Come on, that is not at all comparable. No one thinks walking too close to the edge makes someone a bad person. It’s more like accusing them of a crime, or of cheating on their spouse. You wouldn’t expect someone accused of those things not to feel insulted, would you?
And what if this person considers it, and still disagrees? Most people are inclined to trust their own judgement over others’, after all. We already have an example of such disagreement in this thread - according to MrDibble, the mods disagreed with him about some comments he reported.
When someone tells you the thing you just said makes you sound like you’re a racist and your reaction is to feel insulted . . . you just might be a racist.
I think you’ve lost track of the point. The point I was making is that I make accusations of racism to encourage introspection and a change in behavior, not to be insulting. “Idiot” has no purpose but to be insulting, so you’re talking about something completely different now.
Yes, what if? Sounds like a potentially fruitful discussion could follow, if you are willing to consider it and not jump to “I’m insulted!” immediately.
I agree that most people are going to react badly to such an accusation, and that it is generally preferable to say “that statement sounds racist” rather than “you sound like a racist”. It’s a subtle distinction, though, so I don’t think a policy that pretends there’s a vast difference between them and that a reasonable person would be angered by one but completely OK with the other is useful.
But in the Pit, insults aren’t only used when fighting for altruistic causes. Anyone can call anyone an idiot (or lots of other things) for almost anything. I recall someone insulting a member who they thought started too many simple threads by saying something like “He’s ruining this place by starting threads asking stupid stuff like ‘Why is there corn in shit?’”. (he hadn’t actually created that thread) The sense that I get is that as long as the pitter is sincere in their pitting of another member, pretty much anyone can be pitted for just about anything. If someone is upset that Soandso did X, then someone else can pit Soandso for doing X. I don’t think there’s any requirement that X be something that is socially offensive.
You’re right, and I’m sure I have posts in the Pit that were intended to be insulting.
But this long tangent started with discussions of accusations of racism, and how it’s unfortunate that it must be considered an insult. I’m speaking specifically about that, not the Pit as a whole.
People just don’t understand how important it is to have a cool, polite, and logical debate on whether Black people are inferior because of genes or the existence of welfare.
The point I am making is that your expectations of what people should find insulting are entirely unreasonable.
Not so. Perhaps you believe this person may no longer sound like an idiot if they put more effort in, or educate themselves on the subject, or find better sources to follow.
You lob a rhetorical grenade at someone, accusing them of one of the worst things anyone can be accused of, and somehow expect this to spur a productive discussion?
More productive than the discussion that is presumably already happening, in which the controversial statement appeared?
The incendiary effect is exactly why I consider such accusations to be insults, in the same way as calling someone stupid or crazy is insulting, whether you believe it to be true or not. It hadn’t occured to me that anyone could seriously expect a positive response.
An accusation of committing accidental and/or unthinking racism does not imply moral turpitude. One shouldn’t shrug it off in the sense of paying no attention to it – one should consider it, think about it, and probably (unless the accuser is entirely off the wall) stop doing it. But one should shrug off any sense of insult, yes.
An accusation of being deliberately racist is an accusation of moral turpitude, yes. (Which is not a reason we should be unable to make it; at least in the Pit.)
Determinedly ignoring repeated information from multiple others that one’s statements and/or behavior are racist takes the behavior out of the category of accidental and/or unthinking.
If on considering the matter and investigating information and explanations one thinks the accusation is unfounded, reasonable discussions can be had.
That’s not generally what I’m seeing.
What I see, most of the time, isn’t people saying “the Black community in inner cities” (presumably, in the USA and maybe similar countries) but saying “Black culture”. As if there were only one culture that involved all Black people.
And what I see in reply to it, at least here, isn’t people objecting only on the grounds they think any explanation of “under-performance” is racist; but people objecting on the grounds that there’s no such thing as “Black culture” in that sense; and/or on the grounds that culture “in the Black community in inner cities” isn’t as being described – often with cites; and/or on the grounds that to the extent there are such cultural influences, as you yourself say, “we built the incentives that caused it”. (Which, although you said it yourself, is what the CRT you object to so vehemently is saying.)
If you insist on continuing to use it after being informed that it’s used as a slur, then I’m likely to assume that you mean it as a slur.
But since instead you’re saying:
I’ve got no problem at all believing that you didn’t know it before. I’m pretty far left, and I didn’t know it before.
And that’s exactly the response most people are looking for, when they point out that something reads as racist, or otherwise bigoted, to them.
I lived through it too; and I still didn’t know anything about “Democrat” as an insult until I saw it recently discussed on these boards.
And when people do carefully try to make it, the distinction often seems to be ignored; the attitude instead often seems to be that mentioning racism is an insult in itself.
To be clear, “lived through it” as in was a C-SPAN junkie and could identify all the active members of the House by voice alone during Gingrich’s heyday.
No. But when someone says, lets say, the Union wore grey and the Confederates wore Blue and someone with historical knowledge sets them straight they should admit they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about and accept the correction.
I would argue “No” and that mods shouldn’t be allowed to participate in the Pit as posters in threads attacking specific posters at all.
And to put something in perspective: When was the last time someone was given a warning or ban or piled on in the pit for pushing an extremely left-wing viewpoint?
Most people would, unless the corrector is being an absolute dick about it.
For example, saying “You might have that around the wrong way - the Union wore Blue and the Confederacy wore grey; although they both had similar equipment in many other areas and the Confederacy didn’t always have a standard uniform the way the Union did” corrects the person and doesn’t make them feel like a moron, providing a plausible explanation for their confusion and leading to a much more productive outcome all round.
Telling them “You idiot, everyone knows the Union wore blue and the Confederates wore grey, haven’t you ever seen a Civil War painting or re-enactment or something in movies or TV? Educate yourself!” is going to piss them off, get them offside, and make them think you and everyone they perceive as associated with your viewpoint are assholes they don’t want to listen to.
I suspect that we would have very different view of what’s going on and why, and how those incentives are in place. I don’t believe it has anything to do with the sort of nebulous ‘structural racism’ or ‘White Supremacy’, but with very specific policy choices made over the years by politiicans in Washington and in the big cities. I’d start a thread on it, but I think it would become a train wreck.
What if someone tells you something is offensive and you think it’s ridiculous? The ‘Democrat/Democratic’ thing struck me as being very thin-skinned, and possibly being employed as a verbal weapon to beat up the other side. But I erred on the side of giving the benefit of the doubt.
I would not necessarily fault aomeone for saying, ‘Screw that - I’m not playing this game of hypersensitivity to innocuous words and being forced to constantly parse what I write because my opponent doesn’t like it’ if I agreed that it was trivial. I just happened to fall on the other side of that line because I try to give the benefit of the doubt.
As an example on the other side, we endured the Tea Party being called ‘Tea Baggers’ for years on this board even after many people said it was offensive to them, on a thin-reed justification that some clueless tea party group somewhere used the term for a few days before being informed of its sexual connotation, and therefore no one had a right to complain about it. That was certainly a case where people on this board didn’t change their behaviour when they were infprmed that it was offensive - and it was apparently fine to do so.
And to a religious Tea Partier, ‘Tea Bagger’ is far more offensive and graphic than ‘Democrat’ is to a…Democrat.
I think avoiding unnecessary offense is a moral position to take, so I accepted the claim that ‘Democrat’ could be offensive in some contexts and stopped using it. But then, I would never have called someone a ‘Tea Bagger’ either, even if I hated the Tea Party. So the selective and hypocritical outrage over word choices can be tedious and I understand when some people push back,against it.
Huey Freeman certainly pushed a left-wing view and got thoroughly criticized for how he presented it. Then there are the posters who insist they’re leftists but say some really rotten shit and get roundly trounced for it.
You gotta ask, are things like transphobia and paternalistic racism and leering misogyny inherently conservative in an all-true-Scotsmen way? Or is it possible that people on the left can be afflicted with (and inflict on others) nasty bigoted ideas, and can be criticized for them just like people on the right?
Of course, you’re talking specifically about left-wing views, so I’d say the only real extreme left-wing views around here come from asahi, who catches a ton of shit for them in the Pit.