4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
I don't think either of those should be prima facie justification to not apply the rules to someone. We do not know the opportunity cost in interesting writing and original thinking lost by people who did not want to share a forum with him, but to just blankly assume that it can't have been so high as to justify losing him amounts to a complete lack of faith in the community's principles. There also was the untried option of trying to buckbreak him rather than just going for the kill, like by forcibly renaming him. Take a lesson from mid-2000s /b/, which managed to shape its culture by unrestrained use of wordfilters alone and still keep a reputation for "light-touch" moderation.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
No, actually, it wasn't. It was ages ago, but I clearly remember it being used as a diminutive.
By whom?
It is a diminutive, which contributes to its usability as a slur, just like "sky daddy" (your example!) is insulting in a way "sky dad" or "sky father" would not be.
Yes, because whenever the left tries to come up with an insult, the right just appropriates it, instead of banning people and acting offended.
Good for them, I guess (not that they have a choice most of the time), but that doesn't matter. The goal ostensibly was to have a diversity of opinions on this forum, not to settle scores or enact justice for the right wing. There is a perfectly usable neutral word ("transsexual") which is less offputting to a demographic we need more of, because it is barely represented on this political discussion forum even though it is politically dominant in most relevant countries. On the other hand, the only advantages of allowing "tranny" are saving 5 bytes of space per use and letting some right-wingers feel good (and I doubt they would even quit if they were denied this little pleasure).
Also, in case that was not clear the first time around, I'd be very happy with a policy that bans all uses (as opposed to mentions) of "tranny", "sky daddy" and "chud".
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I'm not any more of a fan of him than you are, but it is an old rule of internet communities that singling out moderators to attack is the most surefire way to get more of whatever the moderator you singled out stands for. All you will get is wagon circling, because staff vs. the rabble is the most natural tribal division for a volunteer project. (See Wikipedia for the most famous example.)
The only productive way to effect change is to lay low until there is an opportunity to influence the selection of new staff, and then try to tip the scale towards people you find more agreeable.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
· Edited 5d ago
I think banning "sky daddy" is fair, but I looked at the search results and I can see only one instance that is on the use side of the use-mention distinction (magicalkittycat from 5 months ago). The others - it seems like 75% of uses of "chud" at this point are by self-identified chuds (like the Asmongold fandom) though personally I would have also liked to see that one buried, and "blood libel" is in a different class as it evokes disagreement with its substance rather than its style. (Contrast "sky daddy": Christians would not disagree that God is a father figure, nor that He is at least metaphorically situated in the sky. The offense is caused by the baby talk formulation, implying that believers are stupid and emotionally immature)
"Tranny" is not a slur. I'm all for civility, but you'll never satisfy people who keep inventing things to be offended at.
Who is "inventing things to be offended at"? The term obviously was invented by people who are against "trannies" with the intent to offend, and to pretend otherwise is a level of gaslighting that would get you an A+ on your * Studies course paper if you deployed it for the other team.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
If a hair trigger of this sensitivity was applied to left wingers, they'd be banned on sight.
What's a concrete example of that? I at least certainly can't think of any symmetrical slights (if I had to come up with a way, I'd suggest making your username "FetusSlushie" or "WhiteTears" or something).
I don't remember instances of leftists flinging childish slurs at the holy cows of rightists here at all; and if they did, I would likewise be in favour of the banhammer. What do you think tone policing is about? Why is it so hard for right-wingers to restrain themselves and not use slurs?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
+1 for moderating more on tone again. I'm genuinely struggling to understand why the mods have abandoned that idea so completely, unless it is either inability to shoot their own tribal soldiers in the back, or unwillingness to stand up to a community majority that gets pissy when you do so with theirs. I guess maybe the seeds of this were there since the beginning, considering how the staff had to be dragged kicking and screaming into banning one TrannyPornO (who some, unbelievably, still reminisce about wistfully) even though any forum that wants to be welcoming to leftists should obviously have shown him the door based on his username alone before he made a single post.
(I guess the proposition is complicated to implement also because you see the detrimental effects of popular posters getting punished immediately, while the positive effects of better tone take a long time to manifest as new people trickle in.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
I don't think I got the vibe that the guys had to be walking on eggshells compared to that - in the same circle there are a bunch of very touchy-feely guys as well, including ones with sufficiently little social common sense that they do not desist when their target is evidently uncomfortable with it, and the worst that happens even to those is that people badmouth them behind their back (and some choose to individually avoid them).
I would be tempted to say that this is just because this is not the USA, but then I spent many years in US grad school covering the whole BLM/#metoo ground zero era and even there did not experience anywhere near the climate of fear that is being painted in these threads. Can we be sure that the situations discussed here are anywhere near representative, as opposed to yet another instance of the internet selectively boosting the most degenerate outliers from among hundreds of millions of anglophone users?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
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Flat white (I don't like the foam on cappuccinos, and often in Europe these have twice the espresso too). Some handbrew pourover if I want the caffeine but not the nutrition. Straight espressos only in Italy (I find that you get good-tasting ones maybe 90% of the time there, whereas elsewhere it's closer to 50%).
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I generally avoid it if I can help it for the same reason of not wanting my coffee to be heavy/nutritious. I make an exception if I must go to a place where I know the coffee will be disgusting (Starb*cks and most other chains). In the UK, my go-to was the gingerbread flavouring at Costa.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
I'm obviously talking about the sort of refugees that would significantly change the national character (though I gather that Poland actually got more friction between them and the native population than they at first expected, and soured on the whole thing a bit too). This is like gotchaing someone complaining about immigrants in the US with a statistic about immigrants from Scotland.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
There might be something to that; at a very mixed-age-and-gender social function I was at a while ago, there was a zoomette who got drunk and flirtatiously handsy with the guys sitting around her, and then in her drunken disregulation started spiralling that surely all the people around her must hate her because she is like this. Reassurances that this is very unlikely were met with what seemed like genuine surprise and a measure of disbelief from her.
However, more often I suspect that people going on dates nowadays are so solipsistic that they scarcely get around to trying to model what would be attractive to the other person at all. Baseline Twitter-and-Instagram socialisation does not impart a great deal of theory of mind.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
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I guess with PiS it's quite conceivable that they could pull something like starting such a war, pulling the whole of EU into it, and then exiting and making ceasefire separately and leaning back and watching while the rest of Europe bleeds. They were very much the "our country über alles" but not above pretending to do international cooperation for more gibs party.
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The more decisive question, of course, is not actually alignment on war with Russia but alignment on accepting refugees. Poland is one of the countries that has been refusing to share the load, is now starting to look conspicuously better for it and making it awkward for its Western neighbours. With sufficient cynicism you might compare the EU outlook on this with the theory on China/Taiwan and Russia/Ukraine where bad leadership can't suffer the existence of a living example of how good the same sort of people could have it under an alternative political system.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
From my understanding, much like East Germany, Hungary started seeing substantial Vietnamese immigration during communist times (as part of the general cooperation of the ideologically lukewarm peripheral countries). Do you really figure there was meme flow from the (still mostly Southern refugee at that time) Vietnamese in the US to the (tending Northern) intra-communist transfers?
I haven't been to Vietnam, but are nail salons a big thing there, and if they are, are they considered an American thing?
I mean, your case would be more compelling if you could show even one person who uses the term while neither personally disliking transsexuals or transsexualism, nor engaging in some sort of reclamation exercise.
This is like the troon discussion all over again. Not only is this line of reasoning proving too much ("baboon does not diminish/insult the primates! coon does not diminish/insult raccoons! Why would they be an obvious slur against (...)?"), if you actually believed it you would just find yourself constantly surprised by reality, specifically why certain classes of similar-looking words keep coined by groups of people for other groups they hate and why the target groups keep reacting negatively to those words being used to them. Yes, some leftists famously use a strategy where they pretend to not understand something that is common sense but not backed by an articulate theory that looks good in front of an audience. That doesn't mean you should lower yourself to their level; if you think that you should do that because some leftists somewhere got to, that's a textbook example of fighting the culture war here, as opposed to discussing it.
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