anyone else’s argument, please correct me [DEL]if[/DEL] when I do so.
I try to notice and question my own assumptions. As I am sure you know, it is a never ending struggle. The reason I press the “why is this harm” is to avoid making assumptions, because the ones I can think of only seem to reinforce my existing opinion. Most recently I did so in [POST=22009535]post #419[/POST].
Altering another posters text in quote boxes - other than to snip our irrelevant parts or to place emphasis on the part to which you are replying is absolutely forbidden. There are few more straightforward paths to trouble for a poster. Avoid doing so
I don’t think bigotry without harm is noncognitive like a hornless unicorn. I cannot imagine a hornless unicorn, because a unicorn must have a horn by definition. I can imagine a country without black people, because a country does not need black people to be a country. By ignoring any realistic process of getting from reality to the ideal, a white nationalist (which I am not) can wish for blacks to go away without wishing or wanting any harm to come upon them.
This isn’t some unrealistic hypothetical bigot either. I remember talking with people who held those beliefs: wish black people would go away, but against harming them or forced removals.
Losing a mod, in part due to obvious modding inconsistencies and disregard of precedent, combined with such public soul searching hints at deeper schisms internally in how a board should be run. I think the feedback seeking at this point isn’t going to be productive as it is sort of backwards. I’m of the opinion that you set the tone and rules of the board and have the population it attracts be the population of the board. Trying to please a very obstinate and different set of people with strong ideological differences is an exercise in futility.
This is a thread on disputes which primarily would be a focus for boards such as elections, GD, perhaps the Pit. I think the status quo enforced with an even hand and according to precedent is as good as we can get.
The only bigotry without harm is completely unexpressed bigotry.
But we’re talking about expressed bigotry here, so that hypothetical inner private bigotry is irrelevant.
Like I said, it’s an utterance a human can make, but its inherent self-contradictory nature makes it meaningless. We don’t need to consider wishing for magic beans as meaningful.
I agree with you, but my advice of ignoring bigotry threads was not intended to deal with them at all. I am saying, if bigoted threads disturb you, stress you out, cause you harm, make you want to leave the board, then maybe just ignore them. Don’t deal with them, let them be.
Yes, that means they might go unchallenged if everybody does so. Part of fighting bigotry is that it’s stressful. There’s no way around that. It cannot be an easy task.
And then of course, what you think is or is not moral is your opinion. Nobody has to agree with you about that, and I think it’s a bad idea to justify some sort of accusation of bad faith with your personal moral beliefs. To those with different morals, such an accusation would be baseless and therefore any censorship based on that accusation would appear unfair. Talk about burning bridges.
In my experience, you are just plain wrong. I’ve been in cities where people are very much aware of bigotry. I can understand why you might think everybody has heard about transgender issues or supports gender equality or homosexual relations. I feel like we aren’t going to agree about this, if you aren’t taking my word for it already.
I’m trying to understand you, too. My initial assumption (apparently wrong, I can’t say I’m surprised) was that being exposed to bigotry caused harm, too. What you’ve written indicates to me that my assumption was wrong, or at least does not accurately describe you. I have already laid out four different assumptions (reproduced below) I could make about why you might think ignoring bigotry is “worse” than trying to address it. Alternatively, you can tell me what you think.
For the rest of your post, which I think is the substantive part, I am reading that you are afraid that without more moderation you think the bigots will crush any hope of fighting ignorance with their bad faith tactics. That they will stay just on this side of the rules, and all of the good posters will fall to temptation and get banned. In other words, you are saying that bad-faith bigotry is so dangerous, and so successful that it will succeed against any good-faith arguments; not only that, but if there is such a thing as good-faith bigotry, it is indistinguishable from bad faith.
You didn’t say that exactly but I can’t seem to make sense of your argument any other way. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I confronted a similar argument in the concurrent misogyny thread. I think what you are presenting is a form of defeatism that leads to the absurd conclusion that it is impossible to fight ignorance that manifests itself in the form of bigotry. As such, I must reject the premises: first, it is possible to distinguish between good-faith and bad-faith bigotry, at least enough of the time so as to preserve these forums; second, bigoted opinions can and should be addressed with reason.
It took me a while to think of such discussions that I might give the benefit of the doubt to, and approach with an open mind.
Let’s say you have a bus line. Of all the neighborhoods it services, only one has a significant black population and that neighborhood is at the end of the line. The opposite end of the line is like, downtown or wherever everyone wants to get off. A thread asking if it is racist for the bus driver to ask blacks to sit at the back does not automatically earn the mark of bad faith, in my opinion. I think it is racist because the driver is assuming the black person is staying until the end of the line, solely based on their skin color. It may also be practical but that doesn’t make it any less racist. People might like to mingle on the bus line (ha!) and such a rule prevents that; also normally you give the front seats to people who have trouble walking. But I would not put this hypothetical thread beyond the pale of civil debate.
Or let’s say there’s a thread where somebody says, slavery isn’t necessarily evil. The person lays out a utilitarian argument and claims that overall, slavery could result in less suffering, especially in a post-scarcity economy. He cites that StarTrek episode where Rome meets the modern day, and says the slaves could have unions and guaranteed healthcare and social benefits. No mention of race based slavery. I would surely disagree, but I think it is possible to have a civil debate on that topic.
I can’t watch videos right now but I will check it out later tonight.
I don’t think that’s even an implicit call for violence, and to be honest I don’t think it’s offensive. To “breed like rabbits” is an idiom meaning to have lots of children. I have used this phrase in colloquial speech when describing my own family and the families of my friends. I have also heard it used to describe the Catholics as a religious denomination, Orthodox Jews, and adherents of Islam. I have heard immigrants themselves use the phrase, as well as WASPs.
If it is offensive to you, that only shows how different the culture that surrounds me is from the culture that surrounds you.
First we have to accept that a post being racist or misogynistic is not usually a matter of objective fact but of perception. It is like Yanni vs Laurel. Some things that you see or hear someone else honestly sees or hears as something else even though you cannot imagine how.
With that as a basis my sense is that many posters of traditionally disempowered groups recognize that being at the table, or part of the loop, does not mean that their perception will always carry the day, but it does mean that others hear that Yanni is also heard. Being part of a diverse group in the loop is a clear good for all. Even if your view is not always the consensus you have a better chance to have a more informed consensus. Some hopefully are interested in that.
I don’t think dishonesty motivates anybody in this thread. People have made it clear that they think bigoted ideas are harmful and/or bad-faith. I may not be able to comprehend why they are harmful (yet), and I may disagree that bigotry implies bad-faith, but I do not think the participants of this thread want to “silence” people “for political reasons”.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a safe space to talk with friends. I don’t think it fits the brand, but maybe it’s time for rebranding. But if this is the goal, I wish proponents would be a little more upfront about it. I get the impression (especially from DSeid) that a safe space is not the goal, just some standard of decency that is more stringent than what we have now.
Sex is the sort of thing you can’t easily hide during a physical. Either they are coming in as their birth-assigned gender, or they choose to hide SRS from the record and otherwise deceive us.
But one out of multiple thousands isn’t unrealistic, especially if the few others around here drive to the nearest metropolis for their non-emergent healthcare needs.