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Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued
@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:
In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.
I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?
As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.
If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.
Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.
Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.
I'm... not sure this is a good model. This is from a little over a year ago, and it's not exactly slowed down.
Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this. The person who ran a Minecraft server I contributed personalized code for wrote, casually, about how proud they were to have personally punched a Prop 8 funder. I've got a lot of sympathy for the Quilt side of that culture war, but it's not like it's hard to find loads of conversations in the Quilt Discord hunting for even a sniff of 'right-wing' alignment and shutting down conversations or people they see as doing so. There's been a 'fun' battle in a STEM outreach organization I volunteer for, less about the LGBT and pronouns pins (fine), and more about any team where the mentors show too much discomfort with them (understandable if not great), and what needs to be done to move students (little paranoid) and resources (problem!) around that.
Now, people have a right to not be perfectly accepting and making everyone feel safe, competing access needs, yada yada. But it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and self-identifies as a duck.
But at a deeper level, I think the inability to even think of anti-racist slurs is... kinda showing a big blind spot. Even for that specific example! Karens (and their distaff Kevins), MAGAtards, so on, are all 'about' racism. Do you think "Nazi" is a real specific term describing an ideology, or a boo-light? How about "reactionary", whether on twitter or coming from the President of the United States? And that's ignoring the complex ones, like 'alt-right' or 'white supremacist/nationalist' (which sometimes actually means that, rarely even by self-identification, but just as often means 'somewhere to the right of President Obama in 2014).
And it's not like those are special. Outside of race, "gun nut" was reclaimed, but want to know a place where you can call people groomers on Twitter? These aren't slurs in the sense that a lot of the progressive movement cares, and I've had long debates with TraceWoodgrains about the bounds of it... but that's kinda the point.
Jeezus. I stopped posting on RPGNet years ago, but since then they seem to have reached Atheism+ levels of wokeness. BGG seems to be heading in the same direction, unfortunately.
I think your broader point is somewhat true (there are lots of insulting things you can say about right-wingers that are obviously insults and obviously moderated less severely or not at all on most platforms), but I also have trouble thinking of leftist slurs that are slurs per se. The closest is probably the much-overused "Nazi," but beyond that, what is there? "Magtard" and various insulting variations on "Republican"?
Wingnut, Trumpkin, Domestic Terrorist, y'allQaeda, bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, white supremacist, fascist, klansman, abuser, rapist, anti-semite, fuckboy, pissbaby, incel, bible-thumper, inbred, hick, redneck, gun nut, ghoul, vampire, bloodsucker... The list is considerable.
Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.
Various terms for races that I'm sure we're all regretably familiar with frame ethnicity in a negative light. People are in fact those races, but these terms are slurs because they assume "...and that's a bad thing". One might argue that claiming people are bad for being a race is obviously objectionable, but of course Gammon, Mayo, Whitey, cracker etc are generally acceptable in what passes for polite company online, and terms like oreo or banana show up as well. "White male" often comes with a "fucking" attached. This is just sorta the way things are, no one here is under the impression that it can be changed.
What about terms relating to actions or choices? Maybe it's a slur if it's aimed at immutable identity, versus one's actual choices? Well, no, I don't think so. "bitch", "slut", "whore" are all slurs, and generally unacceptable to use in polite company, at least toward a woman, despite describing someone who engages in specific behaviors. On the other hand, "racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", are all entirely acceptable, while also describing someone who engages in specific behaviors, even when those terms are quite a stretch. If one refers to a woman who publicly sells their body as a "whore", that is unacceptable. But it is entirely permissible to refer to someone as a "racist" for any and every reason, or even no perceptable reason at all. And of course, one of these words comes freighted with serious consequences for those so labeled, and it isn't the one that refers to farming equipment in the vernacular.
It seems to me that most of the words we generally think of as slurs are things Reds frame as bad while blues think are neutral or good, whereas most of the names Blues call Reds are terms Blues think of as bad, with Reds' opinions not really being relevant to the judgement. I can't think of any exceptions that would disprove this model.
It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement.
It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered.[Upon reflection, @Amadan is correct and this claim is unsupportable.]Given the above, of course Blue spaces don't have a slur problem. When Blues use words to demean, shame, or humiliate, it's not a slur as judged by definitions our society actually appears to use in practice. The same goes for "threat", "harassment", and the rest of the no-no word terms.
[EDIT] - To be clear, this is a factual claim. Counter-examples are welcome, and I'd be happy to hear even anecdotal evidence to the contrary.
I see your points, but I don't think you convinced me on this:
I do think that's more or less how it works. Most of your examples are not so much slurs as "generic insults that blues can get away with calling reds but reds can't get away with calling blues." I do not disagree that this illustrates that most platforms are unfair to reds, but other than a few, like "y'allQaeda"and maybe I'll give you "Bible-thumper," none of them look like "words implying that being Red is inherently bad."
"Bigot, racist, sexist, transphobe," etc. - sure, in some people's minds that's synonymous with "conservative," but there is no shortage of leftist circular firing squads where they accuse each other of these things too. (See: J.K. Rowling.) We discuss those a lot here.
You said:
And again, I don't disagree there are examples of this and you can make convincing "who whom" arguments, but this doesn't mean leftists don't really consider the hard-R a slur. Most leftists would castigate other leftists calling Herman Cain or Clarence Thomas the hard-R. Some isolated cases of liberals dropping racial slurs on black conservatives and not being cancelled are not compelling evidence to me that slurs are inherently not slurs if directed at the "right" people. You're pointing out examples of hypocrisy and "who whom," which are plentiful, but not examples of "leftist slurs" per se.
I appreciated your response, fwiw.
Yeah, there's definately complexity here, and not just in the specifics but in the general. @MugaSofer below is gesturing at a sort of taxonomic breakdown, which I thought about attempting but didn't have the energy for; leaving aside the political angle, that's where I think the meat of the general question could be found.
I think these are the central example of actual blue slurs. And yeah, they get used on Blues as well, the same as "bundle-of-sticks" might get used on reds by other reds. It's all various forms of "bad person", "disgusting person", right? The thing is, social judgement and social enforcement are pretty clearly necessary if people are going to live together, so I'm pessimistic that the core form is ever going to go away. "bitch" got embargoed pretty thoroughly in its original context; "Karen" seems to cover like 90% of the same territory.
In the cold light of morning, I think you're entirely correct here. This argument relied on "can a thing possibly happen", and presented it as evidence of a norm. Further, the cases I could think of involved it being spoken, and I can't think of a single case where it was used in print or online. The hard-R has so much taboo mojo that it's going to be used by someone somewhere sooner or later, and some percentage of those uses are not going to be immediately struck by lightning, but that's pretty much the opposite of a norm. I was wrong.
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My list wasn't exhaustive; we can quibble over the "redness" of each individual insult. But mostly they seem no more politically aligned than calling someone a "retard."
I'm also puzzled by "ghoul, vampire, and bloodsucker." Is that really a thing conservatives notice liberals calling them? I'm not questioning whether anyone has ever done this, but just the idea that these are known to be blue insults for reds.
There was a small thing about that's been around since at least the Affordable Care Act. Ghoul's the one that's persisted most, I think. Of course, that turns back into the "inherently bad" -- you could at least write a steelman that they were about criticizing conservative policies, rather than conservatives qua people.
I think there's a pretty sizable number of things along that realm, once you're attuned to noticing them. Their very nature as not politically-aligned makes it harder to notice when they're pointed a specific direction, but that doesn't make it less common.
That said, I think a lot of this distinction is more attuned to Blue Tribe preferences than to generalized ones. Not just in the sense that socons and even non-socons see many of the covered examples (controversially, being gay; less controversially, being queer) as something you do rather than something you are, or that both actual racists and not were often making that Chris Rock Skit as a serious argument, or that the Blue Tribe has put significant effort (for, tbf, reasons not entirely under their control) to define or frame their desired focuses as innate and immutable.
But there's a far more serious matter of it not being especially clear why anyone should find one to be acceptable, and the other an abomination. Why is abuse of parenthesis worse than prolonged mockery of 'magic underpants'? What part of the many bannable terms for correctly calling someone gay in offensive intents are worse than incorrectly calling someone a cousin-humper? Why, given how bad racism and sexism are, are false claims a person is or is motivated by them harmless, no matter how ill-founded or plain false? Why are one of these things a "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to", and the other not?
((I mean, the practical answer is probably that there's been enough organizations with enough power to make these things not mere social faux pas, but potentially a source of legal liability should an employee do it even off-hours and off-premises, or a business not react to it promptly when done by a customer, while the other direction there's... uh, people claiming TERF is a slur, and no one believing it.))
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I noticed ghoul thrown around a lot on /r/stupidpol towards, well, pretty much any 'neoliberal' boogeyman they don't like, but especially targeted towards the old right wing flavors like Kissinger and Cheney. This is pure anecdote, but I have yet to notice vampire and bloodsucker.
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Upon further reflection, I can recall some isolated cases of leftists getting away with the hard-R, but those cases are in fact isolated and quite rare, even for extremely prominant targets. I think it was probably a bad example on my part.
Can you provide evidence of leftists employing such terms without consequences, especially online/in print?
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This strikes me as low-effort, obnoxious, and insincere, but I'll give it more of a response than it deserves. Absent a poll in which leftists are asked to respond to the question "Is it okay to use racial slurs against black conservatives?", I will rely on my experience with leftists and my prediction as to what would happen if you go on a leftist forum and start calling black conservatives niggers. If you would like to test this, I will pre-register my bet that it will result in you being banned.
Calling them niggers, specifically, probably a problem. Calling them Uncle Toms, which is conveying the exact same sort of viciousness...
Leftists are okay with slurs, they're not okay with nigger. Nigger is a magic spell in the US. It should be in D&D as a Power Word.
We are getting into the weeds with the taxonomy of slurs, but it seems to be relevant.
"Nigger" is an insult because the meaning is basically "Black person, which is inherently a bad thing." "Uncle Tom" means a black person who is a traitor to his own people by collaborating with his oppressors.
Leftists do not think being black is inherently a bad thing. They do think that betraying your own people and siding with your oppressors is a bad thing. So one is a slur, and most leftists would agree it's a slur no matter who uses it (because you're saying it's shameful/insulting to be black). The other is a charge of being a morally bad person.
I am not debating whether either term is ever used "viciously" and/or inappropriately. Certainly many insults are unfair and inaccurate, and calling any black conservative an Uncle Tom certainly falls into that category. But they aren't the same kind of insult.
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My comment was indeed sincere, however it was rooted in a misunderstanding about what "hard-R" referred to, which your reply clears up. Thanks for that, and I expect you're correct.
I won't deign to answer your charges of "low-effort" and "obnoxious."
Perhaps you were confusing it for the "R-word" or "R-slur," aka "retard/retarded?" I've noticed that there's a wide range in how taboo this slur is even in leftist circles. Where I grew up, the "R-word" would be only 1 level below the "hard-R" in terms of offensiveness, but I've noticed that in other environments with similar levels of leftism, it's used pretty freely without anyone noticing. E.g. I was shocked when I first noticed how much people used it on Twitch of all places, given how strict Twitch tends to be with authoritarian-left language policing.
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Well, if you misunderstood what I meant, perhaps you were justified in asking for evidence. (What did you think "hard-R" referred to?)
I read you initially as demanding I provide evidence that leftists actually think "nigger" is a bad word. Which did indeed seem like some sort of very dumb and low-effort attempt at a gotcha.
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The left-wing slurs you cite strike me as falling into three categories:
Generic slurs that happen to be applied to right-wing targets (e.g. MAGAtard), probably do have a decent chance of being banned.
Extremely weak, unlikely to seriously offend most people (e.g. cracker, vampire). Might get you banned under very strict mods.
Things that basically everyone agrees exist and are bad in some sense, the debate is over the boundaries. (E.g. racist, fascist, Nazi, abuser). Hard to ban, although you could perhaps ban applying them to other users via a Wikipedia-style "assume good faith" policy (I assume that's the case here, in fact.)
Grooming being wrong is a widespread position, yet the word "groomer" got banned on reddit. So it appears to me that even such words aren't actually hard to ban.
I hadn't heard about this ... apparently it didn't, no.
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