This whole “This guy doesn’t like it when we call conservatives maggots, he must be a Trump sympathizer” schtick is getting very tiresome.
Do you need me to virtue signal a bit about how far to the left I am and how stupid I think the Right is nowadays before I’m allowed to critique the way we dehumanize the other side? Can you let me know in advance how much virtue signaling and on what topic I need to do before you acknowledge that I’m saying this because I genuinely think it is bad for us to use this kind of language towards the other side, and not because I’m a backdoor Trump supporter?
No, there aren’t “good people on both sides”. But I don’t think we should call even bad people “maggots”, not pretend that even bad people are just mindlessly evil automatons rather than human beings with motivations based on the same emotions that we all feel.
And that’s an analysis that we should apply to people that are far more vile than Trump supporters, by the way. It’s the same analysis we should apply to understanding Putin supporters, or Hamas, or yes, even Nazis.
Obviously if the Nazis are trying to take power you should oppose them with force of arms rather than debate them. That’s got nothing to do with whether we should use the same sort of dehumanizing language that they do.
Who said anything about refusing to condemn Nazis and people like them? Can you think of no way to condemn someone other than by using dehumanizing language?
I know we’re never going to agree on this, but I’m going to make my point once again. I’ll preface it by saying that I absolutely agree with the last post from @CoolHandCox citing the Holocaust Museum’s take on the harms of dehumanizing language. I will also say that I fully recognize the power of language to shape our thinking, and why certain words and phrases shouldn’t be used because they’re toxic.
However – and this is crucial – it’s also possible to be so over-sensitive to these issues that one can go way, way, way over the top on the matter of what has come to be called “political correctness”, which in my view is what you’ve done here. It’s much like objecting to the use of a term like “master switch” to denote a main circuit breaker or “master warning light” to denote an unknown problem within a larger system, because it somehow supposedly evokes slavery or something. This is not sensitivity, it’s hyper-sensitivity at a level that is comical.
In order for language to be genuinely dehumanizing and harmful, it has to seriously and plausibly convey the idea that a certain subset of humanity is subhuman and deserves to be treated accordingly. I’ve cited examples of where this actually happened. The idea the “MAGAts” is in that category and would promote hate is entirely within your own imagination. The idea is absurd.
This is getting way off topic, but surely you can see how far removed this is from the silly “MAGAts” meme? It’s also wrong. Hitler and his cohorts were obviously devoid of empathy, and it wasn’t just against Jews, although they were the most oppressed victims. It was also ruthlessly against members of his own party when they challenged his power, against other minorities, against Russians, against the German people themselves when Hitler declared that if they were too “weak” to fight for victory then they deserved the consequences of defeat, and eventually against himself when he took his own life. In a word, he was insane.
Again, way off topic, but please try to keep this in mind when trying to imply that a term like “MAGAt” has anything to do with this kind of atrocity, or is anything other than a silly internet meme.
I am trying to find a nice way to condemn a group that would like to see me dead, but making fun of the word they use to describe themselves and the silly red hat they use to make themselves stand out seems to be a bad idea in your book (despite the laws they pass and the nastier laws they would like to pass, and the absolutely nasty lies they tell about us etc.) so what about…doodyheads?
Poor sports?
Nasty people?
Got a preference?
As far as I can tell, we are being overly nice to some very bad people, but that doesn’t seem to be enough for you.
Dude. You are comparing “master switch” - a term that isn’t meant as an insult to anyone and just happens to use the same word that vaguely relates to slavery - to calling a group of people you dislike maggots. That’s not an irrelevant comparison, that’s a hyper-irrelevant comparison.
Tell you what, why not make this point again, but this time pick a term that’s actually analogous in any way, shape, or form? A term that you think is totally fine that’s used to describe:
a group of people
in a negative way
that derives from an animal traditionally considered to be vermin
If you can do that, I’ll concede that maybe calling Trumpers “Maggots” is just harmless fun.
That’s laughably wrong, in the “it can’t happen here” sense. Hitler was a vegetarian; he loved and cared for his dogs; and despite being a human being who was apparently capable of empathy, he was the world’s greatest monster. He and his supporters are a testament to how ideology can allow you to willfully shut down your empathy entirely towards those you consider enemies, not to how the entire German nation was full of sociopaths but somehow only for a few years.
Thinking that they were cartoon villains might be comforting, but it isn’t true.
Nobody is laughing. And everyone can see the bait-and-switch going on, claiming that everyone is using the term “maggot”, when in reality the people using it the most are the ones trying to ban a different word.
I really don’t know if you are reading any of my posts.
Excluded middle. There is plenty of room between ‘nice’ and ‘vermin’.
Can you quote where I said anything about making fun of their hat being bad?
If you want to say that they’re all wearing Dear Leader’s Little Red Hat, I think that would be totally fine. If you wanted to say that after Jan 6 it is appropriate that they look like they have blood on their heads that would be totally fine. If you came up with a different hat based insult that was actually funny (but where the punchline wasn’t “haha, that sounds like ‘Maggot’!”) that would be BETTER than fine!
Correct - my concern in not wanting the Left to use dehumanizing language in talking about the Right is mostly based around my dislike of what dehumanizing language does to the speaker, IE the harm that will come to the way people on the Left think.
It is not based on any potential harm coming to the Right.
Therefore, the argument “but the Right is bad, who cares if we say mean things about them” doesn’t move me at all; because I was never concerned about the harm to the Right to begin with.
I like “Trumpets” because they are loud and annoying and it alludes to their idol, personally.
Or, alternatively, you can keep calling them MAGAts, and have the intellectual honesty to admit that yes, it IS dehumanizing, but you’re fine with it in this scenario for whatever reason. Like @ParallelLines did above. That’s a defensible position for them to take, and I commend them for it.
The fact that MAGAt is MAGA+Maggot has been cited literally dozens of times now.
I am being totally intellectually honest when I say the word is NOT dehumanizing, and is in fact rather mild considering what they say, what they do, what they want to say and what they want to do.
We call people “rats” when they go to the authorities to report on someone. That fits every criterion you laid out. And to me it’s totally fine; I don’t see the term as being controversial. Certainly not to the degree of, say, an antisemitic slur, which at least one poster here said MAGAt was reminiscent of.
Even the term “vermin” is itself a bad label to apply to people because of its historical usage (as far back as the 16th century) as a label for people who are poor and disadvantaged. Such a thing is what makes that label awful, not solely because it derives from a class of animal considered a pest.
It feels very maggoty to me but I think that’s only because I know what you’re reverse engineering it from? I’m trying to imagine a world where this was the only nickname I’d seen (and obviously in that case it would be clear that it actually means MAGA Hat rather than being an obvious cover up story made up by the online influencer crowd after the fact, once the dehumanization allegations sprang up).
Even so, I think it’s too maggoty. I’d actually buy the idea that the original people who came up with it meant “'MAGA hat” rather than “maggot”, but once people pointed out how similar it is to maggot I think we’d be in the same place we are now.
First off, I’ll definitely give you kudos, that’s about a thousand times closer than @wolfpup’s “master switch”. However, I don’t think it quite works.
We call a single person a rat for their individual actions. It’s not a term for a group of people that disparages them based on their membership in that group. My first point was a term for a group of people, and I do think that’s important.
If a news article came out saying that IDF soldiers were calling Hamas members “Hamasbroshim”, a term I just made up that’s a portmanteau of “achbaroshim”, rats, and Hamas - I highly doubt we’d have so many people eager to explain how actually that term is not dehumanizing at all, it’s just a funny joke.
Seriously though, and speaking of excluded middles, a term can be “dehumanizing” to a greater or lesser extent. And probably everyone (as evidenced by this thread) draws the line differently.
@Babale is going the high road, and not wanting to step a single foot upon it. Which is their choice.
@Czarcasm’s judgement is that they don’t find it so, or perhaps, so weakly so as to be utterly negligible.
(mentioning the two most verbal posters in the argument, not that they are the only ones on either side)
And guess what? It’s fine if you draw the lines differently, and judge differently. Do what is going to be more comfortable to you, especially as it’s not being moderated at this time.
I think a lot of the animosity is over the term “dehumanizing” and feeling insulted by it, but well, my opinions on that are upthread, and I don’t see MAGAs as in any way being worthy of yelling at each other over just HOW deplorable they are.
Wut?? I was done here, but what the ever-loving hell? Do you imagine that I’m just making things up? The word “master” is indeed being deprecated in many contexts such as electrical engineering despite many decades of standard and familiar usage because of someone’s imaginary fantasy that it’s somehow “hurtful” to someone. And forget about referring to your home’s main bedroom as the “:master bedroom” lest you be judged a racist.
This is exactly the kind of way overblown nonsense that you’re promoting.
Yes, language is very important in shaping and reflecting our values. It’s also all too easy to go way over the top into a frenzy of political correctness that becomes comical self-parody.
No, I don’t think you’re making stuff up, I’m familiar with the discussion - I just agree with you that it’s nonsense.
Just because other people spout nonsense about master bedrooms doesn’t mean that there isn’t a valid comment to be made about calling people “maggots” and spelling it a funny way.
And in case you missed it while indignantly writing this post in response to the first line of my post, I explained precisely why I don’t think the two are comparable above.
No, since doing so requires slanting the language in their favor. As you yourself demonstrated when a few posts on you called Hitler “history’s greatest monster”; “monster” is as “dehumanizing” as it gets. There’s no virtue is cherry-picking language to make horrible people look better than they are. And it aids and abets people like the Nazis, and treats their victims as less than human rather than merely failing to suck up hard enough to their killers.
Maybe people calling themselves “MAGA” and wearing cheap red caps with “MAGA” on them is a really dumb idea, and you should get on them about their shortsightedness?
I wasn’t calling you a Trump sympathizer and I don’t for a moment believe that you are. I was just mocking you for making terrible arguments.
Funnily enough, you seem to have ignored the more substantive points in my post (particularly your repeatedly excluded middles), presumably because they didn’t align with your preferred dudgeon level.
