Would you agree that flippant questions about rape are considered not merely offensive but actually hurtful to anyone who has experienced it or anyone who, by dint of their birth, must constantly fear it happening to them?
It is not trying to remove anything that might offend. It is not removing “debates about what constitutes rape, what constitutes consent, what are the appropriate punishments for a rapist, what steps can a society take to prevent rape.” It is removing debates about when rape is OK.
Just stop with these stupid exaggerations and slippery slope arguments, and focus on the actual topic.
You’re fixated on the baseless idea that if you can construct a scenario in which rape is the least bad option, then “rape is okay” which is aggressively misunderstanding the situation.
What’s worse, a single rape or all life on earth dying in agonizing pain? I guess you think rape is okay. Or you think torturing and killing all life in earth is okay. Take your pick.
No, that was Max.
And you’re fixated on the idea that this is somehow an interesting question that must be debated.
Lack of interest is determined by lack of response, not by bans. I think extreme hypotheticals can generate interesting discussions. Certainly no one is proposing that the topic and posters are banned because no one was interested in discussing it.
Aaaannd… we’re back to just ignoring the people who feel those threads make this a worse place. Frustrating.
I mean, sure, for funsies you can debate rape, and it’s a jolly good pastime, that debate. Is the funsies worth the negative impact on others?
This, along with all the hysterical flibbering over how we should all be able to argue any point we like is absolutely fucking hilarious coming from a board where I could be banninated for calling a sick fuck a sick fuck, providing I did it in *gasp* THE WRONG FORUM!!!1!
Oh, and BTW, Senor Beef, that’s a whole lotta words to say “Ouch, I got nothin’.”
I think context is appropriate EDIT: I meant to say context is important. I certainly think interjecting in a thread about gardening in MPSIMS would be a wildly inappropriate place to try to introduce extreme thought experiments about rape.
But rape is not unique in being potentially a hurtful topic to someone who has experienced, feared, or had love ones experience it. There are hundreds of similar topics that could evoke that reaction. Off the top of my head, what if someone created a thread entitled, say, “under what scenarios could it be justifiable to drive drunk?” and people listed scenarios like “my designated driver had a heart attack, and we’re in the middle of nowhere with no cell service”
Now, such a hypothetical discussion may not interest you, and that’s fine, but people like to discuss odd things, or construct thought experiments to see where their own limits are, or how other people’s minds and values work.
To you, if you have no particular personal experience with being the victim of a drunk driver, this may seem like a weird but harmless thread, and you’d simply ignore it. But what about someone who lost a close family member to a drunk driver, or survived a crash themselves? Then allowing threads regarding drunk driving is deeply offensive, and therefore should be banned.
I could come up with a hundred more topics like this - things that some people have personal connections to and could be upset by - and get a hundred topics banned, if we’re consistent.
Rather than suppress all discussion that can be deemed offensive or emotionally affecting, we should instead have a place where all (honest) discussion is permissible. If people are particularly sensitive in general, or to specific topics, they can simply avoid those things. Someone who is particularly sensitive to issues of rape should not go into a GD thread that’s clearly about rape in the title.
Trying to ban all potentially offensive or hurtful discussion has a massive chilling effect on open discussion. Being that sort of open discussion is exactly what GD is about and has been about, and the world will lose something if we simply ban all topics, conversations, and thought experiments that involve any subject that could potentially hurt anyone else.
I am sure you could imagine a hundred topics like that. And the controversy around them would similarly be imaginary.
But set your imagination aside for a moment. We’re not dealing with an imaginary scenario here*. We’re dealing with the actual situation of folks who’ve survived rape being, uh, unhappy when confronted with the “lets debate rape for our own entertainment!” threads.
That’s not something I came up with and imagined it bothering people. That actually happened. Let’s handle the real before we imagine problems.
- Yes, Max’s thread is about an imaginary scenario, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m not ignoring you. I’m dismissing you. I believe you are wrong, and I am not willing to sit by as you attempt to destroy a forum for open discussion without at least making a case against it.
When those others have complete control of whether they view or participate in those discussions? Yes. People who are easily offended by other people’s debates should not spend their time in GD, and they most certainly should not go into a thread that’s clearly about a topic that they’re extremely sensitive about.
Your dodge is pathetic. I completely destroyed your points - both that your characterization was factually wrong, and that if your analogy were correct, it would still work against you rather than me. Your personal attack was completely and authoritatively refuted. And now you are simply pretending it didn’t happen rather than deal with being wrong.
Or people who want to have funsie rape debates can go do it elsewhere. Either way.
I know you say you might not have hung around if there were limits like this. I think you’re a good poster. But I KNOW there are people who didn’t hang around because of the lack of limits like this, and they’re also good posters.
This is a grotesque, dismissive, and contemptible summary of what’s going on. Don’t be gross.
So again, why is a hypothetical thread about rape unacceptable because there are rape survivors, but a similarly themed thread about drunk driving is not a good comparison even though there are plenty of victims of drunk driving?
You seem to be saying that you’re not concerned with people being offended and hurt over potentially hundreds of topics that could hurt them, but that rape deserves special treatment, as though rape is the only thing that can be difficult to discuss in the hypothetical, or that no other thing that human beings are made to endure could possibly compare to rape.
Are there plenty of victims of drunk driving who have voiced displeasure at those threads? Because it’s the second part that I think you’re imagining.
I’d rather deal with the actual problem than dismiss it as a problem because I can imagine other problems.
Gonna save you some time here: the rest of that paragraph is nonsense. You’re a better reader than that. Take a moment, reread. Maybe sleep on it. That’s not what I “seem to be saying” to any reasonable reading.
Why can’t they just avoid discussions that they could be hurt by? Why do those discussions have to not exist?
That’s the fundamental imbalance here. I came to these boards primarily for GD originally, and the open nature of the discussion was what appealed to me. If your proposal takes hold - that there are essentially a list of banned topics - GD can not offer me what I want in an open discussion forum. However, the opposite is not true - someone who was sensitive to one particular issue could simply avoid that particular issue, and enjoy all other threads or forums.
I am not trying to take away a place where people can go and not be exposed or offended by their pet issues, I am trying to keep them from taking away my ability to go somewhere that has open discussions.
And furthermore, one of the biggest problems we have these days with the internet and modern society is that people are retreating into forums that only cater to what they want to hear, and where what they don’t want to hear is suppressed. That’s exactly the sort of sentiment that the SDMB was originally designed to fight. GD would be ruined if it turned out to be a safe space where only things permissible to those who are most vulnerable to being offended are the standard to which we cater.
As has been pointed out many times: this is a community. As a community, we have decided NOT to include certain types of debates and language. Yes - there are limits to what we can or should discuss.
Just where did we decide that and no there should not be offlimit topics in GD. It is harmful to the community to allow isolated social bubbles to exist.
I’m not sure that’s true. First, it is a community - a community that was originally created to fight ignorance and to uphold intellectually honest and open debate - at least specifically speaking about GD. Second, I’m not sure that we actually have decided that certain topics are off limits. Is rape the only one? Is that officially codified? Can we discuss hypotheticals that involve murder or genocide or torture, but not rape? Is there a list of banned topics? Is there a number of people who have to say they are personally offended by the existence of a discussion before it becomes banned?
I’ve been here for 20 years, and maybe I’ve missed some big swings of moderation, but I’m not under the impression that there are a list of topics that are actually forbidden from debate on these boards. It seems as though this current issue we’re talking about is veering into that territory, but that’s why some of us are trying to fight that.
First, you don’t need to get an answer to everything. If folks who are survivors of rape tell you that it’s bothering them, you don’t need to grill them until the answer satisfies. Sometimes grownups can say, “Y’know, I don’t fully get it, but I get that it bothers you, and I can adjust. My fuck-around entertainment isn’t worth bothering you over.”
But second: the thread title is right there any time you go to Great Debates. Survivors of rape who find Funsie-Rape-Debates bothersome shouldn’t have to avoid the entire forum to avoid FRDs.
Jesus man, can you fuckin quit it already? This is really disgusting, and it’s betraying the fundamental attitude you have toward rape victims.