I wonder if anyone asked Jim what he would like to be called.
People (especially as they get older) use antiquated language, I still “tape” television shows even though they are digitally recorded without any tape. I still “dial” my phone, even though touch tone and cell phones have been around for years. I also still go to the “Dairy Mart” even though the store changed its name 15 years ago and even then the store only sold milk as a very small part of its inventory.
The same with “colored” or “negro” or “black” (which seems to actually be more acceptable today than 15 or 20 years ago.) My grandfathers both taught me that segregation was evil and that the treatment of “coloreds” was absolutely awful. That was the standard term that nobody at the time considered offensive.
But then my grandparents are told that the term is offensive. They were rightfully upset because they were on the good side of the debate. Then they would ask who exactly decided that this term was offensive? Was there a plebiscite among black Americans who decided this? Of course there was not, it usually gets started by one or a handful of members of left wing academia who merely declare it.
That’s not a good reason to change your speech anymore than if Donald Trump told you to use certain words. But then after a while they come up with the ridiculous notion of “people first” language whereby "colored person is offensive because it does not describe that the person is a person first and colored second. That is absurd. You used “rich man” but said that you meant it to be derogatory, but what about young man, old man, elderly gentleman, black man, engineer, doctor, lawyer, white man, the postman, etc. etc. etc. Should I bitch when someone calls me a lawyer, demanding that they show that I am a person first and foremost and that lawyering is simply my career? It’s word juggling.
I have no desire to use the term colored, but I do worry that it will be demanded of me to change my words, not because they are demeaning, but because our betters want to control my speech by simply declaring that it is demeaning and make me hop around changing my language upon their own demand.
Oriental is a great example. There was never an offensive context for that term, but someone decided it was offensive using childlike statements like “Orientals are rugs, Asians are people.”
In college in one of the PC classes, we were told not to use the term handicapped under the rock solid logic that “Simply because one has a disability, does not mean he or she is handicapped.” That’s just word salad. I could say “Simply because a person has a handicap, does not mean he or she is disabled” that makes just as much sense.
TLDR: Being against PC does not mean that I want to be able to call someone a nigger or a faggot. The objection is made by people who do not mean any offense at all being required (by whom?) to change their language lest they be a social pariah or lose a debate immediately.
Language changes. It typically changes slowly enough that everyone can get on board. The correct response to “the term you used to use is anachronistic and a little offensive” is, “whoops, time to change my terminology”, not sputtering, scoffing, taking offense, and insisting that there’s no possible way that’s the case. If you care so much about being on the right side of the debate, you should care at least enough to update your terms once or twice (PoC has been in wide use since the 80s, dude), and actually listen when people tell you what bothers them about what you’re saying.
Of course, it’s true. That’s pretty much the idea of “free speech”. It means that even the ideas you personnally don’t like can be expressed.
If you have a problem with that, you’re pretty much opposed to free speech.
That’s not really the point, though.
It’s more like… Y’know how Gab is supposed to be “Twitter, but where speech is really free and we won’t ban you for expressing your opinion”? Instead, Gab is “Twitter, but basically every single user is a neo-nazi”. Voat is supposed to be “Reddit, but where speech is really free and we won’t ban you for expressing your opinion”. Instead, it’s “Reddit, but basically every single user is a neo-nazi”. That’s the dynamic Leaper is referring to. And Scott Alexander covered it pretty well, IMHO.
I used to think that there was enough demand for a free marketplace of ideas that if a company become too restrictive, another one would spring up to replace it. Then I suffered through the conflict between Reddit and Voat.
Reddit recently alienated (no pun intended) some of its users, who decided to move en masse to an alternative Reddit-like platform called Voat, whose owner promised not to restrict content unless it was illegal (in his home country of Switzerland, which permits a lot). I don’t want to get into the details too much (though I did explain my perspective on it on Tumblr), but suffice it to say that (one) (small) part of the problem was that people thought Reddit was failing its free speech principles by cracking down on various unsavory groups.
HL Mencken once said that “the trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
There’s an unfortunate corollary to this, which is that if you try to create a libertarian paradise, you will attract three deeply virtuous people with a strong committment to the principle of universal freedom, plus millions of scoundrels. Declare that you’re going to stop holding witch hunts, and your coalition is certain to include more than its share of witches.
So while some small percent of Reddit’s average users moved over, a very large percent of its witches did. Sometimes the witchcraft was nothing worse than questioning Reddit’s political consensus. Other times, it was harassment, hate groups, and creepy porn.
Or from another article of his:
I wrote before (1, 2) about the sort of dynamics this situation produces. A couple of years ago, Reddit decided to ban various undesirables and restrict discussion of offensive topics. A lot of users were really angry about this, and some of them set up a Reddit clone called Voat which promised that everyone was welcome regardless of their opinion.
What happened was – a small percent of average Reddit users went over, lured by curiosity or a principled commitment to free speech. And also, approximately 100% of Reddit’s offensive undesirables went there, lured by the promise of being able to be terrible and get away with it.
Even though Voat’s rules were similar to Reddit’s rules before the latter tightened its moderation policies, Voat itself was nothing like pre-tightening Reddit. I checked to see whether it had gotten any better in the last year, and I found the top three stories were:
- SJW Awareness is a steam curator that warns you about SWJ games
- Africans describe their extortion schemes. They put babies into ovens and hot showers. Now they’re migrating to the EU.
- “The Phantom”, a black serial killer who targets blonde haired white children, has been freed from prison and roaming the streets of the same city he terrorized
The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
…Seriously, these places fucking suck.
What’s going on here is pretty straightforward. All of these platforms that scream about “FREE SPEECH” as their main identifying draw? The main signal they’re trying to send is, “You can say whatever you want here and not get banned.” Which, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad signal (although hoo boy do they tend to be bad about recognizing the legal limits of free speech, such as harassment, incitement to violence, reporting terrorist threats, etc.). But the actual reason for their creation was that another community decided that, free speech or not, they did not want to associate with a certain group of people - jailbait enthusiasts, neo-nazis, men’s rights activists, Milo Yiannopolous, et cetera - and so a clone website sprung up to cater more specifically to them.
Of course, if you’re not really big on free speech, the fact that the website you’re a part of decided to ban /r/fatpeoplehate or /r/incels probably doesn’t bother you too much. Those are shitty communities filled with Fo people who weren’t just banned because they spoke openly about their beliefs in their own forums, but because they felt the need to share the hate elsewhere. And even if you’re really into free speech, you’d have to be really, really, really into free speech to prefer to spend your time at a forum containing mostly the members thrown out of those aforementioned shitty communities. And not very many people are that into free speech.
The same dynamic applies to Gab, Voat, Conservapedia, PureFlix/FoxNation, Fox News as a whole, whatever inevitably springs up as the conservative alternative to Patreon in response to it banning Milo Yiannopolous (poor guy just can’t catch a break - who knew that being a literal neo-nazi would be a bad career move?), et cetera. And they’ll market themselves as “free speech!” platforms, either because they legitimately believe it, or because it’s a better pitch than “we’re appealing mostly to nazis and pedophiles”. Because make no mistake, that’s what Gab and Voat are - platforms for nazis. They may not have been intended as such, but that’s what they turned into, because most people, when they realize a platform is okay with Nazis, will not hang out on that platform.
Side note on this, but the Oriental thing was nothing to do with rugs. The term ‘Orient’ just means East, it was never well-defined, and keeps changing. At one point it was the Islamic world, then it referred to the Ottoman Empire region, then it shifted over to become East Asia. UK continues to use oriental to mean ‘Near East’ (relative to UK), Americans use it to mean ‘Far East’ (also… relative to UK, when Far East is actually closer).
For what it’s worth I personally find ‘Asian’ no better than ‘Oriental’. Everyone knows you’re still talking about Chinese-looking rice-eating people who were occupied by Japan at least once, but those are very different places and people, and Asia of course includes Saudi Arabia, Burma, Turkmenistan, Russia, etc. So ‘Asian people’ really isn’t much better.
Precisely, it bothers me. What you describe (unsavory people gathering on some platforms that don’t implement any limitations other than legal) is the obvious result of main sites enforcing always more restrictive rules in order not to offend anybody. When I looked for alternatives to Tumblr, for instance, I noticed that both Pillowfort and BDSMlr were banning racist and hateful content. BDSMlr (weirdly enough) is banning rape and torture. You might be happy of it, I’m not. I put this move in the same category as the decision to ban porn on Tumblr.
There’s this kind of debate on Deviant Art, for instance. The guy who does torture porn is offended that DA doesn’t ban underage stuff. The guy who does rape porn is offended that DA doesn’t ban torture stuff. The guy who does BDSM porn is offended that DA doesn’t ban rape stuff. The guy who does regular porn is offended that DA doesn’t ban BDSM stuff. The guy who does erotica is offended that DA doesn’t ban porn stuff. The guy who does artistic nudes is offended that DA doesn’t ban erotic stuff. The guy who does inspirational pictures is offended that DA doesn’t ban artistic nudes (yes, there are people complaining about artistic nudes on DA, either because they feel it’s women oppression or because of the children who might see them). Everybody seem to think that whoever wants to ban his stuff is a big prude, but banning the other guy’s stuff is obviously a sensible move everybody sane should approve. It’s blatantly clear that everybody wants to ban things they find unsavory, and the only disagreement is about where to draw the line. As in the story : “we’ve already established who you are, now we’re only arguing about the price”. Everybody has the mind of a censor and their only disagreement is that everyone wants to be the one deciding where to draw the line. “No pixel has been harmed in the making of my picture, but this guy over there is harming pixels way too much, and should be banned because I can’t stand his stuff”. Basically, there are no objective reason to ban “this other stuff” and not theirs, and no argument they use to protest against censorship that hits them that isn’t equally valid for stuff they themselves want banned. Besides (even though it’s not my main argument), it has a chilling effect on everybody (should I paint this woman with bigger boobs, let’s it will be reported as child porn? Should I make the sex less rough in my story, let’s it will be reported as rape? Should I delete the flogging scene, let’s it will be reported as torture?).
I picked an example I’m familiar with which is not strictly “free speech” as in the sharing of ideas, but you get my drift. Drawing the line between what can be said and what can’t be said is no different from drawing the line between what can be depicted and what can’t be depicted. You’re pretty happy with platforms banning mysogyny, but if I remember correctly you were unhappy with Tumblr banning porn, even though one of the most vocal group opposing porn is radical feminists, who would label you a mysogynist for supporting it. You’re pretty happy with platforms banning hate speech, but most of them include derogatory statements about religions as hate speech, and put the bar pretty low for this (because there are a lot of religious people taking offense out there). Don’t expect to be able to paint a “Christ in piss” of course, regardless how meaningful you think it is, make sure you don’t draw Muhammad, and think twice before expressing contempt for religion if you’re an atheist.
Their reasons to ban hate speech are the same as their reasons to ban porn : people are offended. The result is the same : hate speech and porn (as you could see with Tumblr) are pushed towards darker and darker corners of the internet. Unless the line is drawn by yourself, there’s no guarantee that your ox won’t be the one gored next, or that the ideas you want to express aren’t already included in the forbidden list in the mind of many people (as I said : your favorite erotica is mysogyny, and your criticism of the Catholic church is hate speech). And finally, there’s no consistent way to support one kind of censorship while defending another. You’re just happy that they happen to have banned whatever you don’t like, like plenty of people are happy that they banned whatever you liked. You can’t reasonably argue to ban X while being shocked that Y was banned too. Every time you smile at the thought of these horrible people being banned, you become part of the problem and one of the proximate cause of this general sanitization of the internet (and not just the internet : the UK has made illegal to own most depictions of BDSM) that will end up with you being banned too.
Can I remind you of an argument that most certainly you have thought of or even probably used wrt other issues : nobody forces you at gunpoint to read pedophile apologists or white supremacists blogs.
Oh! And I forgot to mention something I wanted to : every time you get whichever group you don’t like banned, you’ve achieved exactly nothing. As you pointed yourself, it’s just reforming in some other, darker place which is even more of an echo chamber.
Where are you going with this? If I host a website, are you saying I don’t have the power to ban anything I want? That I SHOULDN’T have that power? It’s my site, I can do what I want with it.
To quote the guardian:
The community was banned this week after Reddit updated its site-wide policy to prohibit content that “encourages, glorifies, incites or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people”.
“Communities focused on this content and users who post such content will be banned from the site. As of November 7, r/Incels has been banned for violating this policy,” said a Reddit spokeswoman.
I mean, we can debate whether that’s fair, but what’s beyond debate is the question of whether or not /r/incels existing was a good thing. It wasn’t. The only people it was arguably worse for than its own members were the women the movement targeted. This is what I meant by this passage above:
(although hoo boy do they tend to be bad about recognizing the legal limits of free speech, such as harassment, incitement to violence, reporting terrorist threats, etc.)
Because, as it turns out, when you gather a bunch of really horrible people in one place to discuss their horrible beliefs and let them fester in an echo chamber where anyone who bucks the trend gets downvoted, shunned, or banned, those beliefs can often morph into awful, awful actions. Gab has gotten in trouble for failing to deal with the violent threats on its platform. Freedom of speech is not absolute; harassment is not covered, threats of violence are not covered, et cetera. Even if you don’t have a problem with hate speech, the reason so many people do have a problem with it is that hate speech very regularly comes from the same people who will commit hateful and violent actions, because the idea “black people are committing genocide against us” and the action “I’m going to shoot up a black church” typically come from the same place.
I’d rather the platform I was on have standards against hate speech. I know for a fact that you’d rather the platform you’re on have standards beyond “it’s legal” - because you’re posting on the Straight Dope, rather than 4chan.
This should come as little surprise. Most people would rather not share a platform with Blut-Und-Boden-1488. The overlap between “people interested in BDSM” and “people who would like to share their platform with nazis” is even smaller. The equivalence between nationalistic and racist hate speech and porn is… well, kind of bullshit, regardless of what radfems think. I mean, finish this - “First they came for the nazis, and I said nothing, because I wasn’t a nazi. Then they came for…” I mean, seriously, there’s kind of a societal Schelling Point here - bigoted hate speech is on a different level from, well, everything else.
This is simply not true.
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/6zg6w6/reddits_bans_of_rcoontown_and_rfatpeoplehate/
Social media offers a great many people immediate access to these groups and individuals. People have been talking about how the far right has hacked youtube’s autoplay algorithm for quite a while now, but that’s just the most obvious example. When this shit can’t just show up in your feed, much fewer people are willing to spend the time and energy to actively seek it out. Make it uncomfortable or unfun to go to a KKK rally, and a lot of people will stop going, and it’s not like there’s that many ways for these people to network.
Who decides what is offensive? That’s my issue. I don’t see that it is Asians, for example, claiming that “oriental” is offensive. There are no internal polls conducted. I dispute that some random person on the internet or at a university can tell me how to speak.
If I know a black guy named Larry and he tells me he wants to now go by his full name of Lawrence, then that is fine, that is personal to him. If he tells me that he doesn’t want to be called black, but African-American, then I will call him that and will not use the term black to describe other members of his race: around him. But I would be a little pissed off at him and wonder his motivating at taking offense to something that was not meant with malice and that there is no logic reason to take offense at it.
But I get really upset, and it is the point of this thread, when third parties claim offense to something and demand that I change my language based upon their claims. Again, who appointed them to speak?
It is even worse when third parties unrelated to the group claim this power. When a white liberal, for example, says that I cannot say oriental. Again, on what authority do they speak? Further, maybe this person is motivated by political bias and/or has spoken to a vocal subset of the group they claim to represent that does not reflect the views of a majority of the group? Why do I have to jump when told by that person?
This is a very, very important point which is typically glossed over. Pick an issue that the overwhelming majority would agree upon; say a guy says that he believes that most women who claimed that they were raped are just whores who were asking for it. If they didn’t want to have sex then they shouldn’t have went to the party in revealing clothes and should have been home reading their Bibles and learning to be a good stay at home wife and mother.
You can do one of two things:
- You can banish him from the SDMB or any other social organization. Tell him his argument is simply stupid and ignore him, fire him from his job or end his entertainment or professional career.
OR
- You can engage him in the argument and attempt to persuade him that he is wrong and back up your assertions with scientific data. Maybe that persuasion will be successful or maybe not.
If we do #1, which we do today, the guy has not changed his opinion. Indeed he is more solidified in it because it seems that nobody is able to “rebut” his argument. But he does know to keep his mouth shut. He won’t say it in public or at work, but he still thinks it.
Then in the dark settings of a redneck bar, he meets others similarly outcast and they become friends. With nothing to check their beliefs, they become radicalized. Not a single person is there to object to their outrageous ideas so they grow. And then they remember that they told a racist joke and got fired for that so they lump blacks in with women and then with gays and transgenders and everything that the “polite society” is screwing them for.
They continue to radicalize. Not only our their (now radicalized) beliefs losing, the debate cannot even be had; they cannot even say what they believe. That is a powderkeg for violence. If my favored candidate loses an election, then I can treat my wounds and hope to win next time. If my position is not even being heard, then I might take some violent action. That has caused wars throughout history.
Now, if we do #2, then some people may have to hear offensive things. Well, suck it up and be an adult. That’s the price of freedom. You attempt to educate and persuade this person why they are wrong. Maybe you get a few converts. You lose a few others. But the person, even though he lost the debate today, is free to come back and debate tomorrow. He remains part of civil society.
That is healthy for other reasons. Society ebbs and flows; what was good 100 years ago may be bad today or vice versa. We don’t know about 100 years from now, so the default position should be that every idea is a potentially good one, WITH some very limited exceptions.
Today, though, the exceptions are not limited. Take SSM for instance (not to rehash that debate). We have posters here that were opposed to same sex marriage in 2005, but by 2012, they came to support it. Some (around 35% of the US population) remain opposed to it. Do you want to make those people social pariahs or maybe hope to bring them into the fold by 2022?
Transgender restroom access if even more pronounced. From day one it was decreed that all good people supported it and any argument to the contrary was “transphobia” A guy could say, “But what about my 13 year old girl, and a male to female transperson with a penis comes in and…” Nope! No! NO! I used the word “transphobia” so I win the debate.
It is bad for reasoned debate to simply decree that certain statements are racist, sexist, transphobic, islamophobic, xenophobic, etc. That helps you “win” the debate but maybe you were wrong in your characterization of what was said and maybe there was some truth in those statements. If you shut the debate down, and I’ll get fired from my job for saying it, we will never know. That’s the objection to PC.
It is not about insults or anything of the sort.
Just out of curiosity, how often do you get into these conversations? Because I think I’ve gotten into them maybe one time. That was when my kids told me that I really shouldn’t say “retarded” anymore to describe someone who is acting dumb. Do you often have white liberals telling you you can’t say Oriental? How odd.
Anyway, assuming this really is a problem for you, my guess is that, more often than not, the white liberal is probably trying to help you update your ridiculously dated and possibly offensive language in a good faith effort to avoid embarrassment on your part. Chances are, these white liberals assume you used the dated and possibly offensive term without realizing that it was so, and not because you’ve decided that 1950s terms for minorities are the only ones that count, and that you’re easily offended by someone mentioning the updated terms.
I’m sure if their speech has offended you, they would apologize and let you go using dated and possibly offensive terms, but they may decide to interact with you less.
When you’re addressing the jury, I’m sure you’d have to no problems referring to your client as “that negro”, or "my colored client, or “the Chinaman defendant”. Hopefully, the judge and jury, and your client, are all cool with that.
Everybody who uses language. As language users change over time, so does language.
Nobody is saying that you personally have to hold the opinion that any particular epithet is intrinsically offensive. But it’s a simple fact of life that if you refuse to maintain any awareness about what significant numbers of other people consider offensive, you will not necessarily be given the benefit of the doubt on your intentions.
Then you’re not paying attention. There are plenty of Asians who object to using the word “oriental” to describe Asian people.
If you are looking for some kind of official authority to “tell you how to speak”, you are doomed to be disappointed. But if you expect that the absence of some kind of official authority means that you’re entitled to some kind of Get-Out-of-Racism-Free card when you fail to pay attention to what sorts of expressions are widely considered offensive, you’re also doomed to be disappointed.
Language is a collective art form that we all practice together by noticing how other people are using it and adapting our usage as a result. Lawyers and mathematicians and other practitioners with highly technical forms of expression can require their particular professional subset of language use to be much more tightly rule-bound. But whining because ordinary language has areas of ill-defined semantics and debatable interpretation just comes across as petulant and childish.
Using language like a grownup means paying attention to the subtleties of change and interpretation, not just sulking because you’re not being given what you consider sufficiently clear and immutable guidelines from a universally recognized higher authority.
Why don’t you ask all the people who piss their pants over “Happy holidays” instead of "Merry Christmas? Or the people who feel outrage over football players kneeling during the NA instead of standing? Conservatives are always crystal clear on what’s offensive and who gets to decide it when it comes to their sacred cows.
So the thing about societal norms is that they generally aren’t dictated from on high. It’s kind of making the same mistake as this comic makes.
…Okay, only barely, but I will shoehorn SMBC into my posts as much as humanly possible dammit.
But basically, the answer is: we did. Society as a whole did. Who gave them that power? Well, to the degree that they didn’t already have it (e.g. your boss telling you “use this language this way”), the answer is usually that you did. In the above example, you gave Larry that power, because it’s generally a pretty damn reasonable power to request. “Don’t call people things they don’t want to be called” isn’t exactly “let me take money directly from your paycheck” or “let me lock you up” as far as power goes, and it always struck me as a weird thing to worry about. And because this power is so ephemeral, it’s often… well, not really there. Some guy asking you to modify the way you speak? If you want to, you can usually just ignore them. Unless there’s a deep societal convention, in which case things get a little more complicated. But you’re probably not going to get a lot of shit for saying “oriental”, or for saying “handicapped” a year or two after the euphemism treadmill decides that that’s out and some new term is in.
How do we decide? Well, varies from person to person. Just to take one obvious example, I can imagine good reasons why someone might not want to be called “black” (it identifies them with the color of their skin, but they aren’t actually very black, for example), and good reasons why someone might not want to be called “african-american” (their family has lived in the US as long as any white person’s and they don’t appreciate that part of their heritage). It’s what individuals are comfortable with, mostly.
As for those third parties… past a certain point, it can become taboo within a society to refer to people certain ways. You might as well ask why we don’t say “negro” any more - people became uncomfortable with it for a number of reasons (reasons neither you nor I are in any good position to judge, by the by). Well, enough of that, and saying “negro” starts signaling not just anachronism, but disdain. When you say that, it says to people, “I’m not going to adjust my language to make black people more comfortable for some reason,” and they’re left to wonder what that reason is, and often come up with answers that leave you looking kind of like a jerk. Y’know, like “That guy keeps calling Obama a negro; what the fuck is wrong with him?”
What gets to me is why you get so mad about it. It’s not a huge deal! Seriously! So you call the guy African-American rather than black. D’y’know why you do it? Because it makes him comfortable. But that doesn’t need to be zero-sum. There’s no reason this needs to piss you off, or bother you, or even tweak your sensibilities. “Huh, they want me to refer to them using different terms? That has no effect on my life whatsoever, signals to them that I’m their friend, and shows them that I respect them, sure, no problem.”
(This is how sensible people feel about pronouns for transgender/non-binary people, by the by.)
So yeah, I don’t get it. Why so angry? Where is this coming from?
It is not so bad now. I could not care less if I refer to people as Asians versus Orientals. But you have set the groundwork for controlling speech without any real reason other than that some (minority? majority? academics?) believe and feel that such speech is offensive.
It leads to to a society where in a debate on detaining children of illegal immigrants that the preferred term is “temporary child care centers” and that the term “cages” is terribly offensive to the brave men and women who guard our borders. And “we” won’t lock you up for saying cages, but you’ll just get banned from the SDMB, not be really free to debate it, and fired from your job.
Which means he’s not spreading it.
Look, I realize this is kind of free market of ideas dogma here, but… good ideas don’t always win. What matters more than how true something is is how convincing it is, and how much attention it gets. The former is at least somewhat correlated with a statement’s truth value; the latter is basically completely orthogonal.
Like… D’ya think white fascism is on the rise again because racism and fascism are good ideas? I could demolish Richard Spencer’s entire bullshit intellectual framework by asking one question about genetic makeup and race! These are phenomenally stupid ideas when you really think critically about them.
…And yet…
See, the thing about this is that you have to assume a certain level of good faith. You have to assume the person you’re arguing with is actually interested in the truth in some way. That they’re not just there to propagandize or signal strength. Because if they are… Debate may help them reach more eyeballs, and if you do it well and carefully and understand what you’re getting into, you can sometimes reach their audience, but… Well, sometimes you’re Bill Nye, and maybe don’t cause more harm on balance than good; and sometimes you’re Sargon of Akkad, and make neo-nazis look rational and sensible. This is why Dawkins doesn’t debate creationists. There’s nothing to gain and much to lose. They’re not aiming to convince you. They’re aiming to gain access to your audience.
Y’know what’s a whole lot more effective than a redneck bar with a few dozen people in it?
A forum with 690,000 pseudonymous users and a self-sorting mechanism by which groupthink can be enforced.
A facebook page with millions of followers.
A youtube channel that gets hundreds of thousands of views through the autoplay queue (Youtube’s algorithm is awful at this - I follow almost exclusively leftist/liberal youtubers, and it still recommends alt-righters and fascists to me!)
That first example isn’t an exaggeration, mind you - that’s literally /r/The_Donald. You want radicalization? Check that shit out. It’s a massive, public forum that exists solely as a pro-Trump echo chamber, and it has more people in it than the average city. Attempts to convince them that that their positions are wrong are met with downvotes if not outright deletion, as well as thought-stopping cliches meant to stop those who saw your statements from actually thinking about what you’re saying. There is a reason “Fake News” or some variant of it has been a common rallying cry of the far-right fringe for quite some time, and was very popular among the nazis - it doesn’t matter how bad the news is for your side if it’s all fake anyways. It doesn’t matter that Trump is so poorly-received that his picture shows up when you google “idiot” if google is biased against you. Why should anything matter? “Trump is making America great again, and if the biased lamestream media and obstructionist dems would get out of his way, he could do it a lot faster.” This is literally the level of argument you get when you point out the latest negative headlines to Trump supporters on sites with a more right-wing lean. Facts do not matter. They’ve been trained to close off their epistemology to anything that would make their side look bad. What does “debate” help, in that situation?
Notice what we’re looking at? There’s our old friend, “bad-faith actors” again.
Of course, in reality, it’s not a debate. It’s witnessing. They’re not trying to come to the truth - the truth is really fucking shitty for them, and the smarter ones among them know that. Notice how these groups never tend to hold debate on their home turf? Nobody ever “debates” the age of the earth in a Pentecostal church. Nobody ever “debates” the merits of Donald Trump on /r/The_Donald. Nobody ever “debates” whether or not blackpill philosophy is valid on /r/Incels. In fact, those debates are just about overtly banned. It’s export only ideology. Because the goal, again, isn’t truth-seeking. It’s validation of the ideology. They want to spread their ideology to as many people as possible, with the goal of convincing people who don’t know better or don’t want to think too hard about it.
And because the goal is recruitment, not debate, social media serves as a constant source of fuel for them. Putting your shit on Youtube or Facebook or Twitter guarantees at least a potential audience that’s absolutely huge. Catch the eye of youtube’s search algorithm, go viral on facebook, and suddenly you’ve got a huge audience at your fingertips. People don’t have to go out of their way to hunt you down, they can just access you right in the same place they talk to their parents or their friends, in the same place they watch cute cat videos and livestreams.
Taking that fuel source away makes it that much harder for them to spread. It actually works. So that’s a thing.
Do you have cite for this? It was my sense, from my long-ago reading of the book, that although most, if not all, of the whites in the story use the word, that was Twain accurately portraying the attitudes of people at that time and place – in a distinctly unflattering light – and not his personal outlook. And according to Wikipedia, “Nineteenth-century literature features usages of “nigger” without racist connotation. Mark Twain, in the autobiographic book Life on the Mississippi (1883), used the term within quotes, indicating reported speech, but used the term “negro” when writing in his own narrative persona.”
True, Huck Finn uses the term, but that’s because he’s a product of his times. However, his affectionate relationship with Jim, and his epiphany at the end, that he won’t turn Jim in, even if it means he’ll go to hell, makes it clear that he is rejecting the bigotry of his society.
Do you have a cite or a reliable example of this actually happening? (Hint: Rush Limbaugh is not an acceptable source.)
And when #2 fails? You have only given two options. We engage him, attempt to persuade him, back it up with scientific data, and he says, “Nope, not listening, and I’m going to continue to pronounce my beliefs whether you want to hear them or not.”
And even then, they don’t get banished. There are some “scientific” racists on this board right now. They are tolerated, and in some threads that have nothing to do with their beliefs, they can even be welcomed.
But, there have been some racists on this board who could not keep their racist beliefs from infecting every thread they posted in. After several attempts at your #2 there, they eventually were banned. There are racists out there who have had several conversations with their bosses, and eventually, their bosses give up trying to explain that they cannot express their racist views and keep their job, and the racist chooses their racist views over their job.
#2 there would be great, if it worked all the time, but what do you suggest is done with someone when it does not work?