I think it goes beyond semantic silliness because it acts to keep the discussion away from the personal. If you are debating someone, what is the point of calling that person a racist? We shouldn’t be talking about each other in GD, we should be debating ideas. And the more the mods can keep the discussion away from the personal, the better. BTW, I can easily see where “you’re a conservative” or “you’re a liberal” should be moderated-- when it’s intended to shut off debate and focus on the person rather than the idea.
And, if you really, absolutely, positively MUST get personal, we have the Pit. So, it’s not like there is no outlet for calling people racist if you need to.
I get what you are saying, but this is the current state, and it doesn’t make sense. Imagine this exchange:
Poster 1: I think you are generically inferior, as is everyone whose heritage comes from Africa in the last 2000 years,and the best we white people can hope for is to provide your people supports until your defective genes are out-competed and disappear".
Poster 2: You’re a racist!
And it’s poster two that is moderated because the first statement is somehow neither a personal attack nor hate speech nor trolling.
Statement 1 is probably going to receive Moderator action either for a personal attack or for trolling.
It is a straight up declaration of a racist opinion provided without any supporting information. The posters who generally get accused of racism on the SDMB, tend to take actual facts, (or information organized as if it was factual), and draw conclusions from it. The evidence and the logic can be challenged without name calling. Resorting to name-calling does nothing to demonstrate to third party observers that the claims are based on errors of some sort. It just demonstrates to such third party observers that the opinions are unpopular or even [*gasp[//]] Politically Incorrect. It simply gives the name caller the smug satisfaction of believing himself or herself superior to the poster accused of being a racist.
False premise. Identifying someone as a racist is not simply “name-calling,” any more than it’s “name-calling” to identify someone as a thief if they describe their habit of taking books from bookstores, or to identify someone as a rapist if they describe their propensity for having sex with unconscious victims, or to identify someone as a Marxist if they espouse the wisdom of Karl Marx’s revolutionary philosophy. The rest of your post, in which you psychoanalyze people who use the noun “racist,” fails based in part on this faulty premise.
It’s a useful word that describes a specific phenomenon, just like white fragility syndrome describes a specific phenomenon. The latter term may go a long way to explaining this board’s dislike of the former term.
It is nothing but name calling to label a poster a racist.
Racist carries the connotation of deliberate evil, even when the actions and beliefs of a person who has made a racist statement are prompted by fear, ignorance, or other factors. The use of “racist” to label a person removes the responsibility from the name caller to identify the errors in the words of the person so labeled. It is nothing more than a way to avoid actually addressing the words of the labeled poster.
One may propose all the weird twists of logic, ignoring actual usage in English in the early 21st century, to rationalize the idea that labeling a poster as evil is not name-calling, but such tortured attempts to redefine that action are not persuasive.
Calling a poster a bigot or a rapist or a thief is also prohibited for the same reason. Attack the words or actions of the poster rather than pretending that using a highly charged word with a widely accepted value is not name-calling.
Doubling down on a false premise just leaves you with two iterations of the false premise.
Nonsense. That might be what you read into it, but that connotation–especially the “deliberate” part, and also the “evil” part, so pretty much the entire connotation–is far from universal.
Two more bland sentences with no evidence to back them up. No responsibility is removed; it’s more than that.
On a board where “that’s a racist idea” is allowed, but “You’re being racist” is not, it’s a bit rich for the folks who came up with that policy to accuse anyone else of weird twists of logic.
To be clear, Why do you need call anyone anything in a debate? How does it add to the debate to focus on the person rather than the argument? The mods are constantly intervening in debates and telling us not to make it personal. As soon as you say “you are…” you’ve made it personal.
So, once again, why is it necessary to say “you are a racist” instead of “that is a racist argument”? The first version detracts from the debate by focusing on the person rather than the argument.
Which is why we have a specific forum where you can focus on the person. No one is going to stop you from calling someone a racist in the Pit.
I have no idea why you want to pretend that accusations that a person is racist does not immediately convey the idea that the target is evil in 21st century North America, but there is no foundation for your claim. One can probably find some discussions of racism in academic journals where racist and racism indicate nothing more than a world view, but in the real world–particularly when hurled as an accusation–they always convey meanings of evil intent. (And on the off chance that some individual somewhere uses the terms as “mere” descriptors, the odds that the target of such accusations will see them in the same way are nil.)
It’s not that it adds to the debate. There is no debate, like there often isn’t in GD. Racism is wrong. If what you say leads to a racist conclusion, you are wrong. This is something society accepts. It’s the only reason why “racist” can be considered an insult at all.
The issue is that these people are saying disgusting filth, and being jerks to entire minorities. And yet we all have to coddle them. It’s worse for us to insult them than it is for them to insult every minority poster on the board.
I personally would prefer that racism would be moderated. If you want to argue that black people are genetically inferior to white people, you can do so in the Pit, where insulting people like that is okay.
But, barring that, being able to call them racist seems like a nice compromise. They can say their hateful shit if they want, but they will have to worry about being called racist.
This is what keeps them in check in real life. If you want to say racist shit, you have to worry about the consequences. The board is allowing them to talk, but taking away the consequences.
And hence, the uptick in racist posters since the departure of Marley, who was more reasonable about this subject. This is the only board where I post that seems to have reasonable moderators who leave this shit be.
For some reason, the feelings of racists matter more than the feelings of the people they denigrate.
I have no idea why you think that repeated accusations of dishonesty are somehow conducive to debates, but as long as you’re going to continue doing so, conversation with you is worthless. Your posts serve simply to demonstrate the terrible priorities of this board: using precise language to describe viewpoints is banned, but the mods themselves engage in well-poisoning like this.
I don’t want to be able to call someone a racist. I don’t even stick my toes into the cesspool threads where it’s relevant. What bothers me is that we don’t allow “You’re racist” because that’s somehow personal and needlessly inflames the debate, but we allow “You’re genetically inferior” provided the poster provides a wall-of-text full of bullshit pseudo-scientific, oft-discounted babble because somehow that wall of text provides “supporting evidence”–even though the exact same “supporting evidence” has been taken apart and shown to be worthless over and over and over again.
We can’t say “you’re a racist” because the assumption is that that makes the argument personal, people get hurt, it goes off the rails. But we can say “you’re genetically inferior” and then it’s on the target to keep hold of themselves, not react emotionally to a deeply personal dig not just at themselves but at their families.
It’s the imbalance that drives me crazy. We are treating racists with kid gloves, giving them as much rope as they want as often as they want, going out of our way to treat them well out of some loyalty to the ideal of free and honest debate. I feel like we give them *more *latitude than we’d give less controversial topics because it’s become the test case for our loyalty to those ideas. But in doing so, we ask a significant number of people to submit to being discussed like specimens in an experiment and hold them to an incredibly high standard in terms of not responding to what are personal attacks. And I can’t help but feel like it’s yet another example of not taking the feelings of minorities quite as seriously as the feelings of the mainstream.
This was addressed to exhaustion in the previous thread in which you participated–have you forgotten, or have you hoped that I have, or something else?
Briefly: we use words to identify all the time. In that thread, even people who argued against the use of such words found themselves using such words. Using words that describe a viewpoint–Democrat, Muslim, pacifist, fantasy reader–are not necessarily insults, as long as the description is precise and accurate. Using words that are deliberate slurs for the viewpoint–Democrap, Towelhead, peacenik, loser–are necessarily insults, since there are other less inflammatory words available.
As for the idea that it’s the “you are” construction that makes it personal, that’s untrue. Look above, where Tom tells me that I’m pretending to hold the views I hold. That’s personal, and that should certainly earn him a warning (especially since he’s a repeat offender), but it’s unlikely to do so, since he knows better than to use the forbidden construction. He dances around the rules, making personal attacks on me and other posters, even while he condemns the use of precise language.
Using the noun “racist” is not necessarily an insult. Telling someone they are lying about the beliefs they hold is necessarily an insult. Our current rules forbid the former and allow the latter, which is precisely the opposite of what they should do.