Above Political Correctness

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by CelesJessa

Or there's always the choice of a not-so-hostile confrontation.

In my personal experience, though, not-so-hostile confrontation just doesn't work. It certainly was ineffective with me. Like, generally speaking if I said something stupid and someone on NPF tried to politely correct me in a respectable manner, I'd usually respond agreeably but inadvertently or subconsciously interpret the entire ordeal as permissive. It would not prevent me from still remaining intolerant or conservative or a bit of a douche, and it would not force me to reassess my opinions or my perspective. Instead I'd probably just come back a month or two later and say the same stupid shit, aggravating the same people all over again.

Personally I think that's how my experiences on NPF generally went -- like initially I think NonCon and Mirai and Fifthfiend and others were trying to be polite and non-confrontational with me, but every time they'd do so I'd just come back in another thread a while later and make the same mistakes or the same kinds of ignorant statements. Eventually they'd have to get aggressive or I'd just keep doing it and offending them.

And it was only after they were aggressive that I was forced to truly reassess my beliefs and the way I behaved and the things I said and the thoughts I thought. Like sure initially I'd respond in the exact way you've noted -- like being all upset and riled and incapable of responding logically and derailing the conversation -- but days or weeks after the fact I'd actually find myself thinking back to what happened -- in large part because I was upset with the overtly hostile nature of the debate and the way things degraded...and then I'd say, "Huh. Shit. Maybe I was wrong."

That kind of reassessment just doesn't happen if someone just says "I'm sorry Snake, I know you didn't mean to be offensive but that comment could be interpreted in a poor way against women / the LGBT community / ethnic minorities / whatever." If someone tries to be civil about it the criticism will usually brush right by me and no lesson will be learned.

Yeah, logical arguments are a part of the equation too, and a pretty important element of NonCon and others' hostile criticisms of me was that they actually needed to be right -- and have the logical underpinnings of a cohesive argument against my ignorance -- in order for the hostility itself to lead to the desired outcome. I'm not saying that isn't important but I am saying that if I say something ignorant and offensive to others in society and you want me to actually learn and reform and grow in response you had better call me an asshole when I deserve to be called such or I will continue to be an asshole.

[Overcast]

Simultaneously I'm not perfectly sure, but you might have a particular kind of ignorance in you Snake. A lack of perspective. Someone with perspective can look at the whole picture and see flaws in their thinking when someone else lays down solid facts on the opposite end. If you were that kind of ignorant then I can see why you'd need someone to publicly embarrass you every single time you need to change your perspective.

But honestly I think that is a bit much, and that if you aren't gaining perspective from the action and are just becoming religiously attached to a different set of ideals then I don't think you are gaining enough.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by shiney

Your argument is you want people to get pissed off at you when you offend them. That isn't the argument I'm trying to make, which is you shouldn't censor yourself to not offend them. If you did that, then you never would have changed, because you'd have never said the viewpoints that offended them to begin with.

My argument is more that people who get angry and respond with hostility to the ignorant statements of others should not be held more responsible for the argument by Moderators and others than the individual who said the stupid and ignorant and offensive comment in the first place.

Unfortunately on NPF it tends to go in the opposite direction -- the people who are ignorant and who say offensive things tend to get away with less a punishment than the people who get justifiably angry by their stupidity and bash them for saying something inappropriate. Ideally it should be the other way around. You can interpret that as enforcing "political correctness" at the expense of sharing divergent viewpoints but I think that's precisely what a good internet community should do. We should not tolerate cultural insensitivity or stereotypical thinking. You should not be able to make feel people terrible here simply for committing the "offense" of being "different or abnormal" in a way that leads to the beneficiaries of institutional privilege making stupid jokes at their expense.

[Nikose Tyris]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Frankly, I don't think the intent of the speaker should matter. If I as a beneficiary of institutional privilege by being born a heterosexual white male am having a conversation with someone who is in an oppressed minority group and I happen to make a reference to them being "abnormal" or women being "emotionally unstable" or gays being "extravagant" or black people liking offensive "ghetto rap music," the fact that I may have intended to simply make a joke, express a lack of understanding for a "foreign" or "unique" culture, or make a broader and unrelated point has no bearing on the fact that I just said something stupid and really offensive.

Agreed to a point, yes! Regardless of intent, if you say something that is taken offensively, or if you use an outdated and impolite terminology, congrats, you've said something stupid and offended someone.

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Now there are two ways that the person I've offended in this hypothetical situation can respond to this: they can let it slide (in which case the privilege just perpetuates, and I continue to say stupid untrue generalizations because I've never been called out on it, and I continue to inadvertently offend people out of ignorance) OR they can get angry and call me out on it.

Disagreed. Why does someone have to get ANGRY about it, before someone takes notice? Getting 'angry' only gets my hair up and makes me more likely to fight back about the issue, even if I know I'm wrong. Anything can be conveyed in reasonable discussion, barring the listener being a) really, really dense, or b) really, really stubborn. [see a].

EXAMPLE: I use the term 'Queer' in my community. It's our word. We prefer it because of it's expansiveness; it doesn't limit it to the 'gay' community, the 'trans' community, because those are seperate things. It's an umbrella term that we feel incorporates all of us.

However, some groups dislike it, and refuse to participate in this blanket term; some prefer "LGBT Community", which doesn't include genderqueer and incorporate them. I've encountered many people, including my Aunt, who despises the use of the term 'queer' in the name, and I've had disagreements with her over it.

Who's technically in the 'right' here? Short answer, she is. She's allowed to be offended. She's not capable of saying "That's offensive,"- that implies everyone would be offended by this, which isn't the case. However, that she is offended, and asked me to stop using it, is different. I've agreed to stop using it around her.


Also- It changed from Transexual/Hermaphrodite to Transgender because They are confident and individual in their sexuality, and they are not 'both sexes'; they identify as a specific gender, and are entitled to be the gender they choose. Their gender also doesn't define their sexual orientation.

That's the short answer, as I've been given.



Edit: Wow, took so long to write that one, I got left in the dust.

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by Overcast

Simultaneously I'm not perfectly sure, but you might have a particular kind of ignorance in you Snake. A lack of perspective. Someone with perspective can look at the whole picture and see flaws in their thinking when someone else lays down solid facts on the opposite end. If you were that kind of ignorant then I can see why you'd need someone to publicly embarrass you every single time you need to change your perspective.

Yup, that's right, the clear conclusion here is that I'm a dense idiot who is ignorant, lesson learned, everybody go home now.

...No, I don't think that's it at all. If I had no ability to express empathy towards others or view things "from their perspective" I'd still be making arguments about how gay marriage should be illegal or how everyone of Arabic descent should be subject to additional scrutiny in airports.

Perhaps to be more blunt, I think that everyone has a bit of dense ignorance and prejudiced bias to them. I suppose your criticism of me is accurate, therefore, but one I would expand to encompass everyone and not one I would narrow into a matter of my personal shortcomings. I don't think Bob the Merc, for example -- sorry for using you as an example Rob -- was any more or less suspect to falling victim to his predisposed biases than I was, and I think he needed just as many people shouting and bickering with hostility in his direction to achieve his orientation shift. Same with anyone, really. We're all suspect to believe what we're taught to believe by our parents and our communities until something radical shakes us from our foundations and forces us to reassess.

Nonetheless, if you say something offensive how you feel about the ignorant shit or what you think you intended by it is not nearly as important as what the offended party feels. Making that distinction is critical. Really, the hostile responses to my stupid statements were not only intended to "reform" or "educate" me but also to inform others in the community who were offended due to their minority status that they had allies and were supported and that intolerant shit wouldn't be tolerated.

In other words, if I say something stupid and offensive that could be interpreted as insulting to gays, even if I did not mean the insult, if someone calls me an asshole, he's/she's not only sending a message to me, but he/she is also sending a positive message to the LGBT community here on NPF. That message is "You are welcome here, and if someone tries to suggest otherwise we will bash him with a fury to protect you and ensure you continue to feel welcome here."

...That is fairly important, I'd wager.

[CelesJessa]

Personally, I agree (and I think everyone else would too) that anyone should be comfortable and welcome here, and I can think of times where mods have stepped in when people made posts that boiled down to "women, amirite?" and said "Hey guys this isn't appropriate" that made me feel better/more welcome (which maybe should have happened in the other thread, if there had been time before flying off the handle happened). But I'm not sure if "We will have crazy flame wars if you get insulted" would make me feel much more welcome.

In any case, I just dislike any bashing in general.

[Fifthfiend]

Originally Posted by shiney

So because I'm not in a minority somewhere, I should have to tiptoe around what I say, taking into account the potential that someone MIGHT get offended by a word or nomenclature I use, and instead strive to use vanilla terms that are either not as effective or not as descriptive to get across the point which I am trying to make? So because I'm not in a minority somewhere, I should have to tiptoe around what I say, taking into account the potential that someone MIGHT get offended by a word or nomenclature I use, and instead strive to use vanilla terms that are either not as effective or not as descriptive to get across the point which I am trying to make? Saying women are emotionally unstable is a crass generalization so it's a poor example. Ghetto rap music as a phrase is derogatory in itself, classifying a subgenre of people as living in the ghetto, so it's a poor example. Both of those terms already have negative connotations before using them. The term or word abnormal may relate directly to something that is, in fact, not normal. Just because I'm not a gay mexican black woman shouldn't mean I need to constantly censor myself to I can preserve the ego of people who might take offense at something. I repeat my position that people need to pay attention to the speaker.

It's massively disingenuous, to claim that "abnormal" has no pre-existing negative connotations.

Like I really can't imagine what you're trying to prove by pretending we don't all understand that calling a person abnormal is an incredibly insulting, terrible thing to say.

Originally Posted by shiney

So because I'm not in a minority somewhere, I should have to tiptoe around what I say, taking into account the potential that someone MIGHT get offended by a word or nomenclature I use, and instead strive to use vanilla terms that are either not as effective or not as descriptive to get across the point which I am trying to make?

And it gets even worse when this incredibly broad, unspecific descriptor is your example of a word you just have to use because it's just so much more effective and descriptive than terms like "transgender" or "bigender" which, you know, actually directly describe what is being discussed.

I really don't know what your deal is with political correctness that you're willing to defend this, of all things, because TDK successfully wrapped it up in that banner.

[Overcast]

I don't want to know I have allies, I don't want someone else to try to represent me. If a person wants to say they were offended by something that was just fine but don't try to drag the whole community into the issue. I want people to just own up to the fact that they aren't protecting everyone who shares this public image when they are just shutting down what I see as imagined ignorance. Them doing so doesn't tell me I'm welcome. A mod coming down on someone who spoke what I consider real ignorance, that makes me feel welcome. A woman talking in a public conference about how a baseball coach said homosexual slurs doesn't make me feel welcome. An administration finally passing a situation that allows gays to serve in the military properly that makes me feel welcome.

[shiney]

It's more of my personal preference that people are allowed to use the english language as a language instead of needing to constantly defend themselves against potential accusations of being offensive. Like, you can see when someone says something innocuously (at least in person)...I guess I should specify that a person can be offended all they want, nobody should say they can't be offended, but that before responding with vitriol or attitude they should attempt to clarify what the speaker meant initially?

That said, calling a person abnormal, directly, yeah I'll give you that. Splitting hairs in regards to normal/abnormal behavior is a bit more difficult, because I guess normalcy is subjective as to each separate individual since what's normal for me may not be for others. It almost requires someone to base it off the majority or the standard vs. the deviation which then leads toward prejudice and bias. This is where I believe the intent of the speaker comes in, but then it's difficult to make that determination...

I mean I'll agree with you outright though that saying a person is abnormal is pretty rude inasmuch as assuming you are doing so to say they're weird or wrong, but that just isn't the tone I got from the initial thing. Perhaps interpreting someone's tone over the internet is subject to the reader's predisposition as well.

A lot of subjectivity regarding this entire discussion, come to think of it!

[Archbio]

Shiney, what I'm getting from your explanation there is that you don't seem to realize that a lot of people who set out to be offensive actually usually work a bit to make their intent somewhat ambiguous or create a vague sense of plausible deniability.

If you wait for something more obvious than a gratuitous use of normal/abnormal in an odd context coupled with considerable smugness before you realize that someone is trying to be offensive; you're going to wait a long time. Especially since you've all made it very clear that some words are words, but some attitude is just beyond the pale.