I don’t, either, which deeply surprised me. Perhaps the meaning of the word has changed, or maybe I’m just using the wrong word.
Exactly. If you use a word that is much more offensive than you realized, the normal flow of the conversation is, “Did you just say XXX?!” “Yes, I did, why do you ask?” “Don’t you know that’s fill in reason for offensiveness here?” "Oh, really?! I had no idea. I guess I shouldn’t say that.
I’ve seen that exact interchange several times, including with me being the person who said the offensive word. Typically, all parties them move on.
did you miss the “if”? I rarely struggle to explain myself and never avoid answering
seriously? you don’t think people are discriminated against for those reasons and have been for a long time?
What about class? What about accents? What about intelligence?
Individuals are society. A job opportunity denied to a person because of their class is of exactly the same importance as one denied because of gender or race.
And when someone deliberately uses a word he knows is extremely offensive, then apologises for it when called out (but not to the person he insulted). Is that common too?
Personally, I think it’s harmful to denigrate people based on their weight, their height, their level of education, their social class, and a lot of other “group” characteristics, and I respect the user of those slurs less, too.
That is not something I’ve ever personally witnessed. Perhaps we travel in different circles.
I am an American, and I haven’t read most of this thread.
But no, I don’t think “people using slurs” is mostly an internet phenomenon. It happens all the time in real life. One of the examples I was thinking of was people standing around chatting, irl, and one of them used the verb “gyp”, and someone else pointed out that it was a slur referencing gypsies.
That depends a whole lot on who one’s around in real life.
It’s been a very common social phenomenon, among some groups of people, since long before the internet existed; including both people using such terms unthinkingly, and people using them deliberately.
One reason some people are so resistant to any suggestion that they should stop using such terms is that they’ve spent their whole lives until recently thinking of such use as “normal.”
Are we still talking about the Pit here? Because it sounds like a strange exchange for the Pit.
Going back to the OP, if a conservative thinks that an insult is out of line, they could tell the other person that their insult was not acceptable in their group, and the people in the Pit would stop and apologize? I’ve never seen this happen.
So? Being American doesn’t stop you acknowledging that there are many other countries with their own unique histories and social problems and consequently ideas of what is offensive.
Perhaps we travel in different circles.
Conservatives are Bad and Wrong, so it’s okay to insult a whole group of people in that case.
I don’t deliberately “travel” in circles that use such slurs on purpose. I read a lot, and have certainly seen them in casual use in print, including in books not specifically about such issues. I even now hear them occasionally from people I run into casually; and that was IME more common when I was younger – probably because people are now more likely to object to it.
With racial, ethnic, comments on physical shape/ability, etc., slurs? Do you have some examples? – I do remember some comments on Trump’s weight; they tended to be called out, though I don’t know that they were called out by conservatives.
And if you see such slurs used against conservatives, do you call them out on those grounds? or only on the grounds that conservatives are being insulted?
Looking at it more seriously, the things @Novelty_Bobble listed are all viewed as bad or lesser by somebody, and therefore worthy of insult. And very often the group so insulted are seen as deserving it, or just as being the ‘other’ who it is okay to express hatred towards. Eg, fat people are deserving of scorn because they lack self-control, poor people are poor because they haven’t worked hard enough, or because they waste their money on booze and gambling, etc, so it’s okay to insult them. Both these factors apply to progressives insulting conservatives.
It’s a natural human desire to find an ‘other’, as it helps in-group cohesion. Having barred themselves from treating usual candidates like foreigners as the other, progressives are forced to choose them based on political beliefs or other not-yet-barred characteristics.
Class is also a thing that people have used to discriminate against other people for a long time, absolutely. However, in our society at least, class is something less intrinsic to you than the state you are in at that time. That doesn’t mean that, say, people demonizing the poor isn’t a huge problem. It absolutely is. If we take the attitude that poverty is a moral failure then it’s easy to refuse to help anyone who is poor. But that’s really not the same thing as a “slur”.
Accents aren’t something people discriminate against in and of itself, that’s just a marker for ethnic discrimination.
Intelligence, I’m not sure what you mean there. If you mean slurs against people with a mental disability, I already included that. If you just mean people who aren’t as smart - no, I don’t think we have any kind of systemic discrimination against stupid people. If anything, American culture looks down at those who are too educated or smart.
And part of the reason it’s a problem is that such slurs encourage those attitudes.
Do they? I don’t think insults based on taking a specific political position are in the same category. They’re based on specific behavior.
I do think some on this board tend to use the term “conservative” to include positions and behavior that until recently weren’t considered conservative at all; but then, I think that’s not limited to the left.
One of the reasons slurs matter is that encouraging the attitude behind them is likely to lead to affecting job opportunities.
The pit is a subset of the world, but I have never been talking specifically about the pit. And this thread isn’t specifically about the pit, either. It’s about whether it’s good or bad if the board as a whole is driving away conservative posters. But I wasn’t commenting on that topic, I was just posting about a side issue that arose.
I rather think we do. I travel in circles where it’s normal to call out an accidental slur. Perhaps you travel in circles where no one ever uses slurs.
I also overhear slurs on public transit, while waiting in lines, and in any number of other places. Perhaps that’s a more common problem in the US than it is where you live.
That’s nonsense. They’re a marker for class, and some regional accents are looked down on in-and-of themselves. I’m very skeptical that that isn’t true in America also.
I don’t even know how you can think that. Have you lived at all?
Sure, but the issue is that you’re one of them dirty accent-having-class members. Not that you have an accent. The accent is just how I know you’re a dirty lower classman.
Ah, people don’t talk while queuing or on public transport in the UK. People almost never chat with strangers full stop. So perhaps we really do have different experiences.
I’m sure people must use them occasionally, but among friends, no, not often, and I can’t think of when I heard one called out. People with lots in common probably mostly agree on what is okay and what isn’t.
