If they were truly unimportant, they wouldn’t give them. But they are. They are a form of punishment. It is an official reprimand put on your record, which can be used to “fire” you.
It makes perfect sense to try and have as few as possible, and to fight the ones you think are unfair.
I still say his best argument is that it’s unfair to punish someone for a rule they didn’t yet know about. This talk of trying to claim it’s not actually that offensive is silly.
Again, I will link the advertisement from 2011. Everyone has been put on notice for six years now. It’s time to accept that, to actual mentally disabled people, it IS actually as offensive as those other words, and to treat it accordingly.
Why are you asking me? Did I claim to have the answer to that question? I was merely sharing some reflections on use of the term “retard.” Call me crazy, but my comments seemed relevant to the topic at hand. I have offered no judgment on the warning, and don’t intend to.
Offensive to who? Are you claiming to be as thick as two planks? Or merely borrowing offense?
I’m not offended by your offense merely because I find /this particular discussion/ ridiculous: I grew up around ‘special’ people, so I knew from a young age that the Orwellian language manipulation had repeatedly failed, with each word haplessly replaced by a new ‘not offensive’ word or phrase.
Sounds like you are surrounded by a real group of winners there.
Any time I hear/read someone use that word, it lowers my opinion of them as a human being. If I were working around people like your team–I’d look for a new job.
As the person who first objected to Shagnasty’s use of the word, I think it’s important to bring some context into this.
Shagnasty’s original use of the word was in this context:
and then doubled down with:
Shagnasty didn’t just use the word, he managed to use it in the most offensive way possible, by reducing a human being down to a single trait and using a word that signals the authors disgust at that trait.
What’s more, for all of Shagnasty’s professed love of the film, he sure doesn’t seem to understand it at all. The entire point of the film was that Forrest would continually be misjudged by the people around him when they first met him because of prejudice against his intellectual disability. But that as people got to know him better, they realized that his intellectual disability was only a part of his character and his kindness, loyalty, moral strength and physical abilities were far more important and what made him into a whole human being. By what I see from Shagnasty’s retelling, it seems like he was never able to look past the intellectual disability and, because of that prejudice, ascribed all that happened to Forrest to mere chance rather than active agency on Forrest’s part.
The reason why that word is offensive isn’t because some secret cabal got together one day and started marking arbitrary words off a list, it’s because they cause real harm to real people. Imagine if you were someone suffering from an intellectual disability reading that post. You’re reminded once again of just how many people are unwilling to look past your intellectual disability and see you as a mere collection of stereotypes they’ve cobbled together from awful media depictions. And they’re reminded that, even for all Forrest managed to accomplish, there are still some people who continue to label him solely by his intellectual disability so what chance do they possible have of transcending that label?
In my original post, I’d simply assumed that Shagnasty simply misspoke and would apologize about how his use of the word gave off the wrong impression. His later post has be suspecting that he’s genuinely bigoted against intellectually disabled people and felt the need to threadshit that to the world in a topic that wasn’t even about Forrest in the first place.
No it is not in common use in New England, and yes, it is considered offensive here. Maybe in your little world it’s OK, but please don’t broad brush the rest of us decent human beings here.
People don’t like the word “retard” and think Forrest Gump has been unfairly slighted. Fine. No problem. No need to keep repeating that people are offended.
But how the hell is using the word “retard” deemed to be hate speech and deserving of a warning?
This board is choc full of libtards, trumptards, bigtards and gods knows how many kinds of tards yet out of nowhere describing Forrest Gump as a retard is worthy of a warning?
Be offended all you want but that warning was not consistent, it was plucked out of thin air at the whim of a moderator.
I agree that, if it’s hate speech, it’s hate speech in every forum, but it’s not modded that way. Similarly, libtard, etc., would also be hate speech and are also not modded that way.
My view is that the Warning should be downgraded to a Note, and if there’s a formal change that “retard” is hate speech, there should be a note in the rules.
And, warnings matter. If Shagnasty has a bad day or has too much to drink, and goes off the deep end in a rant in the wrong forum, that could easily lead to another warning, or even a ban. The SDMB is a cool place, for some values of cool, and I would hate to be banned from here. I would also have argued against this warning.
I had just seen this on the top page and checked the posts as well, I do not see anything he said that could be characterized as offensive. If anything he was speaking in abstract. It’s not as if he was deliberately going out of his way to use the term or use it against another user. I’ve not been here long enough to have any merit on this, but I thought i’d chime in as well.
It’s a bullshit warning and should be reversed. The term “retard” was not directed at another poster, but instead was directed at a fictional movie character. How lame a warning is that?
We could make a movie out of this: “When Jackbooted Mods Run Wild”.
The issue isn’t at whom the “hate speech” is directed, it’s whether or not the term qualifies as hate speech. It’s not OK to say “The new Star Trek movie was OK, but I’m not getting why they had to make Sulu a fag”.
This was a bad ruling. What the OP was doing was a perfect example of breaking the “Don’t be a jerk” rule. A new, retroactive rule saying that “retard” was and always has been hate speech on the board is silly. You can’t expect someone to obey a rule that didn’t exist before their comment.
The “hate speech” warning should be rescinded and a new “don’t be a jerk” warning should be applied to the OP.
The issue has nothing to do with whether “retard” is hate-speech or not; the issue is “Did the SDMB consider “retard” hate-speech before the OP’s comment?”. The answer is clearly “No, they didn’t.”
Totally this. He was told time and again in that thread that his language was bothering people, and he was deliberately obtuse about it. It wasn’t hate speech, but it was unnecessary and jerkish.