I don’t think it is appropriate for you or anyone else to tell a poster the proper way to discuss a topic or “how to do so.”
Hey, here’s the proper way to debate in Trump threads: You should always refer to Trump as Mr. President and you can avoid being moderated. See how that works?
Maybe he didn’t need to say that the hypothetical woman had her butt cheeks hanging out, but he did. Does he need your permission to do so? Do we need a drafting or stylistic committee to help posters draft threads? Or is it only in threads about women? Does he need permission from a minority of posters who form a group for this purpose?
If a father tells his daughter, “You aren’t wearing those pants out of this house because your butt cheeks are hanging out!” does he hate his daughter? All women?
I would say that in only a liberal utopia would your views be satisfied, but even in a liberal utopia there would be debates about the proper terms as they evolve daily. Or could we just go a different way and say that unless something is deliberately and universally recognized as insulting do we moderate it and let everyone else feel as they may because that is the cost of living in society and especially being a part of a debate or discussion?
I love this. It is snarkily funny, yes, but there is a serious point to be gleaned. These kinds of aims really were the exact (well meaning) impulses behind the way things were done in Jacobin France under Robespierre, in the Stalinist USSR, in Maoist China (and still to an extent today).
This is kind of a canard, one I wish to emphatically disassociate myself from since we have been sort of on the same “side” elsewhere ITT. I don’t understand why this fact bothers some white conservatives so much.
It bothers white conservatives because they resent being told what they can or can’t do or say by other people even though they themselves have a long history of barging in uninvited to tell other people what they can or can’t do or say. How dare [fill the blank] tell them THEM what to do!
Because “hate speech” thus requires context, not just a clear set of no-no words and phrases. And this makes it harder to tell what it is. Even worse, legitimate scientific inquiry may or may not be hate speech. All the “races” (in quotes because there are so many edge cases) are clearly different in average height and body proportions. And *appear *to have different peak athletic abilities. And might have different inherent talents at specific mental tasks, though this is really hard to tease out causation on. (is the reason “asians”, a small minority of all Americans, are the overwhelming majority of students admitted by merit to Caltech because they are actually smarter and/or more talented at STEM? This is a *valid *interpretation of the data, albeit not the only one)
Anyways, this is “hate speech” to even declare that people *might *be different from each other from the very start and that the hypothesis “everyone is equal in every way” appears to be false.
Her issue is not literally about whether the topic of the thread is exclusively about men or women’s anatomies.
It’s that the tenor of the discussion is one that uses language that is disrespectful to women, this making her feel disrespected by the social atmosphere of the conversation and thus not wanting to be part of that atmosphere.
The same thing would be true for me for example if a thread accepted the use of demeaning language about people of my race or age or religion or body type. If I’m an overweight person, I’m not going to participate in a thread in which the other participants freely use terms that are demeaning and humiliating about fat people—fatasses, porkers, pigs, oinkers, lazy disgusting fat bastards cramming their faces.
Regardless of whether the topic is a valid topic of discussion, the tenor of the language is exclusionary. That’s the point.
But it is not. I am carrying a few extra pounds myself, but if there was a thread about how fat people were just disgusting pigs, I am fully free to skip over it. I can participate in any other thread if that thread raises my blood pressure.
I am also free to participate. I can give excuses/rationales for why some people are overweight and dispute the characterizations that we are all lazy bastards.
I can also Pit the people who started or commented in the thread using those terms.
What I shouldn’t be able to do is ban any discussion about overweight people unless the OP uses careful terminology so I don’t get hurt feelings. The real world doesn’t work that way and this board shouldn’t be a safe space.
Yes, if there is a direct insult, nobody should have to put up with that, but insults directed at the group??? It happens to conservatives and religious people all over GD. If we are going down that road (which we shouldn’t) then let’s be consistent.
I generally agree with your posts, but this is specious. Using “language is sacred” to excuse linguistic attempts to turn other people into things, is a very bad argument.
A prominent–and recent–example of how disgraceful a strategy this really is might be the current US President’s use of “infested” with reference to black and brown people. Is it Trump’s sacred right to speak of black-majority areas as “infested”?
Dismissing attempts to “thing” females as being trivial, while agreeing that turning people of color into things (by means of repeated use of “infested,” “invasion,” etc.) is wrong, is a not-uncommon response by some who consider the matter. There is an attraction, felt by some, to the idea that femaleness is, essentially, trivial. This idea is worth questioning.
Turning entire demographic categories of people into things, metaphorically of course, creates a feeling of power. We all enjoy feeling powerful. But part of being an adult is realizing that the particular sense of power derived from asserting primacy in this way is not actually respectable or healthy. Certainly there is nothing “sacred” about this technique for artificially boosting one’s feelings of superiority.
Another example (in addition to the current project of the Trumpian right to “thing” black and brown people): the vogue some years back for hiring little people to work in pubs/bars and similar venues, for the purpose of being the objects thrown in a test of athleticism or strength of the thrower. Turning a demographic group—people of short stature—into things, brought enjoyment and pleasure. Ask yourself: what sort of pleasure was that, exactly? The pleasure of throwing? If that’s all it was, then why not just throw pieces of furniture or such?
“Dwarf-tossing” and referring to certain racial/ethnic groups as “infestations” and describing a woman as a collection of body parts that you want to make use of (“hit”): these are methods of asserting that one is a member of the dominant group.
So if a poster wanted to argue that yes indeedy, illegal immigration is, like our President said, an “infestation,” you would ban the topic from discussion? Or at least ban any support of that proposition?
To me, that is incredible that it would be out of bounds to defend a position taken by any president, whether you support him or not.
No. But if a poster argued (for example) “we need to change the laws on immigration because those people are infesting our nation with their ______ and their ______ and we must clean out the rats’ nest” I would expect the language to receive moderation. (As is usually the case, the moderator in question would likely choose the moderation tool to use after looking at the context and at the poster’s history.)
The topic of illegal immigration itself is 100% legitimate and, no doubt, there are already threads about it, and will be many more.
Luckily, I wasn’t arguing that “it would be out of bounds to defend a position taken by any president.”
But a message board is allowed to have community standards. Moderators of such a board are within their rights to moderate a post that said (for example) “I think Trump is right that there’s no need to get a woman’s permission before grabbing her by the pssy” or “We should all live by Trump’s rule to tell others to ‘knock the hell out of’ and ‘knock the crap out of’ anyone who we don’t like.”** A moderator is likely to intervene and note that these posts advocate for committing assault—a crime. The board has a reasonable right to moderate posts that promote the commission of crimes.
On such a board, it would be valid for a poster to refer to Trump positions with approval—so long as that poster avoids breaking the board rules (such as those against advocating the commission of crimes).
It’s all common sense, really.
*not recalling off-hand what words are disallowed in this subforum, I’ll go the asterisk route.
I would argue that some of Trump’s worst rhetoric could in fact be worthy of moderator action if said here. But the OP in question is not nearly as bad.