If I step on your toe unintentionally, and you’re in pain, just because I don’t feel that pain (it wasn’t my toe) doesn’t mean that any harm done occurred either in a Platonic sense or not at all. It sure as heck doesn’t mean that you’re an ideologically-motivated, irrational zealot for getting mad when my response is anything other than “Whoops, sorry.”
the problem is that the pain is not caused by someone stepping on your toe, but by someone showing subtle but detectable signs of thinking thoughts that you disagree with.
The pain caused by someone committing thought crime against you has a more dubious ontological status than the pain caused impact upon your toe.
A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many. Like every other polite euphemism for anything, it has become a swear word, a swear word that unlike Carlin’s list of seven words you used not to be able to say on TV, still has the power to shock.
Indeed, as soon as one creates a new euphemism, it implies that the thing that it is a euphemism for is unmentionably disgusting, thus becomes good swear word, depriving the euphemism of the niceness that is the essential characteristic of a euphemism, while rendering all previous euphemisms for the thing (of which there are usually large number) too disgusting to speak.
The pain caused by the inevitable and inexorable transition from euphemism to curse word is fundamentally different from the pain caused by stepping on your toes. It is more like the pain caused by losing an election, or someone banging a prettier girl than you banged. The tenth commandment forbids you to experience or admit to experiencing certain kinds of pain. Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint. You cannot help feeling pain if someone steps on your toes, but you can and should help feeling certain other forms of pain, which forms of pain are therefore less real.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion—they aren’t “just words”.
Also, people don’t reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn’t socially acceptable but covert racism still goes on, both black and white Americans search for more and more subtle clues to whether people are racist. This looks insane, but is a rational response to a difficult situation.
I’m not sure it’s a line so much as it’s an impression. Strategists try to reshape battlefields to give themselves the high ground. I’m not sure I can articulate anything worth updating on, but I’ll think about it and get back to you if I come up with anything.
“A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many.”
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults often hurts more than physical fights.
People should not seek to take offense where none was meant—but when offense is meant, and you know it’s meant, not being hurt is often harder than ignoring a merely stepped-upon toe. A deliberate insult can linger all day in your mind when a toe is soon forgotten.
English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Supporting evidence: American English speakers weren’t even content with a two syllable word meaning that homo sex is “unmentionably disgusting”, and it’s been shortened to one syllable.
On a tangential note, this usage of “reclaim” has always bothered me. “Queer” didn’t start out with positive or neutral connotations. It has not been reclaimed by the GLBT movement, it has been appropriated. Reclamation denotes previous ownership, something that simply doesn’t apply when you look at the historical relationship between the words that are being “reclaimed” and the groups that are claiming them, but it’s chosen for its connotations of legitimacy, since people are less likely to object to your taking back what’s rightfully yours.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
This may reflect the conservative belief in naive realism, that words refer to things in the world, and are ultimately defined by pointing at stuff, primarily by mothers pointing at stuff, as in “mother tongue”. Leftists frequently believe that words create reality, hence they always start language projects.
If a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, no point in finding new words for shit. You want conservatives to say “gay”. Observe. They say “gay”, but somehow it sounds remarkably as if they saying (long, long, long list of words no one is allowed to say any more)
Before building a house, check that your foundation is sound.
The bias you have to be most careful of in this situation is availability. When claiming “liberals X, but conservatives don’t X,” I think people first run a mental search for “liberal X” and then a search for “conservative X.” But mental searches aren’t as reliable as you might wish—if in the post just above, your brain was primed with an example of “liberal X,” your mental search will be a lot better at thinking of liberal X, and so you might conclude that liberal X is much more common. Curse you, availability bias!
One way to train yourself to search thoroughly is my “magical exercise of power” (actually just an improv exercise, but assertive naming seems to have worked for the Rules of Power :P).
Actually, if you spend time in a highly partisan environment, availability bias is a huge problem. One of the things people do in an effort to convince each other is invent and promulgate pseudo-experience.
If you keep getting told stories of people from group A attacking group B, and you’re a B, the stories stick with you. You’re also less likely to spend time around A’s, so that you don’t have a personal history of knowing that they might be less dangerous than you’ve been told, and you’re not likely to hear stories about them being attacked by B’s or to take such stories seriously if you do hear them.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
“pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion” “Enhanced interrogation” instead of “Torture” ”Collateral damage” instead of “Civilian casualties” “Death tax” instead of “Inheritance tax” or “estate tax” ”Civilian contractors” instead of “Hired mercenaries” “Freedom fries” instead of “French fries” ”Freedom fighters” instead of “Those particular terrorists we happen to support” ″illegal” used as a noun.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
I’ve never heard this before. Can you point me to some evidence?
The rest of your comment seems intentionally offensive. Am I correct in this assessment?
If so, feel free to pm me with your intended message without the offensive content, if you are trying to make a point with the offensive content. I don’t know if anybody else is getting your intended message, but I know I am not, and I am curious, if you can reframe your content more constructively.
Probably not. Enhanced interrogation is torture, but not all torture is enhanced interrogation. “Enhanced interrogation” implies the point is to get information, if any is available. Torture includes more acts because it includes other purposes, like fun and deterrence.
Named is examples like China mentioned in the article. Unnamed was something like torture v. dustspecks where who is doing the torturing doesn’t figure into it.
I need to add: trying to induce a confession as China did, like trying to get information, is also “interrogation”, unlike torture for no reason, fun, deterrence, etc.
I almost admire your fortitude in repeatedly charging forward, Light Brigade-like, with material you know beforehand is going to be downvoted to oblivion for partisan mindkilling.
At this point you are coming across as either a troll or as hopelessly mind-killed. It is possible you do not fall into those categories, but that’s the impression one gets from comments like the above. Please read if you have not already done so why politics is the mindkiller.
Hm. This got downvoted pretty heavily, didn’t it. So how about some of the downvoters point out some examples of conservative projects to deliberately remodel language, in the sense for instance feminism explicitely tries to, or that whole business of political correctness.
Disclaimer: I’m not conservative, hell I’m not even American and we don’t have “conservatives” where I live. I’m asking this because the falseness of what sam said is very far from apparent to me.
How do you expect people to know who was provoked or unprovoked, once you deleted your comment? If you want people to know how a discussion went, you have the option of retracting but not deleting.
If I understand correctly, when a page gets refreshed with a reply to a comment, the delete button on that comment is gone; but as long as one is viewing a previous state of the page, when you use the delete button it works.
Which is what I did. I hadn’t seen your reply, you made it just as I was deleting—literally, I deleted and upon the page reloading I saw the inbox thingie with your reply. I was deleting because I had just noticed that I missed all those other replies to Sam.
Once again guessing, I’d say that “queer” and “bent” were both at a time abandoned by the gay community (even though “bent’ is of course the actual counterpart of “straight”) because of the negative connotations of weirdness in the former case, and something that’s not in its proper shape in the latter. “Gay” persisted because it was the first name whose alternate connotations were positive (being merry/carefree).
I don’t know why “queer” became acceptable to be reclaimed again, but I’m wondering whether it’s because “weird” is not really seen as a bad thing anymore—“geek” has also become a badge of honor after all, though it once used to be an insulting word.
Geek was actually the specific term for a carnival entertainer who bites the heads off of live chickens, before it became a generic term of abuse, before it became a specific term for someone who is passionate about a particular interest.
Also possibly because the original meaning of “weird” has become lost, or at least outmoded, as a result of tarnishing by association with the slur. Nowadays, high school and college literature professors have to preface discussions of Moby-Dick with a disclaimer to the effect that the passage
Well, well, well! Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer—queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time—queer, Sir—queer, queer, very queer. And here’s his leg! Yes, now that I think of it, here’s his bedfellow!
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable
We already have more one syllable euphemisms for male homosexual than I can shake a stick at, each of which became a curse word, and each of which was supplanted by another euphemism. The most recent one previous to gay was “queer”.
The same usually happens with other euphemisms for other undesirable characteristics—for example “retard”.
Euphemisms do not work. If the thing being referred to was OK, we would not be looking for euphemisms, thus euphemising merely draws attention to the fact that the thing being referred to is not OK.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults
But very rarely is someone in trouble for making a deliberate insult. When people get in trouble for being politically incorrect, they are accused of wrongthink, not intentionally insulting any specific identifiable person.
Also, I’m curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
The pain of deliberate insults occurs when Person A directly insults Person B, not when Person A denigrates group X. After all, school and University is non stop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males, which has a lot to do with massive male drop out rate. So the alleged representatives of group X are not personally insulted.
I hate to get involved in political discussion, but that seems inconsistent with the data: dropout rates for men in the US are slightly higher than for women, but the difference is only about three percentage points. Perhaps more saliently, the gap appears to historically have been larger for black and Hispanic students than for whites (it still is for Hispanics), which is exactly the opposite of what I’d expect if “nonstop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males” was a major factor.
My school more or less had all the teachers from the MTV show Daria. Most of those are leftist, with enormous character flaws and failures of rationality.
Fortunately I learned that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one’s toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Feeling demeaned is painful and can be worse than having one’s toe stepped on. But some people are allowed to complain about it, and other people are not.
It’s like saying that stepping on someone’s toe is bad, but some people by definition don’t have toes. If they claim to have toes too, it only proves their malice—by pretending to have toes they want to make us less sensitive about the pain of the real toe owners.
If you officially don’t have a toe, then everyone is free to step on your toe, because officially it didn’t happen. Other people then tell you how lucky you are for not having a toe. Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
If you mean that there are classes of marginalized people who aren’t allowed or aren’t capable of objecting to mistreatment I agree. And I would agree that the cluster of people that cares a lot about racism, sexism, etc. often doesn’t see such people as deserving justice. When male victims of domestic violence feel excluded by feminist discussions of domestic violence which vilify men for example—I think that counts as a real harm.
But that does not mean everyone’s claim to having had their toe stepped on deserves equal respect or credibility. Claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible and people taking offense to the suggestion of equivalence is reasonable. This is why I don’t agree with the anti-subordination activist’s position of privileging first person accounts of dis-empowered people when defining the scope of bigotry and injustice. I think neutral principles of some sort are required to sort out claims of injustice—but of course I don’t know how to arrive at such principles and think it is likely that any criteria I propose will be based on concern for protecting my politically favored groups. And that would be bad. In short, this stuff is really complicated and I’m not really aligned with much anyone on the subject.
Assuming it wasn’t a metaphor, it would still obviously be ill-posed though, right?
It may be that one game can be beaten by someone only on normal, but all levels but one are easier on hard with unlimited ammo. Or that one game is easier on normal and another easier with unlimited ammo on hard. One level might require 72 hours of straight gameplay to beat on hard with unlimited ammo, but such a victory might be reliably achieved, and a 9⁄10 chance of death each run on normal, with success determined by the third minute.
The metaphor is that people have different advantages and disadvantages. The one person whose challenge is difficulty conserving grenades and separating enemies to confront as few at a time as possible might have little in common with the person whose challenge is grouping enemies such that the fastest and slowest are each hit by as many of his individual grenade throws as possible.
claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible
Oh come on. Lot of people get beaten up for being white, frequently maimed for life. There is a whole genre of you tube videos on the topic. No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did. The fact that when you are digging for white racist attacks, you wind up with such an implausible poster boy as Emmit Till shows how hard up you are for examples.
Which tells us:Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
I have basically no desire to have an extended discussion on this matter with someone who seems to have had their mind killed by politics (whether or not I’ve had my mind killed as well). Of particular note is second clause of
No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did.
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point—a point I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take before. I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another. High status people don’t get into fights as a rule. Low status people are much more likely to—this isn’t surprising when considering what kind of behaviors get selected for in a mammal dominance hierarchy. Males with few to no mating possibilities because of their low status are much more likely to risk their lives in combat in order attain higher status and mating opportunities. Alpha elephant seals with large harems don’t pick fights with the young bulls who lack harems. Obviously black people who beat up white people do not experience a substantive status change when the succeed but we all know evolved software misfires.
(Unfortunately it may need to be said that I don’t consider the above explanation for violence to be a justification for violence)
No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did.
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point-
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another.
You will seem to be conceding what you deny.
Groups that employ random irrational violence tend to lose to groups that employ rational coordinated cooperative violence, violence that is bold yet planned and prudent, groups that display loyalty and discipline. It does not follow that that those who employ random irrational violence are violent because they lost, but rather that they lost because their violence was irrational.
Nor does it follow that those groups that lost were “victims”. If we look at Africa, it is apparent that blacks were better off ruled by whites than by blacks.
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans. Why should anyone have to come up with a single representative example when you can point to general policy?
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution, and being a member could even be politically advantageous.
It’s easy to take a position that’s socially frowned upon, and argue or assume that everyone who disagrees with you is too biased by social conditioning to change their minds. Easy enough to turn it into a fully general counterargument. But here of all places, I think you should keep in mind that if your position is getting a bad reception, you should strongly consider the possibility that you are either not making a good case for it, or that you’re arguing for something that simply isn’t correct.
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans
So you are not going to let the absence of any facts get in your way.
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
The Klu Klux Klan made it dangerous to engage in certain political activities, especially if one was black (see the Wikipedia list of notorious Klan Murders). It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks. Klan violence was political violence, and indeed terrorism, but it was not race hate, not the race hate that we see so enthusiastically displayed by blacks on You tube
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to be black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks (the presence of whites makes blacks safer from other blacks), but it is even more dangerous to be white in such areas.
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence. There’s no shortage of writers who have written about racially motivated violence against blacks as part of their personal experience. There’s no shortage of documentation. What evidence, that we should reasonably be expect to be there if a significant amount of racial violence against blacks has happened, and have access to, would be sufficient for you?
If you simply wanted to convince other members of this board that most racially motivated crime in America today is committed against whites, your best bet would probably have simply been to link them to this. But even this is a seriously problematic claim; the idea that 90% of race based crime incidents are white seems to originate here. I read the original report, and confirmed that it makes no such claim, rather, Sheehan gets that figure by classifying all interracial crime as race based crime, and comparing the number of violent crimes committed by black perpetrators and white victims with the number of violent crimes committed by white perpetrators with black victims. But not only is it absurd to suppose that all violent interracial crime is racially motivated, there are a lot more white people in this country than black people, meaning that if all criminals chose their victims completely at random, black on white crime would dramatically outnumber white on black crime. In fact, according to the report, crime among black people is more intraracial than crime among white people relative to the number of crimes committed.
The swastika on the tab for the site where Sheehan wrote the article is a pretty significant sign of a biased agenda all by itself.
But claiming that violence against blacks by whites has not been historically significant, in addition to present day race based crime being slanted in the opposite direction, that’s a really outstanding claim. So what evidence are you prepared to present?
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence.
A black man who happened to be walking down the street while a dozen Klansmen happened to be walking by in the other direction was not going to be attacked by a dozen Klansmen for no special reason other than general hatred of blacks, the way a white man walking down the street may be attacked by a dozen blacks for no special reason other than general hatred of whites.
If you count all the blacks that were attacked to be carried off into slavery, unjust white attacks on blacks probably greatly outnumber unjust black attacks on whites, but these were not race hate attacks. They attacked because they wanted someone to cut sugar cane, not because they disliked blacks.
From the absence of race hate attacks by whites, and the frequency of race hate attacks by blacks, we can conclude that everywhere in America today, the safest places for a white man, are also the safest places for a black man.
From which we can conclude that you do in fact believe that blacks on average, have worse character than whites, since you are aware that predominantly black areas are unsafe—unsafe for everyone, but especially unsafe for whites.
From the fact that Everett Till is the poster boy for white attacks on blacks, we can conclude that in all of American history from around that time to the present, there has never been a racially motivated attack on a black resembling racially motivated attacks on whites that occur every day in today’s America, because if there ever had been such an attack, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
Why bother to quote my text if you’re not going to answer the question?
You could say that there are cases where black people have attacked white people for being white, and I wouldn’t contest it. And you could say that white people haven’t attacked black people for being black, and I would be willing to concede that there is a sense in which that is true. But to say that black people have attacked white people for being white, but white people have not attacked black people for being black is simply absurd.
The reason that they can both be individually correct, but not accurate as a comparison is because it involves a manipulation of terms. I am prepared to accept the claim that black people sometimes attack white people for being white, with the implicit understanding that what this really means is “being white and being in the wrong neighborhood,” or “being white and being taken as a scapegoat for a lifetime of second class citizenship.”
I am also prepared to accept that the claim that white people don’t kill black people for being black can be said to be true in a sense; you’re not going to find a white person who’ll kill a black person for being black in the same sense that they’d kill a person for sleeping with their wife. But you can find white people who’ll go out and commit premeditated attacks on people of other races to promote their ideology of a racially homogeneous society and strengthen their allegiance to the cause. It’s called lone wolf activism. And while the Klu Klux Klan would not, as you said, attack a black man who just happened to be walking down the street, a black person could attract violence for being found in the wrong neighborhood, just like your white person in a black neighborhood scenario, or for associating too closely with white people, or being too successful, or “getting ideas above their station.” Black people were attacked for representing a threat to white individuals’ place in the social hierarchy among people who needed someone to look down on. Saying that this doesn’t count as white people attacking black people for being black, while black on white racially motivated violence does count, is a severe case of special pleading.
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks, but it is even more dangerous to be white.
What dangers are you referring to, specifically? Can you point me to a specific source that measures these harms? I have never heard your concluding suggestion before, though I think I have heard the opposite claim.
It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks.
Evidence?
One series of anecdotes: I’ve been the only white person in the subway car quite a few times. I didn’t check carefully, but there were few if any Asians. I’m short, I’m female, I have no reason to think I’m a scary looking person. I haven’t been attacked or threatened.
Downvoted for selecting one out of hundreds of potential effects and calling it “apparent” without a shred of evidence. Seriously, you can’t make that point without a book-length argument, and good luck getting anyone to read a book like that.
You said something like this before, and—at risk of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio further, in which case I apologize—I’m honestly curious: what’s wrong with Emmitt Till?
It seems that you are going out of your way to spread general mind-killing to this thread.
Your second point, regarding differential admissions to colleges is potentially much more interesting. The claim that there’s both directed harm and actual inefficiency resulting is a pretty strong type of argument. And you even back it up with sources.
But you start off your post with a claim that even if it were true is only marginally related to the topic at hand and is going to create a clear negative emotional reaction in almost any reader. And that claim is made with zero sourcing other than your own say so.
Depending on your viewpoint one can classify the following as either Dark Arts or as good communication: when talking to people about controversial subjects you don’t need to throw out every claim that could potentially help one viewpoint, and this is an especially bad idea when one of those supporting arguments will give a negative association to the claims in question. This is true whether or not the supporting argument is factually accurate.
Here’s an example that will be likely less controversial here. If I’m discussing evolution with a religious Jew or Christian, it more efficient to stick with the easily discussed factual issues. If they make specifically religious objections one can simply say that that’s something they’ll need to resolve and just lightly note that some people seem to be able to do it. You aren’t going to get very far if your central arguments are something like fossil record, genetics, oh and your religion is all bullshit.
Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
The second and third paragraphs are excellent, with sources, and I have very different standards for voting depending on the speaker and what I expect from him or her. Do others not? I would encourage sam0345 to make more posts like this until they are standard for him, and then later dowvote him for such posts when posts like this are typical for him.
I wouldn’t have downvoted it in isolation, but it seemed to me that, taking his other activity today into account, sam0345 was basically trolling. My habit is just to downvote that stuff until it goes away. Maybe the line between relatively high-quality trolling and needlessly inflammatory dissent is blurry...but are we really short on Brave Truth-Tellers here on LW? I submit we are not.
Oh no, not at all, I meant it more like “Oh LW, you so crazy!” I believe we are very, very contrarian here; stating unpopular beliefs is a form of showing off (see The Irrationality Game). I am not sure what quantifiable evidence I can offer of that, but I’m far from the first to make the observation.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
If it had excluded the sentence “No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did,” I would have given it an upvote without a second thought. Because of that comment, I gave it an upvote only because I think it doesn’t deserve to be at −6, and would not have upvoted it if I saw it at 0.
Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
And by abduction: lack of empathy for people who have thorns in their side, lack of empathy for those weak at the knees, and eremikophobia (fear of sand).
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
When someone uses “gay” as a curse word, he is not “marginalizing blah blah blah”. He is inadvertently revealing that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing—or inadvertently revealing that he thinks the frequent change of euphemism is an indication that most people think it is a bad thing. You are punishing him for his beliefs, not for his actions. He is not intentionally attacking anyone.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
if there’s one thing I don’t need more of in my life it’s arguing with a population comprised mostly of wealthy, white Libertarian-esque cisgendered/heterosexual men whether or not you can be racist/sexist/whatever without intentionally being a bigot.
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished.
School and university is a non stop denigration of whites, males, and white males. It is clear that males feel marginalized and diminished, which contributes to high and rising dropout rate of males, but it is more important to worry about the marginalization of some groups that other groups.
the problem is that the pain is not caused by someone stepping on your toe, but by someone showing subtle but detectable signs of thinking thoughts that you disagree with.
The pain caused by someone committing thought crime against you has a more dubious ontological status than the pain caused impact upon your toe.
A typical example of this is the word “gay”, the latest polite euphemism for male homosexual, the latest of a great many. Like every other polite euphemism for anything, it has become a swear word, a swear word that unlike Carlin’s list of seven words you used not to be able to say on TV, still has the power to shock.
Indeed, as soon as one creates a new euphemism, it implies that the thing that it is a euphemism for is unmentionably disgusting, thus becomes good swear word, depriving the euphemism of the niceness that is the essential characteristic of a euphemism, while rendering all previous euphemisms for the thing (of which there are usually large number) too disgusting to speak.
The pain caused by the inevitable and inexorable transition from euphemism to curse word is fundamentally different from the pain caused by stepping on your toes. It is more like the pain caused by losing an election, or someone banging a prettier girl than you banged. The tenth commandment forbids you to experience or admit to experiencing certain kinds of pain. Not all pains have equal status as cause for complaint. You cannot help feeling pain if someone steps on your toes, but you can and should help feeling certain other forms of pain, which forms of pain are therefore less real.
The problem is that some insults (and this is currently true about those relating to homosexuality) get backed up with violence and/or with serious social exclusion—they aren’t “just words”.
Also, people don’t reliably put abuse behind them. Their reactions to threats that it might start up again are quite strong. The situation is complicated by the fact that these reactions can be amplified by social effects.
Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness has the thesis that, because overt racism isn’t socially acceptable but covert racism still goes on, both black and white Americans search for more and more subtle clues to whether people are racist. This looks insane, but is a rational response to a difficult situation.
It is unclear to me that those consequences were unintended.
I think you’re overestimating people’s competence, but it’s hard to tell about that sort of thing.
What’s your line of thought?
I’m not sure it’s a line so much as it’s an impression. Strategists try to reshape battlefields to give themselves the high ground. I’m not sure I can articulate anything worth updating on, but I’ll think about it and get back to you if I come up with anything.
Hmm… I’d have guessed it was less about being a euphemism and more about English-speakers wanting to have a one-syllable word instead of a five-syllable one, much like “straight” is a one-syllable word for “heterosexual”, without this meaning that hetero sex is “unmentionably disgusting”.
Even from childhood we know that pain caused by deliberate insults often hurts more than physical fights. People should not seek to take offense where none was meant—but when offense is meant, and you know it’s meant, not being hurt is often harder than ignoring a merely stepped-upon toe. A deliberate insult can linger all day in your mind when a toe is soon forgotten.
Supporting evidence: American English speakers weren’t even content with a two syllable word meaning that homo sex is “unmentionably disgusting”, and it’s been shortened to one syllable.
But the original word was “queer”… which is now not a curse after having been reclaimed.
On a tangential note, this usage of “reclaim” has always bothered me. “Queer” didn’t start out with positive or neutral connotations. It has not been reclaimed by the GLBT movement, it has been appropriated. Reclamation denotes previous ownership, something that simply doesn’t apply when you look at the historical relationship between the words that are being “reclaimed” and the groups that are claiming them, but it’s chosen for its connotations of legitimacy, since people are less likely to object to your taking back what’s rightfully yours.
I find amusing the notion of bigots launching a campaign to reclaim “queer” as an insult.
Only leftists consciously try to remake language. Conservatives do not,
This may reflect the conservative belief in naive realism, that words refer to things in the world, and are ultimately defined by pointing at stuff, primarily by mothers pointing at stuff, as in “mother tongue”. Leftists frequently believe that words create reality, hence they always start language projects.
If a rose by any other name will smell as sweet, no point in finding new words for shit. You want conservatives to say “gay”. Observe. They say “gay”, but somehow it sounds remarkably as if they saying (long, long, long list of words no one is allowed to say any more)
Before building a house, check that your foundation is sound.
The bias you have to be most careful of in this situation is availability. When claiming “liberals X, but conservatives don’t X,” I think people first run a mental search for “liberal X” and then a search for “conservative X.” But mental searches aren’t as reliable as you might wish—if in the post just above, your brain was primed with an example of “liberal X,” your mental search will be a lot better at thinking of liberal X, and so you might conclude that liberal X is much more common. Curse you, availability bias!
One way to train yourself to search thoroughly is my “magical exercise of power” (actually just an improv exercise, but assertive naming seems to have worked for the Rules of Power :P).
I really don’t think availability bias is his biggest problem.
Actually, if you spend time in a highly partisan environment, availability bias is a huge problem. One of the things people do in an effort to convince each other is invent and promulgate pseudo-experience.
If you keep getting told stories of people from group A attacking group B, and you’re a B, the stories stick with you. You’re also less likely to spend time around A’s, so that you don’t have a personal history of knowing that they might be less dangerous than you’ve been told, and you’re not likely to hear stories about them being attacked by B’s or to take such stories seriously if you do hear them.
Freedom fries.
“pro-life” instead of “anti-abortion”
“Enhanced interrogation” instead of “Torture”
”Collateral damage” instead of “Civilian casualties”
“Death tax” instead of “Inheritance tax” or “estate tax”
”Civilian contractors” instead of “Hired mercenaries”
“Freedom fries” instead of “French fries”
”Freedom fighters” instead of “Those particular terrorists we happen to support”
″illegal” used as a noun.
Do these suffice?
I’ve never heard this before. Can you point me to some evidence?
The rest of your comment seems intentionally offensive. Am I correct in this assessment?
If so, feel free to pm me with your intended message without the offensive content, if you are trying to make a point with the offensive content. I don’t know if anybody else is getting your intended message, but I know I am not, and I am curious, if you can reframe your content more constructively.
Homicide Bomber.
There are certainly other examples, but that’s the first one to come to mind.
Islamofascism, “real America”, ‘Democrat’ as an adjective as in ‘Democrat Party’, Death Tax, Obamacare.
It’s politics; people come up with this stuff for a living.
If Lesswrong were an explicitly conservative site, we would recently have been re-reading the “Enhanced interrogation v. dust specks” sequence...
Probably not. Enhanced interrogation is torture, but not all torture is enhanced interrogation. “Enhanced interrogation” implies the point is to get information, if any is available. Torture includes more acts because it includes other purposes, like fun and deterrence.
Also, it is only enhanced interrogation when you or your allies are doing it. When others do it, named or unnamed then it is torture. See here.
What does this mean?
Named is examples like China mentioned in the article. Unnamed was something like torture v. dustspecks where who is doing the torturing doesn’t figure into it.
I need to add: trying to induce a confession as China did, like trying to get information, is also “interrogation”, unlike torture for no reason, fun, deterrence, etc.
Because no conservatives have ever started language projects?
I almost admire your fortitude in repeatedly charging forward, Light Brigade-like, with material you know beforehand is going to be downvoted to oblivion for partisan mindkilling.
At this point you are coming across as either a troll or as hopelessly mind-killed. It is possible you do not fall into those categories, but that’s the impression one gets from comments like the above. Please read if you have not already done so why politics is the mindkiller.
Hm. This got downvoted pretty heavily, didn’t it. So how about some of the downvoters point out some examples of conservative projects to deliberately remodel language, in the sense for instance feminism explicitely tries to, or that whole business of political correctness.
Disclaimer: I’m not conservative, hell I’m not even American and we don’t have “conservatives” where I live. I’m asking this because the falseness of what sam said is very far from apparent to me.
People already have. See comments below.
Yawn.
Missed it due to clicking on a link that produced a single-thread view.
Same to you, friend.
I’m not your friend, pal.
Downvoting both of you for signalling contempt at each other.
Let’s try and keep the forum as respectful as we can.
Certainly. Though I admit I am a little baffled as to why I got downvoted more heavily, when I wasn’t the one who came out with unprovoked rudeness.
How do you expect people to know who was provoked or unprovoked, once you deleted your comment? If you want people to know how a discussion went, you have the option of retracting but not deleting.
I’m still wondering how you were able to delete your post after I had already replied to it.
If I understand correctly, when a page gets refreshed with a reply to a comment, the delete button on that comment is gone; but as long as one is viewing a previous state of the page, when you use the delete button it works.
Which is what I did. I hadn’t seen your reply, you made it just as I was deleting—literally, I deleted and upon the page reloading I saw the inbox thingie with your reply. I was deleting because I had just noticed that I missed all those other replies to Sam.
Which would mean, with some greasemonkey, one could have a delete button on anything I guess.
Once again guessing, I’d say that “queer” and “bent” were both at a time abandoned by the gay community (even though “bent’ is of course the actual counterpart of “straight”) because of the negative connotations of weirdness in the former case, and something that’s not in its proper shape in the latter. “Gay” persisted because it was the first name whose alternate connotations were positive (being merry/carefree).
I don’t know why “queer” became acceptable to be reclaimed again, but I’m wondering whether it’s because “weird” is not really seen as a bad thing anymore—“geek” has also become a badge of honor after all, though it once used to be an insulting word.
Geek was actually the specific term for a carnival entertainer who bites the heads off of live chickens, before it became a generic term of abuse, before it became a specific term for someone who is passionate about a particular interest.
I may never think of Best Buy’s tech support department the same way again...
Also possibly because the original meaning of “weird” has become lost, or at least outmoded, as a result of tarnishing by association with the slur. Nowadays, high school and college literature professors have to preface discussions of Moby-Dick with a disclaimer to the effect that the passage
has nothing to do with sexuality at all.
(Melville knew what he liked, I guess.)
--Moby Dick
That makes sense.
There were lots of words before queer.
I can only imagine how Roy Cohn felt during the Army-McCarthy hearings when Joseph Welch quipped that “a pixie is a close relative of a fairy”...
We already have more one syllable euphemisms for male homosexual than I can shake a stick at, each of which became a curse word, and each of which was supplanted by another euphemism. The most recent one previous to gay was “queer”.
The same usually happens with other euphemisms for other undesirable characteristics—for example “retard”.
Euphemisms do not work. If the thing being referred to was OK, we would not be looking for euphemisms, thus euphemising merely draws attention to the fact that the thing being referred to is not OK.
But very rarely is someone in trouble for making a deliberate insult. When people get in trouble for being politically incorrect, they are accused of wrongthink, not intentionally insulting any specific identifiable person.
“Wrongthink” is oldspeak. Say ‘ungoodthink’.
Also, I’m curious whether you think your assertion holds in cases where an activist organization of (Group X) is the entity that accuses a speaker of political incorrectness towards Group X.
The pain of deliberate insults occurs when Person A directly insults Person B, not when Person A denigrates group X. After all, school and University is non stop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males, which has a lot to do with massive male drop out rate. So the alleged representatives of group X are not personally insulted.
I hate to get involved in political discussion, but that seems inconsistent with the data: dropout rates for men in the US are slightly higher than for women, but the difference is only about three percentage points. Perhaps more saliently, the gap appears to historically have been larger for black and Hispanic students than for whites (it still is for Hispanics), which is exactly the opposite of what I’d expect if “nonstop denigration of whites, males, white males, and dead white males” was a major factor.
And Protestants! Can’t forget those poor, persecuted Protestants, nosiree.
Seriously, where did you go to school? Cause it wasn’t where I went to school, I’ll tell you that.
My school more or less had all the teachers from the MTV show Daria. Most of those are leftist, with enormous character flaws and failures of rationality.
Fortunately I learned that reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
Marginalizing or diminishing people due to the socially enforced classes they belong to is not at all the same thing as “showing subtle signs of thinking thoughts you disagree with”.
Feeling demeaned or socially excluded is a fundamentally different kind of pain than that caused by having one’s toe stepped on: it is a much more damaging one.
Feeling demeaned is painful and can be worse than having one’s toe stepped on. But some people are allowed to complain about it, and other people are not.
It’s like saying that stepping on someone’s toe is bad, but some people by definition don’t have toes. If they claim to have toes too, it only proves their malice—by pretending to have toes they want to make us less sensitive about the pain of the real toe owners.
If you officially don’t have a toe, then everyone is free to step on your toe, because officially it didn’t happen. Other people then tell you how lucky you are for not having a toe. Then they accuse you of lack of empathy towards people who have their toes stepped on.
If you mean that there are classes of marginalized people who aren’t allowed or aren’t capable of objecting to mistreatment I agree. And I would agree that the cluster of people that cares a lot about racism, sexism, etc. often doesn’t see such people as deserving justice. When male victims of domestic violence feel excluded by feminist discussions of domestic violence which vilify men for example—I think that counts as a real harm.
But that does not mean everyone’s claim to having had their toe stepped on deserves equal respect or credibility. Claims of harm due to anti-white racism, as if it were equivalent to anti-black racism are really implausible and people taking offense to the suggestion of equivalence is reasonable. This is why I don’t agree with the anti-subordination activist’s position of privileging first person accounts of dis-empowered people when defining the scope of bigotry and injustice. I think neutral principles of some sort are required to sort out claims of injustice—but of course I don’t know how to arrive at such principles and think it is likely that any criteria I propose will be based on concern for protecting my politically favored groups. And that would be bad. In short, this stuff is really complicated and I’m not really aligned with much anyone on the subject.
The question “Is it easier to beat action game levels on normal mode, or on hard mode with an infinite ammunition cheat on?” would be ill-posed.
Sorry, don’t follow the metaphor.
Assuming it wasn’t a metaphor, it would still obviously be ill-posed though, right?
It may be that one game can be beaten by someone only on normal, but all levels but one are easier on hard with unlimited ammo. Or that one game is easier on normal and another easier with unlimited ammo on hard. One level might require 72 hours of straight gameplay to beat on hard with unlimited ammo, but such a victory might be reliably achieved, and a 9⁄10 chance of death each run on normal, with success determined by the third minute.
The metaphor is that people have different advantages and disadvantages. The one person whose challenge is difficulty conserving grenades and separating enemies to confront as few at a time as possible might have little in common with the person whose challenge is grouping enemies such that the fastest and slowest are each hit by as many of his individual grenade throws as possible.
Edit: Never mind. I got it.
That there are different advantages and disadvantages does not mean that there cannot be, on net, one group that dominates another.
Oh come on. Lot of people get beaten up for being white, frequently maimed for life. There is a whole genre of you tube videos on the topic. No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did. The fact that when you are digging for white racist attacks, you wind up with such an implausible poster boy as Emmit Till shows how hard up you are for examples.
Similarly, lots of people are excluded from university for being white and male, and worse, white and male from rural America
Which tells us:Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
I have basically no desire to have an extended discussion on this matter with someone who seems to have had their mind killed by politics (whether or not I’ve had my mind killed as well). Of particular note is second clause of
which is historically ignorant to an almost absurd point—a point I don’t think I’ve seen anyone take before. I will note that random irrational violence is almost always done by victims of one kind or another. High status people don’t get into fights as a rule. Low status people are much more likely to—this isn’t surprising when considering what kind of behaviors get selected for in a mammal dominance hierarchy. Males with few to no mating possibilities because of their low status are much more likely to risk their lives in combat in order attain higher status and mating opportunities. Alpha elephant seals with large harems don’t pick fights with the young bulls who lack harems. Obviously black people who beat up white people do not experience a substantive status change when the succeed but we all know evolved software misfires.
(Unfortunately it may need to be said that I don’t consider the above explanation for violence to be a justification for violence)
So where is your poster boy who got beaten up for being black? If you had such a poster boy, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
You will seem to be conceding what you deny.
Groups that employ random irrational violence tend to lose to groups that employ rational coordinated cooperative violence, violence that is bold yet planned and prudent, groups that display loyalty and discipline. It does not follow that that those who employ random irrational violence are violent because they lost, but rather that they lost because their violence was irrational.
Nor does it follow that those groups that lost were “victims”. If we look at Africa, it is apparent that blacks were better off ruled by whites than by blacks.
There’s no more need for a poster boy for racial violence against blacks than there is for a poster boy for historical repression of the Native Americans. Why should anyone have to come up with a single representative example when you can point to general policy?
Well into the 20th century, the Klu Klux Klan was still considered socially respectable as an institution, and being a member could even be politically advantageous.
It’s easy to take a position that’s socially frowned upon, and argue or assume that everyone who disagrees with you is too biased by social conditioning to change their minds. Easy enough to turn it into a fully general counterargument. But here of all places, I think you should keep in mind that if your position is getting a bad reception, you should strongly consider the possibility that you are either not making a good case for it, or that you’re arguing for something that simply isn’t correct.
So you are not going to let the absence of any facts get in your way.
Which presupposes that which is to be proven: That the Klu Klux Klan beat blacks up for being black, the way blacks beat whites up for being white every day.
The Klu Klux Klan made it dangerous to engage in certain political activities, especially if one was black (see the Wikipedia list of notorious Klan Murders). It did not make it dangerous merely to be black, the way it is dangerous merely to be white in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks. Klan violence was political violence, and indeed terrorism, but it was not race hate, not the race hate that we see so enthusiastically displayed by blacks on You tube
Come to think of it, it is also dangerous to be black in any location where whites are outnumbered by blacks (the presence of whites makes blacks safer from other blacks), but it is even more dangerous to be white in such areas.
What would you take as adequate evidence? The Klu Klux Klan is notorious for having lynched and committed other acts of racially motivated violence. There’s no shortage of writers who have written about racially motivated violence against blacks as part of their personal experience. There’s no shortage of documentation. What evidence, that we should reasonably be expect to be there if a significant amount of racial violence against blacks has happened, and have access to, would be sufficient for you?
If you simply wanted to convince other members of this board that most racially motivated crime in America today is committed against whites, your best bet would probably have simply been to link them to this. But even this is a seriously problematic claim; the idea that 90% of race based crime incidents are white seems to originate here. I read the original report, and confirmed that it makes no such claim, rather, Sheehan gets that figure by classifying all interracial crime as race based crime, and comparing the number of violent crimes committed by black perpetrators and white victims with the number of violent crimes committed by white perpetrators with black victims. But not only is it absurd to suppose that all violent interracial crime is racially motivated, there are a lot more white people in this country than black people, meaning that if all criminals chose their victims completely at random, black on white crime would dramatically outnumber white on black crime. In fact, according to the report, crime among black people is more intraracial than crime among white people relative to the number of crimes committed.
The swastika on the tab for the site where Sheehan wrote the article is a pretty significant sign of a biased agenda all by itself.
But claiming that violence against blacks by whites has not been historically significant, in addition to present day race based crime being slanted in the opposite direction, that’s a really outstanding claim. So what evidence are you prepared to present?
A black man who happened to be walking down the street while a dozen Klansmen happened to be walking by in the other direction was not going to be attacked by a dozen Klansmen for no special reason other than general hatred of blacks, the way a white man walking down the street may be attacked by a dozen blacks for no special reason other than general hatred of whites.
If you count all the blacks that were attacked to be carried off into slavery, unjust white attacks on blacks probably greatly outnumber unjust black attacks on whites, but these were not race hate attacks. They attacked because they wanted someone to cut sugar cane, not because they disliked blacks.
From the absence of race hate attacks by whites, and the frequency of race hate attacks by blacks, we can conclude that everywhere in America today, the safest places for a white man, are also the safest places for a black man.
From which we can conclude that you do in fact believe that blacks on average, have worse character than whites, since you are aware that predominantly black areas are unsafe—unsafe for everyone, but especially unsafe for whites.
From the fact that Everett Till is the poster boy for white attacks on blacks, we can conclude that in all of American history from around that time to the present, there has never been a racially motivated attack on a black resembling racially motivated attacks on whites that occur every day in today’s America, because if there ever had been such an attack, you would not be reduced to using Emmet Till as poster boy.
Why bother to quote my text if you’re not going to answer the question?
You could say that there are cases where black people have attacked white people for being white, and I wouldn’t contest it. And you could say that white people haven’t attacked black people for being black, and I would be willing to concede that there is a sense in which that is true. But to say that black people have attacked white people for being white, but white people have not attacked black people for being black is simply absurd.
The reason that they can both be individually correct, but not accurate as a comparison is because it involves a manipulation of terms. I am prepared to accept the claim that black people sometimes attack white people for being white, with the implicit understanding that what this really means is “being white and being in the wrong neighborhood,” or “being white and being taken as a scapegoat for a lifetime of second class citizenship.”
I am also prepared to accept that the claim that white people don’t kill black people for being black can be said to be true in a sense; you’re not going to find a white person who’ll kill a black person for being black in the same sense that they’d kill a person for sleeping with their wife. But you can find white people who’ll go out and commit premeditated attacks on people of other races to promote their ideology of a racially homogeneous society and strengthen their allegiance to the cause. It’s called lone wolf activism. And while the Klu Klux Klan would not, as you said, attack a black man who just happened to be walking down the street, a black person could attract violence for being found in the wrong neighborhood, just like your white person in a black neighborhood scenario, or for associating too closely with white people, or being too successful, or “getting ideas above their station.” Black people were attacked for representing a threat to white individuals’ place in the social hierarchy among people who needed someone to look down on. Saying that this doesn’t count as white people attacking black people for being black, while black on white racially motivated violence does count, is a severe case of special pleading.
Stop feeding the troll.
I was thinking the same thing as Desertopia, but decided that he wasn’t worth the time it would take to type up.
I’m curious: who are your white victim poster children?
What dangers are you referring to, specifically? Can you point me to a specific source that measures these harms? I have never heard your concluding suggestion before, though I think I have heard the opposite claim.
When I walk down the street and hear footsteps I start thinking about robbery. Then I look around and see someone white and feel relieved.
Evidence?
One series of anecdotes: I’ve been the only white person in the subway car quite a few times. I didn’t check carefully, but there were few if any Asians. I’m short, I’m female, I have no reason to think I’m a scary looking person. I haven’t been attacked or threatened.
Downvoted for selecting one out of hundreds of potential effects and calling it “apparent” without a shred of evidence. Seriously, you can’t make that point without a book-length argument, and good luck getting anyone to read a book like that.
You said something like this before, and—at risk of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio further, in which case I apologize—I’m honestly curious: what’s wrong with Emmitt Till?
Edit:
Jesus Christ, I can’t believe you said that.
It seems that you are going out of your way to spread general mind-killing to this thread.
Your second point, regarding differential admissions to colleges is potentially much more interesting. The claim that there’s both directed harm and actual inefficiency resulting is a pretty strong type of argument. And you even back it up with sources.
But you start off your post with a claim that even if it were true is only marginally related to the topic at hand and is going to create a clear negative emotional reaction in almost any reader. And that claim is made with zero sourcing other than your own say so.
Depending on your viewpoint one can classify the following as either Dark Arts or as good communication: when talking to people about controversial subjects you don’t need to throw out every claim that could potentially help one viewpoint, and this is an especially bad idea when one of those supporting arguments will give a negative association to the claims in question. This is true whether or not the supporting argument is factually accurate.
Here’s an example that will be likely less controversial here. If I’m discussing evolution with a religious Jew or Christian, it more efficient to stick with the easily discussed factual issues. If they make specifically religious objections one can simply say that that’s something they’ll need to resolve and just lightly note that some people seem to be able to do it. You aren’t going to get very far if your central arguments are something like fossil record, genetics, oh and your religion is all bullshit.
Don’t mindkill when you don’t have to.
May 2011 : Greece: Fascists attempt to kill immigrants : one migrant stabbed to death, 17 hospitalized.
I (perhaps incorrectly) understood him to be speaking of within the US. Otherwise, Libya also has some significant, very recent counterexamples.
Eh, not that hard to give examples in the US either. The most recent that comes to mind. And that’s just the most recent fatality. If one extends to just people being “beaten up” the set will be much larger.
Claims must be specific and backed with evidence. The claim as he stated it is false. If he wants to limit it in scope, then let him limit it as he will, and its significance then becomes proportionaly limited in a similar way. From a claim about the world entire, it becomes a claim for about 1/20th of the global population, and thus attains 1/20th its former significance, at which point we ought give it about 1/20th the weight we otherwise would.
I want parochialism and assumptions of parochialism to have no place in this forum. If we can discuss many-worlds and if we can worry about what we’ll be doing for fun a million years from now, then people can bloody well lift their noses up to perceive there exist countries outside the USA.
I have mixed feelings about what you say here.
On the one hand, of course the whole world matters. On the other, we can make much more specific claims about smaller regions, and test them more easily.
In this particular case, I think both are overwhelmed by concerns of conversational pragmatism. If you can defeat his arguments in the framework where he made them, you win. If you make an objection outside that domain, and he says “but that’s not what I meant”, then squabbling about particularities of domain, word choice, and inference is a frequently observed failure mode. Noting and criticizing US-centrism (or any other -centrism) is worth doing, but should be considered an aside.
I am surprised that this is so severely downvoted.
The second and third paragraphs are excellent, with sources, and I have very different standards for voting depending on the speaker and what I expect from him or her. Do others not? I would encourage sam0345 to make more posts like this until they are standard for him, and then later dowvote him for such posts when posts like this are typical for him.
Upvoted.
I wouldn’t have downvoted it in isolation, but it seemed to me that, taking his other activity today into account, sam0345 was basically trolling. My habit is just to downvote that stuff until it goes away. Maybe the line between relatively high-quality trolling and needlessly inflammatory dissent is blurry...but are we really short on Brave Truth-Tellers here on LW? I submit we are not.
(Pretty short on black people, though.)
That just sounds self-congratulatory applause-lights. What’s your evidence for this claim?
I read “Brave Truth-Tellers” as a slightly sarcastic way of saying “contrarians”, which we’ve got plenty of.
Quite.
No we don’t.
Oh no, not at all, I meant it more like “Oh LW, you so crazy!” I believe we are very, very contrarian here; stating unpopular beliefs is a form of showing off (see The Irrationality Game). I am not sure what quantifiable evidence I can offer of that, but I’m far from the first to make the observation.
If it had excluded the sentence “No one gets beaten up for being black—and very few people ever did,” I would have given it an upvote without a second thought. Because of that comment, I gave it an upvote only because I think it doesn’t deserve to be at −6, and would not have upvoted it if I saw it at 0.
And by abduction: lack of empathy for people who have thorns in their side, lack of empathy for those weak at the knees, and eremikophobia (fear of sand).
When someone uses “gay” as a curse word, he is not “marginalizing blah blah blah”. He is inadvertently revealing that he thinks homosexuality is a bad thing—or inadvertently revealing that he thinks the frequent change of euphemism is an indication that most people think it is a bad thing. You are punishing him for his beliefs, not for his actions. He is not intentionally attacking anyone.
Or he could be advertently revealing that fact.
No one is saying he is. In fact, the context of this entire thread is someone saying explicitly that no one is saying he is.
Jandila:
When people say “that shit is gay” gay people feel marginalized and diminished. They feel hurt. Whether or not it was intentional (and certainly it often is).
School and university is a non stop denigration of whites, males, and white males. It is clear that males feel marginalized and diminished, which contributes to high and rising dropout rate of males, but it is more important to worry about the marginalization of some groups that other groups.
You know, you’re going to have to back up these claims eventually. Why not start now?