“Race” is not a term used to describe a common cultural background, in my experience.
There is no “race” of Baseballians. There is no “race” of Catholics. I have never heard someone talk about the “race” of geeks.
I don’t think anyone in this thread really disagrees with the notion that people shouldn’t be called names that offend them; the difficulty is how we can know if that is happening, or if what’s happening is merely something innocuous that resembles it.
Certainly a person can complain when they are at the receiving end of it - and that complaint should probably be upheld even if the speaker doesn’t realise they’ve done anything wrong.
But that’s not the scenario that sparked this thread - this one comprised a complaint about having observed what appeared to be a racial slur between two other parties - and as it turns out, neiither the speaker (location: Delhi), nor the subject (nationality: Pakistani) would consider it a slur.
There’s no way to police that. There’s no need to police that, because that would essentially be saying “When we take this thing out of context, it looks bad!”
I did not do so, any more than “<snip>” is distorting or mangling anything.
I have no idea why you have chosen to stake out this position, but the notion that “blah blah blah meaningless frothing drivel” carries the same editorial weight as “snip” or ellipses is nonsense.
This is a Warning to refrain from doing this again.
[ /Moderating ]
Huh? What are you talking about?
Do you actually know what the Ummah refers to?
Also what are talking about with your reference to “Q-Tip and his friends” is about.
Considering that the people who invented the concept of nationality this is an extremely presumptuous comment.
Now, since you’re the one who seems to have this idea that “Paki” isn’t a racial slur because Muslims aren’t “a race” perhaps you can explain why “spic” and “raghead” aren’t racial slurs since Hispanics and Arabs aren’t races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ummah
We’ve compared enough slurs and insults already, haven’t we? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many people disagree with each other by agreeing with each other.
I looked back at truthSeeker2’s post again, Ibn Warraq, and it occurred to me that he actually was referring to one person in Pakistan - not people who looked Pakistani, not all South Asians, not even Muslims - and the idea that he’s making a derogatory comment about Pakistanis is based entirely on the fact that he said some negative things about Islam. That doesn’t really follow. As I said, I wasn’t entirely convinced he meant no offense, but it was a borderline call. I don’t take issue with your objection to his comment, but I think you’ve more than made your point and I think it should be acknowledged that his post was not unambiguously insulting - you chose to interpret it that way and you’ve chosen to compare “Paki” to every single other racial and ethnic slur out there. (This thread is practically a list of them; if we’ve missed any, please don’t correct me.) Not everybody knows that “Paki” is an insult, but the mods do and we’ll continue to treat it as one when we think it is being used that way and the situation warrants it.
I know I sent you a PM about this, tomndebb, but I didn’t realize the PM I got was also a copy of a post in this thread.
I won’t bother to post the whole message I sent you, but I will say publicly that your official Warning is bullshit; at no time did I repeat my use of ellipses or say that I would ignore your instructions.
Your warning seems to be only because I disputed your characterization of my previous use of ellipses, and AFAIK, disagreeing with a mod about such a thing, even publicly, is not against the SDMB rules.
I’ll take that under consideration. OTOH, it looks to me that you used your “disagreement” to simply claim that you were not going to follow the rules with a soupçon of getting in another personal jab at another poster.
Which part of my 14 word response made you think that? The part where I disagreed with your characterization of what I did? Or the other… wait, there is no other part of my 14 word post.
How about Brit? or Aussie?
Only negatory context I can think for Brit is in “Brits Out!” daubed on walls in Northern Ireland or maybe Scotland.
I can’t think of any negative connotations regarding the term “Aussie”, can you supply some?
This thread is quite a train wreck, but still I must point out that “nation” and “country” are not synonyms. A group of people can form a nation without having their own country.
If we find* one dude, anywhere *that thinks it’s a slur, then it’s out?
But you have shown that Brit is a slur… in some rare conditions. Thus, it needs to be banned just like Paki.
Ah, I see. Thanks for pointing that out. I thought he was trying to have an honest, though heated debate and had genuinely thought I was referring to something that I wasn’t when he said:
I think it would be preposterous to believe that he thought I was actually referring to some obscure music group from the 90s and far more likely that he was engaged in other behavior which I’d rather not elaborate on because I’ve already given both you and Tom headaches.
I’ll merely say, and hopefully this doesn’t violate board rules
Snowboarder Bo
It’s obvious you were just trying to pick a fight so I’m not going to respond to you on this thread and recommend that if you want to continue that you open a pit thread and perhaps I’ll join you.
Once again, I’m genuinely surprised and confused as to why you’re bothered by my using various racial slurs to demonstrate how horrible other slurs are. I’m hardly the first person to do this and I’m certainly not going to be the last. I’ve certainly seen many gay activists bring up the term “nigger” to demonstrate how awful the term “faggot”. In fact as already mentioned at my college after the administration didn’t react strongly enough to some people scrawling anti-gay slurs on the sidewalk in the minds of the gay student union the President and Vice President publicly demanded to know whether or not the same would have happened if the graffiti artists had chalked “Kike” or “Nigger”. I don’t remember any black students being upset by it. Moreover, when American Indian organizations publicly compared naming a football team The Washington Redskins to naming a team The New York Niggers, the NAACP’s reaction was not outrage but support.
Similarly, plenty of people on SDMB have repeatedly done the same. In an article on the term “tranny”, Miller, a mod, actually brought up the term “nigger” and specifically compared “nigger” to “tranny”.
For that matter, I certainly wasn’t upset at the scene in Three Kings when the characters spent several minutes arguing about why it was perfectly okay to refer to “ragheads” “camel jockeys” and “towelhead” but not “dune coon” or “sand nigger” with the consensus that “raghead” “camel jockey” and “towelhead” were okay to use but “sand nigger” and “dune coon” were crossing the line.
I’m not asking to mock your sensibilities or beliefs but because I honestly don’t understand why you found what I did so upsetting.
One last thing if you don’t mind.
In post #71, you said “since we gave truthseeker2 several other mod instructions”. I don’t see him receiving any “mod instructions” in that thread much less several.
Would you mind linking me to the several mod instructions he’d received.
In the movie “An Everlasting Piece,” set in the 1980s in Belfast, the Catholic characters definitely used “You’re a Brit” and “Brits” as derogatory terms for Protestant Irish.
True. In fact, the people who invented the concept of nationality most certainly considered the Jews to be a nation.
Similarly, the Muslim concept of the Ummah(the Islamic community/nation) certainly corresponds with the western concept of nation and is often translated as “nation”.
What part of “context” do you not understand? :rolleyes: Jap and/or Paki have a history of being used in derogatory fashion - Brit and/or Aussie do not. If you don’t understand that, I can’t help you.
So, as shown by** Acsenray **and by the irish poster whose name I can’t remember- also does “Brit” has that same history.
Sure, I agree that context is critical. But thus Paki is fine- in most American contexts.
So is “Jap”. I just hear it the other day “Man, that’s one cool Jap bike you got there!”, said admiringly of a motorcycle. Is that a slur?
Now, when I use it here, I use it in the context of “Japs bomb Pearl Harbor!” and I feel that that historical context is also fine.
I don’t have a problem with the tactic. I told you pages ago that I understood what you were saying and I knew before you started this thread that “Paki” can be a racist insult. In fact that’s part of the problem: my objection is to how often you are resorting to posting lists of racial slurs. Here you’ve just recited your litany of racist words again with no purpose that I can see, since you’ve used this analogy a dozen times already and almost everybody in the thread already understood it. Surely posting it again isn’t convincing anyone who doesn’t agree with you. You’ve now posted far more racial slurs than any actual racist would ever be allowed to do here. I’ll just politely but firmly suggest you quit now, having achieved your point many posts ago.
I already did this. Posts #23 and #29 are mod notes. They were directed to everyone in the thread and were intended to move the discussion away from the potential racial slur and back to the actual thread topic. Of course by then, you’d already posted more racial slurs than truthSeeker2:
(edited)
(Partial quote.)
And, of course, this one in response to tomndebb’s mod note (partial quote):
I haven’t moderated you for using any of these terms and I’m not accusing you of actual prejudice, but you made your point a long time ago and it’s become excessive and distasteful.