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Notes -
What changes if you say "n-word" over nigger? We know what you mean, and anyone who doesn't can be have it explained.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun isn't telling you it's optimizing for light, their point is that it serves to keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate.
But that's not what it does, it doesn't keep out the people who aren't interested in productive debate, it simply declares this topic as out of bounds for debate. "it's cool you're thinking about it, but we have already decided it's not on." "ps the fact that you disagree with me on this tells me that you don't belong here - we're optimising for light, so you can fuck off!"
Truth is light. There is never ever ever a reason to alter a quote, or published work, and the last decade has proven this is no slippery slope, once we started censoring nigger out of quotes and published works, it wasn't long before we were burning books and rewriting history.
If we want to optimise for light - which was definitely part of monkey's point, if not the crux, we should tell people the truth - words have exactly as much power as you give them.
There's no truth being hidden, the mapping from "n-word" or n****r or whatever variant you want is fairly clear - the person means nigger, but just isn't comfortably saying it.
It would be one thing if Monkey said something like "Of course there's also a substantial faction who just spam racist stuff". This is vague and doesn't tell us what is actually being said. But I'm not sure what truth you think is being hidden by refusing to write the word out. The word continues to exist, people continue to encounter it, and they come to bear the same mapping eventually.
I do agree that Monkey views the refusal to use it as both optimizing for light and keeping out the undesirables. I re-read the comment.
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