Big Tech Twits Get Dumber and Corrupter!

[Week]

52 minutes ago, Darzin said:

Maybe Elon Musk isn't but it's hard to argue Heartofice isn't when he's unfailing polite and significantly more moderate on these issues then the Republican party. They idea that he couldn't possibly believe what he says when millions of people believe just that is just willful blindness.  

My statement was directed at El*n as his ilk.

You are free to make whatever assessment of individuals based on your experience and reading of interactions. I have no interest in engaging.

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

The problem with targeted harassment is solved by banning... Targeted harassment. Not claiming a word being used by the harassers is a slur when it's not and banning that.

Oh yeah it’s a moat and Bailey.

Ex. Man says adoption agencies  children should give their kids over to people qualified at raising children and then proceeds to say gay people shouldn’t be allowed to adopt.

When that man is called homophobic a second man comes in and says there is nothing wrong in wanting adoption agencies to give kids over to qualified agencies and attacks the critics as wanting to endanger children through placing them with same sex couples who aren’t qualified. Doesn’t bluntly say gay couples should banned from adopting but does posit on how it’s silly for adoption to not and promote a ‘traditional’ family model.

 

1 hour ago, Liffguard said:

"Terf" is frequently used as a pejorative, but that's not the same thing as a slur.

Yeah it’s like racist, far right extremist, or dumbass or conservative me calling some people these awful things isn’t equivalent to calling them the n word 
or f-slur.
I do think it possibly reveals a minimization of actual slurs and the harm they present. They’re just words which make you feel bad 

1 hour ago, Darzin said:

Maybe Elon Musk isn't

Apartheid boy definitely isn’t.

1 hour ago, Darzin said:

hard to argue Heartofice isn't when he's unfailing polite

That doesn’t really give credence to one’s good or bad faith in discussion. Though maybe this is due to a different view of what polite entails.

1 hour ago, Darzin said:

They idea that he couldn't possibly believe what he says when millions of people believe just that is just willful blindness. 

Okay actually re-reading @Week post nowhere did he actually single out HOI.

Yes some of the people who are saying calling cis people is comparable to  calling a gay man the f-slur, or black woman the n-word in their heart of hearts genuinely hold this position that I hope you can recognize is still really stupid and gross.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Liffguard said:

"Terf" is frequently used as a pejorative, but that's not the same thing as a slur.

Er disagree. Fits this defintion from dictionary perfectly.

“a derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people“

Terf is often used as a slur. 
 

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Terf is often used as a slur. 

Oh your retreating into standard dictionary definitions. This seems incongruous with your past statements. Interesting shift

Anyway Idiot would similarly qualify as often being used as slur by that definition. So would conservative. So would Brexiteer. So would woke. Ooh remoaner is a slur by this metric 

When people generally think of slurs they think of a bigoted term to describe a group for  an unalienable characteristic about them in a negative or dehumanizing  way thus shouldn’t be said.

If you genuinely generally apply  this standard “slur is when call group bad name” than I see no utility  to cry cis or terf is a slur with regards  in furthering a worthwhile conversation

It just seems a way to try and bludgeon conversation/criticism  through feigned righteous indignation. Right or left I hate that sort of thing dude.

Oh also

an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their 

afound this definition. 

 

I guess you’re never going to insult Megan Markle again lol.  Or you will and based on the parameters you’ve set it’d be fair to ask you politely not to use slurs when referring to her you know dumb, talentless, boring etc.

I kid.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Starkess]

I definitely do not think "cis" or "cisgender" are slurs, but neither do I think it's cool to aggressively and repeatedly call someone by a term they have said they do not like being applied to them. And I think the term "cissy" is a slur.

[Week]

Found some people that are really concerned about "cis" as a slur.

 

 

[Liffguard]

2 minutes ago, Starkess said:

I definitely do not think "cis" or "cisgender" are slurs, but neither do I think it's cool to aggressively and repeatedly call someone by a term they have said they do not like being applied to them. And I think the term "cissy" is a slur.

I think if someone objects specifically to being referred to as "cis" then it's polite not to refer to them that way.

I think the problem lies in that for many, it's not the term "cis" they actually object to, it's the implication that they fall into one particular category out of several equal categories and that their identity shouldn't be assumed as the default. I've been witness to several conversations in which someone rejects the label "cis," but then also rejects being referred to as non-trans or any other term to specify that their gender identity matches their birth sex. They'll insist that they don't need a descriptor at all, and that the onus is on trans people to be specifically identified as other. In those situations, I'm less inclined to respect preferred nomenclature.

[BigFatCoward]

7 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Why do you think cis is silly?

 

Because nobody in the real world uses that term to describe themselves. Outside this board I've never heard it used by anyone, ever. Surely attaching labels to poeple that they don't like, we can all agree is a bit mean?

And its just a stupid sounding word apart from anything else. 

Edited June 21, 2023 by BigFatCoward

[Zorral]

Vol. 45 No. 13 · 29 June 2023
Cancelled
Amia Srinivasan writes about free speech on campus

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n13/amia-srinivasan/cancelled?

Quote

 

.... No doubt it can be painful, infuriating or upsetting to be called a racist or a bigot or a sexist or a transphobe. Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving end of such remarks doesn’t mean that one’s own rights to ‘free speech’ are thereby imperilled; it might simply be a reminder that speech can wound. The failure properly to metabolise this point is what leads to the ludicrous spectacle of people with enormous speaking platforms complaining about having been ‘cancelled’. In 2020, the conservative broadcaster Andrew Neil tweeted that the left-wing journalist Owen Jones had ‘tried – and failed – to cancel my BBC career many times’. He was referring to Jones’s persistent criticisms of the far-right content that appears in the Spectator, of which Neil is the chairman: an exercise of Jones’s free speech rights that John Stuart Mill would have recognised as a paradigm. ....

.... These are baffling provisions, stemming from a conflation – now commonplace – of free speech and academic freedom. Suppose that a climate change denier wants to speak at, or be employed by, Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment. It is presumably within the rights of Oxford’s geography dons – world experts in ecological change and crisis – to deny him a platform or a job. Indeed, that is the whole point about academic freedom: it is the freedom to exercise academic expertise in order to discriminate between good and bad ideas, valid and invalid arguments, sound and hare-brained methods. This is what academics do when we curate syllabuses, make appointments, allocate graduate places and funding, peer-review papers and books, and invite speakers. In each of these cases we are exercising our professional judgment about the intellectual worth and seriousness of other people’s ideas. ....

.... DeSantis is an extreme example of the right’s doublethink around free speech. In that sense he is a boon for more moderate Republicans. His legislative absurdities allow subtler attacks on free speech and academic freedom to blend into the political background. The Texas legislature, one of the 24 state legislatures which in 2021 introduced gag orders on the teaching of various topics including ‘critical race theory’, recently codified new grounds for the revocation of tenure at public universities, one of which was ‘moral turpitude’. At the University of Illinois in 2014, trustees voted to block the appointment of a new professor, Steven Salaita, after students and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on the understanding that the university would disclose the email addresses of any students who participated in a Koch-sponsored class, reading group, club or fellowship, so that the Koch Foundation could ‘notify students of opportunities’. (‘No one else has this infrastructure,’ the foundation’s vice president bragged to supporters at an annual meeting.) The university was also asked not to speak to journalists about these programmes without first seeking the foundation’s approval. In 2007, the foundation proposed to donate $7 million to Florida State University’s economics department, on the condition that it hired faculty members and funded graduate students who were ideologically aligned with Charles Koch. The conservative non-profit Turning Point USA (which the Chronicle of Higher Education has called the ‘dominant force in campus conservatism’), runs a Professor Watchlist with the names and details of academics who it claims ‘discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom’.  ....

 

I still do not understand why those who advocate for bigotry, racism, white supremacy, fascism/nazism, misogyny, etc. so object to those words since what these words means are what they advocate for so vociferously. 

Author attempts to answer my ever present question:

Quote

.... It would be natural to conclude that the right has been very clever in the way it has made the notion of cancellation a cudgel that can be wielded only in its own political interests. But the asymmetries of ‘cancellation’ also answer to a widespread and deeply felt sense of who is and who is not entitled to occupy the public sphere. Certain people with certain views – people like Andrew Neil, or household figures like J.K. Rowling – are seen as having a right not only to free speech but, more important, to be treated with respect, and to have their views taken seriously. (Of course everyone does have a right – a genuine right – not to be subjected to death threats or harassment, which applies in Rowling’s case just as it does in Jones’s and Sarkar’s.) When such people are accused by those on the political margins of being racist or sexist or transphobic, this is a violation of a tacit social agreement, which we call the ‘right to free speech’ but in fact is something else, what we might call the right to a respectful public hearing. It is for this reason, I think, that the New York Times letter-writer feels able to set up an equivalence between the criminalisation of leftist speech in Florida and the calling-out of conservatives as racist on Twitter: the latter is as much a violation of an assumed entitlement as the former. ....

This applies perfectly to the screeds and whines of the SCOTUS members.

Edited June 21, 2023 by Zorral

[Ser Reptitious]

17 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

Surely attaching labels to poeple that they don't like, we can all agree is a bit mean?

Speaking as someone who very much falls into the "cisgender" category, I find this whole debate rather amusing, in the sense that if we had this whole discussion about any other group, a substantial portion of cisgenders would complain loudly about "political correctness gone wild" and how people are too sensitive these days.

[Zorral]

58 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

nobody in the real world uses that term to describe themselves.

Yes, they do.  Particularly in the US, and in the sf/f world.

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, Ser Reptitious said:

Speaking as someone who very much falls into the "cisgender" category, I find this whole debate rather amusing, in the sense that if we had this whole discussion about any other group, a substantial portion of cisgenders would complain loudly about "political correctness gone wild" and how people are too sensitive these days.

I agree completely except I do think there's another term or two that potentially could wind up with a similar reaction.

BFC - the term came about to have a way to refer to people who are not transgender without stigmatizing trans people with the implicit "normal/abnormal" framing that comes from saying "not trans".

The same thing is present in discussion around neurodivergence with "allistic" being used the same way as "cis" is, in that case to pair with autistic. I suspect a lot of people reading this have probably never heard of that one, but if it became a prominent discussion it's the one I could see some of the same people objecting to.

And yes, it is impolite to continue calling someone something they don't want to be called but that doesn't make the words you use when doing so a slur. At most it's as Liffguard said - a pejorative. And I really wish politeness would stop being treated as such as important thing when it's papered over bigotry. There's nothing civil about someone using very polite words to tell me I'm sub human scum, and it's my choice to be impolite in return by telling them to go fuck themself. Obviously targeted harassment should be against any moderation policies and it should be enforced in an unbiased fashion, if that's actually being done then it takes care of the problematic cases of impoliteness and what's left is when people choose to not be polite. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that Twitter is not being entirely unbiased in it's enforcement however when a large chunk of it's employees are in a precarious immigration status reliant on the job and their boss enjoys fire people and has a record of very publicly disliking trans people.

[Zorral]

Cisalpine Gaul would like some words.

[karaddin]

1 minute ago, Zorral said:

Cisalpine Gaul would like some words.

Exactly the one I was thinking of earlier with geography using it lol

[Varysblackfyre321]

5 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

Because nobody in the real world uses that term to describe themselves. Outside this board I've never heard it used by anyone, ever. Surely attaching labels to poeple that they don't like, we can all agree is a bit mean?

 

This seems a bit hyperbolic but taking it for granted…

Ask the average British in the 1870s what their sexuality was and most wouldn’t understand the question without elaboration. Not because they don’t know there are people who like members of the same sex(who’d they’d describe using actual slurs), but because heterosexual wouldn’t enter the public lexicon until the latter half of the 20th century  because most people never thought to label something that seems naturally intuitive and normal things.

2 hours ago, karaddin said:

I really wish politeness would stop being treated as such as important thing when it's papered over bigotry.

Please refer to me as as a white American—call me a legacy, or original, or authentic American/jk.

[Heartofice]

There has to be some acknowledgment that words take on meanings and context depending on who is saying them and how and why. 
 

So, just like TERF can be used as a normal claim about someone’s beliefs, it can be also be clearly used as a slur against someone as a way of giving them a label and attaching a number of qualities to them by using it. 
 

Calling someone ‘Cis’ is just the same. You can see the term being used as an insult all the time in discourse. It’s often used as a way of shutting someone up and putting a label on them to prevent them from talking.
That doesn’t mean the term is always a slur but it often is used in that manner. 

And just to be clear, because there still seems to be some confusion, the word is not being banned from Twitter, it’s just if it’s used as part of a repeated targeted harassment. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

10 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

There has to be some acknowledgment that words take on meanings and context depending on who is saying them and how and why. 

Starts off with a reasonable premise that most people could agree to.

 

Goes quickly down hill into insanity.

10 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

So, just like TERF can be used as a normal claim about someone’s beliefs, it can be also be clearly used as a slur against someone as a way of giving them a label and attaching a number of qualities to them by using it. 

Do you recognize how a person can be as legitimate in declaring homophobe is a slur  as you are in saying terf or cis is a slur?

I cannot decide what answer to this would be worse.
 

Anyway I  expect to see this level of righteous indignation whenever Megan Markle is referenced using a slur—you know like dumb. 
 

10 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It’s often used as a way of shutting someone up and putting a label on them to prevent them from talking.

Says the man attempting to get his political opponents to self-censor by never calling deplorables he likes mean names because mean name=slur.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Varysblackfyre321

[Varysblackfyre321]

11 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

You can see the term being used as an insult all the time in discourse.

Not really no. It’s fairly infrequent outside the nichest internet corners?

13 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

And just to be clear, because there still seems to be some confusion, the word is not being banned from Twitter

Oh so Elon would be allowing of the proliferation of a term in to which he’s argued by default is a slur like the f-slur or n-word(with a hard let’s say)

 

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Starts off with a reasonable premise that most people could agree to.

 

Goes quickly down hill into insanity.

Do you recognize how a person can be as legitimate in declaring homophobe is a slur  as you are in saying terf or cis is a slur?

I cannot decide what answer to this would be worse.
 

Anyway I  expect to see this level of righteous indignation whenever Megan Markle is referenced using a slur—you know like dumb. 
 

Says the man attempting to get his political opponents to self-censor by never calling deplorables he likes mean names because mean name=slur.

Starts off reasonable.. quickly goes downhill into insanity…

[BigFatCoward]

5 hours ago, Zorral said:

Yes, they do.  Particularly in the US, and in the sf/f world.

You think this disproves my point?