He did right, I would have done the same. In fact I told you specifically (by private message) that if that hijack continued, I was going to shut it down. A poster used the word “hillbilly,” you objected, a few other people made jokes about it and you continued to object. Everybody was then told to knock it off. You had a chance to register your opinion and you did so. There was no reason to let a dispute over the h-word drag that thread off track.
EDIT: In fact tomndebb comes pretty close to agreeing with your contention that it is offensive, since he said it was not a good choice of terms in Great Debates. So I don’t know why you’re complaining.
There is no dispute to be had over this. Not by anyone who knows what a hillbilly is, anyway. It is not a racist term because it does not refer to people of any race specifically. It refers to people from a particular region and it’s associated with stereotypes of poverty and ignorance. It doesn’t refer to all white people. If you find it obnoxious I won’t argue against you, but it is not related to race. And I think the last time “Jap” came up in Great Debates, we handled it the same way: by telling people to stop it and not warning them. So we treated the words equivalently even though I don’t think they are equally offensive.
I’ve never heard of any white people from a major city or a suburb called a hillbilly.
It looks like you’re positing that hillbilly is equivalent to Jap, which is ridiculous. It’s connected to some mean stereotypes, I agree, but it doesn’t merit moderation for hate speech or anything of that type. It was used in that debate as an insult directed at some specific people. Not a race, a class, or anything else.
I did not say it was funny. I said Jack Batty’s post was a joke, which it obviously was. He was poking fun at you for taking umbrage at the use of the word hillbilly. Here is the entire hijack, starting with just the relevant quote from The Second Stone’s post: