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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.
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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