Ok, but you opened by saying how “this is so tiring” so that sure sounds like feeling put upon.
That’s remotely not true at all. I say stuff all the time without worry that I’m offending people and, if someone did tell me they were offended, it’s usually trivial to adjust my speaking.
That said, using that statement after listing what you guys call the flower is ridiculous. “What? I can’t use this obvious and well-known slur? Well I just can’t say anything any more, can I?”
OK, but does that mean you have to go along with or condone some offensive shit? Forget fear of speaking to people, many people have that, you don’t want to speak to people who casually drop that kind of talk into conversations. Do you really care if some racist likes you?
I’d like to think it stops when we reach the point where we’re not arbitrarily throwing around racist or otherwise bigoted slurs any more, in service of some notion of tradition.
There’s no slippery slope here, I think. Just a bunch of stuff that is clearly stupid and ought to stop. And not stopping is wilfully ignorant.
There are two parts to this picture though. There are people who just think it would be good if we stopped doing stuff that perpetuate actual racist terminology or behaviour, and there are people who, whether we’ll meaning or just busybodying, seem to want to excise things that are not racist at all, but in some way resemble it superficially - for example people demanding that action be taken against a Spanish - language website that happens to sell shirts in a variety of colours including black. There is no reason to lump that idiocy in with the other category of stuff, which is perfectly reasonable reform.
In fact you’d be doing a great disservice to the proponents of reasonable reform, to not differentiate them from the performers of recreational outrage.
At the very least, it’s a very poor example of whatever the complaint is.
‘Political correctness gone mad’ does exist. There are people out there threatening to report a Spanish website for using the Spanish word for the colour black, to describe a colour option for a black garment. That is an example of insanity, and if that kind of insanity was really common, it would be tiring, I guess.
But the rudbeckia example is just something that’s unacceptable, clearly perpetuating the use of a racist slur and simply needs to stop. The one thing is not like, or part of, nor leading to the other.
Wow you actually are claiming that using the n-word to describe flowers is just a totally normal thing no one should be outraged about because gosh darn it’s just part of good ol’ Southern culture.
I’m not sure who it is that you think is outraged. If it’s me, then you’re wrong. I care about the matter we’re discussing, even though I am not the victim of it. I don’t think it’s either a terrible or remarkable viewpoint for me to hold.
Erm, no, that’s not how that works. Basilosaurus doesn’t get renamed to Basilocetus when we realized it was a whale and not a marine reptile.
That’s got very little to do with renaming offensive species names, which I have nothing against. But it isn’t being done because the names aren’t descriptive, or we would have a very long road ahead of us.
I looked up the scientific name and ‘offensive’ and the only things that came up were people who thought that ‘black eyed’ refers to domestic abuse. So I don’t think this is a big problem for anyone outside a small group of racists that Beck is apparently familiar with.
Yeah! For example, if you say “maybe we shouldn’t call this plant by a racial slur”, a totally reasonable thing to say, you’ll get some people who get terribly offended and upset that you’re doing so. Crazy!