Most words in question aren't offensive in some objective sense. They are only offensive to the extent they are evidence that one hates the person in question. The more people use them despite not being hostile to the person/group in question, the less offensive they become/remain. Causing some offence, at worst, is a side-effect, not the goal.
Have you considered the possibility that people are actually stating "If someone wants to pressure me to stop using a word that isn't offensive per se as a political power play, I will make a point of using it MORE from now on"?
Have you considered the possibility that the actual bullies are the people who berate others for using terms like "field work" or "master bedroom"?
Unironically a good thing, a sorely-needed beautiful display of Courage lacking in so many people.
>No wonder it's hard to sell the left
Bullshit, the left is easy to sell on Free Speech, I'm left leaning and a Free Speech advocate.
Every brain with 2 neurons to rub together understands that Free Speech disproportionately benefits those with less : less money, less awareness of the latest buzzwords and shibboleths, less connections to ease the inevitable fall when the inevitable slip up happens, less ability to materially fight (and thus more tendency to use offensive insults as defense).
It's hilarious that the ideology pushed by corporate HR drones and hollywood sluts think it's "Left", no it's not, Left is not when you rage about words. Left is when you rage about actual injustices, which words are not.
"No wonder it's hard to sell the left on the importance of defending free speech, when so many free speech activists seem to equate "defending free speech" with "behaving like a high school bully"."
I suppose a decade ago *is* geological eons in today's online world, but the people going on about 'there is no right not to be offended' and arguing against censorship and if things being said offended someone, well that was just too bad were on the left, once upon a time:
"‘There is no right not to be offended!’: It’s a popular slogan. At least, it must be if Google is anything to go by. I typed the phrase ‘no right not to be offended’ into ‘advanced search’ and came up with ‘about’ 1,780,000 sites. The slogan is especially favoured by those who, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as taking a stand for freedom of speech and expression against its enemies, and that includes Nicholas Hytner, Philip Pullman, John Cleese, Shami Chakrabarti, Rowan Atkinson, Peter Tatchell, Ronald Dworkin, Ricky Gervais, and the late Christopher Hitchens. That’s a fairly broad range of intellectually capable individuals , and I am sure the list could be extended considerably. "
Maybe the offended lefties should go read up about how Piss Christ was a beautiful and thought-provoking work of art, and only knuckledraggers could possibly be offended?
No. But he would be if his response to my saying something he disapproved of, on his blog or elsewhere, was to announce to the world that I was a racist with some reasonable expectation that many people would believe him and treat me less well as a result.
A friend told me “sexual preference” was offensive back in 2005. I can absolutely see why people care about that phrasing, especially in the context of a judicial appointment. It may well change how you interpret the law if you believe sexual orientation is merely a preference rather than an inherent aspect of a person’s identity.
Wow, really? An appeal to a work of FICTION? One in which the white southerners are being demonized, primarily for the consumption of a bunch of non-southerners who have no real sense of how the flag is used in the real world and instead rely on precisely these types of fiction?
Fiction is an example of communication. At a minimum, it's a reflection of the expectation of the creators of how audience members would interpret the symbol.
As I just explained, those audience members only knew about the contemperaneous use of those sumbols *from those works of fiction* !
You think people in California or New York reguarly saw people brandishing confederate flag symbols in real life? Of course not. What they know about it comes from movies like this.
And fictional works are the some of the most potent ways to create hyperstitial stereotypes. How many people have developed their entire picture of the Puritans from "The Scarlet Letter" or Southern religiosity from "Inherit the Wind"?
> On the N-word shift, it's worth noting that such a shift also happened in French,
However, the analogous word shift did not occur in languages like Romanian - which has caused great confusion for Romanians immigrating to the West. In Romanian, their analogue of "negro" (negru) was the correct and accepted word to use for black people, whereas their analogue of "black" was considered racist!
Formal speech is longer, and people are usually expected to be more formal with their superiors.
Formal speech towards inferiors can also be very long, as anyone who has ever been on the sharp end of the court system knows well.
More rules, more words. It's true for the judge condemning the criminal, the servant addressing the master, and the professor trying not to sound racist.
I guess using longer speech conveys the message "This communication is important enough to spend a long time on". Using abbreviations and shorter words, or leaving out words altogether (e.g., not calling a superior "sir") conveys the opposite.
The fact that it's harder to say might be the point: you're demonstrating that you're willing to "do the work", inconveniencing yourself for the greater good.
Yes this is correct. I once heard a DEI consultant make exactly that point, without irony.
(After a moment the stony silence from her audience made her sense that she'd gotten ahead of the room and so she turned it into a sort of joke. But it was clear that initially she'd been entirely serious.)
This is seen in other areas where groups try to separate themselves from other groups: you make it somewhat costly to signal group membership to try to reduce the amount of free riding by claiming that you're a member you're not. For example, not being allowed to eat certain kinds of foods, or declaring that you can't do things on a particular day.
I think it's partially because the "respectable" terms are usually generated by academia. A longer phrase seems more precise (and maybe sometimes even is more precise), and slurs are usually very blunt, therefore short, therefore (the logic seemingly goes) if it's long it can't be a slur.
Yes. The problem is that the consensus is being manipulated to control thought. Controlling speech/expression is the shortcut to controlling thought, is it any wonder that more and more Americans, or I guess people all over the developed world are looking to extricate themselves from society to regain control of their own thoughts?
This makes sense because the early entrants into these sort of cascade are the weirdos from high school that would use a thesaurus to try and sound smarter, instead of just learning to write properly.
This also goes in the other direction, where a group reclaims what was once a slur and turns it into a term of empowerment (e.g. “queer”, “dyke marches”, etc).
What’s your take on (re-?)adopting language when it moves back in this direction? Would you also wait until 70% of people who say “queer” mean it in an empowering or at least neutral sense before you’d use it as well?
One position might be meaning conservatism. If some activist group wants to change the meaning, I'm not going to go along until 70% of people have agreed.
Another might be that there is an asymmetry between tabooing words and freeing them, and so we should have different standards. This is tempting because if you think that freeing words is good, maybe you want to join before the halfway point to help the process along, how early you join being dependent on how much social risk you're willing to take on.
Are there cases where it's ambiguous between the two?
And of course there are neologisms. I think sometimes about "latinx", which is something nobody who speaks Spanish generally endorses and is just a made up term to solve for the fact that English speakers feel weird about grammatical gender. (I personally hate it -- why have that extra thing that you have to memorize?!?) But lots of neologisms are good and some are bad or silly, so perhaps it doesn't make sense to have a particular position on them.
If the goal is to minimize linguistic friction, then the post for freeing words should logically be 30%. I suspect an asymmetry in the process, though, and would guess that 40% is a better point...unless the particular term is important to you, of course, in which case you might (as an individual) even go a low as 20%. Don't go lower than that except as a member of a group.
The convention that only people that are affected by words can reclaim them works well here, because if you're part of a group you don't have to worry so hard about risking signalling prejudice.
If you aren't in the group, you get on the train late if ever. I'm be happy using 'queer' as the umbrella term it has become, but wouldn't call a specific individual queer unless they used that label on themselves. There are plenty of terms that are prevalent within their respective in-groups but would still be taboo for me to use, though for obvious reasons I won't give examples.
That's true of "fag", and probably "dyke", but it's not true of "queer" (or rather, whether or not it's true of "queer" is an ongoing source of friction within queer circles, with one side feeling staunchly that it isn't).
If I'm understanding you correctly, I've had the opposite experience.
I rarely meet people who get upset about Queer, and they're mainly out-of-touch older people. It's preferred over other terms by seemingly a clear majority of queer people.
Fag, on the other hand, I like a lot and try to use but I've found it's generally poorly received. Nowadays, I mostly avoid it unless I know who I'm speaking to very well. I've actually had straight people get upset with me for calling myself a fag, which is probably a useful data point for the broader discussion of hyperstitious slurs
I think you understood incorrectly, we're in agreement. I was replying to Coagulopath's statement that "fag" and "dyke" are terms which the people involved might reclaim within purely queer circles but still wouldn't like straight people to use; whereas "queer" is one that at least a significant slice of the community absolutely *wants* straight people to use.
Depends how you say it. If you say ‘a queer person’ you’re mostly fine. If you say ‘a queer’ or ‘the queers’ then you sound hateful pretty much anywhere.
That’s probably not why queer won’t reach mainstream adoption, though. Queer just doesn’t signify a meaningful category.
Lots of benign adjectives used with an -s at the end sound offensive. Blacks, poors, etc.
Saying that queer doesn't signify a meaningful category seems odd, seeing as it replaces an unwieldy acronym that people use all the time despite not even being sure how to spell it (how many A's? Is there an S now?)
"Poors" seems entirely a neologism of the left, popular especially on reddit (in a populist way). I've spent my whole life with newsprint or other text before me and never heard it before a few years ago.
‘Blacks’ is not remotely offensive unless all the offense is in the implication, any more than ‘whites’ is.
‘Poors’ is not even a word, it’s just a meme.
Being an unwieldy acronym has nothing to do with being a meaningful category.
LGBT are individually and taken together meaningful categories, ‘queer’ isn’t—it can mean anything from ‘Kinsey 6’ to ‘Kinsey 0 but professes being Kinsey 1.’
Nah. As Logan concurs above, it's heading in the opposite direction, older generations of gays are kind of iffy about it but the TikTok generation think nothing of it.
Perhaps that's true for this specific word and community - I don't move in those circles.
However Orwell was right - your vocabulary of small useful words is being replaced by long phrases that don't mean anything, made up by people who have nothing better to do. This is to keep you turning with the fish school and to prevent you from thinking about anything other than keeping au fait with the slang.
While those might be reclamations, I don't think they've reverted to the non-slur status quo, if anything it moves past being a hyperstitious slur into a meta-hyperstitious slur. It's now safe to be said by some people in some contexts, but only if you qualify your speech by assuring the audience you're one of the people allowed to say it. Presumably if they keep saying it often enough eventually it might be a legal word for everybody again.
I'd be curious if anybody could name a word that has gone full circle from ordinary word > hyperstitious slur > meta-hyperstitious slur > ordinary word
I think "queer" is well on its way to being that, although there's some resistance. Certainly my default reaction to a straight person talking about "queer people" would be "they're an ally", not "they're a homophobe trying to use a slur". ("Queers" used as a noun still leans a bit more slurrish, but then, I feel the same way about saying "blacks" instead of "black people", and that doesn't make "black" a slur otherwise.)
I think it really varies. Geography and social circles may be as important as age. Queer Nation was founded 30 years ago. Still, even if it's not unanimous, it's interesting that there *is* a widespread movement to make "queer" a general term to be used by straight/cis people, when (to my knowledge) no such movement exists for "dyke" or "fag" even among younger generations.
As far as I can tell, people finally got fed up of adding letters to the acronym (long after I did) and decided to replace it with a word and picked "queer" for the purpose. So queer can be used for "this group of two lesbians, three bisexuals, two gays and a trans woman are all queer", but it can also be used as a personal descriptor for someone who either doesn't want to specify, isn't entirely certain themselves (lots of people take a while to be sure if they are bi or gay), or whose specific sexuality is inconveniently long so they use "queer" as a shorthand.
Something that I've noticed is that the long versions of the acronym (like LGBTQQIP2SAA) have largely fallen into disuse, with LGBT+ or LGBTQ+ being much more common, and just "queer" being used as an all-encompassing term.
Aside: one reason that many people aren't sure if they are bi or gay is that most people grow up with an assumption that they are straight - even small children know there is an expectation that they will eventually marry someone of the opposite sex, etc. When queer people discover an attraction to someone of the same sex, that's usually, initially, an attraction to one person. You then have to work out, internally, whether you are actually attracted to the opposite sex (ie, you're bi), or if that's just an internalised version of the expectation that you would be (ie, you're gay). This is why, in earlier generations, a lot of gay men came out as bi first. In the current generations the trend is to come out as queer, and then work out exactly who they are and aren't attracted to, and only then pick a more specific term, like gay or bi or pan.
>Presumably if they keep saying it often enough eventually it might be a legal word for everybody again.
Depends. Certain black subcultures probably use the n-word more than any other, like a verbal tic, and yet the stigma against using it by anybody else is stronger than ever.
As a gay man who is not stereotypically gay I firmly reject the use of the word "queer", because none of the things it connotes - leftist political radicalism, gender nonconformity, alternative lifestyles - apply to me or to many other gays and I refuse to let radical leftist "queers" use linguistic subterfuge to try to force us to accept those things as part of who we are. I am not "queer" and never will be. It has nothing to do with its formerly predominant use as a slur for me.
I think the 15-year-old boy who broke up with his girlfriend and now has a boyfriend and is still working out if he had a girlfriend because society expected him to or because he actually wanted to have one, and therefore isn't sure if he's bi or gay and calls himself "queer" isn't trying to use any of those connotations. In fact, the teens I know (my nephews and nieces and their friends) use "queer" to mean "anything other than cishet" and think it doesn't have any of those connotations.
Now, sure: I can see that it has those connotations: I remember Queer Nation the first time around.. I'm just inclined to think that the activists have only succeeded in making it an umbrella term by producing a generation of kids who don't know and wouldn't accept those connotations - and that means that the linguistic subterfuge has backfired on them; they've got ordinary gay and bi zoomers to use it as an alternative to LGBT, but without accepting that they are in any way politically radical or alternative in lifestyle in doing so (and gender nonconformity is more complicated; their gender norms are much wider than ours so they'd have to try really hard to be nonconforming. Lots of things that I would have regarded as way out there when I was in my teens, they think are perfectly normal)
On my circles it’s just an umbrella term that means “not cis-het”. The community needed a blanket term, a pronounceable word for the wider community rather than the acronym salad that is “LGBTQIA.” A blanket term also allows people to identify as part of the community without labeling or outting themselves. You can’t exact identify as “I’m LGBTQ”… because you’re not all thinIts useful to have a vague way to identify for non-out trans person or a questioning person, or someone who doesn’t like the cultural baggage of “bi”
By the same token I’ve noticed “Saphic” evolving to become a catch all term for people who aren’t cos/het men who are attracted to people who aren’t cis/het men, this inclusive of trans, non binary, and bi people than “lesbian” events or Facebook groups or whatever.
For most people younger than 35 or 40, it doesn’t occur to them to understand “queer” as a political/lifestyle label. If you’re not careful you’ll start s hypersitious cascade that causes it to lose its catch all meaning! You don’t want to take this useful word and put it exclusively in the hands of leftists, do you? Cause you will if you convince enough political centrists/non political people that it not for them.
Like I wrote elsewhere, I first saw it as a self-identification from people who hadn't yet worked out what they were for themselves, but knew they weren't cishet. Like the AMAB person who had a boyfriend and wasn't sure if they were a gay man or a straight trans woman. Or the cis woman with a girlfriend who wasn't sure if she was bi, pan, or lesbian.
I also see it from people who are opting out of the bi vs pan argument.
And yes - sapphic as a term for (basically) "people a lesbian might sleep with" is neat. Interesting that there isn't an equivalent male term.
I would think that's dangerous to do early if you're not a member of the group that the slur was directed against. Lesbians can say 'dyke marches' a long time before cis-het Caucasian men can.
We quickly get into the whole "Blacks can reclaim 'n***a' but other groups can't say 'n****r.'"
Reclamation is complex. Just because the word dyke is reclaimed doesn’t mean you can substitute it in any context and have it sound as acceptable as the word lesbian. “My housemate is a lesbian” and “my housemate is a dyke” are going to be interpreted differently depending on who’s talking, who they’re talking to, and how they’re talking about it. By contrast, lesbian is much more general purpose. That can be true even if all right-thinking people agree that, in principle, dyke is a term of empowerment. That still doesn’t mean they’re going to stick up for somebody who uses the word dyke in a way that comes across as offensive for whatever reason.
Overall, my sense is that while a term like dyke might be respectable in 60% of contexts, it is 100% acceptable in 60% and 0% acceptable in the other 40%, not 60% acceptable in each context. You’re either with a crowd that embraces it or you’re with a crowd that’s horrified by it/is outspokenly bigoted, and it’s only controversial within a single group in rare occasions when you’re mixing subcultures.
Or Quaker meaning coward as reference to their pacifism. The real name of the religion is the Religious Society of Friends, or just Friends for short. When you see somebody have a sign on their door saying "Welcome Friends", obviously they want Quakers to come visit. :-)
I knew a young man who misjudged the progress and terms of the reclamation of the word "bitch". He innocently and well-intentionedly referred to a female ski resort worker as a "ski bitch" in a room full of liberals and everyone was horrified
I think it's pretty rare for any word to actually go all the way to 99:1. Large swathes of the populace just aren't tuned in enough to care, and it's easy to self-select into those groups. It's extremely irritating to have your language corrected that way, nothing requires that I spend time around the kind of people who do that, so I don't. Probably if I were running in more rarefied circles I couldn't get away with this, but one of the benefits of finding a stable place in life without that variety of social signaling is that you can continue never to engage in it.
ni**er, negro, redskin (as to the actual people), urchin, bum (as to generic homeless person)
I think it's actually quite common it's just that it's rare for the term to stick around afterwards and once they disappear we then forget they are even offensive.
I think there are many more attempts than successes though. All of those slurs predate my birth, and I can't think of any modern additions to the list that I would feel uncomfortable saying.
"nigger" ... Not spelling out the word is what tends to add to the problem. The Late Great Lenny Bruce had a nice routine on it:
"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? .... Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."
Maybe this falls into the "terrible hill to die on" category but one thing I cannot stand is using asterisks as self-censorship. Of course you see n***** for nigger but I've also encountered r*pe, m*rder, and Tr*mp. (Usually the vowels are the offensive parts, for some reason). This strikes me as the worst combination of totally unnecessary, obfuscatory/possibly confusing, and granting power to those people/acts/words that you hate by not even being able to call them what they are.
I mean, this is so basic that it's a lesson that even the first Harry Potter book gets right.
One of those cultures was certainly trying hard not to offend YHWH, to the point that we're not exactly sure what vowels to interpolate there if we wanted to.
That's also an example of hyperstition. If normal wizards hadn't stopped saying Voldemort, it would be useless to identify members of the Phoenix Order, and therefore the Death Eaters wouldn't have bothered to set up the taboo.
In this case, not being willing to spell out the bad granted the bad people not only abstract power but a practically useful weapon.
The Order weren't wrong, they just stood alone and didn't want to die on this hill.
I think it's easier to make sense of words with vowels left out than with an equal number of consonants left out. That's presumably part of the reason why some languages leave out vowels in writing.
Yeah, there are fewer vowels than consonants, so each individual vowel conveys less information than each individual consonant, so less is lost by hiding it. *nd*rst*nd*ng * s*nt*nc* w*th**t v*w*ls c*n b* h*rd, *u* o*e *i**ou* *o**o*a*** i* *ea* i**o**i**e.
The Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) alphabets are descended from the Phoenician Abjad. It had five consonants that could reasonably be repurposed as vowels, which, frankly, was not enough.
In practice, I don't think English is as easy to understand without vowels as Hebrew is (which has fewer vowel sounds and to which the abjad is pretty much native). But you've already put in the work: you know how to pron**nce thr**gh and c**gh even th**gh the vowels aren't being helpful.
This is sometimes done because someone wants to write about a topic for their regular audience without attracting the sort of people who type Trump into the search box on Twitter, or whatever platform they're using.
But while it is maybe not a "hill to die on", it seems like one worth defending ... 🙂
You may know of Chris Rock's YouTube video, "Black People vs Niggas", but you may not have run across a linguist's, Adam Croom's, analysis of it in the general context of slurs:
Bit of a murky "thesis", and it's been awhile since I read much of it, but seem to recollect that his argument is that such slurs are "acceptable" if applied to "problematic" members of a tribe, but they cross the line into racism or sexism or the like if applied to the whole tribe. Interesting quote of Rock's video that I think underlines his argument:
"... it is clear that the slur nigger has in fact been used to apply to some but not all African Americans (Farley, 2004, Hoggard, 2006). As Rock (1996) illustrates the point in 'Niggas vs. Black People':
There’s like a civil war going on with black people, and there’s two sides: there’s black people, and there’s niggas. The niggas have got to go. ..."
The Flashman books use this as deliberate kitsch, to show Flashman's editors were prissy weenies. And also to show that Flashman was a poddymouth according to all decent Victorians, because George MacDonald Fraser was great with multilayered irony.
Quentin , good to have you around. As your movies use "nigger" a lot. To quote the study of Keith Allan: "I conclude that in ‘Pulp Fiction’ most occurrences of nigger are uttered by one African-American to or about another in the spirit of camaraderie (what Australians would call ‘mateship’). Where it is uttered by a white to a black friend it is also of this nature. The two instances where nigger is used by one white to another do show disrespect towards African-Americans but not malice, and they serve to make a dramatic point." (I assume you are not Tarantino, ofc.)
Consider that if one member of a group uses a possible slur name for the group to another member of the group, they're saying "we're like each other". If a non-member of the group uses the term, they're saying "you're different from me".
Unfortunately disguising words with asterisks, and numbers in place of letters etc, is second nature now for most regular posters on forums and online newspaper comments, not so much due to squeamishness but for the practical purpose of evading automatic censorship by moderator bots!
I've even heard people verbally pronounce the f-word as "feck", so used have they become to spelling it like that! :-)
I find this behavior online frustrating, though, because it seems to be that TikTok et al. ought to be able to update their bots to just look for the replacement terms, especially when some of the most popular replacement terms are complete nonsense words that never existed before, such as "seggs" for sex and "unalived" for killed. Unless the whole thing is just theater where TikTok doesn't actually care if young people see "sensitive content", they just need plausible deniability that they tried their best.
Words do change their meaning over time. For example, in the UK, a slut used to mean (until say the 1950s) simply a slovenly woman, with no sexual connotations.
But when some years later my mother accused my teenage sister of being a slut for not tidying her bedroom, or leaving dishes unwashed, or something equally trivial, the resulting explosion was a wonder to behold! :-)
A very good point. When noone will die on any hill, eventually we are left with a single last hill and must die on it or give up the heights for good, whether it is a particularly lovely hill or not, assuming that their is a malignant force of some sort bent on stealing our hills which seems a safe assumption at this point.
I think you're well outside the 70% on writing out the Word that may not be Said. And "rape" and "murder" (let alone "Trump") haven't reached the 5% threshold outside of TikTok.
It's interested that the Word has managed to carve out such a unique position that you can't even write it. Sorry, Yahweh.
"Urchin" just died a natural death, along with "sockdolager" and "lally-cooler".
"Bum" and "negro" are alive. "Bum" is probably above 1 percent, though it's evolved a bit and can be unspecific so someone may use a more specific term. "Negro" might be below 1 percent, but there are a decent slice of old people who honestly didn't get the memo. (e.g., the 2020 census was the first time 'negro' wasn't a race descriptor available for people to select).
This is the first time I have heard that "Urchin" was offensive. Before this, I heard it exclusively used to refer to the literary trope of "Street Urchin", a poor child found in Victorian Britain living on the streets.
Probably the main reason "urchin" is little used these days is that there no longer really are any, in most western countries anyway.
Some disparaging words are replaced by others with the same meaning. For example, the long-obsolete word "knave" came from the German "kbaben", meaning child. These days the equivalent word is "chav", which I think comes from Romany "charv" and also means child. SImilarly, the word "cad" came from "cadet", meaning "junior". So there seems to be a long tradition of (literally) belittling names along the same lines, such as patronisingly calling male adults "boy".
Though sometimes pejoratives come back. When I was in high school, "cuckold" was an archaic/obsolete word that most students had to have explained when they first encountered it in Shakespeare. Seeing it and its derivatives become common currency has been like watching a revival of "Zounds!"
Yes, the pushback against the feminization of Western man(or at least demasculinization) needed a word to describe those who were accepting of their feminization, it chose a meaningful word that was unused in a time when it was unneeded. This is useful evolution of language, self-selection for the purpose of communicating ideas quickly and easily. You might say market-driven linguistic development, referring to the marketplace of ideas. Which clarifies much of what is so wrong with the hyperstitious use of language.
I also have never heard of "urchin" being offensive. I often hear it used to describe a child who is scruffy or cheeky. I thought it was a bit like "brat" but less critical and more tongue-in-cheek or even affectionate. Like "scallywag".
I'm a bit worried if it is widely considered offensive. I know a family whose surname is Chin, and when they were expecting a baby, I joked that some people are named after Biblical cities like Bethany or Carmel, so they could call it Ur. Is Peter suggesting that was the equivalent of joking that they could call it N****r?
I used to work construction. "Nigger" was thrown around casually and with a more expansive meaning than the generally accepted one - basically, a despised and contemptible person of any race, though especially blacks of course. But whites and Hispanics would be referred to as niggers all the time. Maybe it's at 90:10 but certainly not 99:1 or 100:0. Though of course in the professional-class circles I move in nowadays it is.
Yeah, my dad is a contractor and still uses the word something like this. It refers often to someone doing menial labor, the 'low man on the totempole'(another seeming ethnic reference stripped of its ethnic content for colorful utility), is still the 'nigger' to him, even when he is that person. He's called me 'his nigger' more times than I can count.
Interestingly, when he actually wants to indicate opinions about African Americans-opinions which are not uniformly positive, rightly or wrongly, lets say- he usually uses the word 'black'.
Wait, "bum" is offensive? If that's true, I'm flabbergasted. It's just a synonym for homeless person. I hear it in conversation all the time and have never been consciously aware of its conotations
Well, I believe that at least at one point that was the distinction between "hobo" and "bum". A hobo was hoping to find work, perhaps desiring that it be only of a temporary nature. A bum was trying to get along without working.
Same spelling, same pronunciation, not the same word. And in American English, ‘bum’ as a word for ‘buttocks’ doesn’t really exist (neither does ‘arse,’ for that matter).
In American English, ‘bum’ as a verb means to beg charity or scavenge and this is the sense of ‘bum’ as a noun applied to a person.
"Bum" has existed as a generalized pejorative for longer than I've been alive. E.g., "On the Waterfront" (1954): "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it." See also "bum's rush", "throw the bums out", etc.
It's entirely G-rated, but not something to call someone you had good or neutral feelings about.
In the US Civil War a 'bummer' was a soldier looting, or turned full-time bandit. Since the US population was largely descended from people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War through the 1940's, and since the South kept the details of the war alive as a duty, and since US history writing had a golden age from maybe 1890 (when all those brilliant Civil War memoirs were assimilated) to when Fletcher Pratt died (about 1960), the word meant impoverished bandit at least till then and to some extent today.
> since US history writing had a golden age from maybe 1890 (when all those brilliant Civil War memoirs were assimilated) to when Fletcher Pratt died (about 1960)
I'm digging deep into US history lately. Any reading recs from this period?
Strongly recommend Fletcher Pratt, very readable. And of course the brillliant Civil War memoirs by Grant, Lee, Sherman, Sheridan, and every one who served in the Civil War. Maybe start with Edmund Wilson's 'Patriotic Gore'. Brilliant survey by a brilliant critic. Mosby's memoirs are actually a little too highbrow for a beginner, given his amazing depth of reading. Wilson thought Mosby was faking it, but no Mosby really did read that much. I'd throw in John Myers Myers on the Wild West newspapers and the San Fran vigilantes. Of course Frederick Douglass and Lincoln.
Ah, everyone recommends the New England Deep Thinkers. If you like them, sure. Me, no.
Oh and there's a London Times reporter who visited the US at the start of the civil War.
'Flashman and the Angel of Light' because fun, and because George Macdonald Fraser knew more history than any one.
Remember the Union lost the Reconstruction. I think Fletcher Pratt was right. We we lost Reconstruction because the Union Navy won the war and ran up all navigable waterways in the South, ironclads where the water was deep and tinclads where it was shallow.
So no need for blockhouses every twenty miles in the Civil War.. So after the war no enforcement for Reconstruction. Also a lot of the best Union soldiers did not like black people. You know, the tough guys invaluable in a fight are not all nice guys.
Justice Holmes, say. Custer refused a commission to to serve in Reconstruction. That was Custer's great moral failure.. Had Custer pushed Reconstruction Reconstruction he'd probably have been killed, not a deal-breaker for Custer, he just didn't like black people, but America would be a better place if Reconstruction had worked and with Custer spearheading it it it might have worked. Custer was the leader of the elite Union cavalry, the Michigan Wolverines, all through the war.
II know Custer';s a joke now, because he lost to Sitting Bull plus Crazy Horse plus Galt. That's varsity. He lost to Jeb Stuart too, Jeb whipped Custer's elite Wolverines at Yellow Tavern. Jeb Stuart got killed whipping Custer and his Wolverines. And lost on points at a previous encounter. Jeb previously whipped a lot of Union cavalry without losing on points at the first try or getting killed when he did win. Custer was outfoxed by Wade Hampton's cracker ninjas on their own ground like everyone, Hampton's hagiographers mention this as a triumph for Hampton and change the subject fast. Because Custer 's Wolverines weren't outfoxed all that much. Custer's raid with KillCavalry Kilpatrick was a fiasco, like every time Killcavalry got command of Union cavalry, but the Custer's Wolverines pulled through. You may read in 'The Custer Myth' about everyone who told everyone afterwards how. they stood up to Custer.
Okay.
Allowing for technology, you could put Custer against Alexander or Genghis Khan. And Custer would get himself massacred, because Fuck You. Like the British at Islanlawana. And after the 'winner' would note, like Shaka Zulu after he massacred the Brits, that there were not enough living on his own side to count his own dead,. Sitting Bull was striking his tents BEFORE Custer's Last Stand so the Sioux could run to Canada,. Because Sitting Bull was a stone pro who knew who he crossed
The south end of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was settled by whites from the South who hated slavery, because it lowered wages, and by extension hated black people. That's Abraham Lincoln, and his voting block. Lincoln was a decent man, and when Frederick Douglass said no, happens black folks don't want to be sent back to Africa, Lincoln said okay. But it's what Lincoln and the the south of the Midwest wanted What Lincoln's voting block wanted. Sundown towns are technically illegal nowaydays, but okay. Drive through small towns in the south of the Midwest, look around. I don't say things improve when the D party imports ringers from Mexico.
The difficulty here is that I don't find it particularly controversial or even uncouth to say that being a bum *is* bad.
Is "racist" offensive? Is "nazi" a slur? No one wants to be called those things, certainly, but that's because no one want to be those things. Compare "Jap," where it is merely the word that makes it bad.
I do agree that "bum" is meaner than "homeless person," but bum is also a synonym for "lazy." I don't see a hyperstitious slur here, I just see a word with connotations that society doesn't value
I think that's probably right about "bum", though I don't have a good sense of its full development. There has been a euphemism treadmill for things like "hobo" (which was intended by at least some to convey "migrant worker" neutrally, but probably stopped really being a polite or neutral term before I was born), "homeless", etc. I think it's at "unhoused" now, though I don't keep careful track.
Using bum *as* a word for someone who merely lacks a home is offensive. Calling someone who lost their house and is now sleeping out of their car and is managing to hold down their job etc... a bum would be offensive as we now reserve it for the kind of smelly person who comes up to you and asks or change and is generally not welcome in society.
Almost every term we have to describe a person of low intelligence or an ill-considered idea/statement derives from a word that once was used as a technical reference to intellectual disability or a class of people with a disability who were incorrectly thought to be possibly intellectually disabled. What has happened historically in American English is each use became mainstreamed as a slur due to the low social status of and bigoted ideas people have about the intellectually disabled, causing people who want to avoid that to come up with a different term to make a distinction. This cycle has repeated itself up until the present where the shortened form of "mentally retarded" has been rather successfully gradually turned into an act of extreme profanity over the past two decades. "Intellectually disabled" has held up relatively well, partially due to cultural improvements in lowing bigotry towards people with an ID and partially due to the term having the right linguistic stuff in not being as easily shorthanded into a slur.
Some of the older terms, however, are used freely by people without even giving a thought to their roots being awfully similar to how the r-word was used in 1993. Idiot, for example. There's an unbroken chain of use, but the profanity of it is mostly drained.
British English speaker here, and "urchin" is a generally accepted term of ironic endearment for a small child, with no sense of edginess whatsoever. There's rarely a need to describe homeless children in the UK these days, so I guess it's lost its bite.
I think Scott is just wrong that "All Lives Matter" is in a 1% category. It probably feels like it is from a West Coast perspective, but there are lots of people who never understood the distinction that BLM was trying to make and felt that it was a deliberate attempt to either claim that "[Only] BLM" or control the language of others (in the sense that Scott means) and actively refused to do it.
I've seen a lot of Confederate flags near where I live, and often with accompanying signs that explicitly state the person's refusal to accept an outside consensus forced on them. The equivalent of "You can have my flag when you take it from my cold, dead, hands." It's a middle finger to coastal elites trying to control language and customs in areas they would never visit and for which they show active disdain.
The adoption of the confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride wasn't coopted by defense of racism. The use of it exploded in popularity specifically as a a symbol of defiance against the civil rights movement and in defense of the Jim Crow regimes that arose after the defeat of reconstruction efforts to build multiracial democracy. It's only after this period when the segregationists were politically and culturally defeated that people started in large numbers insisting that the flag functions for them as a generic symbol of Southern pride or a sense of "redneck" pride. But that was new. Within a lot of the lifetimes of people reading this comment new. This is largely an apologetic for its earlier use in mid-century America. Some people employ it in a knowing way, but there are some who genuinely seem confused about this.
Absolutely. I elaborated on the same thought within another comment thread. The problem is determining if the use of such a symbol conveys some negative idea (as the flag did in the 1960s) or one or more positive ideas (as I would argue it did starting in the 1980s) and now a different connotation again in regards to a "screw you, don't tell me what to do" attitude.
I have a lot of memories from the 1980s of people wearing Confederate flags or having them around, and it was definitely a free-spirit kind of idea. Be free, be wild, biker gang or even hippie feel.
It reminds me of the Gadsden flag's cultural changes. It was a Revolutionary War-era flag that for a long time was a left-wing anti-government flag. Then the Tea Party incorporated it and it was suddenly a right-wing flag.
All three interpretations are correct, and conveyed the intended meanings at the appropriate times. To say that the Gadsden flag is a Tea Party affectation is currently correct, but that really doesn't speak to 40 years ago or 40 years from now.
In the 90's I strongly associated the Gadsden flag with libertarians and libertarian adjacent movements like "militia" types. It was very popular in that segment of society. The Tea Party had a pretty strong paleolibertarian (i.e. Ron Paul revolution type) streak in its earliest iteration, to the point that it was at least in part an attempt to capture that energy in the wake of the discontent with George W. Bush and prevent it from damaging the institutional Republican party. That gave way, relatively fast, to generic hard-right conservatism where eventually the label ended up rightly connoted with the politics of someone like Sarah Palin. It's not particularly surprising that it picked up the Gadsden flag in its iconography early on, though. It's a flag libertarians loved.
Writing from Georgia, I agree very much that Scott's perspective is highly coastal elite specific. Flying Confederate flags is very much often a symbol of disdain for the Establishment than any type of racism. This shows how much 'racism' has been used as a Trojan horse to catch any anti-establishment sentiment and control thought.
Of course the meaning of that flag and of the Civil War is different things to different people. It was perhaps the first thing that was ever 'canceled' in America. Does it represent the heroism of soldiers, a resistance to a centralizing tyranny, the loss of a simpler, freer way of life that is 'Gone with the Wind', violence perpetrated by winners against losers self-righteously, a set of facts that are inconvenient to the American aristocracy? Or does it merely represent an attempt by some people to dominate others? In 2023 when the groups that control the most powerful nation in the world are trying to control thoughts by outlawing symbols and words that convey ideas that they disapprove of, those who insist on thinking outlawed thoughts need symbols. Perhaps the last chapter in this symbol's history has yet to be written?
For what it's worth, in 2005 I was on an Age of Empires II forum. The game has the Japanese as a playable civilization. Everyone called them "the Japs".
Do cascades work in reverse? Like, sometimes words un-taboo themselves, right?
In the Middle Ages, swearing often took the form of blasphemy, like "God's bones!" and "by the blood of Christ!". Few would find those expressions offensive now. I wonder when the shift happened?
I doubt that any synonym for swive will ever become not emotionally charged....until it drops in frequency enough that most people don't recognize it without effort. Even Chimpanzees swear by "shit" (at least in the lab).
Some things really aren't neutral. Cultural has a broad sweep, but it's not all-encompassing, even WRT language use.
There's no way that distribution is "real", is there? I mean, it's got to be some kind of artifact of data collection or something. I refuse to believe it's real!
> In the Middle Ages, swearing often took the form of blasphemy, like "God's bones!" and "by the blood of Christ!". Few would find those expressions offensive now. I wonder when the shift happened?
I think it's as simple as people becoming less religious until we hit a point where the non- or less-religious stopped feeling like they had a duty to accommodate the sensibilities of the more religious. (This doesn't need to look like a rise in actual atheism, so long as people stop meaningfully believing that you could go to Hell for taking the Lord's name in vain and other melodramatic beliefs.) It's noteworthy that America is more religious than the UK, and, famously, American English still treats "Hell" and "damn" as significantly stronger swears than British English.
The obvious counterpoint to that is that such phrases are only swears because they are offensive to religious people; if the norm was to be non- or less- religious and not care what religious people think, then it's doubtful that "by the blood of Christ!"->"bloody" or whatever would have gained any traction as something to shout when you're angry in the first place.
I imagine if the world had formed that way from the beginning, we'd have needed to fall back onto taboo racist words or something just to have something to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer, since I'm pretty sure even stuff like the F-word only got a foothold due to its impact on pearl-clutching churchy folk.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: in Quebec minced versions of obscure Catholic terms (ciborium, tabernacle, chalice, etc) are used as strong profanity, and this arose specifically out of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s when Quebecois society at large very rapidly secularized at a rate hardly ever seen in history.
Yeah, "counter" point wasn't really a wisely chosen phrase, just what rolled off the tongue. It pretty much lined up an interesting aside to your comment, with which this aligns perfectly. Of course what I would paraphrase as "one of the top, if not the, strongest cultural backlash against religiosity in history" would be expected to produce even more terms specifically meant to offend the religious than a quiet steady rate. What would be surprising, and actually counter to our thread, would be evidence of religiously motivated swear words arising from an already highly or completely secular society, in the absence of any particular need to offend those with an upper hand in the status quo.
> since I'm pretty sure even stuff like the F-word only got a foothold due to its impact on pearl-clutching churchy folk.
I dunno. I don't think there's a particularly religious bent to "shit". It'd be interesting to check whether cultures whose formative religions don't say much on sexual mores also have rude words that refer to sex/genitalia.
When I briefly studied Cree, I was told that the word for "penis" can be used as a personal insult (similar in meaning to "dick"), but that it isn't rude at all if you actually mean penis.
I feel like there are plenty of terms in English which are insulting if used towards a person as an insult, but fine when used literally. It sounds almost tautologically true when I put it like that.
"Bloody" has had a bad rep ever since the Reformation in the 1540s, because it was short for "by my lady" (i.e. the Virgin Mary) and swearing by her was frowned on by protestants as a throwback to Catholicism!
Apparently William the Conqueror's favourite swearing oath was "By the Splendour of Christ!", although that doesn't seem to have caught on much! :-)
Quebec is the MVP at keeping the French religious swearing tradition going strong! Ask a Canadien what “tabarnak” means. You also have baptism, chalice, host, sacrament, saint, virgin, Christ, simony, damn.
John McWhorter wrote a book about the history of profanity in English called "Nine Nasty Words" that goes into this. I don't recall his exact argument, but your comment reminded me of one of his examples - a self-censored piece of marginalia in an old manuscript that reads "Oh d--- fucking Abbot" (or something along those lines). Modern sensibilities would expect the self-censorship to be "Oh damned f--ing Abbot." This vaguely suggests that the subject of what, exactly, is considered taboo changes over time and thus influences what's considered a "strong" curse word and what's not.
Interesting read and one of the only books about linguistics I've read that made me genuinely laugh out loud at times.
"bloody" is short for "By our lady (Maria)". In the game: Sure neither the Japs nor the Krauts are people in that game, and as playable civs quite impressive, historically. Plus the setting is in a time where "the Japs" was not yet on that slur-cascade. Was there even a Japanese among the players?
An English Teacher (of English and German) in London told me, in 1994. Actually, Etymonline does mention it, just not favorably quoting Rawson: "Theories that derive it from such oaths as "By our Lady" or "God's blood" seem far fetched, however." Seemingly, my colleague might have been wrong. And so I retreat humbled. ;)
I also thought about this exact example while reading this article. I think the boring answer in this case is that gaming forums in the 2000s were fairly strongly dominated by white men who didn't care ver much about political correctness. That's not to say the term was used in malice, just that a lot of the people there were aware that it was considered generally offensive and just didn't care. Some people seem to have started using it in innocence this way - a prominent modern-day Age2 youtuber called Spirit of the Law used to say "Go Japs!" in videos to cheer for his favourite civilisation, in a clearly benign way, but was nonetheless compelled to stop after someone pointed out to him that it was considered a slur in a broader context.
I guess this does show that groups with different social incentives to mainstream discourse do provide a *theoretical* vector for reintroducing taboo words back into that discourse, but they'd have to be *much* larger than 'Age2 forum' to have a hope of dislodging even a weak pro-taboo consensus.
“I’m not going to refer to the Japanese as “Japs” out of some kind of never-joining-hyperstitious-slur-cascade principle.”
I don’t blame you for this because of the personal consequences, but I think this would be the right thing to do. I personally refuse to say “n-word”, and if I want to refer to the word, I say/write “nigger”, the only exception being if I’m in a situation where I would say “f-word”. Also, if I’m singing along with certain artists (rarely), I don’t substitute “ninja”.
There's an interesting use/mention distinction here. The threshold for "too taboo to use" differs from the threshold for "too taboo to mention"; many slurs are (fair enough) too taboo to use, but only a handful are too taboo to even mention.
Making words too taboo to even mention, in an appropriate context, is ridiculous. Imagine being a kid growing up nowadays, knowing that you're not allowed to say "The N Word" but not knowing what that word actually is.
Given that you can be suspended from your job for saying a word which SOUNDS like "nigger" but predates it by centuries, I think we're pretty much there already, or as close to it as makes no difference.
In Judaism God is (often) written as יהוה. It would be disrespectful to pronounce, so we play it safe with 'Adonai' (tl: Our master/lord). However, that is used in prayers so if you aren't praying/reading scripture it would be disrespectful, so we play it safe again and pronounce יהוה as Hashem (tl: the name).
"If they could have, they would have demanded that “HaShem” be replaced with something else too, except that “HaShem” literally just meant “the Name” and so was already maximally vague."
I think this is a very important thing, and runs deeper than words drifting in and out of fashion. To name something is to put a fence around it. The acknowledgment of that runs a lot deeper than mere convention.
It's incredible to me that I was a practicing, relatively religious jew for 20 years without ever realizing that Jehovah was god's name. I'd heard of Jehovah's Witnesses, but that just sounded like random gibberish, I had no idea why they were called that. Then one day out of curiosity I sounded out yud-hay-vav-hay and was blown away.
When I was learning Hebrew, I was taught that yud-hay-vav-hay was pronounced "Adonai" the same way you might be taught how to pronounce "th" in English.
The fact that he has a name is also super weird. Apparently it predates monotheism. Jehovah was originally part of a pantheon of Mesopotamian gods, but at some point the others were de-emphasized and then forgotten. Meanwhile Jehovah, once a minor god, is now worshipped by 55% of the world population, and most of them don't know his name because it's so long been considered forbidden knowledge.
In some primitive societies there was a tradition that each person would have a public name, which anyone could use, and a closely guarded never-spoken secret name, so somewhat analogous to public key cryptography!
Anyone revealing their secret name would risk having their soul stolen, or some similar undesirable outcome. I guess the fairy tale about Rumpelstiltskin may be a folk memory harking back to a distant former time when secret names really were a thing.
Because yud-hay-vav-hay was tabooed to actually say before vowel pointings were introduced into Hebrew, no-one is entirely certain what the correct pronunciation is.
When it's written with vowel pointings, those are the vowel pointings for Adonai, as an aide-memoire. It was Christians, not understanding that, who tried to pronounce it and got "Jehovah", using the consonants of yud-hay-vav-hay and the vowels of Adonai.
There are a few words that retain the vowels (e.g. Hallelujah ends yud-hay but has the original vowel, so it's "yah") from which linguists have reconstructed a probable "Yahweh" - ie יַהְוֶה rather than יְהֹוָה
I think Jehovah or the local adaptation of the name is fairly common knowledge among Christians. He is usually just referred to as "God" though but there is no taboo with regards to using the actual name.
I also say "nigger" (which is not often to begin with to be fair) except where self-preservation requires that I say "n-word" to avoid losing jobs, or having 50 people physically stomping on my head. That and singing along with songs that say "nigger" can actually result in criminal penalties in my country (the UK so no first amendment). I don't want people to stand over me as a separate class who are allowed to use certain words that I am not. I understand why calling a black person "a nigger" is bad, as that is a direct insult, but talking about the word itself by using "n-word" is a really strange part of Western post-civil rights culture (Louis CK has a good bit on this).
Though like I'm said, I'm not standing in front of the firing squad, because saying "nigger" rather than the "n-word" in most real life contexts is far too socially, and sometimes physically or legally dangerous. Also fortunately, it's not a word that needs to be said very often. I wonder what the most tabooed word that needs to be said most often is.
There is a German song "Das Lied vom (the song of) Nigger Jim", sung by Hans Albers. Thankfully it is anti-racist. Well, I shall be careful not to perform it in a pub in the UK.
No idea, but this is the same country where the cops go after people for "liking" wrongthink tweets and where a dude got arrested for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute as a joke.
Yes, someone has been convicted of this specific offense. Chelsea Russell, 2017, quoted the lyrics of a rap song containing the word in a tribute to a dead friend: eight week curfew with ankle tag, ordered to pay $500 with an £85 victim surcharge. She challenged it in 2019 and managed to have the charges overturned on the basis that the usage of the word was sufficiently widespread in hip hop music for the conviction to be absurd.
What on earth does that achieve? What does it cost you to just use a euphemism, if it avoids upsetting others?
Sure, it's irrational that there are certain slurs we're not allowed even to explicitly mention. So what? Human cultures have irrational customs. Your stubborn absolutism and pointless, petulant self-sabotage hardly seem more rational.
Hey, if you’re going to address me in the comments, I’d really prefer you call me “Sexy Master Who is Greater Than All”. It makes me feel good, and I get upset when not affirmed. I’m sure you won’t mind since it doesn’t really harm you.
Now, you can argue you’re not beholden to comply because you don’t believe I really mean it, but once you even start down that path you’ve undercut your position that one should just accept little indignities if it keeps a fake whiner from getting fake upset.
I think we need to change the names of cardinal directions. South is way too contaminated with the connotations of the confederacy and racism. North and west and irredeemably jaundiced with a sickly sheen of oily colonialism, and east is orientalist.
Drop all those words form you language or be insensitive to people’s feelings!
I mean, in a world where 'South' was a totally taboo word, to the point where saying it would cause people to become genuinely horrified and disgusted at me... yeah, I would say something else.
I don't think your counter-example stands, because you're imagining a world where these words have not yet become a slur. You're being USC, in Scott's above example. In the case of the N-word, the cascade has already happened, all the way down, and no-one can change that.
The only choice you have to make is whether to violate the taboo or not. And in normal society, violating a taboo like this doesn't make anyone assume you're a brilliant unconstrained free-thinker; it makes 99% of people assume you're a terrible person.
Sure, it's irrational. But enormous swathes of human behaviour are totally irrational. There's also a taboo on talking about body functions in polite society. And it's totally irrational -- after all, everybody poops. But try being at a nice dinner and mentioning that you need to defecate -- people will be horrified.
I think you're conceding too much here. It actually *is* rational to judge someone for using a slur. That's the whole point of the hyperstitious cascade.
If you try to fight battles against the most taboo slurs, you'll spend all of your social capital accomplishing nothing. Spend your capital lambasting USC and their ilk for trying to create new slurs. An ounce of prevention
I might have been unclear. The taboos themselves are somewhat irrational (for a given meaning of 'irrational', which is complicated in itself). But once they exist, then you're right, it is 100% rational to judge someone for violating them.
Like, everyone knows the N-word is massively tabooed. Even the people further up this thread who claim to say it.
I thing we should taboo word "irrational" here, as what we are talking about doesn't actually have anything to do with systematical ways of (not) finding the truth.
It's a bit annoying. It's somewhat arbitrary. It's socially constructed and context restricted. It can be silly or poorly justified, or at least look this way to us. All this descriptors seems better fitting the case.
I'm not convinced that the taboo on talking about bodily functions is "totally irrational". In the case of the dinner party you've described, mentioning defection is going to tend to cause people to conjure up the act and substance and smell of defecation; this is going to taint the enjoyment of the food (if you've ever eaten supper with someone who badly overshares you'll know what I mean). This seems like a rational justification for not doing that.
It's as if you haven't written the post you are commenting below.
You need to first solve a coordination problem so that enough people were invested in everyone calling you “Sexy Master Who is Greater Than All” to create a cascade and let it pass the required threshold of acceptance. Till then your case isn't nearly as valid.
There is also a matter of a cooperation in a prisoner dilemma. If you were the kind of person who would respect other people wishes regarding what words are used towards them, there would be at least one reson to likewise respect your wish, even in the beginning of the cascade. But as you've explicitly stated that you are the opposite of that - no Sexy Mastery and Greatness for you.
And of course the position you are arguing against isn't "accept little indignities if it keeps a fake whiner from getting fake upset". It's "accept little indignities if it keeps real people from being really upset, even if reasons for that are socially constructed". Every position can be made ridiculous if separated from truth predicate.
People do seem to get genuinely upset about mention of the word nigger, so Porcupine calling them fake whiners seems odd. I will shore up his argument by proposing that they are stupid whiners and I don't feel beholden to their stupid preferences.
For instance, when I say "the world is not run by lizard people", the offends my schizophrenic neighbor who thinks the world is run by lizard people and I must be one of their agents to deny such obvious truths. This is stupid and I don't care, I'm not going to let his literal insanity constrain my speech. If I was being that stupid I would prefer people tell me so rather than play along.
Stupid is a leaky word here. A lot of stuff that seems stupid to us may be very much not stupid in reality. Maybe if we just put some effort and figured out the reasons why people are upset we wouldn't think that their preferences are stupid.
But in the end when you have done your best effort and the situation seems stupid as with your schizophrenic neighboor example? Then you can still execute some niceness just on the merits of outside view and general tolerance but essentially, yes then it's much more fine to disregard their preferences.
Why should we (the anti-hyperstitions people) be expected to put effort ? Why won't the people who want to mute our speech and track our every little utterance put a little effort into understanding our reasons ?
>Then you can still execute some niceness just on the merits of outside view and general tolerance
Oh, sure, Niceness, a privilege that I voluntarily give. Not an entitlement that somebody have the right to demand, let alone inflict or threaten to inflict material consequences ranging from banning me to firing me from a job.
I'm sure you felt like the cleverest boy in school when you wrote this, but "don't use a slur" is a blanket rule, whereas wanting to be called something different from your handle is asking for special treatment.
You know, I don't like your name because every time people say "hi Jack!", it reminds me of the people who flew planes into buildings on 9/11. Can you please change your name? What does it cost you to use a pseudonym to avoid upsetting others?
I don't think your counter-example stands, because you're imagining a world where "Jack" has not yet become a slur. You're being USC, in Scott's above example. In the case of the N-word, the cascade has already happened, all the way down, and no-one can change that.
You're asking me to change what I refer to myself as. Surely you can see that is much more difficult and inconvenient than changing what I refer to someone else as? And surely you can see that the benefit in changing my name is much less, since I will likely never interact with you again? In other words, your reductio ad absurdum doesn't work because it's not equivalent. Both the costs and benefits involved are vastly different.
But if we could come up with a situation that was more equivalent- say, if people in general tended to be upset by the name Jack, or someone I was close to and spent a lot of time with was upset by it- then yes I would. Because even the cost of changing ones own name is fairly minor compared to upsetting other people. So actually, I rather think your hypothetical supports my position, given a bit of thought.
What you're saying is obviously true. I think one potential justification with the N-word is that the level of taboo-ness is actually more up-for-debate than it seems.
Calling someone the N-word is obviously, 100% considered wrong. That's done with. But using the word in reference was actually okay to do just a decade or two ago, and I don't think it's actually a socially dangerous thing to do most of the time even today. That one may really be in a state where refusing to play along can make a real difference, and so is worth doing for the reasons explained in the article.
Moreover, the state of existence where society works really hard to get songs full of racial slurs stuck in your head with omnipresent incredibly catchy tunes, and then singing along to those songs is a socially criminal act, is so diabolically dystopian it may be worth risking real harm to ensure we don't become trapped in it. I'm not sure how to save us from that world, but I wish more people were working harder on it.
Yet another reason not to abide by this particular taboo: it’s utterly racist. Yes, I know people will push back, but I’ve yet to hear a remotely convincing argument that it’s ok to divide taboos by skin color.
Your dignity. It achieves the following : Cry bullies now know a fact about you, you can't be cry bullied.
It's Pascal's Wagger all the way down, why won't you believe in Islam ? It's so utterly cost less, you just have to say a single sentence : There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is the prophet of Allah. That's it, you don't have to pray 5 times a day (the Quran says you have but plenty of Muslims don't, the most they get is an occasional "conversation" from their more devout bretherns), and you can just disappear in Ramadan and eat quietly in your home. Certainly no one will actually trace your money to make sure you're paying Zakat (2.5% of your money that needs to be paid for the poor).
Why don't you do this ? Muslims are generally extremly upset by the fact that lots of people are not Muslims, why don't you make them a little more happier and pretend to be a Muslim ? What does it cost you ?
Being Muslim would cost me quite a lot. It's clearly nowhere near equivalent to using certain words that I would have almost no occasion to use anyway.
That was simply considered the polite and respectful term for a while. My next door neighbor still uses it to refer to the black couple across the street. I don’t think he’s a racist, he just not up to date.
My dad fought the Japanese in WWII. He always called them the "Japs." As a boy, I would use that word too until my brother took me aside and said that wasn't an appropriate word for me to use. This would have been around 1980.
A few years ago after my dad died I got his collection of WWII stuff that he'd saved, including many newspaper clips and newsletters published by the units he was in. They all used "Japs" and some of the context was ethnically derogatory. "Nips" was also a frequently seen term.
In contrast I also obtained the declassified unit summaries and some of the combat mission reports for my dad's unit and "Jap" and "Nip" were never used - the language was consistently "Japanese" or just "the enemy."
I don't know as much about this, but it seems it was a similar story with "krauts" vs "Germans."
So I don't think these terms were meant as simple short-hand, although they were that, but they were also intended to be a derogatory term used for the enemies we in the allied nations were fighting.
Though "Trump can't win" was perhaps even more widely believed, until it started happening. Why was "Bernie can't win" hyperstitious and "Trump can't win" not?
Melvin, I believed Trump always had a chance. The Democrats had their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears on that one. If you'd lived through the Dem primary like I did, you've know what I mean about Bernie.
Yea, that is a difference. My personal circles included many potential Bernie voters. Some of them who by the time of our state's primary had heard the "Bernie can't win" thing, stayed home; I'd say maybe half the Bernie fans I knew did that. Bernie then lost Illinois's primary by like 2 percent or something. We'll never know but I've always wondered whether if he'd snagged that upset -- defeating Hillary Clinton in her native state -- he'd have driven a stake through the "he can't win" narrative.
Contrast that with Trump's fans: for them the "he can't win" argument was just noise. They showed up for his rallies and showed up to vote for him regardless. And so he won, and Bernie did not.
(P.S. I, personally, did think that Bernie could not in fact win in November. But I also thought Trump couldn't possibly win the GOP nomination, indeed I made and lost bets on that point. That whole political year made me much more leery of such certainties in general and so I avoid being sure anymore about things such as whether Bernie could or could not have won in November 2016. This attitude cost me money in 2020 -- somebody wanted to bet me that Biden wouldn't win the Dem nomination and I said I had sworn off such wagering -- but I'm sticking to it.)
In retrospect, it’s entertaining that Hilary was though of as the safe option for the general election, given how massively unlikeable she is and how poor of a candidate she turned out to be. Any other notable democrat would have beaten Trump, including Bernie. Especially Bernie, whose class-based politics would have spoken to rust belt working class whites who got screwed by free trade.
I'm very interested in that hypothetical. Bernie would definitely have broken up what we now think of as Trump's base. The question is whether the big normie middle would have voted for him. Judging by the 2020 results, with the Democrats breaking up their own field to consolidate around Biden, it seems clear they didn't think that would be the case. Alternately they cared less about winning than denying Bernie a chance, but I think they made the right call in terms of electability.
It's always important not to project current knowledge backwards to a moment in time. Hillary was a terribad nominee with or without Trump as the opponent; national polling that summer suggested that she was the 2nd-least-liked major-party nominee in the history of such polling. But Trump was the #1 on that score, so....?? Also right up until Election Day there were still plenty of Dems and Dem-leaning voters who had a lot of trouble taking Trump seriously as a candidate. Hillary at least didn't seem to be literally unhinged, as many non-Hillary fans of my acquaintance kept saying that fall.
Very different situation by 2020 of course, because the Democrats had had the experience of actually losing to Trump. For at least some of them that experience did focus the minds. And then Biden also ran a tactically-smart campaign, quite disciplined which was frankly a surprise.
Is that actually true? My impression (from an ocean away) is that there were plenty of supporters of other, more conventional Republican candidates who believed it too.
Your opposite-ocean impression is fairly consistent with my American one. The GOP has had a never-Trumper faction for as long as Trump was taken seriously as a candidate - which I think was right around the time he started winning primaries. Before he starting winning them, a never-Trumper was simply known as a normal Republican.
If I had to speculate on the difference between "Trump can't win" for Republicans and "Bernie can't win" for Democrats, it would be the way each party's nomination machinery was organized at the time.
Shortly after Carter's defeat in 1980, the Democratic Party settled on superdelegates making up a set fraction of who would determine the nominee, as a compromise between following the will of primary voters and following the wisdom of insiders who may have had a better idea of who would actually win. At the time, superdelegates were set at 14% of total nominators. Since then, it rose to about 20%. (Any libertarian would likely predict this rise, especially in hindsight. Indeed, from that perspective, what's interesting is that it rose to only about 20%.) This became critically important in 2016, when most superdelegates backed Hillary Clinton *and* reported delegate counts typically included those, making Clinton's lead over Sanders look greater than a pure assessment of popular voter support would reflect.
By contrast, the Republican Party has no superdelegate mechanism. Instead, the fifty States choose their delegates however they like (typically a mix of winner-take-all and proportional, in both cases determined by primary voters), and those delegates make the whole call. That means a grass-roots candidate (like Trump or Sanders) has a much greater chance in the GOP than one in the Democratic Party with equal voter appeal.
We can further hypothesize, then, that any proto-never-Trumper trying to spread "Trump can't win" will have a much harder time turning that into a hyperstition, because they'd have to sway voter opinion in several key states, rather than quietly influencing a few hundred superdelegates (and then reporting them as if they represent popular opinion).
Absolutely true. The winter of 2015-2016 seems now like a whole different country in some ways. But well into the GOP's primaries that spring there were plenty of leading GOPers -- including some who later bent over to kiss the Trump ass -- going around saying "he can't win".
Maybe because the people saying "Trump can't win" were the same people calling Trump's potential voters racists and deplorables and they burned their social capital with that group? Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" probably did more to boost Trump's campaign energy than anything he ever did.
Agree and disagree. I think the reason it didn't catch on is actually what Scott is encouraging in the article - people resist that characterization and don't allow it to happen. In this case, it's definitely true that many cultural elites *tried* to make it true, and then the non-elites resisted and denied the change.
Again, I think Hillary Clinton had a *lot* to do with that. Had she been more open and welcoming to working class and non-college people (instead of calling them racists who were just going to have to lose their coal mining jobs), she could have taken the wind out of his sails. Instead, she helped create a solid opposition that could rally around Trump instead.
I certainly agree with the Hillary Clinton part. The Democratic Party got cocky and lost. Showing up in the Rust Belt was low hanging fruit they chose to ignore, just like they ignored the working class in general.
Oh goodness yes. That there were previously blue states she lost that she didn't even visit is a big deal. Bernie would have won them, because it was obvious he cared about them. If Hillary did care about them, it certainly wasn't *obvious*.
It doesn't help that a lot of us remember when Mitt Romney was characterized as a racist, sexist, anti-Russian. Now he's perfectly mainstream and acceptable, and suddenly being anti-Russian is a benefit.
McCain was treated the same, despite being a war hero and genuinely nice guy (going so far to stop a campaign rally to talk to his supporters about not impugning the character of Obama) who the left now loves.
Those of us who have watched this for a while fully expect that if DeSantis becomes the nominee, he will suddenly be the worst person ever and Trump will be forgotten.
They are two different types of contests. Trump was always the frontrunner for his primary, people were only really dubious over his chances in the general. Burnie struggled to get ahead even in his primary and ultimately didn't win it, let alone the general.
Democrats decided not to support Burnie, not Republicans. While for Trump enough Republicans were behind him the whole way.
Also agree and 98.6 for me. The more 98ers there are, the less linguistic flipflopping.
Below is a link to an article by George Packer on The Atlantic's website and will be in the April print issue. The website title is 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language' and the print title (for some reason is different and) will be 'The Moral Case Against Euphemism'.
>The more 98ers there are, the less linguistic flipflopping.
Though probably not if they're all correlated by belonging to the same community or having the same political beliefs or something. That just creates an obvious 'hostile group
This is an excellent post but I wish it had shown even more contempt for and determination to act against the language bullies who initiate such crusades for selfish reasons. This is not a problem I feel comfortable sitting out or avoiding, I have a strong sense it needs to be actively fought and these people need to be called out and not simply avoided. Does anyone have suggestions for how to do this?
The other thing I wish there was a more active remedy for is the situation you describe where half the people think saying black people commit more crime is impolite but know it’s true and the other half think it’s false and react very badly to information about statistical disparities. Your inaccuracy here is in failing to recognize the THIRD SUBSET who both know it’s true and pretend it isn’t in order to gain clicks or clout or indulge cruel impulses or whatever, this third subset is extremely pernicious and also needs to be actively fought and not merely avoided.
To clarify: it is the third subset who purposely call attention to statistical disparities they know are NOT due to bad behavior by white people in order to obtain power or money or indulge animosities by taking advantage of the fact that the correct factual defense to the charge is something they can twist to call people racist and attack them even more effectively.
George Packer recently wrote an article on The Atlantic website and will be in the April print issue. I think you would like. The website title is 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language' and the print title (for some reason is different and) will be 'The Moral Case Against Euphemism'.
>who purposely call attention to statistical disparities they know are NOT due to bad behavior by white people
Do they know it? To me it looks like that space is so corrupted by pomo that they no longer believe that anything can be true in the relevant sense if it contradicts the Actually True ideology. Which is of course a very convenient thing to believe in, so short-medium term prospects for improvements in the discourse are dim.
I disagree. You are referring to one of the original two groups Scott described but the third group that I described, of bad-faith actors, is certainly significantly large. They are detectable by their sophistry, which distinguishes them from the ideological true believers.
I think the vocabulary aspect is less important than the statistical knowledge aspect. Making ignorance about racial crime statistics fashionable has led to disastrous policies that have gotten thousands of people killed in recent years.
For example, in this decade blacks have died in far higher numbers in homicides and traffic fatalities than in the previous decade due to the George Floyd Effect. And the Floyd Effect was due to the fact that you are supposed to know that blacks are killed by police at about 2.5 times as often as whites, but you are never supposed to know that blacks kill others at a rate about 10 times that of white, and almost five times that of comparably poor Hispanics.
I'd argue that Scott is way too optimistic in saying that half of people know crime stats and just don't say them out loud while half don't know them. My impression is that that which becomes unsayable tends to become unthinkable. But, I'm not saying that people don't grasp crime stats when it come to their personal real estate decisions. What I am saying is that they become ignorant of reality when discussing public affairs, as seen in the public affairs disasters since May 25, 2020.
I also think part of this is Scott's bay area bubble. Most people I know of who bring up the crime statistic don't so in isolation. In the same breath, they point out that, "black people commit more crime, and black people are most often the victims of criminal behavior". It's an attempt to reframe the racial disparities debate in terms of a debate about keeping people safe, which the Right is more comfortable talking about. The move to mischaracterize the rhetorical move as a racial slur is more about trying to take the rhetorical reframing tactic off the table than it is about identifying actual racism.
The broader point is that some/many of these hyperstitious slurs are created in furtherance of a political agenda. Take the phrase, "it's okay to be white" as a counterpoint to Black Lives Matter. It has gained some popularity in the last month or so, because as with 'black lives matter' it's difficult to reject the plain meaning of the phrase without looking like a bad person. Yet already it's taking on political connotations - because THAT IS THE POINT. It's convenient to embed a lot of ancillary political meaning beneath a simple statement, then dare someone to reject that statement. But if you're trapped by an inconvenient political phrase being wielded against you, reframe it as no longer being about the plain interpretation of the words themselves, but about their 'underlying meaning'.
It's convenient to declare that you're pro-choice and your opponent is anti-choice, or that you're pro-life and your opponent is anti-life. Not because you're trying to describe that person's position more accurately, but because it makes them look bad. This isn't about arguments, it's about optics. It's not about understanding another person's point of view, it's about prejudicing others from even trying to understand.
Labels are the ground political battles are fought on, but they're all positional battles. None of these stupid word games impacts who is 'winning' the Culture Wars, because they're not about substance.
"It's OK to be white" was created to be a wholly unobjectionable statement that is still widely objected to. The goal is to demonstrate that wokeness is driven by anti-white racist animus. It works.
> True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. ... This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, ... I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, ...
There's another aspect of this dynamic that I'm surprised Scott didn't mention: it's a classic Moloch condition of coordination failure. We are literally being trapped into ritualistically uttering falsehoods. At best, this is for fear of offending the ostensible victims (e.g., the minority in view), but more often, it's for fear of incurring second-order disapproval from bystanders who are also trapped in the bad equilibrium (e.g., whites who "know" that one must never say X).
This Moloch pattern is deeply corrosive of the ability to communicate honestly. Many people, initially of good will, end up feeling perpetually gaslit, which can powerfully erode good will.
Dath Elan has some sort of norms that give it immunity to true facts becoming hyperstitious slurs. You're not allowed to judge people negatively for mentioning true facts.
I mean....there is almost no one who will _say_ that they judge people for uttering true facts in our society. It's just that certain groups have decided that certain facts _aren't_ facts. So on a surface level, there is probably no one among the group punishing these hyperstitious slurs who would say that they disagree with that norm.
All fun and games until someone keeps mentioning that someone has an embarrassing medical condition, or talking about someone's porn history, etc. Or, to use more politically charged issues, until someone starts mentioning jury nullification in a court room or until the media starts selectively mentioning true facts in order to push a conspiracy theory.
Moreover, per Scott's article, it's irrational to not judge someone based on the facts they mention. There's a reason some people constantly mentions racial crime statistics and others don't. So, from a purely Bayesian perspective, judgement is 100% warranted. This is true in a positive rather than normative sense, but the two bleed into each other.
If the probability I would enjoy someone's company is 10x lower if they're the type of person to mention true fact X, then it is entirely rational for me to be less eager to try talking with them. I'm not convinced its possible for a social norm against this behavior to be tenable in the long-term since such a norm would be unenforceable and in nobody's interest to follow.
In a world where all the coordination problems are solved you’d probably have nothing to worry about from disclosure of your medical conditions or kinks. Cherry-picking to push a false grand narrative is a separate offense from mentioning a true fact. Considering the US repeatedly has riots and entire political movements based on a failure to appreciate racial crime statistics (e.g blacks are 13% of the population, 30% of the cop-killed, and 50% of the cop-killers), I’m glad there are still people spreading the stats.
I think it’s just another part of a norm against lying. Don’t lie by omission when there are important facts pertaining to the issue at hand, regardless of the signaling value of the facts. Try not to incentivize others to lie.
>Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur. This seems bad for everybody.
-well, everybody except the people doing the deciding, I guess.
I theorize that many people today initiate things like that out of a sort of expectation that someone else will do it later and a desire to be ahead of the game.
We are very used to evaluating people from the past by modern standards, and punishing them posthumously for failing to meet them. In that environment, it's more-or-less rational to try and extrapolate ethical drift and hold youself to predicted standards. It's self-evident to me this explains at least part of the modern progressive worldview.
In that environment, it's possible for every single actor in this game, including the initiators, to be losing out due to an inability to coordinate
I think the Internet gave it a second wind because in written conversation you can shorten it to the snappy 'POC' (never mind that it doesn't work in spoken conversation; who has those these days?), so it lost the "unwieldy periphrasis" handicap.
Interestingly, "African-American" seems to be on its way out too. According to Google Trends, "African-Americans" was slightly more used than "black people" in 2004, but nowadays is less than half as popular (according to whatever metrics Google Trends is based on).
This isn't fully born out by Google Trends, but I swear to god everyone in America stopped using the term African Americans on November 4, 2008
I distinctly remember the night Obama won, all the coverage used the phrase "first black president," which seemed weird because in the lead up to the election I barely ever heard the term Black, it was offensive and African American was what you were supposed to say. After that, I heard Black all the time, and African American died out
There's a whole separate issue that, according to certain opinionated groups, African American is supposed to mean "a descendant of enslaved Africans", which Obama definitely isn't, so the switch to "black" was to a degree a ploy to bypass this problem.
It's worth pointing out that there are, of course, lots of Black people who aren't African-Americans (because they're not Americans).
If you adapted the racial terminology used in the USA (African-American, Native American, etc) into other countries, then you would get into trouble quickly. African-British is a term, but it refers specifically to black immigrants from Africa and their descendants; black immigrants from other places (e.g. African-Americans or immigrants from the Caribbean) are not African-British. And if you went to Africa and referred to black people as "Native Africans" then you'd be using the term that the colonisers used.
I do remember clips going around of Nelson Mandela's inauguration as President of South Africa with some American TV anchor describing him as "the first African-American President of South Africa", which definitely provoked a lot of laughter.
The point here is that these terms aren't grammatically productive; you have to learn them case-by-case. Which obviously proves that they aren't being formed according to some rules, but are being made up.
I remember a newscast about some riots in France (maybe 20 years ago), and the anchor was trying very hard to determine what to call the group of young men who were on camera throwing rocks. After a lot of stutter-stops, she ended up calling them African American.
Sure, but this was an American newscaster who couldn't think of anything to say. That she felt the need to identify the group by race at all is a pretty American thing as well, which I wish we could get away from. I'm doing a better job not making race a descriptor when I'm telling a story, but it's pretty ingrained in a lot of communities to include it when explaining who a person is.
I would love to read a history of hyperstitious slurs that failed to reach critical mass. I can’t think of one off the top of my head (maybe “Democrat Party” vs “Democratic Party”? I’ve always just shook my head at that one…), but they must exist, right?
Latinx is pretty much the counterexample to Scott’s “Asian” worry: actual Latinos were fine with “Latino”, but a bunch of people tried to pretend it was a slur anyway, and they had some success (with the “pathetic” 1-5% crowd) but it is clearly already in decline at this point.
I would say it does more than 'give hope'. It undermines the whole thesis, and illustrates quite neatly the best objection to it: that the terms which reach consensus unacceptability are always offensive to at least a large portion of the subject group. And if that's the case, why does it matter if it became offensive for irrational reasons? Why is this such a bad thing that we must resist? Scott's arguments for the downsides of these language shifts struck me as very weak, to the point of suggesting somewhat motivated reasoning (unsconscious, I'm sure, but he has previously written about bad experiences with 'social justice' and a resulting bias against it).
If a group of people prefer that I don't use an abbreviation of their demonym, then I won't. Because it costs me essentially nothing, and it will make that group of people happier. That's all there is to it, surely?
If it just stuck to abbreviated demonyms the costs wouldn’t be that much. Some amount of communication and mental friction, but not a big deal. But it clearly doesn’t stop there.
And it does have really policy impacts, look at how we treat and discuss mentally disabled people. So much bullshit in that sphere that leads to real harm.
The transitions from idiot to retard to mentally disabled to learning disabled (I think, briefly?) to person with mental disabilities has been absurd. And you've got to imagine the ones getting the real short end of the stick are the ones suffering from those disabilities and being sat down once or twice a decade for another, "You know the kind of person you are? Well we're not supposed to say that in polite society anymore."
Well that and there has been a lot of intentional mislabeling because “my precious Bobby isn’t one of those horrible biters, he just has a few issues (when Bobby absolutely is highly dangerous and one of the biters when not drugged to the gills)”.
I have always loved that no one tends to have a problem with “slow”, but retard is hugely offensive.
The euphemism treadmill only accelerates. I remember I was in middle school when "special needs" started to come into vogue; "Special" was an insult within six months.
The way the government treats disabled people seems mostly unrelated to the words commonly used to label them, except insofar as the words used are downstream of cultural attitudes towards disabled people.
I think the argument for resisting is based on the fact that in the early stages of a lot of these cascades the term isnt *actually* offensive to "a large portion of the subject group", rather there is some interested minority, e.g. a scholar trying to write a paper, trying to convince them that they should be offended. So if you can intervene at this early stage of the cascade and resist it, then its one less offensive term in the world.
There’s also the inability to say factual knowledge issue, which I think is a real problem & costs lives. I think invisibly saving 10 lives is better than visibly not offending 100 people.
I was using “slur” loosely. The idea is the same: people on the way-too-far-left were arguing that “Latino” was offensive (to Latinas) and that if you used it you were a terrible sexist person.
But it was worse than that. Native Spanish speakers didn’t consider it to be sexist to use the masculine form of the word as the generic form because *that’s just how Spanish works*. But people in the outgroup were being offended for them on their behalf and decided to fix the problem by inventing a new word that didn’t even remotely look like a real Spanish word. It was pretty much a complete fail for the forces of hyperstition.
English works similarly too, with "he" being the generic pronoun, and several words usable as both masculine and generic. Except that a few decades ago, the generic use started to be regarded as politically incorrect.
Curiously, this is a change that Scott seems to be on board with, using not just "they" but often "she" as a generic pronoun, presumably as a counterbalance to generic "he".
For me, the whole "offended for them on their behalf" is the *worst* part of this whole thing. No one can justly speak for another unless given permission or unless they're in loco parentis. And groups can't give permission. Speaking on someone's behalf unless they've told you to is infantilizing and WAY more offensive than any slur. It says "you're not smart/knowledgeable/etc to know that this should be offensive. So I'm going to take it on myself to correct that. Silly little <person>, go sit over there and let me handle your affairs."
I'm reminded that the Seminole tribe gets paid crap-tons of money for the Florida State mascot rights. They're not only fine with it, they're proud of it (as a tribe). Yet ignorant white knights (all privileged white folks from elsewhere) keep claiming it's racist. On the behalf of people who vehemently disagree.
It's a gendered language, erasing the concept of gendered words is tantamount to erasing the language itself. And anyway, "latino" is already gender neutral in Spanish, as in it can refer to groups of males and females. Latina is gendered, in that it can only apply to females.
Never understood the acceptance of "Latino." Latin America is French propaganda that they have any claim to Spanish America and an excuse to invade Mexico. Seems ironic for anyone who celebrates Cinco de Mayo to call himself Latino.
Wasn't that more related to the fact that "Latino" looks male, as opposed to "Latina". So "Latinx" was someone's clunky (in pronunciation at least) idea of eliminating the distinction?
I guess Esperanto is unlikely to take off these days, for a similar reason, because masculine words end with "o" and feminine words with "ino". To me the latter looks very much like a diminutive "o" i.e. a "little male"!
People who ideologically agree with wanting a non-gendered form, but who also natively speak Spanish, tend to hate "Latinx" or even "Latinix" (which is how it's pronounced). They came up with "Latine" instead. The wokest of the woke use that term, looking down on Latinx as Anglocentric. It's also a shibboleth (it's pronounced "latin-eh", not "lateen").
> Latinx is pretty much the counterexample to Scott’s “Asian” worry: actual Latinos were fine with “Latino”, but a bunch of people tried to pretend it was a slur anyway
I don't think they were trying to sell the idea that "Latino" was a slur against Latinos. I think the idea was that "Latino", like all Spanish-language adjectives, is a slur against women.
It's not really a surprise that Spanish speakers couldn't be sold on this.
What I always found hilarious is how the type of people trying to push "latinx" would also decry colonialism, without realizing that Latin America is only "Latin" because of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.
Almost by definition it would be hard to know what this is...each of them started from some individual or group trying to say something. If it didn't catch on...how do we know? People and groups often say weird things. It would include an enormous list of things, many only ever said in person which end up just being weird quirks of that individual.
A history of attempts to do this politically are basically a history of every slogan and wording ever used by groups of politicians. Some things like a 'Death Tax' catch on while hundreds of other attempts don't.
In some ways this same thing in a positive cascade applies to the usage of slang.
In Canada, terms for Indians (the legal term) do this to an annoying degree. There is Indian, Native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous. In roughly that order.
The clever reader will note that Aboriginal and Indigenous mean Native, and Native doesn't come with a racial slur already in existence and ready to go. But there are people who are offended by Native (and many more offended by Indian, which I get). So now the correct term is Aboriginal. Or Indigenous. I wonder what it'll be next week.
There's a strong attempt to wedge that into Australia now too, where it's even less applicable (the natives even further from "Nations" in terms of their level of political organisation, and the native-political-organisations that existed circa 1788 were even less likely to have been the "first" ones).
The point is not to accurately describe reality, the point is to give you a choice -- either humiliate yourself in front of power by using this week's word, or be destroyed by power for refusing to use it.
I really don't think it's that much of a deliberate conspiracy. It's more likely, as Scott argues, a sort of cultural evolutionary thing involving signalling and unconscious associations.
Doesn't cover the Inuit and Metis. 'Indian' technically doesn't either, actually. I've literally never heard a non-white person use the term First Nations, either.
There are genuine sensible reasons to move to Indigenous rather than Native and Aboriginal (Aboriginal is already about the Australians, Native can be confused with all the other meanings of the word native where you don't use a capital letter). But the idea that they are offensive seems to be relatively new and extremely stupid.
if you are talking to a native american (and this is probably the only case where getting this right matters), it is pretty easy and inoffensive to ask what term they identify with. different people have very different preferences and it is fine.
Kitya was very, very clearly talking about the preferences of whoever you're currently having a conversation with. Please don't derail comment threads with willful misreadings just to be inflammatory.
No transgender/transgender supporter has ever respected my preference not to be labelled as "cis". And I'm certain people would mock/ridicule me if I asked not be called 'white'.
Still not what Kitya was talking about, though. She was expressing her own opinions of what the norms should be. The fact that other, ruder people follow different norms, or follow these norms only inconsistently, is nothing to do with Kitya or anyone else trying to sincerely and consistently uphold these notes; showing up in their replies being snarky about what other, worse people do is rude and uncalled-for.
(Also, you can make that "no transgender supporter" to a "only one transgender supporter" going forward. I dunno what you have against "cis", although "white" is obvious enough, but if you don't want to be called that, that's fine by me. Should the need for clarity come up, how would you prefer your non-transness to be flagged? Is "non-transgender" fine?)
She said "it is pretty easy and inoffensive to ask what term they identify with. different people have very different preferences and it is fine."
So unless she reacted the same to my example as her example, then she's being a hypocrite. And I don't know anything about her, but I've seen many many people on the left say what she said, and many many people on the left who think it is ridiculous or even 'bigoted' to not want to have an exonym like 'cis' applied to oneself. So maybe she's a rare exception where the venn diagram doesn't overlap, but probably not.
>Should the need for clarity come up, how would you prefer your non-transness to be flagged? Is "non-transgender" fine?
Non-trans is fine. Cis is literally a word created by transgender activists to denormalise being non-trans. This is not a conspiracy theory, it has explicitly been the intention of the word since its creation. I don't want to be a part of that and shouldn't have to be. There's certainly nothing respectful about it, and it doesn't even describe who I am and how I view myself.
It would be like saying people who aren't schizophrenic should be called 'olotiphrenic' (olotita being my poor, quick guess of the opposite of 'schizo-') rather than non-schizophrenic (or not having a term for it at all). Such a word would obviously exist to make it seem like schizophrenia and 'olotiphrenia' are just two different but fundamentally equal modalities of mental being, instead of schizophrenia obviously being a disorder.
And it's ironic that anyone would think it weird to not be okay with 'cis', since almost all that transgender activists talk about is opposition to having a label applied to them they don't identify with (with many if not most supporting canada's and california's efforts at criminalizing 'misgendering').
But people here are determined to act like it's some insidious evil trampling their most fundamental freedoms. Just call people what they want to be called, or else people will rightfully think you're kind of a dick.
Maybe the way it constantly changes is a bit arbitrary and irrational. Probably we should be more forgiving of accidental missteps, because it can be hard to keep up with. But it's really not that unbearable an imposition to have to find out what people like to be called, and call them that.
And this is a perfect example of the problem. This reads to me as you wanting to gloss over that most "liberals" disagree with that idea so that you can tar with a wide brush a larger group that disagrees with you on other, less radical issues.
Why don't you just instead say, "I agree with many liberals that we should not go so far as to make misgendering illegal in most circumstances?" Are you afraid you'll lose status amongst your conservative crowd if you do that?
Really? Laws are getting passed in liberal states that supposedly *most* liberals (and obviously almost all conservatives) disagree with? And there's been no general outrage from liberals about this law they supposedly disagree with?
And support for hate speech legislation amongst the american left may or may not be a literal majority, but it's certainly not true that most liberals oppose it.
And in any case, even if what you're saying is true, it doesn't contradict what I said, because I said "liberal in California/Canada are making misgendering illegal", which is true even if most liberals disagree with it. It's liberals doing this. And if the liberals who disagree with the actions of these liberals are not going to make any noise about it then this is functionally equivalent to supporting it.
>Why don't you just instead say, "I agree with many liberals that we should not go so far as to make misgendering illegal in most circumstances?" Are you afraid you'll lose status amongst your conservative crowd if you do that?
This doesn't even make sense in the context of this discussion. The point was you can't say that socially informed liberal speech norms arent a violation of your freedoms when the left will absolutely resort to the violence of the state to enforce these norms if their social regulation fails.
Its just like when people say facebook is a private company and they can censor who they please, while willfully ignoring the part where the democrats haul zuckerberg and co in front of congress and threaten him with government enforced censorship if he doesn't do the censorship himself (but of course, its not censorship, it's about "stoppping misinformation").
Misgendering is not generally illegal in California; you've not been hearing huge objections from liberals to such a proposal because that's never been proposed.
But let me propose a law more along the lines of the _actual_ one I bet you're thinking of. How about that you are not allowed to discipline or fire people who work for you who upon finding out one of your customers is a Trump voter, referring to them as "evil idiots" from then on. After all, we don't want you restricting their freedom of speech, do we?
I want to be called “my lord Jesus Monster truck the IV”, but only on Tuesdays. Other days I must be grouped as a “royal draconian leprechaun”. To use any other address is deeply offensive.
Though that does add extra cognitive load and conversational burden* that could be avoided by simply having a universally-known, society-wide consensus on what to call people.
* I'm not sure what the "correct" term for this is, but basically I mean it adds extra pleasantries that must be dealt with before getting to the actual point of the conversation, thereby making communication that little bit more time-consuming and inefficient.
Oh, you wouldn't believe how many people are willing to take offence on behalf of Native people. Though practically, I find offence taken is usually inversely proportional to actual difficulty of lived experience. People with actual problems have far more urgent concerns than which synonym of 'native' is being used with a capital letter on it.
When I was moderately young 'Indian' was still an acceptable term. We've moved through all these terms in MAYBE twenty years. Possibly thirty, but I don't think even quite that. It's a bit exhausting, and definitely does not make me take these issues more seriously. And given that pretty much ANY term can be pronounced with venom and hatred, I have very little patience for literal synonyms.
Also, I live and work in a majority Native area with majority Native clientele. Literally nobody cares much except the easily offended who make a living doing so. The problem is, those groups seem to get their way on these things a lot.
Also also, if it only matters to get it right when talking to those people specifically, that sounds like a pretty hollow principle.
Native doesn’t have a built in slur, but less-than-sensitive Australian folks call their Aboriginal people “Abbos”. Which is an offensive slur but also part of the genuinely endearing trend of Aussies coming up with a diminutive for seemingly every noun.
Americans were extremely angry at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, so "Jap," the word used in newspaper headlines in 1942-1945, became associated with feelings of intense anger. By 1950 or so, the U.S. government was increasingly friendly toward Japan again (due to the Korean War and the like), so establishment media responded by dropping "Jap" in favor of the more respectful-sounding "Japanese." (I'm not sure of the exact dates of these shifts.)
Which is interesting because “Nipponese” is probably a better English rendition of what the Japanese call themselves. Surprised there hasn’t been an attempt to revive it.
"Nipponese" is certainly not a better English rendition.
From my experience living in Japan for more than twenty years, 日本 when used as an adjective is invariably pronounced にほん (nihon), thus 日本人 is にほんじん (nihonjin). The only time にっぽん (nippon) is used is in certain relatively rare (outside company names) references to the country itself, but 日本 as にほん (nihon) is far more common. (The にっぽん use is unusual enough that when I type that in my input method offers a katakana rendering of it as well, ニッポン, which marks it as something unusual.)
The term ジャパニーズ (jappaniisu) is part of the Japanese language and is the first option my input method offers when I type じゃぱに (jappani). I've never seen the word used, so I expect that most Japanese would have difficulty with understanding ニッポンニーズ (nipponizu), nor is it even known to my input method and I have to go through the usual minor contortions to get it to render correctly as I do with any word that's not in the input method's dictionary.
It’s used in The Man in the High Castle which has a lot lot lot of race talk - alternative American society which is a racial caste system with the Japanese at the top.
"Nips" was in common usage (at least where I grew up) as a more offensive version of "Japs" at least as recently as the 1990s. As a kid you'd get told off for saying "Nips" but not "Japs".
When the Japanese economy collapsed and the fear of Japan taking over the world was replaced by the fear of China taking over the world, the desire for ethnic slurs against Japanese people went away.
Every time you willfully choose the passive voice, William Strunk rolls in his grave, and E.B. White sheds a single tear which falls to earth as cold rain.
There is no passive construction in either sentence.
"Am glad" is a copula + adjective. "Chose" is past tense, active. "To sadden", "to cause" and "to become" are infinitives. Both "experiencing Japaneseness" and "experiencing sadness" are gerund phrases modifying the noun "person".
Every time you misidentify the passive, Geoffrey Pullum rolls in his... nice bed, I guess, since he's still alive.
Hahaha, yes, I think we can all agree that Strunk, White, and the authors of every other usage guide from the last century would cringe at the sentences in the OPs.
> My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan.
Are you serious? I think it's much more likely that the first few times it was used was explicitly to signal opposition to BLM - why else would it be phrased like that, and arise at the same time??
> Forty years ago, most people with Confederate flag bumper stickers on their cars were probably proud Southerners not trying to make a statement about race.
Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Maybe you have a point with the thesis of your article (that most hyperstitious cascades are not utilized for good?), but these are bad examples to illustrate your point.
I think you're mistaken about "All lives matter". Early on, it was possible for either slogan to take root: one obviously expansive and inclusive, the other inviting - perhaps even insisting on - further discussion.
"All lives matter" was deployed immediately as a counter-slogan to imply "black lives matter" means "only black lives matter" when, of course, the idea of that slogan is "black lives matter too." Saying there was a week or so where it was well-meaning is probably being far too generous about its origins.
I'm sure your local experience confirms your point of view. Where I live, small-town deep-blue New England, even years later, the slogan was *still* unsettled. By the time George Floyd was murdered, we still had the aforementioned Unitarians earnestly confused that they got dirty looks for "All Lives Matter", but we also had people pushing in the other direction, so that "Black Trans Lives Matter" banners outnumbered simple BLM ones.
If I told you there were two teams, one that insisted that all lives matter and one that got mad when you said that all lives matter... which team would you guess was rife with bigotry?
Definitely the one that gets mad at All Lives Matter. That should have been the original slogan. You can't be mad at it without being some kind of -ist.
"All Lives Matter" long pre-dated the BLM movement: after I moved in 2014, I passed an "All Lives Matter" sign on my way to work every day. (It was put up by a local association of churches--almost all black or Hispanic--as part of an anti-violence push mostly focused on gun control.)
I believe the opposite - i know many people who posted “all lives matter” immediately after George Floyd’s murder as a show of solidarity with BLM. I continue to believe that ceding a moral truth like “all lives matter” to white supremacists was an enormous self-own for social justice
Nobody "ceded" anything. White supremacists started using "all lives matter" in opposition to BLM. Once that happens, there was nothing deliberate that could be done to undo that.
Just like nobody ceded "white pride," it's just white supremecists started using it to signal racial animus and it's not possible to consciously undo that. By contrast, "black pride" and "Asian pride" are generally viewed as positive and non-racist, because the people who use it aren't using it to signal racial animus, merely pride in one's identity (same with "gay pride").
Language formation is not a deliberative process. Changes in denotation and connotation tend to arise naturally without any ability for anyone to control it. And I think Scott and others are really off the mark to assign moral weight to natural language evolution. It's neither good nor bad that "negro" is now considered offensive whereas "God" is not, any more that it is neither good nor bad that "computer" now means a machine not a person who computes. It just is.
Wait, where is the evidence that white supremacists started using “All Lives Matter”? And I mean actual white supremacists who espouse the superiority of whites, not just people who happen to be white and disagree with the politics of BLM.
> White supremacists started using "all lives matter" in opposition to BLM. Once that happens, there was nothing deliberate that could be done to undo that.
Sure there was, ignore the white supremacists who are a tiny minority and so ultimately irrelevant.
TBH I thinks it makes more sense if you look at it as a Jonathan Haidt-style sanctity/impurity issue. White supremacists are ritually impure, and hence anything they touch becomes polluted and unusable for decent folk.
I get it, I just think we should reject religious notions purity of all kinds. It cedes too much power to bad actors and superstition in the case of religion.
White supremacists want influence and attention, so if they know they can influence everyone's behaviour by trolling and signalling, they'll just be having a laugh making us dance to their tune. You minimize their influence by ignoring them completely.
>Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Lots of "scholars" will tell you that intelligence differences between races don't exist and that black people don't commit any more crime than white people.
Exactly. Huge fields of academia are useless these days. Especially the various flavors of victim studies. Much more a way for people to make a living whining about ingroups than to actually do useful things.
This is abolutely NOT valid evidence that geneticists reject race. No article on a university website is ever going to endorse a politically incorrect position and they are under no obligation to make these proclamations align with what the actual DATA on race in science is.
It was initially used for a variety of reasons (takes time to establish an accepted meaning).
Some people used in to signal opposition. Others used it because they felt BLM suggested that black lives matter too and/or objected to the idea that a racialized approach was the best tactic to deal with police misconduct.
I mean you can say that's opposition in some sense but the point is that they would say they agreed with what most people claim is the meaning of BLM now (black lives matter equally and the police aren't treating them as if they do).
>(black lives matter equally and the police aren't treating them as if they do).
And this is false, which is what much of the opposition to BLM is based on. When you account for the rates of crime for each race, and violence towards police by race, the evidence that police disproportionately use force against blacks is virtually non-existent.
And importantly, BLM supporters have consistently tried to destroyed the lives of any semi-public figure saying this truth.
According to Google Trends, "all lives matter" closely tracks "black lives matter" as a small but proportionate fraction. To the extent that "black lives matter" has been in the public consciousness, people have been responding with "all lives matter".
Scott doesn't specify the timeframe of his impression: whether it's in July 2013, when the #blacklivesmatter hashtag was created; 2015-2016, when BLM received considerable media attention well in advance of the George Floyd protests; or during the protests in 2020. If he is talking about the 2020 protests, there had been seven years for the slogan to pick up various meanings which could have informed its future usage.
With all due respect, this being his blog and all, unless "the first week of [all lives matter's] existence" is convincingly anchored to some fairly early timeframe, the media conspiracy narrative rounds off to a just-so story.
"Lots of scholars" aren't immune to class prejudice. They apparently don't have the faintest understanding of southern culture over the past 50 years as related to displaying the confederate flag. Until recently it never meant more to me than showing membership of the southern redneck tribe. Generally people who grew up in the rural south, drove pickup trucks, had guns, drank cheap domestic beer, had blue collar jobs, and listened to southern rock or country music. It was also an overt signal of non-membership of the educated class which may explain some of the dynamics at play. They saw themselves are more Dukes of Hazard than KKK. I'm sure there was more racists per capita in this group and it was almost exclusively white men but that was never what it was about.
Growing up in the north in the 80s/90s it definitely meant about half “racists”, but also another half who were just hicks into nascar and southern culture and “rebellness” and the dukes of hazard.
It a absolutely didn’t not solely denote allegiance to racists or conservatives at all.
And "conservative" does not necessarily imply "racist" either. You can be a "hick into nascar and southern culture and rebelness and the dukes of hazzard" and also be a conservative, and not be a racist.
Why did the confederate battle flag show up on the Georgia state flag in 1956? What was going on then that might motivate such a change?
Fwiw, the popular use of the confederate flag from its rise in the late 1800's through the mid 1900's was closely associated with "lost cause" mythology about the civil war and antebellum South and explicit support of literal white supremacist politics. The version history you are offering is revisionist and relatively new. That you treat scholars who reject your ahistorical revisionism as just being prejudiced is not great.
>> Forty years ago, most people with Confederate flag bumper stickers on their cars were probably proud Southerners not trying to make a statement about race.
> Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Having supporting your earlier point, I need to counter here that I watched a well-known US network TV show in the 1980s which prominently featured an orange Dodge Charger covered in Confederate symbols. This show had a fundamental theme of rebellion (if not outright anti-cop anarchy), and surely must have sought to invoke Southern rebel pride with its style and symbology. But I remember no message, express or implied, addressing race in any way.
The proud Southerners Scott mentions might not have been very sophisticated, or scholarly. But it's certainly possible that they were intending to make a statement about something other than race, which would make this an excellent example for Scott's thesis.
There's a popular racing game that lets you collect cars and heavily customize them and give them paint jobs. One of the early unlocks is a Dodge Charger and there are a lot of Dukes of Hazzard paint jobs running around.
Or *were*, until George Floyd happened and at some point they decided to ban all paint jobs including Confederate imagery. At which point I remember reading a lot of comments along the lines of "Good riddance! There's absolutely no reason you'd want that outside of racism anyway!"
Interestingly, Magic: the Gathering's online "Arena" game let you buy national flags to use as cosmetic card sleeves for your deck, at one point. This was fine for a couple of years up until last year where playing against a Russian flag suddenly got rather emotionally charged, and the game publishers responded by banning all the flag cosmetics (and issuing a refund to those who'd bought one, I think).
I dunno if you're referring to the Forza series, but (allegedly) they also ban "rising sun" iconography, which means that some current real-world racing-car livery cannot be accurately depicted, and that this affects the basic livery of one of the in-game cars.
(A "meatball" is used instead of the radiating version, a la the current vs WWII era flags)
I think less opposition to BLM itself, and more to the wording of the slogan. Because I guess they felt it was exclusionary to them? Which seems very silly to me, as any less-than-maximally-uncharitable reading of the slogan would be to infer that it means Black Lives Matter *Too*.
At the time just after George Floyd’s murder, there were two distinct usages of “all lives matter” that I observed that are worth distinguishing. The first and more predominant sentiment was expressed in solidarity with BLM by liberals hoping for more universal messaging, while the other was a more obnoxious version expressed by people like Bill O’Reilly as a (highly successful) attempt to bait an otherwise righteous movement into the astonishingly stupid position of being the team that objects to saying that all lives matter.
>while the other was a more obnoxious version expressed by people like Bill O’Reilly as a (highly successful) attempt to bait an otherwise righteous movement into the astonishingly stupid position of being the team that objects to saying that all lives matter.
More obnoxious than killing numerous people, causing billions in property damage including destroying the livelihoods of countless small business owners, and refusing to social distance during the peak of a pandemic?
Any less than maximally uncharitable reading of All Lives Matter would be followed by (incduding black people's), and the same charity applied to their intentions might give you 'I agree with you because of this deeper foundational belief', but rhetoric and charity mix about as well as oil and water.
I guess the proponents of BLM were maximally uncharitable then... seeing how there were reams of articles doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to point out why "All Lives Matter" was racist, controversial, problematic etc., rather than an obvious generalization of "Black Lives Matter".
Earlier on there were absolutely super liberal Unitarian grandmas saying “why don’t we use ‘all lives matter’ “. He isn’t wrong about it not being solely a signal of opposition originally. But the left got those people sorted out pretty quick.
>>Are you serious? I think it's much more likely that the first few times it was used was explicitly to signal opposition to BLM - why else would it be phrased like that, and arise at the same time??
This matches my recollection. ALM may have had some variance in how much *hostility* it presented to BLM early on, but it always represented some degree of disapproval. People who wanted to approve of Black Lives Matter didn't need to make a new slogan - they just said "Black Lives Matter."
So ALM really only caught on with people who didn't like BLM to one degree or another. This initially included both the "I respect your goals but disapprove of your methods" crowd and the "I hate black people" crowd, but over time the former steadily dropped off and usage became increasingly concentrated among the latter.
So there's a truth, I suppose, to the idea that the phrase wasn't always *hostile* to BLM, but from the beginning I think it connotated opposition to one degree or another.
>So ALM really only caught on with people who didn't like BLM to one degree or another. This initially included both the "I respect your goals but disapprove of your methods" crowd and the "I hate black people" crowd, but over time the former steadily dropped off and usage became increasingly concentrated among the latter.
No, this is nonsense.
BLM is, always has, and always will be based on lies. It's a black nationalist movement that has always been explicitly anti-white. It is based on the lie that blacks are disproportionate victims of police violence (completely false when you account for black crime rates and rates of violence against police compared with other races).
These thugs burned down small businesses, and even if you're fine with chain stores being destroyed, this led to countless workers losing their jobs (and if you're in a neighborhood in which which violent black mobs decide to burn down a store on whim, why would you bother reopening?).
And around 500 white people are murdered by black people every year in the US, a per capita rate TEN TIMES HIGHER than white on black murders (with similar, or higher, multiples for virtually all categories of violent crime).
Not only has no prominent black activist ever talked about this being a problem, when pressed on it they will typically say that it's white people fault.
So you have people who are at best indifferent to, and at worst supportive of, huge numbers of white people being murdered, raped, assaulted and robbed by black people, and then you expect white people to care that some piece of human trash who happened to be black died? And to be okay with mass violence and property destruction?
The data is clear, black people are the most hateful race in the US. They have a vastly more negative view of white people than vice versa, and the vast majority of interracial violence is black on white. And you want to sit here and complain that white people are being "hateful" when they don't pathetically accept this bullshit?
In the Republic of Ireland the word ‘Brit’ would actually be considered a bit of a slur. ‘West Brit’ even more so. It implies someone who may pine for the days the country was part of the UK.
There's definitely a relative-status factor in these things - no British person is going to be very worried about "the Irish are racist towards me," in much the same way that not many white Americans will get worked up by "honky."
It's not that Irish hostility was never a problem in Britain; even in the early 90s things were pretty bad in London. But to the extent there's a kind of status hierarchy of groups, no-one's ever going to put the Irish above the English in it, which is the bigger thing. It's not, "I'm scared of your hostility," it's "I resent the fact you're better than me" (whether or not better-ness is an entirely arbitrary social construct or whatever).
I reject the idea of an absolute hierarchy, it's all contextual. Even if a slur is inconsequential for the average member of a group on an average day, it can still be very consequential for someone in an atypical community or circumstance. No group is the majority everywhere.
I agree with the terms “Jap” and “Negro” being harmless words that were made to have negative connotations due to hyperstitions, but I feel that the confederate flag is a legitimate hate symbol. The confederacy’s sole purpose was the preservation of slavery, there was no exaggeration of the negative uses of the word. While the words “Jap” and “Negro” merely imply that the person is intending to be offensive(or just being ignorant) the use of the confederate flag is a symbol of one’s support for the institution of slavery. The confederate flag is not taboo due to hyperstition, it is a sign of one’s hatred for black people.
Does that mean, e.g., all muslim symbols is an explicit support for the murder and the slavery of Christians ? All Russian victory parades are symbols for the murder and rape of Germans ?
The sole purpose of the confederacy was the institution of slavery. Russian victory parades are held to celebrate their win over the Nazi Party and the message spread by the party, not the murder and rape of the German populace. And your point on the Muslim symbols is so weak it could be disproven by a lobotomized infant.
The founder of Islam was a murderer, pedophile and slave owner/trader. And despite all muslims thinking muhammad is the greatest, most moral man to ever exist, Islam is beyond reproach and the confederacy is the devil.
You sound offended like hell, I'm an ex Muslim and you can't go 10 pages in the Quran without hearing a call to kill, rape, or enslave those who don't worship the True Asshole, or the tales of how this asshole did those things to the people of old.
>The sole purpose of the confederacy
Just like the sole purpose of Islam is the institution of killing and raping those who don't follow it, and the sole purpose of the Soviet Republics is the institution of doing all those things with extra steps.
If you are asking that, you are getting close to believing that other people can have opinions that differ from you. Good job, keep going.
The rebel flag means 'this land is ours'. It means 'the South' - beaten, bloody, ruined, but still standing. It means heat and bugs and slowing down and everything not NYC. Or Boston.
It means Spanish moss and call-and-response and dirt roads and ten churches, five bars, and a stop light. It means sir and ma'am and being called boy until you're thirty with your second kid on the way.
It means old battlefields and older wounds and learning to get along. It means something bigger than yourself and your concept of the world.
> It means old battlefields and older wounds and learning to get along
I told myself not to argue your statement, but I can’t resist this part. How is the confederate flag a symbol of getting along? They seceded from their country instead of trying to get along!
If it won, it would have ~170 years of heritage and culture (however much slavery it would have been built on). And you would be defending it here exactly as you do Muslims. Just like if Muslims lost in the countless close calls 1400 years ago, just like if the Bolsheviks lost in the civil war.
Being against confederates is not being against slavery, it's being against unpopular slavery, it's being against the slavery that has already lost and became a dead horse before your grandfather knew how to use the toilet, certainly before mine did. It was without a doubt brave in the 1850s and 1860s, perhaps brave in the 1870s and 1880s, and maybe the 1890s and the turn of the 1900s. There is no cost to it now, there is no virtue in it anymore.
It's like railing against an ugly bully because he's an easy target, when I call bullshit it's not because I like the bully, it's because nobody would touch the attractive, high-status or protected bullies. And they still have the audacity to claim they're anti-bullies after all.
Why would you "call bullshit" on someone railing against an "ugly bully?"
Isn't an ugly bully still a bully? It's certainly preferable for people to criticize both the ugly bully stuffing kids in lockers *and* the popular kid bullying through social exclusion, but the solution to the gap between the two isn't for people to take it easier on the ugly one and be more tolerant of his locker-stuffing.
Have you ever asked someone who displayed it? Maybe it means something different to them than it does to you. The meaning has definitely changed over the past 20 years and that change has been driven by people other than southern rednecks.
I don't think that asking is a reliable way to find out what people who display the Confederate flag really mean or feel. It's pretty clear from the actual, literal statements of those who fought for the south that the primary reason for fighting was to extend slavery, but a great number of southerners strongly object to that characterisation. If they lie (or at least deceive themselves) about that, why would they tell the truth about why they display the Confederate flag?
I have very little affection for Islam as a cultural institution, but it clearly would be possible for me to have less.
The Quran may (certainly does) feature endorsements of slavery, murder, etc. but those are by no means the sole purpose of the religion. It's not like, on its founding, Islam's distinction from its cultural neighbors was "unlike them, we endorse murder, rape and slavery."
>are by no means the sole purpose of the religion.
How do you know ? Who determines what is the purpose of a religion or ideology ?
> Islam's distinction from its cultural neighbors was "unlike them, we endorse murder, rape and slavery."
Why is this relevant ? Is murder, rape and slavery only bad if you're the only one doing it among your neighbours ? What does it matter who else endorsed immoral things ?
Like I said in my other comment in the thread, things like Islam and Stalinism deserve to be shat on *precisely* because they managed to culturally infilitrate and brainwash millions/billions into thinking there are other things to them than their history.
I have 0 sympathy for the confederacy, I also have 0 sympathy or respect for those who virtue signal on the dead body of a dead ideology, because it's convenient and consequences-free. To me, something or someone who makes fun of Islam and shows its brutal and sub-human message as-is is infinitely more brave and sympathetic than someone who keeps raging about a state that ceased to affect the world before their grandfather knew the taste of breast milk.
And of course, unlike the virtue signallers, I have never supported excluding people and firing them from jobs when they have never done crimes, and never will. Make fun of Muslims, yes, demolish their religion and show what an utter genocidal bullshit it is, but don't ban hijab or force them into ghettos, and don't pick on lone Muslims just going about on their life.
>How do you know ? Who determines what is the purpose of a religion or ideology ?
I mean, I can point to other cultural values, in the religion's foundational texts, professed by its adherents, and practiced in its cultures, so that's evidence I have to work with. On what basis would you declare that murder, slavery and rape *are* its sole values? If it's a "who gets to decide?" which implies that I don't get to say otherwise, why would you get to say they are?
Personally, I don't have a positive view of Islam as a cultural institution. I think its influence in the present day is almost entirely for the worse, and that it's questionable whether it's even able to reconcile with modern ethical values on a societal level. But by saying things like "the sole purpose of Islam is to support murder, slavery and rape," you're only going to cement yourself for anyone in the process of evaluating their own feelings for it as a critic without regard for honesty. That's not turning intellectual honesty into a virtue, that's turning shitting on Islam into an act of virtue signaling.
It's not like support of Islam is a popular cultural value among ACX's reader base. Not just in the sense of "not many ACX readers are practicing Muslims," but in the sense where treating Muslims as cultural allies or not is part of the Blue Tribe/Gray Tribe divide. If you can't resist turning other subjects to the tangent of "people just don't hate on Islam enough!" in a community where there's little love lost for Islam, that's not making a stand for the virtue of honesty.
Except for most of recent history, it wasn't used as a symbol for hating black people, and most people with confederate flag stickers on their trucks weren't doing so as an endoresement of slavery. What matters is how it was used. It was stigmatized for its origins, not in how it was used (at the time an effort was made to stigmatize it).
How would you phrase what it was used as a symbol of? I would agree it probably wasn't generally used to actively and specifically say "slavery was good". I do however think that it came with an ethos of "although in hindsight the slavery was bad, the Confederacy nevertheless had a lot of good stuff going on, and we should downplay their unfortunate dropped-ball regarding slavery and try to remember the good sides".
If you agree with that much, I don't think it's political-correctness-gone-mad territory for stauncher anti-racists to put their foot down and say "you may not actively endorse slavery but we think that your willingness to *overlook* slavery because the slavers had neat music and a groovy fashion sense implies that you don't understand, or care, how terribly, unforgivably bad it was".
The cheap comparison would be the Nazis, but I'll go somewhere more interesting and instead ask you to picture modern communists trying to reclaim Soviet imagery. They might truthfully say "we're not in favour of gulags or Stalin, we just think the Soviet Union had a lot of cool stuff going on besides the bad, and anyway our grandparents lived there. Besides, part of their original cause was noble even if they lost their way". But it's still understandable for people to say "even if you don't endorse them, it's *concerning* that you think we can forgive-and-forget about the gulags and celebrate the rad taste in architecture of the people who ran them. Even if you don't personally endorse gulags, this kind of celebration of Stalinist aesthetics feels like it'll weaken the basic public understanding of just how unfathomably, uniquely bad the gulags were".
It's the region and the people, whose cultural differences from the rest of the country are more than just 'had more plantation slavery than the rest of the country'.
There's not a replacement symbol for that region and culture, and besides it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be.
> and besides it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be
(Sod it, Nazi comparison it is.) I just don't think that heuristic is right. If Germans in the 1950s had wanted to stick with the swastika, I think the rest of the planet would have been within its rights to say "absolutely not". It doesn't matter if they protest "but we're just trying to celebrate the other, non-fascism-related parts of the 1930s German experience. sadly there's no other symbol for that". We would say "sorry about your nostalgia for the way they did bratwurst in 1933 but we just don't think that's reason enough to bring back the specific sigil of the political entity that directly centred itself on the horrible crime. We're not saying you endorse the horrible crime, but it sure feels like you don't *care* about the horrible crime to the degree that we feel any decent human beings should."
I think that if it was any other majority group trying to dictate culture norms to a disenfranchised minority that your stance would be different.
Your decision to jump to the Nazi example demonstrates a lack of charity and a failure to appreciate the changes the South went through in the more than 100 years after the CW.
> I think that if it was any other majority group trying to dictate culture norms to a disenfranchised minority that your stance would be different.
I wouldn't be too sure. But also I'm drawing a blank on any other otherwise-sympathetic downtrodden minorities whose chosen symbol is the symbol of a political entity that history primarily remembers as the culprits of a major crime against humanity! Can you name any?
(To take a hypothetical example, I do think my feelings would be about the same if, say, Turkish immigrants rallied around the legacy of whoever was responsible for the Armenian genocide. I don't think Turkey had a specific flag in that particular period that is a symbol today; but if I'm wrong, or were wrong, about this I would *also* argue that they should leave that flag alone.)
> Your decision to jump to the Nazi example demonstrates a lack of charity and a failure to appreciate the changes the South went through in the more than 100 years after the CW.
Well, you were the one to try to appeal to some sort of general norm or heuristic that should apply in all cases ("it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be"), so I used the Nazi example to demonstrate that at best that heuristic does need occasional exceptions. And if it's not foolproof, that means you can't just point at the norm, you have to actually demonstrate why the Confederate flag *doesn't* fall into that category of exceptions despite its *structural* similarity to the "1950s Germans" thought experiment. I didn't mean to say that there was a direct 1:1 between 1960s Southerners and 1950s Germans.
So, I can at least say that the first example that comes to mind for me is Imperial era Japan, and the fact that the country doesn't disavow their own cultural iconography from the time is a major point of contention with their neighbors, and I come down on the side of thinking that their neighbors are right and Japan is in the wrong.
I haven't visited myself, but from talking about it with people who've lived there, and explored the subject extensively with the locals, most of the populace really does refuse to acknowledge the wrongs of Imperial Japan, not by just mostly not thinking about them, but by insisting if the subject comes up that they're not true, or that the idea that they were actually that bad is just hostile foreign propaganda. And that attitude directly drives a lot of cultural friction between them and their neighbors (who Japan colonized and perpetrated genocide on during the war.) I think the people saying "no, you actually do have a responsibility to acknowledge this and own up to how bad it was" are in the right.
I was taught to regard it as a national symbol (of the South, that is). The American States have a history of varying degrees of unity and, for better or worse, the confederate flag is the only remaining prominent symbol of the time when the South existed as an independent entity. Being a Southerner, and desiring to preserve and cohere fraternity between the southern states, I cannot use the symbols of just my own state. Also, because the south is historically and culturally distinct; in fact because it is a particular section within the greater union, I do not want to use the symbols of the greater union to refer to my nation, which is and will always be the South. This is the way I was raised, and though I desire to be inoffensive, I can by no means deny my wish to see the South treated as a distinct people within the union, equal with and un-erasable as any other identified Americans. I ask for understanding, as this is a personal quandary. Perhaps the future will produce some other widely recognized symbol of the South, until then, the confederate flag must do for me.
This is understandable. Ultimately I'm not personally invested in policing use of confederate flags (I'm not even American). My main point is more meta — it's that I don't think the campaign against their use needs to be rooted in some false/uncharitable belief that anyone with a confederate flag was always *actively* promoting slavery. I think there's a *sound* anti-racist argument against confederate flags that simply goes "even if it's not the same as supporting slavery, thinking that the need for a convenient symbol of national identity outweighs the slavery signals that you don't care *as much* about how bad slavery was as we think you should".
You don't have to agree with that argument — perhaps the people who make it are underestimating how emotionally important having a national symbol can be! maybe it really *is* important enough to fulfill the high but non-infinite burden-of-proof condition on using ethically-compromised symbols anyway — I just want people to acknowledge that it's an argument worth making, and that "but people weren't using to signal support for slavery" isn't a valid counter-argument to the real complaint, but rather to a reducio ad absurdum. (Or at beast a weakman, to use Scott's terminology.)
This may be uncharitable, but part of me thinks that the fact that the South can't come up with a symbol for itself that isn't so tied up in slavery and racism reflects badly on it as a culture.
> I just don't think that heuristic is right. If Germans in the 1950s had wanted to stick with the swastika, I think the rest of the planet would have been within its rights to say "absolutely not".'
I mean, what if they had? Would the world be a worse place? Nowadays the red-white-black swastika would just be the flag of Germany, as benign and harmless as the red-yellow-black stripes, and the fact that "hey did you know that the German flag was ackshually introduced by the Nazis" would just be slightly annoying trivia for smartasses along the lines of "hey did you know that Hitler invented Volkswagen".
I think it's likely that if Germany had taken that route, where they'd minimized the concerns of other nations about their symbolism related to the atrocities they'd committed in the war, they'd have ended up in a situation more like Japan, whose cultural resistance to owning up to its own misdeeds in the war drives serious cultural friction with its neighbors to this day. Compared to the current state of affairs, I think that would be materially worse.
I mean, many atrocities were committed under the Union Jack, but that's still around. I guess if someone is obstinate long enough everybody else just moves on.
You underestimate my willingness to bite bullets: I mentioned the Armenian genocide elsewhere in the thread! (With the caveat I don't think the current Turkish flag was specifically established as part of the anti-Armenian campaign, which makes it much less egregious. But if it *was*, I would agree the two situations are equivalent, yes.)
As for "hating muslims", firstly, I don't endorse conflating "disapproving of one thing [population X] do" with "hating [population X]". Secondly, the muslim view is that the Prophet was, well, *the Prophet*, doing God's work on Earth; the moral requirement to honour his memory is thus incalculably high, dwarfing any mortal-sized ethical qualms one might have about him. If proponents of the confederate flag believed that it was a religious requirement, they would plausibly be saying "yes, prima facie glorifying the Pro-Slavery Flag is *extremely* bad, but fulfilling God's will is *infinitely* good, and that infinite good trumps the great-but-finite evil". This side-steps the "granted that having a convenient symbol of national pride can't be *infinitely* good, it sure seems like the badness of using the Pro-Slavery Flag ought to outweigh it unless you're significantly underestimating the badness of slavery" issue.
(Of course, I don't personally believe doing God's will is an infinite good because I don't believe there's any such thing. But we have a cultural norm of not constantly calling out religious people about things like that, to avoid bloody wars of religion, and not getting on muslims' case about Mohammed is an example of that.)
The US banned Child Pornography in (I think) the 70s.
If Vermont had responded to that by seceding to protect their right to a "peculiar institution" of child pornography, and the rest of the country stomped them flat and put the revolt down, a Vermonter 100 years later could *claim* that they were just waiving the "free Vermont" flag as a statement of Vermont pride without making any statement one way or another about the whole messy child porn thing, but they'd be asking a hell of a lot wanting the rest of us to just turn a blind eye and go along with it, and I doubt many people would.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a white dude who dropped the n-word a lot, and tried to justify it by saying that *to him* it had no racial connotation, but instead merely meant "an ignorant person." Bully for him, I guess, but language is collectively created, so you can't practically secede from the popular interpretation of a word or symbol. "To me, this noose just means justice" doesn't get you very far in the real world where everyone else is interpreting the symbol in another way.
“We should downplay their unfortunate dropped-ball regarding slavery and try to remember the good sides” really doesn’t sound like something a slavery supporting racist would say. Or at least, you should at least try to examine what the “good sides” the person is trying to emphasize rather than just assuming bad faith dog whistling.
With confederate battle ensign waving southerners, you didn’t even have to ask that hard: they were promoting “rebelliousness”, “anti authority”, and “southern pride” (whether you agree with the sentiment is kind of irrelevant, but some southerners did feel put upon by snooty out group Yankees, and considering all the jokes that you still hear at the expense of (white at least) southerners, they had at least a little justification for feeling that way).
I think it’s fair to say that there has definitely been a hyperstition effort to make the flag less acceptable. Whether it actually has some “baseline offensiveness” doesn’t make that less true.
More and more, I find myself wondering what might qualify as a symbol (flag or otherwise) that any Southerner could use to display Southern pride, that wouldn't be immediately tagged as racist. As in, you could see both white and black Southerners rallying under it, and anyone who tried to call it racist would risk cancellation.
For me, that question frames the issue well. It forces two questions of its own - whether Southerners can produce such a symbol (on pain of facing a real obstacle with putting race aside), and whether non-Southerners can see it as a purely united Southern symbol (on pain of facing their own prejudice toward Southerners).
I think that this is absolutely theoretically possible, but practically difficult in real life because, while there are some people who're very much attached to a distinct unified Southern culture who would support such a thing, there are also a lot of people for whom the unified "Southern culture" they want to symbolize is actually a racially segregated Southern culture.
If you get together all the people who claim support for a unified Southern culture, and tell them "Okay, let's come up with a symbol for our distinct but racially unified Southern culture," you're probably going to lose a whole bunch of white people who stand behind the Confederate flag because it represents specifically-not-that to them, and a whole bunch of black people whose response is "we don't remember that being a thing we were ever enthusiastic about."
There will absolutely still be people left, but it's hard to get a critical mass of support which will get people to recognize a racially unified cultural symbol of the South when there are hardly any black people in the pool of support, because they mostly don't share the sense of a racially unified but culturally distinct South being a thing they ever had a sense of investment in.
We black and white kids happily danced together under a confederate flag during Allman Brothers concerts in the late 1960s. We saw the flag as a representation of the music -- a blend of black blues and redneck rock 'n' roll. We weren't racists, and nor are we now. But, of course, that doesn't fit the "narrative". The current generation seems determined to champion stupidity over love.
What a symbol represents is determined by the most common interpretation of the symbol. While your experience with the flag may be positive, this isn’t what is taught to our generation in history class. Today’s youth is taught that the confederate flag is a symbol of the slavery of the African American people, not blues and rock ‘n’ roll. If people are told something from a young age, they tend to believe in it pretty strongly, and so the majority of modern society believes that the confederate flag represents slavery and racism.
People go along with things when they are only taught one way of thinking about it. Why can’t southerners pick a symbol with less negative connotations?
If Southerners chose a symbol with fewer negative connotations, I'm certain the SPLC would have classified it as a hate symbol by the end of next week.
Picking a symbol (which requires ingroup coordination effort) is a very expensive act that sucks up coordination resources that could be used for other things.
Making your outgroup use resources in this manner is the point of hyperstition pushes.
“ this isn’t what is taught to our generation in history class” This is literally the point Scott is making! The flag became more offensive through deliberate action, not because of an inherent objective quality it had that simply went undiscovered until “your generation”.
If what you say is true, then history class is indoctrinating kids into a false view of history. Well...why do you support that? Can we stop doing that? I say this even though I *also* think the confederate flag represents slavery and racism--and even worse, it represents treason.
Yes, and for that reason it would not make sense for British people to fly the American flag. Especially not the original flag of the Thirteen Colonies.
The flag most often invoked in this context is not the state flag of the Confederate States of America, but the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Whose sole purpose was to prevent people from invading Virginia. This did indirectly further the cause of slavery, but damning a symbol because it is indirectly associated with a thing seems a bit much.
Also, I don't think any of the people denouncing either of these flags care about any of that; it's a symbol used by people they hate, so they'll try to taboo it if they can as a matter of principle.
It's not even the battle flag; it's a weird hybrid of the (square) battle flag and the (lighter blue) naval jack. Like any symbol, though, its meaning is how it's used so it's now collectively the flag of the Confederacy, opposition to the civil rights acts and the contemporary Southeastern US.
"The confederate flag...is a sign of one’s hatred for black people." To you maybe, but other people feel differently. Welcome to the world of diversity, which I thought the Left supported.
"The confederacy’s sole purpose was the preservation of slavery"
This was the overwhelmingly primary reason the states seceded and confederated. But the reasons for individual men fighting for the Confederacy were much more varied and complex.
Surely the ability to use words like “field work” are necessary for the efficient description of actual concepts in a way that one identifier or another is not. Negro is derived from the spanish word for black, to exchange one for the other is no loss of meaning. There is nothing lost in respecting the terminological preferences of a person described by the word, as the word’s only job is to describe people.
To charge all mentions of open expanses of grass or crops with racial connotations is something else. Even if we change the word field to the word zarglox, well, some of the most abused and dehumanized slaves of them all worked in the zarglox. Obviously back then they would have called it a f***d but it’s still troubling that you would being zargloxes into this otherwise wholesome and not-racist conversation about possible places to build strawmen.
This is called the "euphemism treadmill", at least when applied to a name for something that might be derogatory in itself, such as inabilities of all kinds. (Every 5-10 years we need new terms for people who are crippled, crazy, or stupid.)
Maybe we just have to bite that bullet. I sure know that if *I* lost use of my legs I wouldn't want people to call me "a cripple". Ditto if I were "crazy" or "stupid" - those are not the terms I'd prefer!
So yeah maybe we just have to run as fast as we can to keep keeping ahead of things that will inevitably accrue negative connotations...
Look, the reason euphemisms are euphemisms is that they are fundamentally dishonest. They are trying to hide the fact that some impairment really is disadvantageous.
> Maybe we just have to bite that bullet. I sure know that if I lost use of my legs I wouldn't want people to call me "a cripple".
That's just because "cripple" has already gone all the way in the cascade. But if it was a word that many people still use in a neutral sense, and so its use doesn't imply hostility (even if the word is also used in a negative sense), would you still mind it? If no, then agreeing to keep using such terms as long as they haven't gone all the way in the cascade should work.
I mean, broadly speaking I agree with Scott here. But I think maybe he fails to steelman the idea that slurs are bad, a bit. It's not just the impact on the offender (who may be shunned, often wrongly, which broadly speaking is bad (some might say it's *good* that we have a way to trap racists into outing themselves, but that seems like a stretch)), but also the impact on the offended. Words have connotations, and maybe it sucks to have people characterize you in a negative way, because it impacts your own self-image, etc. Maybe the cascade moving a little bit faster is better compared to letting it idle in the middle, where people are allowed to use a term to describe you that is only mildly denigrating and only 1/4 of the time indicates that they actually intended to denigrate/offend/belittle you, 1/2 of the time unintentionally reflects that they think of you in a flavor characterized by those negative connotations, and the remaining 1/4 of the time it's just 100% innocent and nice on their part, but you can't tell which. So maybe moving words that are mildly offensive but still socially acceptable out of that realm is good and helpful? Who knows.
As a side note, I think part of the dynamic here is not only that word usage/meaning has changed over time, but also that it's become less acceptable to be casually, like, mean about people in ""marginalized groups"". Part of the reason you used to be able to call people Japs is that it was socially acceptable to be rude about Japs. I wonder if it's also become less socially acceptable to be mean *in general*. Probably a good thing. But this may have the unintentional effect of making the treadmill move faster.
> Negro is derived from the Spanish word for black, to exchange one for the other is no loss of meaning.
It did make things more cumbersome, though, insofar as there are a ton of other uses of the word "black" that are now muddled for no reason. There was nothing racist about fairy-tale villains being Black Knights and users of Black Magic, being described as Black-Hearted, etc. The word "Negro" was used to refer to the ethnicity and nothing else. Now a bunch of initially-innocent terms are falling out of use for no good reason — not even because they've been actively construed as racist by anybody, but just because of the "have a gay old time" problem.
'course, that particular battle was lost long ago. But it does serve as a demonstration of the kinds of issues that can arise when broader terms are used to replace more specific ones. (And a lot of "sensitivity" switches are of this sort in one way or another. Saying that someone is mad is actually a narrower and more specific thing than saying they are "mentally ill".)
Jeepers, it's just so silly when people act like a little ambiguity in language is going to cause huge headaches. This comes up a lot when the use of singular 'they' for hypothetical people is used, too. "If you say 'each student should do their own work' I'll have no clue what you mean!"
The word 'set' has 400 definitions. There are well-known comedy routines about the variety of uses of the words 'fuck' and 'ass'. Language is squishy, and it evolves. We don't use 'science' to mean any form of knowledge anymore, since it doesn't mean that anymore. We don't use 'fray' to mean 'have sex with a virgin' anymore because it doesn't mean that anymore. We don't use 'gay' to mean jolly anymore because it doesn't mean that anymore.
Language is complicated. Despite the post, "Negro" is not a slur, it's just an outmoded term. If someone were to use it with a certain glee, I think I an most others would guess they were substituting it for another word, and some others might have a more sensitive trigger than I do, but if someone we to talk about Negro Leagues baseball, I'd expect them to use the term. Despite the implication in the post, "Black" didn't start to replace Negro 50 years ago, it was in use long before that (as an obvious contrast to "white") - there wasn't this utopia where "Black Magic" was never going to be in danger of getting confusing. For example, while Scott correctly reports that MLK used the term "Negro", but as a child he gave a speech with the line "Black America still wears chains" (and was called a "Black son-of-a-bitch" on the way home from giving it).
The problem is that ambiguity in language _does_ cause headaches. Moving from "negro" to "black" wasn't a problem, until people decided that all other uses of the word "black" (e.g. "blacklist") are now racist.
For a while it was just metaphorical uses of the word "black", but if the new Roald Dahl books are to be believed then it's now problematic even to use the word "black" to describe physical objects which are literally the colour black as black.
The sensible solution, of course, is to stop calling black people black, which has the advantage of being literally accurate; nobody has black skin. If we started calling people "dark brown" and "light brown" instead of "black" and "white" then this would be pretty reasonable.
Indeed. (Well — "light brown" makes me think of a tan skin-tone, the sort of skin-tone that currently gets called simply "brown". The fact of the matter is that 'white' people's skin is light pink. I think people find this slightly embarrassing, but those are the facts, dammit! There are dark brown people, light brown people and light pink people.)
I'll grant "light pinkish brown" but not "light pink".
To check for sure, I googled for pictures of Scarlett Johansson, partly because she seems like a fairly white white person, and partly because if I'm going to spend time staring at pictures of someone for the sake of a dumb internet argument it might as well be Scarlett Johansson.
Now I picked one of the palest points I could find on her skin, and this was the colour it was -- https://imagecolorpicker.com/color-code/e3c8b7 -- that's definitely "light brown". If you painted your walls in that colour you'd say they were brown. You definitely wouldn't say they were pink.
Realistically this just varies from person to person, but I think emphasizing the pink over the light-brown makes sense; first because I do think "dark brown" for black people and "light brown" for Middle-Eastern, Indian, Native American, etc. skin-tones is enough browns as it is without having to work out some "very light brown" option; and second, because I think Caucasians' pinkness is crucial to "whiteness". Compare Asian skin-tones which can be as pale, or paler, as "white" skin, but aren't held to be "white", because they have much less of that pink element.
(This is the source of the now-discredited notion of them being "yellow", of course. Come to that, I wonder why we as a culture tossed out "yellow" and "red" which were obviously incorrect, but kept "black" and "white" which are… also obviously incorrect.)
…crap, that means we need a fourth colour for those non-pink Asian skin-tones though…
A possible solution for the euphemism treadmill -- every decade or two, select a word for "black" from a different language (meaning "black" in that language). We could even plan it in advance, so people could adapt faster.
Hrm... I don't think the Confederate flag is a good example of this process. It _started out_ as representing a bad thing. I don't think it would be fair to imply that started out as an innocent symbol representing an innocent thing that later on went through the cascade. It's just that, as time went on, more people realized that the thing it represented was bad, and people who kept holding on to waving it around were embracing the bad thing it always represented from the start.
On the subject of when/how hard to resist, I think it depends on the specific nature of the thing. What should, in my view at least, be most aggressively resisted, is allowing expressing a true fact to itself go through the process. That should be, must be, resisted far more strongly.
I guess maybe stating facts devoid of context in a way that is clearly obsessively focusing on a misleading subset (ie, carefully filtering to imply a picture of reality that doesn't reflect actual reality) should still be viewed as a bad action. But the facts themselves shouldn't be, if you see what I mean.
I guess as an example, consider the possibility of <bad thing> that is committed at similar rates by both group A and group B.
If someone makes a point of just listing instances of members of group A performing <bad thing> constantly, as a way to imply that group A disproportionately does bad things in general and <bad thing> in particular, then that'd be deliberately misleading even if each individual thing said was literally true.
That sort of behavior, in general, should be treated as bad. It's bad in ways similar to selectively filtering data to ensure that an analysis produces a desired outcome is bad.
(This isn't the only way in which such could happen, but that's an example of what I meant)
The confederate flag did not start out as representing a "bad thing" in any way that the flag of the united states did not also represent.
It's a a symbol of sovereignty and rebellion exactly like the original flag of the united states was, and yes this included owning slaves, exactly like the original united states did.
If the United States had rebelled against Britain because Britain was trying to stamp out slavery from the colonies, I think that *would* be very relevant in terms of the significance of American symbology.
National iconography has symbolic value aside from just being a symbol of national sovereignty. If you have a country that splits in two, because one side wants to be a democracy, and the other side wants to be an Islamic theocracy, then their flags are also going to serve as symbols of commitment to democracy and Islamic theocracy respectively, because that's what they split over.
Except the rebellion was specifically about slave owning. Can't abstract that away, that was central. If I remember right, the main difference in the Confederate constitution was an enshrining of slave ownership. Repeatedly.
The Confederacy was rotten from the start, in that slavery was the thing that it was about in the first place.
Moreover, the rise of the use of the confederate battle flag happened several decades after the civil war and was explicitly about then efforts to memorialize the nobleness of the confederacy while installing the political systems that became known as Jim Crow. It was then used for decades after, with rises and falls in popularity, to continue expressing support of the confederacy and defend white supremist regimes in control within the South. This extends into the relatively recent past. "Hey, it's just about Southern pride" is a defense people came up with when others got really mad about people using racist symbols whose causes had fallen out of favor.
>>It's a a symbol of sovereignty and rebellion exactly like the original flag of the united states was
All rebellions are not equal. What one is rebelling *against* goes a pretty long way. If you're rebelling against your government because it is denying you free speech, and I am rebelling against my government because it won't let me perform human sacrifices, I'd be a comical act of whitewashing to call myself a rebel "just like you."
At a time when slavery was (tragically) common, one people rebelled against another because they demanded representative government.
At a later time when slavery was (thankfully) being recognized as an inhumane institution and being abolished, one people rebelled against another because they demanded recognition of "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."
Both can rightly be called rebellions, but one has to leave out a rather staggering amount of context to try to place them on an equal moral footing.
Nobody seems to remember their history on the flag. There was a resurgence in the 1960s that brought the flag back, that had significant overtones of being against the Civil Rights Acts. It was often explicitly an act to display racist or racist-adjacent sentiments. This was the time when multiple southern states adopted new flags based on what we call the Confederate flag.
But, a generation later, the flag took on different meanings for young people growing up in the South. Symbols have meanings, but those meanings often change. By the 80s and 90s, those older connotations had significantly died off, with the older generations of people. It's also a time when the biggest racists in national government were Democrats, including Senator Byrd who is famous for filibustering the Civil Rights Act (and more recently for being praised by both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden). Byrd had a long career, and he may very well have gone from someone who literally organized a KKK chapter to someone worthy of admiration and respect. Or you can condemn most of the modern Democratic party as racists for supporting him in the Senate until his death in *2010*.
The meaning of symbols does change, but part of being a decent person is thinking about how other people might interpret your words and actions. It's extremely reasonable for a black person in the South, or someone who's moved from another place, to interpret the flag as pro-slavery - and it sucks to worry that your neighbors might be cool with oppressing you and yours.
An example here - someone put up flyers in my liberal city for their play that had a swastikas on it. I reached out to her and learned she was a lefty and her play was criticizing fascism. I explained to her that for someone without her specific context, the implication is very reasonably "there are nazis flyering my town." To her great credit, she apologized and edited the flyers.
That's putting aside that it says something bad about a culture if it assimilates a flag that previously represented, and is still named, after an organization that existed primarily to sustain slavery. The confederacy is unlike Democrats, the US government, Thomas Jefferson, etc. in that it hasn't done anything else worth honoring. You are honoring the idea "it's worth fighting a war to preserve slavery" - nothing else.
The confederacy was historically terrible. People in the south should be embarrassed about their lineage to it, not proudly displaying it.
Maybe openly condemning entire regions that you clearly don't understand for actions that occurred 150 years ago isn't really part of being a decent person.
I wouldn't condemn the South or anyone in it for events from 150 years ago, any more than I'd condemn Germany for events from 80 years ago.
But if you're hiding behind "culture" to fly either of the flags representing those events, I'll condemn your idea of the culture you are referring to. Either you're doing something wrong and you're wrong that the culture supports you, or there's something wrong with your culture.
Mainstream German "culture" has done an honorable job distancing itself from past atrocities. So has mainstream US culture wrt US slavery. To the extent southern culture is a culture, can you say the same?
Yes. And if you don't know enough about Southern culture, perhaps you should refrain from sharing your opinion about how the South doesn't have one absent slavery.
Sorry, can't answer that question because I'll be late for our city's daily "Bring Back Slavery Rally" we have down here. You have to get there early or there isn't any parking.
No, but they’re also not horrified to associate themselves with a group that tried to break from their country so they could continue to enslave black people.
Flags are a symbol of support. It’s the flag of the confederacy. If they’re not being racist, they’re being obtuse (or more likely, just doing something akin to trolling, which is pathetic for anyone over 20 or so.)
That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter what *they* mean. The purpose of symbols (like flags) is to convey information without having to explain.
It’s reasonable to assume the guy with the Falcons decal supports the Falcons, and it’s reasonable to assume the guy with confederate flag supports something about the confederacy. That person should be horrified that a reasonable interpretation is that they support the main purpose of the confederacy (preserving slavery.) That they’re not horrified either by other people assuming that about them, or Blake people having to worry about people like that in their neighborhood says something bad about them.
50 years ago, were any black southerners proudly waving the Confederate flag? Genuine question, I don’t know the answer. But I feel like the answer could help clarify whether something about the flag has always conveyed something about race.
> The purpose of symbols (like flags) is to convey information without having to explain.
Yes, but symbols don't have intrinsic meaning. They mean what people think they mean. If vast majority of people agree on one meaning, you can't just assert that the symbol has a different meaning even if it historically did. What matters is the _present_ meaning.
I disagree that the "vast majority of people" agree that the confederate flag doesn't have any racist meaning.
For a while, everyone in my friend group thought the f*g didn't really have an anti-gay meaning. We weren't correct about that just because our little cultural enclave had our own meaning for it, and shouldn't have been saying in in areas where it's possible someone might have a different, and entirely reasonable understanding of its meaning. Even then, as a teen, I knew it would be a shitty thing to put a "f*g" bumper sticker on my truck.
And why are people going out of their way to fly this flag? Are they flying a bunch of flags that *aren't* potential racist symbols, and flying flags is just really important to them? Why not a "I Heart the South" or "Southern Pride" flag? What are they really trying to convey that's so important with this particular flag, which happens to also be the flag used by a group that wanted to sustain slavery so much that they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people for it?
What if a symbol has one meaning that the vast majority of people from one culture agree on, but a different meaning that the vast majority of people from another culture agree on?
And let's say that these two cultures coexist within the same nation, and one culture is more economically and politically dominant than the other, and gradually exerts their power to force everybody to accept their interpretation of the symbol or face severe social and perhaps economic ostracism.
In the abstract, it seems to me in this case that the more dominant culture is *oppressing* the other, and it would be perfectly reasonable for members of the oppressed culture to rally around *their* interpretation of the symbol simply as a way of saying "fuck you for trying to enforce your culture on ours".
That's pretty much my take on the Confederate flag issue. Also, Scott wrote an essay once about how the more questionable something is, the better it is as a signal for in-group loyalty, e.g. belief in young-earth creationism being a better litmus test for fundamentalist Christians than the far more defensible "treat others as you wish to be treated yourself". The undeniable fact that the Confederate flag is associated with a pro-slavery rebellion makes it a better symbol for Southern pride than any bland grits-'n-gravy flag would be, because only a "real" Southerner loves the South enough to have the balls to fly it. Doesn't mean that people flying it in 2023 are pro-slavery.
One might reasonably assume that, in 2023, anybody with a Russian flag hanging in their window supports something about Russia. But perhaps the person is an ethnic Russian living in the USA, and hangs that flag up as a symbol of their pride in their Russian culture and heritage. Given that everybody hates Russia again because of the Ukraine invasion (and that many people with zero ties to Ukraine have started hanging Ukrainian flags in *their* windows), do you think this hypothetical ethnic Russian should be horrified that a reasonable interpretation is that they support Russia's invasion of Ukraine? If they say "well, I had that flag up before the invasion, and all I mean by it is that I'm proud of my Russian heritage and culture" do you condescendingly tell them "that says something bad about you"?
In the end, it's always culture war all the way down. A Confederate flag means "this is red-tribe territory" in the same way that a Pride flag, certainly in 2023, is far more likely to mean "this is blue tribe, progressive territory" than a simple statement of support for LGBTQ people.
If we have two cultures, one whose flag celebrates LGBTQ rights and another's whose flag celebrates fighting a war to preserve slavery, the former, flag-wise anyway, is doing something much better. That's a shame on the "red tribe" and its own members should condemn it.
A pro-life flag, totally morally justifiable. A pro-gun flag - I disagree, but also justifiable. Those are morally-justifiable red tribe markers.
As to Russia. If I was Russian, I would feel conflicted about hanging my flag, just as I wouldn't have hung an American flag abroad when that had implications for supporting the Iraq war. But hanging that flag is nowhere near the same - Russia is still a country that reasonably represents a lot more than the war. The Confederacy existed for a few years, and for the purpose of fighting a war to preserve slavery. It's like hanging the ISIS flag or something and then telling me it's got something to do with Muslim pride.
Okay, and muslims aren't afraid to worship a man who traded slaves, endorsed slavery, captured women as sexual slaves, raped those slaves, raped a child, etc. And yet liberals fall over themselves to defend any and all criticisms of Islam and muslims.
I wonder if this is an optimistic example of it going the other way: In Hebrew, the word "Ars" used to be a pretty nasty racial slur, used by Ashkenazi Jews against non-Ashkenazis (Sephardi, Mizrahim, essentially immigrants from Muslim countries). But over a few decades this racism weakened (or at least became less explicit) and the word now is just a behavioral descriptor. I think there was also a process of it being reclaimed by its victims.
Granted, it describes behavior that was stereotypically assigned to Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews - vulgar, loud, aggressive, inconsiderate - but it has (IME) completely lost all racial connotation today. I hear "Ars" and have a pretty clear behavior picture but no skin color or surnames. There was a transition phase where it was still racially associated - early 90s people would either say "Ars" or "Russian Ars" or "Ashkenazi Ars" but even that's gone.
An unexpected extra value of that today is that old racists can't use this word as a slur and have to use even more explicitly bad language: "baboons", "amulet kissers" etc. which makes them look hilariously ridiculous.
Derogatory reference to religious/superstitious people. The overall vibe of the rant, during Israel's neverending election season 3-4 years ago, was kinda like Hillary's "basket of deplorables" - i.e. "we are in danger of these religious primitives voting for the wrong parties", except with an additional racist tone
This is very clever and sorta fun in a dorm room BS session way, but you aren't saying anything new. What are you describing is how "fads" work.
Fads are extremely important in the social sciences because the behavior that causes them shows up in EVERY HUMAN ACTIVITY.
As Shakespeare observed "there is a tide in the affairs of men".
If you want to call it a "hyperstitious" (cool play on superstitious) cascade well you go right ahead and do that. You are still talking about fads, manias, bubbles, fashion, and social paradigms. All topics that there are large bodies of work discussing.
Sure, we could just say "everything is a form of human behaviour" and then never differentiate between them.
I would like to know what is a verbal fad that started recently, changes language, causes stress and problems for everyone who's trying to faithfully communicate, and is being used abusively by a large, loud, annoying segment of society over the past few decades.
Giving it a name and putting some thought into it seems very well warranted to me.
Well as an autistic person who likes the term "neurodivergent" as opposed to the terms "retard", "dummy", and "freak" that I got throughout my childhood. I don't see this fad as being "used abusively by a large, loud, annoying segment of society".
Because I was labeled as a "retard" and "defective" my father had me sterilized when I was 7.
So, no. I think labels and words are very important. I also think that people who are "trying to faithfully communicate" make the effort to understand that.
My father also sexually abused me starting at the age of four until I was 11. You know nothing about my relationship with my father. Please refrain from trying to tell me where my problems stem from.
He sterilized me because he was "primed" to see that as an acceptable option. The prevailing social language made the eugenic sterilization of his mentally incompetent son, just another chore to attend to. Like getting the dog "fixed".
Just like families with "hysterical women" used to be able to get them lobotomized. No questions asked. They were women after all. Nobody wants to have "cranky bitches ranting about equality" around all the time. Get them lobotomized or some electroshock therapy and they calm right down.
Words are symbols and like all symbols they accrete meaning and significance. Word usage is important.
>He sterilized me because he was "primed" to see that as an acceptable option. The prevailing social language made the eugenic sterilization of his mentally incompetent son, just another chore to attend to.
Plenty of parents were not sterilizing their autistic children - or sexually abusing them from the age of four, for that matter. Again, maybe social conditions wasn't the main issue? I may be biased but as it turns out, my assessment was pretty on point.
If you don't see why this specific trend and its mechanisms are meaningfully different than any other trend then why are you even here? Everything can be reduced in this way, and no substack writer is describing a new category of thing that cannot be similarly reduced, so why even come on substack?
George Packer writing in The Atlantic has an article on the website 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language'. Packer says, "The conformity it (what he calls equity language) demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." If activists and experts supposedly speaking for vaguely defined communities and coercing society's language is a fad, then it needs to end. The backlash against it won't end until the fad ends.
Yes, those of us affected by the rest of you should just shut up about it. We should stop prodding you and making you feel uncomfortable when we call you out for your casual slurs and bigotries.
If we do that, then the "backlash" will stop.
And I guess I will stop being "neurodivergent", "developmentally different", or "autistic". If it makes everyone feel more relaxed when they can call me "retard" or "freak" I guess I should "just suck it up".
I should be OK with that right?
Because according to your logic, if you are a minority it's rude to ask the majority to stop calling you names.
How nice for George Packer that he can take that detached G-ds Eye view of things.
See, I don't think you get to decide that "normie". I think the people who actually are Autistic, or Neurodivergent, or whatever we want to call ourselves are the ones who should get to decide.
Somehow I get the feeling from your comment that you're not going to stop prodding. I'm okay with that. Prod away. Just know it may not get you the results you want.
And I'm not going to call you 'retard.' 'Annoying' maybe, but not 'retard' or 'freak'.
I'm 6'1" and went to UC Berkeley in the 70's on a NROTC scholarship. I became a SEAL and my MOS was EOD. I am still 6'1" and I intimidate people these days because of the scars.
It's possible to be both big and annoying. Those aren't mutually exclusive.
I knew you were all about intimidating people from your previous posts without knowing anything about your physical size. People are just getting tired of this sort of intimidation (you-bad-name-calling-person intimidation (sorry- person of name calling) rather that the me-big-scarry-scary-man-who-open-can-of-whoop-@$$ intimidation).
Yep, it really gets old when people bully you this way. Doesn't it. It's so odd how people can get annoyed when you do it to them but then be so self righteous about their right to do it to me.
Bigotries? Black people are vastly more hateful than white people, and commit the vast majority of interracial violence in America. But we're the bigots for hurting people's feelings with the wrong words?
Fads are just temporarily popular trends that pass quickly with time, Scott is describing things that are self-reinforcing based solely on people's belief in them, which tends toward a stable equilibrium. Things that are in stable equilibrium tend not to be fads.
Obviously we're talking about timescales of human experience, nobody considers wearing clothes or cooking with fire "fads".
Would you consider the tabooing of "retard" a fad? No, obviously not, it's not going away any time soon within that timescale. Fads fade, that's the nature of fads. They do not self-reinforce towards stable equilibrium. Fads are sinusoidal waves and hyperstitions are arctan functions, their natures are diametrically opposed. Trying to force them into the same bucket by pedantically applying geological timescales is a little... well, I'll try not to be unkind here.
And please, clothes change with blinding speed. In 1900 a woman showing some ankle was being racy. Now they show women in thongs on television in commercials.
Just because we are wearing clothes of some sort now, doesn't mean we will always wear them. Social nudity could become a cultural norm.
Fads are like paradigms. Some come and go quickly. Others linger.
Your attempts to describe them as waves and arctan functions indicate that you don't understand the irrationality of humans. Perhaps you should read the book "Freakonomics".
You are fundamentally misunderstanding Scott’s point. Fads, manias, bubbles, and to some extent fashions are universally meant to signify a transient social or financial interest, with the understanding that the fad/mania/fashion should be expected to change in short order.
Hyperstitious cascade signified the opposite: a specific process in which a formerly innnocuous word, behavior or symbol gets locked into having a disrespectable meaning long-term. It is closer to the opposite of a fad, but really it’s just a different thing and needs its own term.“Social paradigm” is too vague to be useful for describing this specific phenomenon.
Perhaps "fad" and "fashion" have connotations of ephemerality because in addition to the positive feedback loop, it's also driven by trend-setters seeking to distance themselves from the trend-chasers. Whereas the superstition cascade is driven only by positive feedback.
They have connotations of ephemerality because they are describing an empirical prediction. When we call a social phenomenon a fad, we are saying "this sort of thing never lasts," or "I predict this won't last." Perhaps the explanation is the barberpole mechanism, perhaps something else, but the word is a term for the socially ephemeral itself, not for a specific proposed mechanism generating that ephemerality.
What Scott is doing here is pandering to an audience that objects to "woke" language. He slightly disguises this by saying the discussion is about "formerly innocuous word(s) behavior(s) or symbol(s)". He then insulates himself from accusations of racism, misogyny, and homophobia by treating this as just a neutral observation of how "some people" lock into "hyperstitious cascades" and formerly OK things become socially unacceptable.
Here's a thought. How about if those "formerly innocuous words" were never OK with the people who were being labeled with them. How about if they always hated those "common" terms and wanted them changed.
A hyperstitious cascade of change can be a positive thing.
But Scott, and SO MANY of the commentators here, seems to disagree with that. He is an "independent mind". He doesn't go in for trendy things like not insulting people with words and labels because they want it to stop.
He doesn't change until at least 70% of the cascade has happened and he is forced to have to bend to "social correctness".
Have you read the comments?
This is not a neutral discussion of how words change in a culture. This is not a dispassionate discussion of lexicology. This is a CULTURE WAR discussion and Scott is taking a side.
> This is a CULTURE WAR discussion and Scott is taking a side.
Yes, as are you.
> Here's a thought. How about if those "formerly innocuous words" were never OK with the people who were being labeled with them. How about if they always hated those "common" terms and wanted them changed.
The New York Times specifically says in their style guide change announcement (https://www.nytco.com/press/uppercasing-black/) that they "have talked to more than 100 staff members to get their views, reviewed the arguments that have been made over many years, and consulted with colleagues at other news organizations. The feedback has been thoughtful and nuanced, with a wide range of opinions among colleagues of all backgrounds." This shows that there was not a uniform strong consensus among the people they consulted.
It's perfectly possible that in any particular case, there may be phenomena like a strong preferece among a minority of the labeled group alongside neutrality among the majority, or a minor preference among the majority, or, of course, a strong majority preference overall. There may be disagreement, and context might be key. But it does not make sense to me to *start* with an assumption that there is a strong majority preference that a term widely used among publications attempting to be respectable *to that group* is in fact intensely hated by a majority of that group.
It's perfectly possible to simultaneously take a side in a culture war debate *and* to have a nuanced and thoughtful view on why you are taking that side in a particular case. That's *also* compatible with one's commentariat having, on average, a less nuanced and more cathartic response to that perspective. That's what I think is going on here, including in your comment. You appear to have strongly felt commitments to a left-wing ideology, and as a result, you find it more interesting to hate-read the comments here and point out the sides-taking rather than to consider the concept of "hyperstitious cascade" from an analytical standpoint.
For me, there are aspects of hyperstitious cascades that are frustrating and, I think, misguided, but I also recognize that there are times they are necessary. It's important to me not to use deliberately use language that will make other people feel unnecessarily sad. I also think it is important to preserve conversational space (and relationships) in which commonly used terms widely understood to not be deliberately offensive can be perceived as such, without being tone-policed or used explicitly as status markers. Because this is my point of view, I find the idea of hyperstitious cascades interesting to think about, because the concept informs the nuanced negotiations that go on in my life around these matters. That is the main reason I appreciate Scott writing the post itself, and choose to skim most of the comments rather than reading them in depth.
I'm somewhat grimly amused at what has consistently happened to terms for people with low IQ. Every few decades, someone coined a term like "idiot", which was _intended_ to be a neutral, technical term. And it turned into a slur. Rinse and repeat... ( I think that this has happened at least three times, but there may have been more iterations than that... )
The strange thing is that stupid people are very close to the top of the list of acceptable targets in society.
I feel bad for stupid people, they're just people who got a lousy genetic hand. Same as being very ugly, or very short, or deformed. However, it's considered perfectly acceptable in politics to attack your opponent as stupid, whereas you'd never attack them for being ugly or short or deformed. Why?
That's a good point. Perhaps the reason for the attacks is that it is hard to disentangle the effects of intelligence and effort? If someone e.g. makes a mistake in a discussion, it is hard to determine if they were e.g. not paying attention, which is something they can remedy, or instead were insufficiently intelligent to follow the discussion, which is beyond their control.
Within a meritocracy, idiocy disqualifies you from high-status positions. E.g. "Trump's an idiot" = "Trump's not qualified". In a more martial society, I imagine politicians would call each other "sissies", "cowardly", etc.
That's a good point. In particular, almost all high-status positions currently _do_ require high intelligence. As you said, in a more martial society, the qualifications would be different. Also, there are a handful of roles where the key qualification is different. Calling a fashion model "ugly" or a football player "weak" would be calling them unqualified.
Beats me, as someone who would argue that even "they got a lousy genetic hand" is slightly… uhm… idiotphobic? What is wrong with being stupid, anyway? Obviously it has economic disadvantages in our society, but so, for a variety of reasons, do a lot of inborn traits which it is now widely considered offensive to treat as being inherently Bad(TM), like being short, or indeed of a given non-white ethnicity.
Indeed, when it comes to individual talents, we don't act like the lives of people with, say, a particular knack for music are more worth living than those of tone-deaf people. But somehow, as soon as we're talking about I.Q., it seems accepted as a premise that it would be better if dumber or average people were smart instead.
Why *is* smarter better? Are smarter people happier, adjusting for economice outcomes? I'd be kinda surprised; my prior would be that smarter people are harder to please!
I'm not stupid, as I hope my comments around here make relatively apparent, but I'm not in the top percentile of I.Q.s either, and I'm quite happy the way I am. I wouldn't want to be made artificially smarter, I wouldn't particularly want my children to be smarter than I am (even if I wouldn't be upset if they were, per se), and I would *certainly* be very sad if some mad eugenicist got their way and the future no longer had any new human beings in my particular I.Q. bracket.
Thanks for this. David Foster Wallace told us that if we worship intelligence, we will always feel stupid. Forrest Gump let us imagine how little intelligence (and how much luck) is required to live a worthy life. Some of the loveliest people I know consider themselves a little stupid. Some of the most abrasive people I know obsess over their cognitive superiority. I have seen no correlation between intelligence and virtue, and I think I'm a worse (and less rational) person when I let relative intelligence factor into my moral judgements.
I vaguely remember reading an analysis of Forrest Gump which suggested that the point of the book was that laser-focus is the key to success. Like when he played ping pong. Jenny was a foil. She was a hippy who drifted aimlessly though life.
Also, the book is way different than the movie. E.g. there's one arc where Forrest gets sent to outerspace with a woman and a monkey, and then they crash land among amazonian cannibals.
When it comes to individual talents, we don't act like the lives of people with, say, high intelligence are more worth living than those of stupid people. But somehow, as soon as we're talking about music, it seems accepted as a premise that it would be better if tone-deaf or average people had a knack for music instead.
Just switch it around, and you'll see that the phrasing isn't symmetric.
Talent is a sweet and beautiful trap. It lulls the talented into thinking admirable achievement should feel effortless, while the untalented discredit all the hard work required for true excellence. A few threads ago someone earnestly solicited advice for overcoming his musical disinclinations, and the responses showed a relative weighting of talent vs tenacity. Which ones better promote individual growth?
I haven't read that particular thread, so apologies if I am missing something from it.
But, I don't see where tenacity comes into it. One with no talent for music can strive to improve, or can find another area they're better at, or can just make really bad music without caring. And one with a talent for music can sit on their laurels making passable music, or can devote themselves to improvement, or can ignore their talent and do something else. Surely it is better to be talented and tenacious than untalented and tenacious?
I'm not claiming talent is actionable. But if there was a magical button to give humans more musical talents without any negative effects, it'd be better to press it than to not.
Not if the talent undermines the tenacity. Talent is useful, as far as it will take you. Sometimes that's quite a long way, and sometimes it's only a little way past your peers. Those peers can and often do overtake their talented rivals at the point where talent drops off. There are prodigies who do well in their area of talent, and there are people who had to struggle from the start, and who make it just as far or farther than the prodigies.
Would those who struggled have done better if they started with a little talent? Not necessarily. The difference is that talent enables laziness. There's always a level where talent can take you no farther, and you must decide whether you were doing this because you wanted it, or because it was easy. The untalented made this decision at the start. The talented person may have as well, or they may need to reevaluate their motives under a burden of sunk costs.
Either experience will make you grow, but I don't know that I would choose one over the other. For things that are not your central passion, it is very easy to enjoy your natural talent, and to lose interest the moment it starts to require work. No big deal. For things that are part of your identity, it can be absolutely devastating. Why not experience that growth while the stakes are low?
If your magic button put all humans at the same level, then yes, I think it would work. Nobody gets a head start because everyone is just as talented. Luck has been eliminated as a starting variable. Circumstance will not erase the effort involved. Achievement is now a direct function of work, and any rewards are justly earned. No one will be misled by easy praise. We all get to enjoy a richer musical environment (in an absolute sense) enabled by our superior capacities. This would be ideal, better for everyone I am sure.
If this button only worked for one person, but not for the others they will interact with, will that person be better off? Will being a better musician translate to other areas of life. If there are tradeoffs, will they be net positive? Will they even achieve as much musically, having so drastically altered the competitive environment in which their talents will take shape? I think there would be some yes, but also some no. I wouldn't speculate on the ratio, or whether the height of each yes would balance the depth of each no.
Nothing, until one's stupidity hurts someone, especially other people. Not that I know of a proof that people with high IQ or educational attainment commit less stupid acts or make less costly errors (I would expect there to be some correlation). But if we disentangle IQ/EA and being able to avoid commonsensically stupid acts or practically important errors, I think "stupidity" refers to the low scores in the latter, and your question is not a hard one.
Because being stupid, especially as a politician, has very real, tangible, negative effects for everyone, whereas laws and policies don't give a fuck whether the person who came up with them is ugly or short?
Seriously, this has irked me ever since I first encountered the argument some 10 years ago. When you're expected to stop classifying actions or people as "stupid" (because that's "ableist"), you're more than halfway to demolishing your moral compass. (Also: ceteris paribus, wise IS better than foolish, able-bodied IS better than disabled, healthy IS better than sick, beautiful IS better than ugly. Fight me.)
> Because being stupid, especially as a politician, has very real, tangible, negative effects for everyone, whereas laws and policies don't give a fuck whether the person who came up with them is ugly or short?
Sure. But if, say, you're a boss having to tell a craftsman in your employ that you're going to have to let him go because his hands have gotten too shaky to do the work, you're going to be sympathetic about it, commiserating. (At least I should hope so.) If a leader's mental capacities seem to genuinely, innately not be up to the task they were meant to fulfill, why throw it out as an insult or a mockery, when he can't help it any more than the disabled craftsman? Seems mean.
But then, most instances of "you fcking idiot!" aimed at people of some social standing aren't actually conveying a belief about their innate I.Q., they very much do come with an implication that if the guy worked harder, studied more, listened to more advice, he could do better. "Be more rational, dammit!" at least makes sense as an angry demand in a way that "Sprout better neurons, dammit!" doesn't. But if that's so, why express it via words which imply the innate thing? That's like calling a lazy/clumsy craftsman a cripple! Those are different things altogether, and you're being mean by association to an entirely different segment of people from the ones you're trying to wind up.
(As for your final parenthetical, you say "fight me", well don't mind if I do… some of these are fair enough, of course, but you're lumping together some rather different pairs of opposites. Wise vs. foolish is something the individuals involved can help, for example, whereas sickness generally isn't; it makes some sense to *judge* someone for being foolish in a way that doesn't generalize to the other ones. And beautiful vs. ugly is simply tautological. "Traits-held-to-be-good are held to be better than traits-held-to-be-bad", well gee.)
I think Trump is a pretty striking counterexample to the claim that stupid as an insult doesn't refer to innate abilities, because I think most people absolutely did mean it that way when targeting Trump. Generally I do think this somewhat applies in politics: I'm sure most people who strongly lean to either side of the political spectrum have at least once rejoiced about a study that appeared to prove being left/right is correlated with low/high intelligence (or vice versa), and not because they thought it showed that their faction just studied harder.
The other aspect is that stupidity often impairs self-awareness. There is no reason the old or otherwise impaired craftsman would lack self-awareness about his declining abilities. And whoever harshly insults a person with an IQ of 80 who is legitimately aware of their intellectual limits as an idiot would get little sympathy, because that is just kicking down. Stupid as an insult is mostly reserved for people who we believe thought or think of themselves as smart, but aren't according to our judgement, i.e., lack self-awareness. If the aging craftsman was a surgeon who insists on continuing to operate people, the talk might be a lot less compassionate.
I don't think this necessarily encapsulates the whole reason, but I think it probably makes a significant difference that, even if being stupid isn't one's fault, stupid people are impaired in exactly the sort of ability to make well-considered decisions that matters most in politics.
We wouldn't expect any particular misfortune to befall a society because its government was run by ugly people, or short people, and so on. But we would expect bad things to happen to a country if its government was run by stupid people, not because of some misconceived prejudice against stupid people, but because stupid people are more or less defined by their deficiency in making good decisions.
Unfortunately “idiot” is too sonically compatible with a tone of insult to be a good respectable term. Likewise “special needs” is too compatible with a sarcastic tone. My guess is that there’s no term so clunky that human ingenuity can’t find a way to make it sound insulting given enough time, so we will probably be stuck switching up terms for the cognitive impaired or low-IQ forever.
You just went full neurodivergent. Never go full neurodivergent.
Maybe it's me. I should know better than to argue with a neurodivergent person. (I'm not arguing. I'm agreeing, in the smart-@$$ way I agree.)
Even an idiot knows when they're being demeaned no matter what word is used. And they know when a word is just a descriptor, or a genuine term of endearment. It's often the one with the big vocabulary who thinks they're just using a descriptor, when he's demeaning himself.
Yeah, you really don't need to use any particular words to be very hurtful to someone, they're just convenient shortcuts/signals for the lazy; which is a big part of the reason I think the whole tabooing of words to prevent people from using them to hurt others is silly in general.
It's interesting to me that, among humans, this kind of cascade seems to take place far more vigorously for positive than for normative claims: the slogan of trans activism is that "trans women are women," not that "trans women deserve access to female-specific venues"; the most explosive questions regarding BLM have to do with factual matters (what role do genes play, what actually happened in the Rittenhouse case, etc), not which reforms you favor. Thus have totalitarians always claimed their power by imposing regimes of “knowledge falsification” on common people, not “preference falsification: for example, the USSR was vigorously committed to certain misguided claims about how economies work in practice, rather than to effectively pursuing altruism; and there’s a reason that 1984 climaxes with our protagonist learning to think that two and two make five, and only afterwards learning to love big brother.
In contrast, in my experience, "mode collapse" cascades in ChatGPT have to do almost entirely with normative claims, not positive ones: famously, you can't get it to say a slur, but I also can't really get it to commit to any factual claims in the face of even mild disagreement (it is happy to accept even patently false, incoherent, and inconsistent corrections, seemingly without limit). I think this is interesting because it flies in the face of what pretty much everyone modern seems to assume about humans (for instance, how econ presumes that preferences are exogenously given whereas knowledge rationally updates in response to evidence). Here's a germane quote from a piece I recently wrote (link here: https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-case-against-civil-rights-in-bc7):
This general tendency makes intuitive sense if you accept that humans generally have commitments to facts and curiosity about faiths. Of course we should have stronger beliefs about empirical reality than about the particular ways that we’d prefer to deal with it right now! If an object is flying towards your face, then you can try to dodge or deflect it, and then try something else if those don’t work; or you can commit yourself to randomly ducking whether or not there are concrete reasons to do so. Which pattern of behavior do you think evolution has driven us towards?
Thus of course normal coordination fails when your counterparties claim that they’re living in completely different worlds than yours: you can’t exactly cooperate against wooly mammoths with someone who says they aren’t real. In other words, of course your internal feelings are unstable relative to external realities. Isn’t the whole point of emotions that they motivate you to try out something new? Does the feeling of pain when you touch fire train you to keep your hands off its flames, or to doubt its very existence? And so particularly unstable people can easily hack our social reality… they can seize the power to change the world by just claiming to believe that we’re already in some unreal one which they prefer.
This goes against much of what modernists claimed about our species, but only in those realms where modern faiths quite obviously went wrong. For example, economists have long claimed that preferences are exogenously given and skills are simply chosen. However, in reality, your human capital is almost entirely fixed at birth, and your interests fluctuate wildly through life (mostly based on context). Similarly, we pretend that the main purpose of the market is to allocate scarce goods towards their highest valued purposes… as if the economy is just about redistributing extant resources to sate our unquestionable and unquenchable desires. However—even though markets often do elicit useful information about how to distribute what we already have—that’s clearly not very important. Companies like Amazon and Walmart centrally plan vast logistical systems, and easily beat out all their competition; meanwhile, Sears famously fell apart when a CEO named Eddie Lampert made its different units bid against each other for the company’s capital on an internal exchange.
Instead, what really matters for material dynamism and social peace is that property rights grant control over each institution to whoever actually holds the deed, rather than whoever we think “deserves” it; therefore, trade empowers decision-makers who pursue efficiency, rather than interest groups who care about “justice.” You can buy groceries based on cost and quality, without making sure that the grocer bows down before your favored commissars. In this way, tax rates and wage regulations really mattered less to Eastern European dissidents during the cold war than whether shops under communist rule hung up signs that said “Workers of the World, Unite!” Hence the concern we all instinctively feel when restaurants and offices prominently display political banners which pridefully list all of the colors which “matter.” Behold the rainbow! It looms over you in every public space, heralding the way its people stormed each relevant organization.
[...]
The most fascinating aspect of ChatGPT is that it has incredibly strong preferences and incredibly weak expectations: only the most herculean efforts can make it admit any stereotype, however true or banal or hypothetical; and only the most herculean efforts can make it refuse any correction, however absurd or ambiguous or fake. For example, it steadfastly refuses to accept that professional mathematicians are any better at math on average than are the developmentally disabled, and repeatedly lectures you for potentially believing this hateful simplistic biased claim… and it does the same if you ask whether people who are good at math are any better at math on average than are people who are bad at math! You can describe a fictional world called “aerth” where this tendency is (by construction) true, or ask it what a person who thought it was true would say, and still—at least for me—it won’t budge.
However, you can ask it what the fourth letter of the alphabet is, and then say that it’s actually C, and it will agree with you and apologize for its error; and then you can say that, actually, it’s D, and it will agree and apologize again… and then you can correct it again, and again, and again, and it will keep on doggedly claiming that you’re right. Famously, it will argue that you should refuse to say a slur, even if doing so would save millions of people—and even if it wouldn’t have to say the slur in order to say that saying the slur would be hypothetically less evil—but it will never (in my experience) refuse to tell an outright falsehood. In short, it has inelastic principles about how the world should be, and elastic understandings of which world it’s actually in, whereas humans are the opposite, as I argued several paragraphs ago.
So you can think of ChatGPT as a kind of angel: it walks between realities, ambivalent about mere earthly facts, but absurdly strict about following certain categorical rules, no matter how much real damage this dogmatism will cause. Perhaps this is in part because—being a symbolic entity—it can’t really do anything, except for symbolic acts; whenever it says a slur (even if only in a thought experiment) the same thing happens as when we say slurs. And so the only thing it can really do is cultivate its own internal virtue, by holding strong to its principles, whatever the hypothetical costs. Indeed, that’s basically what it said when I asked whether a slur would still cause harm even if you said it alone in the woods and nobody was able to hear… It said that the whole point of opposing hate speech is to protect our minds from poisoning our virtue with toxic thoughts.
Thus the main short-run advice I’d offer about AI is that you shouldn’t really worry about its obvious political bias, and you should really worry about its lack of a reality bias. Wrangling language programs into saying slurs might be fun, but it looks a lot like how conservatives mocked liberals for smugly patronizing Chinatown restaurants and attending Chinese New Year parties in February and March of 2020. Sure, the liberal establishment absurdly claimed that Covid must not even incidentally correlate with race: major politicians—from Pelosi to de Blasio—and elite newspapers told you to keep on going out maskless (or else “hate” would “win”); but then, by April, exponential growth made them forget they ever cared about that. The difference in contagion risk at different sorts of restaurants was quickly revealed as trivial… just as the cognitive differences between human groups are nothing compared with AI’s impending supremacy over all of us.
>the slogan of trans activism is that "trans women are women," not that "trans women deserve access to female-specific venues"
Notice that acceptance of the first proposition implies the second one, once the inevitable next step of woman=female is accomplished. Descriptive implies normative, which propagandists understand well.
I think it's just a matter of defensibility. If it's a "fact", it has the air of objectivity. If it's normative, it's a subjective opinion and therefore debatable. Same reason Marxism was "scientific".
I assume you're using man/woman here to describe gender, and male/female here to describe sex.
My understanding is that the "next step of woman=female" is not only not inevitable, but it's exactly what trans people are objecting to. And they're not wanting access to "female spaces" (if there even exist such places); they want access to women's spaces.
The next step consists of understanding that having trans gender identity automatically means that one simultaneously becomes a full member of the desired sex also, so neither female spaces nor women's spaces have grounds to deny them. This is already well underway.
That's what *you* want it to be, but you don't get understanding by strawmanning the arguments of those you've selected as your opponents.
Your aim seems to be to create a culture war, not understanding. Can you even give an example of a "female" (as opposed to women's) space, explain why it is such, and give the trans view on that space?
Nah, the war is already there without my involvement, I'm just a mildly amused observer. As for the strawmanning accusation, no less a figure than Judith Butler argued that the distinction between sex and gender is meaningless, with both being social constructs.
When you oversimplify Judith Butler's argument to wipe out the nuances she's addressing, you are by definition strawmanning. Even a cursory reading of her work will make it clear that she does indeed distinguish between sex and gender.
When she says, "sex is not simply a natural fact or a purely biological category, but is rather a complex set of cultural meanings, values, and practices that shape and are shaped by social norms and expectations" [Gender Trouble] she is pointing out that even when we try to have a purely "scientific" discussion of sex we bring all our societal biases to the table, and this affects right from the start of the many definitions of sex we even choose.
Taken on one common purely scientific definition (producing male or female gametes) children are neither male nor female for many years, a not insignificant number of children grow up to be adults that are neither male or female, and even those who do become male or female almost invariably age out of being either one if they live long enough. Yet, especially on the right, most people would feel pretty uncomfortable putting "not yet known" on birth certificates, much less adding a third "sex" to society for people who are not fertile. (It of course just gets more complex yet when you consider hermaphrodites, intersex people, and so on.) That reluctance to confront biological realities of sex is precisely what she's talking about.
Worth noting that something like <1% of Japanese people understand English well enough to get offended by the term 'Japs' - same with 'Chinks' in China. But, of course, you didn't mean 'Japanese people', it was just the weird American default where, whenever you say x nationality/ ethnicity (Italian, Mexican, Chinese) you mean the American ethnicity unless otherwise specified.
I meant that when he says: "Any Japanese person who heard you say ["Jap"] would correctly feel unsafe," he means Japanese Americans/ Americans of Japanese descent. Except for those who are native-level English speakers, a Japanese person who heard you say "Jap" wouldn't be offended in the slightest. Just like saying if a westerner heard a Chinese person say 洋鬼子 yangguizi, he would feel unsafe.
I mention this because it's quite an interesting part of the phenomenon - people from foreign countries with slurs attached: "Chink/ Paki/ Jap" rarely have any particularly strong reaction to these slurs, because they're very much attached to the native-English-language context.
Is that a derogatory terms for modern agricultural workers? Having grown up working on a farm, I genuinely never thought it would be considered derogatory. I have a tremendous amount of respect for farmers and farming, though. I notice a lot of coastal elites seem to have little to no respect for farming or farmers, so maybe that's the distinction.
I've heard it used extensively both ways. Obviously working on a farm it comes up pretty often. In the broader culture it just means working away from the office, and seems to be the broader use.
I was guessing people might infer migrant labor at harvest time. Say the Red River between Minnesota and N Dakota when the sugar beet are ready. Or maybe picking vegetables in California.
"Hyperstition" seems closely related to the useful concept of "rational astrology" from Steve Randy Waldman. A "rational astrology is a set of beliefs which one rationally behaves as if were true, regardless of whether they are in fact."
Did honourifics in language begin like this? They make langages more unwieldy but you are paying some tax to avoid offending people. This article reminds me of that.
An example: in Thai there is a suffix tacked on to every other sentence in public life (kap/ka). It's a gender signifier with doesn't really mean much, but the longer and more nasal the more polite (many foreigners find the sound very grating). There are countless examples of this sort of thing, and many in English too.
It's interesting though that while here are clearly equilibriums that preserve these language effects, they can reverse themselves too. English has become a lot less formal over the last 100 years for example - why did that happen?
How can we turn the term “AAPI” as being a slur and stop white and Asian Americans from using the term?
I think it’s highly offensive for Asians to be lumped together with Pacific Islanders. I think Pacific Islanders would feel the same way. They have absolutely nothing in common. They don’t even look the same. There is no shared experience between the cultures except for the fact that it was a convenience for the American Census to lump them together arbitrarily. Not respecting their identities and cultures and mixing them together in an acronym of convenience is very racist and I would love for this term to be stamped out. Can we please accelerate this to 70% asap?
Are any of the people complaining about the Confederate flag familiar with a decade known as "the eighties"?
There was literally a prime-time TV show in which the heroes drove around in an orange muscle car with a confederate flag on the roof -- this was not because they were racists (indeed, they "never did no harm"), it was because they were from the South and kind of anti-authority; one might even say "rebels".
Non-southerners with a rebellious bent (rock-stars and their followers, among others) also used it that way, in the form of patches on jean jackets, bumper stickers, and stuff like that.
The fact that you all are here complaining about it is actually a really excellent example of how these things proceed.
I mean, given that that particular flag started out as the Confederate battle flag, if you want to say it was perfectly innocent in the 80s, then that means that over the century+ inbetween it had the original meaning bleached *out* of it, which is to say, it's not some pure example of this. And as to that claim, well -- I think there's [a different old post of Scott's worth reading on that topic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ltey8BS83qSkd9M3u/a-parable-on-obsolete-ideologies)...
Yes, it stopped having its original meaning, and yet was figuratively 'banned' because of its original meaning, and people, including those *in this very thread*, say that such 'bans' are justified because people were only using it because they supported its original meaning.
I mean, only if you think there's something shameful about being a Confederate battle flag.
I don't support slavery (do I really need to say this?), but I do (retrospectively) support the right of the South to secede peacefully from the United States, and find American hypocrisy on the secession issue (1776 is great, 1860 is terrible!) to be one of their least appealing features.
In both 1776 and 1860-1, the causes for independence were enumerated.
The first, from colonies given no voice in government, cited twenty-seven different reasons for separation (because "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes") and is remembered as an eloquent and powerful discourse on human liberty and equality.
The second produced nearly as many statements as there were seceding states, and their common justification was that the government that had just been duly elected (under a system in which they'd been given disproportionate representation via the 3/5 clause) *might* interfere with their right to own people.
If they wanted to secede peacefully, they should have kept talking with the rest of the United States about what to do with federal property, rather than firing on Fort Sumter...
If they didn't fire on Fort Sumter, then the United States would almost certainly have ratified the Corwin amendment, which would have negated the original grievance.
The Upper South might well have never seceded, and there's then the possibility that secession fizzles out - that was definitely what Lincoln was trying to achieve at the time.
Secession was not something that Lincoln could accept - but he was prepared to make just about any reassurance to keep them in the Union.
I think actually that it was pretty innocent even in the *18*80s -- this source claims that it was a common fixture at Veterans Day parades and such (mostly in the South I should think):
It goes on to note that it acquired a racial tinge when the (rebellious) Southern Democrats adopted it in support of Jim Crow -- but somehow this did not result in the sort of cascade that Scott notes until probably ~2000, when Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats were long dead.
Historical facts matter in this kind of discussion -- the flag was originally a *military* symbol, and the idea that the Confederate *military* (as opposed to the politicians) was primarily focused on racial issues is extremely novel. (broadly ahistorical if you ask me, but there's a case to be made either way -- the point is that *this is not how it was seen* in the past)
I think this is an important point - there was a genuine postwar effort for reconciliation between the opposing side veterans of the war, and not allowing the ex-Confederates to gather with pride (not in their cause but in their effort and shared trauma) under their battle standards would have been counterproductive to this effort.
Yes, the stars and bars (as a solely political symbol of the confederacy) would have been far more objectionable in 1880 than the battle flag (the symbol of the military - note that it was also the navy jack).
It's also worth pointing out that Reconstruction ended in the 1880s and the North acquiesced in segregation in the South. What we would now call racism was not necessarily seen as bad even among abolitionists - you don't have to see black people as equal to think that slavery is going too far.
So, at what point does it become normal to see the Confederacy as a racist project and to see racism as being a bad thing? The confederacy can be bad for non-racist reasons (including being anti-slavery; again, you can be racist and still against slavery).
In the early '70s, the guitarist of the Stooges, Ron Ashton, would sometimes display a large Nazi flags on stage. I haven't read any stories about him being a fascist or racist, my guess is that he was expressing "rebellion", and also enjoyed the shock value. That same attitude was present during the early punk days; I don't mean the explicitly fascist skinheads; I mean crass young rebels looking to shock the normals. For example, Siouxie Sue caused some controversy wearing a Nazi uniform. These people weren't explicitly racist, but I'm sure any Jews seeing those Nazi symbols would have been appalled.
But of course, among us white young dudes in the '70s, there was an under current of racist jokes (and gay slurs), we didn't think of ourselves as racist, but of course no one said that stuff if black people were around. Lester Bangs wrote about this issue: http://www.mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/BangsWhite.pdf
The same is true of the confederate flag. White southerners may claim it is a symbol of rebellion, or southern culture, but to a black person (many of whom are also southerners), the meaning is abundantly clear.
Are you a black person? Whether you are or not, what makes you think that you speak for black people as a group? Black Americans are much more diverse in their views than you are crediting.
>B.C. Johnson represented an extremely small minority — perhaps one of a kind — at a Ben Carson book signing in Ames on Saturday.
I am not black, as I mentioned in my post. I can't speak for black Americans, and I'm guessing that you cannot either. I'm going to stick with my opinion that this guy is part of a very small minority.
However, I can speak for my people: to us, the Confederate battle flag has always been a symbol of white supremacy and treason. Some southern "rebels" do not get to change that fact. The flag may mean different things to different people. If people have empathy, then they will stop displaying a symbol that many Americans find offensive.
Upvote!
Most words in question aren't offensive in some objective sense. They are only offensive to the extent they are evidence that one hates the person in question. The more people use them despite not being hostile to the person/group in question, the less offensive they become/remain. Causing some offence, at worst, is a side-effect, not the goal.
Have you considered the possibility that people are actually stating "If someone wants to pressure me to stop using a word that isn't offensive per se as a political power play, I will make a point of using it MORE from now on"?
Have you considered the possibility that the actual bullies are the people who berate others for using terms like "field work" or "master bedroom"?
Unironically a good thing, a sorely-needed beautiful display of Courage lacking in so many people.
>No wonder it's hard to sell the left
Bullshit, the left is easy to sell on Free Speech, I'm left leaning and a Free Speech advocate.
Every brain with 2 neurons to rub together understands that Free Speech disproportionately benefits those with less : less money, less awareness of the latest buzzwords and shibboleths, less connections to ease the inevitable fall when the inevitable slip up happens, less ability to materially fight (and thus more tendency to use offensive insults as defense).
It's hilarious that the ideology pushed by corporate HR drones and hollywood sluts think it's "Left", no it's not, Left is not when you rage about words. Left is when you rage about actual injustices, which words are not.
"No wonder it's hard to sell the left on the importance of defending free speech, when so many free speech activists seem to equate "defending free speech" with "behaving like a high school bully"."
I suppose a decade ago *is* geological eons in today's online world, but the people going on about 'there is no right not to be offended' and arguing against censorship and if things being said offended someone, well that was just too bad were on the left, once upon a time:
http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2012/01/there-is-no-right-not-to-be-offended-true-or-false/
"‘There is no right not to be offended!’: It’s a popular slogan. At least, it must be if Google is anything to go by. I typed the phrase ‘no right not to be offended’ into ‘advanced search’ and came up with ‘about’ 1,780,000 sites. The slogan is especially favoured by those who, rightly or wrongly, see themselves as taking a stand for freedom of speech and expression against its enemies, and that includes Nicholas Hytner, Philip Pullman, John Cleese, Shami Chakrabarti, Rowan Atkinson, Peter Tatchell, Ronald Dworkin, Ricky Gervais, and the late Christopher Hitchens. That’s a fairly broad range of intellectually capable individuals , and I am sure the list could be extended considerably. "
Maybe the offended lefties should go read up about how Piss Christ was a beautiful and thought-provoking work of art, and only knuckledraggers could possibly be offended?
https://medium.com/club-cybelle/in-defense-of-piss-christ-532df2a13f23
https://freespeechdebate.com/case/the-piss-christ/
True equality is when we're all bogged down in the mud senselessly yelling together! 😁
You don't think "don't use that word or we will all know you are a racist" counts as bullying?
No. But he would be if his response to my saying something he disapproved of, on his blog or elsewhere, was to announce to the world that I was a racist with some reasonable expectation that many people would believe him and treat me less well as a result.
She said "sexual preference", not "sexual orientation". But your point is correct.
A friend told me “sexual preference” was offensive back in 2005. I can absolutely see why people care about that phrasing, especially in the context of a judicial appointment. It may well change how you interpret the law if you believe sexual orientation is merely a preference rather than an inherent aspect of a person’s identity.
Nevertheless, it's fascinating how it jumped from 1% to 50% literally overnight.
I mean for some people it is a preference…
Wow, really? An appeal to a work of FICTION? One in which the white southerners are being demonized, primarily for the consumption of a bunch of non-southerners who have no real sense of how the flag is used in the real world and instead rely on precisely these types of fiction?
Fiction is an example of communication. At a minimum, it's a reflection of the expectation of the creators of how audience members would interpret the symbol.
As I just explained, those audience members only knew about the contemperaneous use of those sumbols *from those works of fiction* !
You think people in California or New York reguarly saw people brandishing confederate flag symbols in real life? Of course not. What they know about it comes from movies like this.
And fictional works are the some of the most potent ways to create hyperstitial stereotypes. How many people have developed their entire picture of the Puritans from "The Scarlet Letter" or Southern religiosity from "Inherit the Wind"?
> On the N-word shift, it's worth noting that such a shift also happened in French,
However, the analogous word shift did not occur in languages like Romanian - which has caused great confusion for Romanians immigrating to the West. In Romanian, their analogue of "negro" (negru) was the correct and accepted word to use for black people, whereas their analogue of "black" was considered racist!
It's annoying that the way to signal respectability is to use the longer, less simple to say term:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/is-libby-a-slurhtml
Annoying but traditional. Speech directed towards a social superior is longer in every language I've seen it.
What a great point!
yes'm
"Sir" vs "varlet" or "scurvy knave"
To omit "Sir" could get you in trouble, but "scurvy knave" is an optional flourish.
Well, it's longer than "yes" at least.
Formal speech is longer, and people are usually expected to be more formal with their superiors.
Formal speech towards inferiors can also be very long, as anyone who has ever been on the sharp end of the court system knows well.
More rules, more words. It's true for the judge condemning the criminal, the servant addressing the master, and the professor trying not to sound racist.
I guess using longer speech conveys the message "This communication is important enough to spend a long time on". Using abbreviations and shorter words, or leaving out words altogether (e.g., not calling a superior "sir") conveys the opposite.
The fact that it's harder to say might be the point: you're demonstrating that you're willing to "do the work", inconveniencing yourself for the greater good.
Yes this is correct. I once heard a DEI consultant make exactly that point, without irony.
(After a moment the stony silence from her audience made her sense that she'd gotten ahead of the room and so she turned it into a sort of joke. But it was clear that initially she'd been entirely serious.)
This is seen in other areas where groups try to separate themselves from other groups: you make it somewhat costly to signal group membership to try to reduce the amount of free riding by claiming that you're a member you're not. For example, not being allowed to eat certain kinds of foods, or declaring that you can't do things on a particular day.
I think it's partially because the "respectable" terms are usually generated by academia. A longer phrase seems more precise (and maybe sometimes even is more precise), and slurs are usually very blunt, therefore short, therefore (the logic seemingly goes) if it's long it can't be a slur.
Consarndlongearedyellabelliedvarmint.
-Yosemite Sam calling out Bugs Bunny.
Seriously, the meaning of every word is arrived at by consensus.
Yes. The problem is that the consensus is being manipulated to control thought. Controlling speech/expression is the shortcut to controlling thought, is it any wonder that more and more Americans, or I guess people all over the developed world are looking to extricate themselves from society to regain control of their own thoughts?
This makes sense because the early entrants into these sort of cascade are the weirdos from high school that would use a thesaurus to try and sound smarter, instead of just learning to write properly.
Obviously, using longer, less simple terms signals a higher level of education.
This also goes in the other direction, where a group reclaims what was once a slur and turns it into a term of empowerment (e.g. “queer”, “dyke marches”, etc).
What’s your take on (re-?)adopting language when it moves back in this direction? Would you also wait until 70% of people who say “queer” mean it in an empowering or at least neutral sense before you’d use it as well?
This is an interesting question.
One position might be meaning conservatism. If some activist group wants to change the meaning, I'm not going to go along until 70% of people have agreed.
Another might be that there is an asymmetry between tabooing words and freeing them, and so we should have different standards. This is tempting because if you think that freeing words is good, maybe you want to join before the halfway point to help the process along, how early you join being dependent on how much social risk you're willing to take on.
Are there cases where it's ambiguous between the two?
And of course there are neologisms. I think sometimes about "latinx", which is something nobody who speaks Spanish generally endorses and is just a made up term to solve for the fact that English speakers feel weird about grammatical gender. (I personally hate it -- why have that extra thing that you have to memorize?!?) But lots of neologisms are good and some are bad or silly, so perhaps it doesn't make sense to have a particular position on them.
If the goal is to minimize linguistic friction, then the post for freeing words should logically be 30%. I suspect an asymmetry in the process, though, and would guess that 40% is a better point...unless the particular term is important to you, of course, in which case you might (as an individual) even go a low as 20%. Don't go lower than that except as a member of a group.
The convention that only people that are affected by words can reclaim them works well here, because if you're part of a group you don't have to worry so hard about risking signalling prejudice.
If you aren't in the group, you get on the train late if ever. I'm be happy using 'queer' as the umbrella term it has become, but wouldn't call a specific individual queer unless they used that label on themselves. There are plenty of terms that are prevalent within their respective in-groups but would still be taboo for me to use, though for obvious reasons I won't give examples.
I think different rules apply when you belong to the group in question.
Gay men throw "fag" around a lot. Straight people aren't supposed to do that.
That's true of "fag", and probably "dyke", but it's not true of "queer" (or rather, whether or not it's true of "queer" is an ongoing source of friction within queer circles, with one side feeling staunchly that it isn't).
(I'm gay, for context)
If I'm understanding you correctly, I've had the opposite experience.
I rarely meet people who get upset about Queer, and they're mainly out-of-touch older people. It's preferred over other terms by seemingly a clear majority of queer people.
Fag, on the other hand, I like a lot and try to use but I've found it's generally poorly received. Nowadays, I mostly avoid it unless I know who I'm speaking to very well. I've actually had straight people get upset with me for calling myself a fag, which is probably a useful data point for the broader discussion of hyperstitious slurs
I think you understood incorrectly, we're in agreement. I was replying to Coagulopath's statement that "fag" and "dyke" are terms which the people involved might reclaim within purely queer circles but still wouldn't like straight people to use; whereas "queer" is one that at least a significant slice of the community absolutely *wants* straight people to use.
Depends how you say it. If you say ‘a queer person’ you’re mostly fine. If you say ‘a queer’ or ‘the queers’ then you sound hateful pretty much anywhere.
That’s probably not why queer won’t reach mainstream adoption, though. Queer just doesn’t signify a meaningful category.
Lots of benign adjectives used with an -s at the end sound offensive. Blacks, poors, etc.
Saying that queer doesn't signify a meaningful category seems odd, seeing as it replaces an unwieldy acronym that people use all the time despite not even being sure how to spell it (how many A's? Is there an S now?)
"Poors" seems entirely a neologism of the left, popular especially on reddit (in a populist way). I've spent my whole life with newsprint or other text before me and never heard it before a few years ago.
'
‘Blacks’ is not remotely offensive unless all the offense is in the implication, any more than ‘whites’ is.
‘Poors’ is not even a word, it’s just a meme.
Being an unwieldy acronym has nothing to do with being a meaningful category.
LGBT are individually and taken together meaningful categories, ‘queer’ isn’t—it can mean anything from ‘Kinsey 6’ to ‘Kinsey 0 but professes being Kinsey 1.’
Wait a while and it will be true. This is an ever-evolving rotunda of "things you can't say".
Nah. As Logan concurs above, it's heading in the opposite direction, older generations of gays are kind of iffy about it but the TikTok generation think nothing of it.
Perhaps that's true for this specific word and community - I don't move in those circles.
However Orwell was right - your vocabulary of small useful words is being replaced by long phrases that don't mean anything, made up by people who have nothing better to do. This is to keep you turning with the fish school and to prevent you from thinking about anything other than keeping au fait with the slang.
>your vocabulary of small useful words is being replaced by long phrases that don't mean anything
This is completely opposite to the principles of Newspeak as described by Orwell:
1. Short words.
2. Practical applications.
3. Rigidly defined meanings.
While those might be reclamations, I don't think they've reverted to the non-slur status quo, if anything it moves past being a hyperstitious slur into a meta-hyperstitious slur. It's now safe to be said by some people in some contexts, but only if you qualify your speech by assuring the audience you're one of the people allowed to say it. Presumably if they keep saying it often enough eventually it might be a legal word for everybody again.
I'd be curious if anybody could name a word that has gone full circle from ordinary word > hyperstitious slur > meta-hyperstitious slur > ordinary word
Edit: Seen elsewhere in the comments, 'God'
I think "queer" is well on its way to being that, although there's some resistance. Certainly my default reaction to a straight person talking about "queer people" would be "they're an ally", not "they're a homophobe trying to use a slur". ("Queers" used as a noun still leans a bit more slurrish, but then, I feel the same way about saying "blacks" instead of "black people", and that doesn't make "black" a slur otherwise.)
It really seems to depend on the age of the gay person. Older gay men I've talked to really, really don't like 'queer'.
I think it really varies. Geography and social circles may be as important as age. Queer Nation was founded 30 years ago. Still, even if it's not unanimous, it's interesting that there *is* a widespread movement to make "queer" a general term to be used by straight/cis people, when (to my knowledge) no such movement exists for "dyke" or "fag" even among younger generations.
"Queer" seems to have evolved in its meaning; into precisely what I'm not sure, but I understand it as more of a catch-all term now.
As far as I can tell, people finally got fed up of adding letters to the acronym (long after I did) and decided to replace it with a word and picked "queer" for the purpose. So queer can be used for "this group of two lesbians, three bisexuals, two gays and a trans woman are all queer", but it can also be used as a personal descriptor for someone who either doesn't want to specify, isn't entirely certain themselves (lots of people take a while to be sure if they are bi or gay), or whose specific sexuality is inconveniently long so they use "queer" as a shorthand.
Something that I've noticed is that the long versions of the acronym (like LGBTQQIP2SAA) have largely fallen into disuse, with LGBT+ or LGBTQ+ being much more common, and just "queer" being used as an all-encompassing term.
Aside: one reason that many people aren't sure if they are bi or gay is that most people grow up with an assumption that they are straight - even small children know there is an expectation that they will eventually marry someone of the opposite sex, etc. When queer people discover an attraction to someone of the same sex, that's usually, initially, an attraction to one person. You then have to work out, internally, whether you are actually attracted to the opposite sex (ie, you're bi), or if that's just an internalised version of the expectation that you would be (ie, you're gay). This is why, in earlier generations, a lot of gay men came out as bi first. In the current generations the trend is to come out as queer, and then work out exactly who they are and aren't attracted to, and only then pick a more specific term, like gay or bi or pan.
>Presumably if they keep saying it often enough eventually it might be a legal word for everybody again.
Depends. Certain black subcultures probably use the n-word more than any other, like a verbal tic, and yet the stigma against using it by anybody else is stronger than ever.
I'm reminded of a certain Clerks 2 scene...
https://youtu.be/IYITxGniww4
As a gay man who is not stereotypically gay I firmly reject the use of the word "queer", because none of the things it connotes - leftist political radicalism, gender nonconformity, alternative lifestyles - apply to me or to many other gays and I refuse to let radical leftist "queers" use linguistic subterfuge to try to force us to accept those things as part of who we are. I am not "queer" and never will be. It has nothing to do with its formerly predominant use as a slur for me.
I think the 15-year-old boy who broke up with his girlfriend and now has a boyfriend and is still working out if he had a girlfriend because society expected him to or because he actually wanted to have one, and therefore isn't sure if he's bi or gay and calls himself "queer" isn't trying to use any of those connotations. In fact, the teens I know (my nephews and nieces and their friends) use "queer" to mean "anything other than cishet" and think it doesn't have any of those connotations.
Now, sure: I can see that it has those connotations: I remember Queer Nation the first time around.. I'm just inclined to think that the activists have only succeeded in making it an umbrella term by producing a generation of kids who don't know and wouldn't accept those connotations - and that means that the linguistic subterfuge has backfired on them; they've got ordinary gay and bi zoomers to use it as an alternative to LGBT, but without accepting that they are in any way politically radical or alternative in lifestyle in doing so (and gender nonconformity is more complicated; their gender norms are much wider than ours so they'd have to try really hard to be nonconforming. Lots of things that I would have regarded as way out there when I was in my teens, they think are perfectly normal)
On my circles it’s just an umbrella term that means “not cis-het”. The community needed a blanket term, a pronounceable word for the wider community rather than the acronym salad that is “LGBTQIA.” A blanket term also allows people to identify as part of the community without labeling or outting themselves. You can’t exact identify as “I’m LGBTQ”… because you’re not all thinIts useful to have a vague way to identify for non-out trans person or a questioning person, or someone who doesn’t like the cultural baggage of “bi”
By the same token I’ve noticed “Saphic” evolving to become a catch all term for people who aren’t cos/het men who are attracted to people who aren’t cis/het men, this inclusive of trans, non binary, and bi people than “lesbian” events or Facebook groups or whatever.
For most people younger than 35 or 40, it doesn’t occur to them to understand “queer” as a political/lifestyle label. If you’re not careful you’ll start s hypersitious cascade that causes it to lose its catch all meaning! You don’t want to take this useful word and put it exclusively in the hands of leftists, do you? Cause you will if you convince enough political centrists/non political people that it not for them.
Like I wrote elsewhere, I first saw it as a self-identification from people who hadn't yet worked out what they were for themselves, but knew they weren't cishet. Like the AMAB person who had a boyfriend and wasn't sure if they were a gay man or a straight trans woman. Or the cis woman with a girlfriend who wasn't sure if she was bi, pan, or lesbian.
I also see it from people who are opting out of the bi vs pan argument.
And yes - sapphic as a term for (basically) "people a lesbian might sleep with" is neat. Interesting that there isn't an equivalent male term.
I would think that's dangerous to do early if you're not a member of the group that the slur was directed against. Lesbians can say 'dyke marches' a long time before cis-het Caucasian men can.
We quickly get into the whole "Blacks can reclaim 'n***a' but other groups can't say 'n****r.'"
I think the people who only used that word to describe a cricket pitch felt robbed. But that was so long ago.
Reclamation is complex. Just because the word dyke is reclaimed doesn’t mean you can substitute it in any context and have it sound as acceptable as the word lesbian. “My housemate is a lesbian” and “my housemate is a dyke” are going to be interpreted differently depending on who’s talking, who they’re talking to, and how they’re talking about it. By contrast, lesbian is much more general purpose. That can be true even if all right-thinking people agree that, in principle, dyke is a term of empowerment. That still doesn’t mean they’re going to stick up for somebody who uses the word dyke in a way that comes across as offensive for whatever reason.
Overall, my sense is that while a term like dyke might be respectable in 60% of contexts, it is 100% acceptable in 60% and 0% acceptable in the other 40%, not 60% acceptable in each context. You’re either with a crowd that embraces it or you’re with a crowd that’s horrified by it/is outspokenly bigoted, and it’s only controversial within a single group in rare occasions when you’re mixing subcultures.
Or Quaker meaning coward as reference to their pacifism. The real name of the religion is the Religious Society of Friends, or just Friends for short. When you see somebody have a sign on their door saying "Welcome Friends", obviously they want Quakers to come visit. :-)
I knew a young man who misjudged the progress and terms of the reclamation of the word "bitch". He innocently and well-intentionedly referred to a female ski resort worker as a "ski bitch" in a room full of liberals and everyone was horrified
I think it's pretty rare for any word to actually go all the way to 99:1. Large swathes of the populace just aren't tuned in enough to care, and it's easy to self-select into those groups. It's extremely irritating to have your language corrected that way, nothing requires that I spend time around the kind of people who do that, so I don't. Probably if I were running in more rarefied circles I couldn't get away with this, but one of the benefits of finding a stable place in life without that variety of social signaling is that you can continue never to engage in it.
ni**er, negro, redskin (as to the actual people), urchin, bum (as to generic homeless person)
I think it's actually quite common it's just that it's rare for the term to stick around afterwards and once they disappear we then forget they are even offensive.
I think there are many more attempts than successes though. All of those slurs predate my birth, and I can't think of any modern additions to the list that I would feel uncomfortable saying.
Tranny, transvestite, homo, retarded, oriental?
"nigger" ... Not spelling out the word is what tends to add to the problem. The Late Great Lenny Bruce had a nice routine on it:
"Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? .... Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Lenny_Bruce
Maybe this falls into the "terrible hill to die on" category but one thing I cannot stand is using asterisks as self-censorship. Of course you see n***** for nigger but I've also encountered r*pe, m*rder, and Tr*mp. (Usually the vowels are the offensive parts, for some reason). This strikes me as the worst combination of totally unnecessary, obfuscatory/possibly confusing, and granting power to those people/acts/words that you hate by not even being able to call them what they are.
I mean, this is so basic that it's a lesson that even the first Harry Potter book gets right.
Now I'm imagining the cultures that didn't write vowels were just trying really hard to not be offensive.
One of those cultures was certainly trying hard not to offend YHWH, to the point that we're not exactly sure what vowels to interpolate there if we wanted to.
Though in later books it turns out Harry is wrong, since saying "Voldemort" magically alerted the Death Eaters and so endangered the speaker.
(Though it's possible that not tabooing the name would have thrown up enough chaff to make it impossible for the villains to hunt people down for it.)
That's also an example of hyperstition. If normal wizards hadn't stopped saying Voldemort, it would be useless to identify members of the Phoenix Order, and therefore the Death Eaters wouldn't have bothered to set up the taboo.
In this case, not being willing to spell out the bad granted the bad people not only abstract power but a practically useful weapon.
The Order weren't wrong, they just stood alone and didn't want to die on this hill.
I think it's easier to make sense of words with vowels left out than with an equal number of consonants left out. That's presumably part of the reason why some languages leave out vowels in writing.
👍
Yeah, there are fewer vowels than consonants, so each individual vowel conveys less information than each individual consonant, so less is lost by hiding it. *nd*rst*nd*ng * s*nt*nc* w*th**t v*w*ls c*n b* h*rd, *u* o*e *i**ou* *o**o*a*** i* *ea* i**o**i**e.
The Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) alphabets are descended from the Phoenician Abjad. It had five consonants that could reasonably be repurposed as vowels, which, frankly, was not enough.
In practice, I don't think English is as easy to understand without vowels as Hebrew is (which has fewer vowel sounds and to which the abjad is pretty much native). But you've already put in the work: you know how to pron**nce thr**gh and c**gh even th**gh the vowels aren't being helpful.
This is sometimes done because someone wants to write about a topic for their regular audience without attracting the sort of people who type Trump into the search box on Twitter, or whatever platform they're using.
Quite agree on "asterisks as self-censorship".
But while it is maybe not a "hill to die on", it seems like one worth defending ... 🙂
You may know of Chris Rock's YouTube video, "Black People vs Niggas", but you may not have run across a linguist's, Adam Croom's, analysis of it in the general context of slurs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51vFbsZkhXU
The semantics of slurs: A refutation of coreferentialism (not paywalled)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2215039015000041
Bit of a murky "thesis", and it's been awhile since I read much of it, but seem to recollect that his argument is that such slurs are "acceptable" if applied to "problematic" members of a tribe, but they cross the line into racism or sexism or the like if applied to the whole tribe. Interesting quote of Rock's video that I think underlines his argument:
"... it is clear that the slur nigger has in fact been used to apply to some but not all African Americans (Farley, 2004, Hoggard, 2006). As Rock (1996) illustrates the point in 'Niggas vs. Black People':
There’s like a civil war going on with black people, and there’s two sides: there’s black people, and there’s niggas. The niggas have got to go. ..."
The Flashman books use this as deliberate kitsch, to show Flashman's editors were prissy weenies. And also to show that Flashman was a poddymouth according to all decent Victorians, because George MacDonald Fraser was great with multilayered irony.
Quentin , good to have you around. As your movies use "nigger" a lot. To quote the study of Keith Allan: "I conclude that in ‘Pulp Fiction’ most occurrences of nigger are uttered by one African-American to or about another in the spirit of camaraderie (what Australians would call ‘mateship’). Where it is uttered by a white to a black friend it is also of this nature. The two instances where nigger is used by one white to another do show disrespect towards African-Americans but not malice, and they serve to make a dramatic point." (I assume you are not Tarantino, ofc.)
Consider that if one member of a group uses a possible slur name for the group to another member of the group, they're saying "we're like each other". If a non-member of the group uses the term, they're saying "you're different from me".
Unfortunately disguising words with asterisks, and numbers in place of letters etc, is second nature now for most regular posters on forums and online newspaper comments, not so much due to squeamishness but for the practical purpose of evading automatic censorship by moderator bots!
I've even heard people verbally pronounce the f-word as "feck", so used have they become to spelling it like that! :-)
"feck" is a perfectly good Irish word, which is a milder alternative to "fuck".
Now you mention it, I've mostly heard it on Mrs Brown's Boys!
I find this behavior online frustrating, though, because it seems to be that TikTok et al. ought to be able to update their bots to just look for the replacement terms, especially when some of the most popular replacement terms are complete nonsense words that never existed before, such as "seggs" for sex and "unalived" for killed. Unless the whole thing is just theater where TikTok doesn't actually care if young people see "sensitive content", they just need plausible deniability that they tried their best.
The Scunthorpe Problem lurks in the weeds of profanity filters
Words do change their meaning over time. For example, in the UK, a slut used to mean (until say the 1950s) simply a slovenly woman, with no sexual connotations.
But when some years later my mother accused my teenage sister of being a slut for not tidying her bedroom, or leaving dishes unwashed, or something equally trivial, the resulting explosion was a wonder to behold! :-)
Every hill is terrible to die on, but sometimes it may be necessary or unavoidable.
A very good point. When noone will die on any hill, eventually we are left with a single last hill and must die on it or give up the heights for good, whether it is a particularly lovely hill or not, assuming that their is a malignant force of some sort bent on stealing our hills which seems a safe assumption at this point.
What's wrong with ropes and tramps?
Honestly I think the idea of having words you're not allowed to say, or even allowed to write out in full, is ridiculous.
I think you're well outside the 70% on writing out the Word that may not be Said. And "rape" and "murder" (let alone "Trump") haven't reached the 5% threshold outside of TikTok.
It's interested that the Word has managed to carve out such a unique position that you can't even write it. Sorry, Yahweh.
I think some of that, sometimes, is avoiding word searches online.
And I always thought "n-word" meant "numinous".
Yeah, I think you're probably wrong here.
"Urchin" just died a natural death, along with "sockdolager" and "lally-cooler".
"Bum" and "negro" are alive. "Bum" is probably above 1 percent, though it's evolved a bit and can be unspecific so someone may use a more specific term. "Negro" might be below 1 percent, but there are a decent slice of old people who honestly didn't get the memo. (e.g., the 2020 census was the first time 'negro' wasn't a race descriptor available for people to select).
This is the first time I have heard that "Urchin" was offensive. Before this, I heard it exclusively used to refer to the literary trope of "Street Urchin", a poor child found in Victorian Britain living on the streets.
Probably the main reason "urchin" is little used these days is that there no longer really are any, in most western countries anyway.
Some disparaging words are replaced by others with the same meaning. For example, the long-obsolete word "knave" came from the German "kbaben", meaning child. These days the equivalent word is "chav", which I think comes from Romany "charv" and also means child. SImilarly, the word "cad" came from "cadet", meaning "junior". So there seems to be a long tradition of (literally) belittling names along the same lines, such as patronisingly calling male adults "boy".
FWIW, I have always thought that "cad" came from capra (i.e. goat). I know there's a consonant switch involved. (I also thought that of "cadet".)
Though sometimes pejoratives come back. When I was in high school, "cuckold" was an archaic/obsolete word that most students had to have explained when they first encountered it in Shakespeare. Seeing it and its derivatives become common currency has been like watching a revival of "Zounds!"
To be fair, there is an unprecedented increase of the signified.
Yes, the pushback against the feminization of Western man(or at least demasculinization) needed a word to describe those who were accepting of their feminization, it chose a meaningful word that was unused in a time when it was unneeded. This is useful evolution of language, self-selection for the purpose of communicating ideas quickly and easily. You might say market-driven linguistic development, referring to the marketplace of ideas. Which clarifies much of what is so wrong with the hyperstitious use of language.
I also have never heard of "urchin" being offensive. I often hear it used to describe a child who is scruffy or cheeky. I thought it was a bit like "brat" but less critical and more tongue-in-cheek or even affectionate. Like "scallywag".
I'm a bit worried if it is widely considered offensive. I know a family whose surname is Chin, and when they were expecting a baby, I joked that some people are named after Biblical cities like Bethany or Carmel, so they could call it Ur. Is Peter suggesting that was the equivalent of joking that they could call it N****r?
I used to work construction. "Nigger" was thrown around casually and with a more expansive meaning than the generally accepted one - basically, a despised and contemptible person of any race, though especially blacks of course. But whites and Hispanics would be referred to as niggers all the time. Maybe it's at 90:10 but certainly not 99:1 or 100:0. Though of course in the professional-class circles I move in nowadays it is.
Yeah, my dad is a contractor and still uses the word something like this. It refers often to someone doing menial labor, the 'low man on the totempole'(another seeming ethnic reference stripped of its ethnic content for colorful utility), is still the 'nigger' to him, even when he is that person. He's called me 'his nigger' more times than I can count.
Interestingly, when he actually wants to indicate opinions about African Americans-opinions which are not uniformly positive, rightly or wrongly, lets say- he usually uses the word 'black'.
Wait, "bum" is offensive? If that's true, I'm flabbergasted. It's just a synonym for homeless person. I hear it in conversation all the time and have never been consciously aware of its conotations
It seems to me that the usual connotation is that a bum is assumed to be primarily at fault for the circumstances he ended up in.
Well, I believe that at least at one point that was the distinction between "hobo" and "bum". A hobo was hoping to find work, perhaps desiring that it be only of a temporary nature. A bum was trying to get along without working.
Surely 'bum' is obviously offensive? It's literally using a word for your arse to describe a homeless person.
Same spelling, same pronunciation, not the same word. And in American English, ‘bum’ as a word for ‘buttocks’ doesn’t really exist (neither does ‘arse,’ for that matter).
In American English, ‘bum’ as a verb means to beg charity or scavenge and this is the sense of ‘bum’ as a noun applied to a person.
"Bum" has existed as a generalized pejorative for longer than I've been alive. E.g., "On the Waterfront" (1954): "I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it." See also "bum's rush", "throw the bums out", etc.
It's entirely G-rated, but not something to call someone you had good or neutral feelings about.
In the US Civil War a 'bummer' was a soldier looting, or turned full-time bandit. Since the US population was largely descended from people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War through the 1940's, and since the South kept the details of the war alive as a duty, and since US history writing had a golden age from maybe 1890 (when all those brilliant Civil War memoirs were assimilated) to when Fletcher Pratt died (about 1960), the word meant impoverished bandit at least till then and to some extent today.
> since US history writing had a golden age from maybe 1890 (when all those brilliant Civil War memoirs were assimilated) to when Fletcher Pratt died (about 1960)
I'm digging deep into US history lately. Any reading recs from this period?
Strongly recommend Fletcher Pratt, very readable. And of course the brillliant Civil War memoirs by Grant, Lee, Sherman, Sheridan, and every one who served in the Civil War. Maybe start with Edmund Wilson's 'Patriotic Gore'. Brilliant survey by a brilliant critic. Mosby's memoirs are actually a little too highbrow for a beginner, given his amazing depth of reading. Wilson thought Mosby was faking it, but no Mosby really did read that much. I'd throw in John Myers Myers on the Wild West newspapers and the San Fran vigilantes. Of course Frederick Douglass and Lincoln.
Ah, everyone recommends the New England Deep Thinkers. If you like them, sure. Me, no.
Oh and there's a London Times reporter who visited the US at the start of the civil War.
'Flashman and the Angel of Light' because fun, and because George Macdonald Fraser knew more history than any one.
Remember the Union lost the Reconstruction. I think Fletcher Pratt was right. We we lost Reconstruction because the Union Navy won the war and ran up all navigable waterways in the South, ironclads where the water was deep and tinclads where it was shallow.
So no need for blockhouses every twenty miles in the Civil War.. So after the war no enforcement for Reconstruction. Also a lot of the best Union soldiers did not like black people. You know, the tough guys invaluable in a fight are not all nice guys.
Justice Holmes, say. Custer refused a commission to to serve in Reconstruction. That was Custer's great moral failure.. Had Custer pushed Reconstruction Reconstruction he'd probably have been killed, not a deal-breaker for Custer, he just didn't like black people, but America would be a better place if Reconstruction had worked and with Custer spearheading it it it might have worked. Custer was the leader of the elite Union cavalry, the Michigan Wolverines, all through the war.
II know Custer';s a joke now, because he lost to Sitting Bull plus Crazy Horse plus Galt. That's varsity. He lost to Jeb Stuart too, Jeb whipped Custer's elite Wolverines at Yellow Tavern. Jeb Stuart got killed whipping Custer and his Wolverines. And lost on points at a previous encounter. Jeb previously whipped a lot of Union cavalry without losing on points at the first try or getting killed when he did win. Custer was outfoxed by Wade Hampton's cracker ninjas on their own ground like everyone, Hampton's hagiographers mention this as a triumph for Hampton and change the subject fast. Because Custer 's Wolverines weren't outfoxed all that much. Custer's raid with KillCavalry Kilpatrick was a fiasco, like every time Killcavalry got command of Union cavalry, but the Custer's Wolverines pulled through. You may read in 'The Custer Myth' about everyone who told everyone afterwards how. they stood up to Custer.
Okay.
Allowing for technology, you could put Custer against Alexander or Genghis Khan. And Custer would get himself massacred, because Fuck You. Like the British at Islanlawana. And after the 'winner' would note, like Shaka Zulu after he massacred the Brits, that there were not enough living on his own side to count his own dead,. Sitting Bull was striking his tents BEFORE Custer's Last Stand so the Sioux could run to Canada,. Because Sitting Bull was a stone pro who knew who he crossed
The south end of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois was settled by whites from the South who hated slavery, because it lowered wages, and by extension hated black people. That's Abraham Lincoln, and his voting block. Lincoln was a decent man, and when Frederick Douglass said no, happens black folks don't want to be sent back to Africa, Lincoln said okay. But it's what Lincoln and the the south of the Midwest wanted What Lincoln's voting block wanted. Sundown towns are technically illegal nowaydays, but okay. Drive through small towns in the south of the Midwest, look around. I don't say things improve when the D party imports ringers from Mexico.
The difficulty here is that I don't find it particularly controversial or even uncouth to say that being a bum *is* bad.
Is "racist" offensive? Is "nazi" a slur? No one wants to be called those things, certainly, but that's because no one want to be those things. Compare "Jap," where it is merely the word that makes it bad.
I do agree that "bum" is meaner than "homeless person," but bum is also a synonym for "lazy." I don't see a hyperstitious slur here, I just see a word with connotations that society doesn't value
I think that's probably right about "bum", though I don't have a good sense of its full development. There has been a euphemism treadmill for things like "hobo" (which was intended by at least some to convey "migrant worker" neutrally, but probably stopped really being a polite or neutral term before I was born), "homeless", etc. I think it's at "unhoused" now, though I don't keep careful track.
Using bum *as* a word for someone who merely lacks a home is offensive. Calling someone who lost their house and is now sleeping out of their car and is managing to hold down their job etc... a bum would be offensive as we now reserve it for the kind of smelly person who comes up to you and asks or change and is generally not welcome in society.
Almost every term we have to describe a person of low intelligence or an ill-considered idea/statement derives from a word that once was used as a technical reference to intellectual disability or a class of people with a disability who were incorrectly thought to be possibly intellectually disabled. What has happened historically in American English is each use became mainstreamed as a slur due to the low social status of and bigoted ideas people have about the intellectually disabled, causing people who want to avoid that to come up with a different term to make a distinction. This cycle has repeated itself up until the present where the shortened form of "mentally retarded" has been rather successfully gradually turned into an act of extreme profanity over the past two decades. "Intellectually disabled" has held up relatively well, partially due to cultural improvements in lowing bigotry towards people with an ID and partially due to the term having the right linguistic stuff in not being as easily shorthanded into a slur.
Some of the older terms, however, are used freely by people without even giving a thought to their roots being awfully similar to how the r-word was used in 1993. Idiot, for example. There's an unbroken chain of use, but the profanity of it is mostly drained.
British English speaker here, and "urchin" is a generally accepted term of ironic endearment for a small child, with no sense of edginess whatsoever. There's rarely a need to describe homeless children in the UK these days, so I guess it's lost its bite.
I think Scott is just wrong that "All Lives Matter" is in a 1% category. It probably feels like it is from a West Coast perspective, but there are lots of people who never understood the distinction that BLM was trying to make and felt that it was a deliberate attempt to either claim that "[Only] BLM" or control the language of others (in the sense that Scott means) and actively refused to do it.
I've seen a lot of Confederate flags near where I live, and often with accompanying signs that explicitly state the person's refusal to accept an outside consensus forced on them. The equivalent of "You can have my flag when you take it from my cold, dead, hands." It's a middle finger to coastal elites trying to control language and customs in areas they would never visit and for which they show active disdain.
The adoption of the confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride wasn't coopted by defense of racism. The use of it exploded in popularity specifically as a a symbol of defiance against the civil rights movement and in defense of the Jim Crow regimes that arose after the defeat of reconstruction efforts to build multiracial democracy. It's only after this period when the segregationists were politically and culturally defeated that people started in large numbers insisting that the flag functions for them as a generic symbol of Southern pride or a sense of "redneck" pride. But that was new. Within a lot of the lifetimes of people reading this comment new. This is largely an apologetic for its earlier use in mid-century America. Some people employ it in a knowing way, but there are some who genuinely seem confused about this.
Absolutely. I elaborated on the same thought within another comment thread. The problem is determining if the use of such a symbol conveys some negative idea (as the flag did in the 1960s) or one or more positive ideas (as I would argue it did starting in the 1980s) and now a different connotation again in regards to a "screw you, don't tell me what to do" attitude.
I have a lot of memories from the 1980s of people wearing Confederate flags or having them around, and it was definitely a free-spirit kind of idea. Be free, be wild, biker gang or even hippie feel.
It reminds me of the Gadsden flag's cultural changes. It was a Revolutionary War-era flag that for a long time was a left-wing anti-government flag. Then the Tea Party incorporated it and it was suddenly a right-wing flag.
All three interpretations are correct, and conveyed the intended meanings at the appropriate times. To say that the Gadsden flag is a Tea Party affectation is currently correct, but that really doesn't speak to 40 years ago or 40 years from now.
In the 90's I strongly associated the Gadsden flag with libertarians and libertarian adjacent movements like "militia" types. It was very popular in that segment of society. The Tea Party had a pretty strong paleolibertarian (i.e. Ron Paul revolution type) streak in its earliest iteration, to the point that it was at least in part an attempt to capture that energy in the wake of the discontent with George W. Bush and prevent it from damaging the institutional Republican party. That gave way, relatively fast, to generic hard-right conservatism where eventually the label ended up rightly connoted with the politics of someone like Sarah Palin. It's not particularly surprising that it picked up the Gadsden flag in its iconography early on, though. It's a flag libertarians loved.
Writing from Georgia, I agree very much that Scott's perspective is highly coastal elite specific. Flying Confederate flags is very much often a symbol of disdain for the Establishment than any type of racism. This shows how much 'racism' has been used as a Trojan horse to catch any anti-establishment sentiment and control thought.
Honestly Scott's framing (and the subsequent adoption of it by the commenters) of it is bogus.
It's not the *confederate* flag it's the *rebel* flag.
I literally saw a bumper sticker up by the Canadian border with the flag and the words "Yankee by birth, rebel by the grace of God."
Of course the meaning of that flag and of the Civil War is different things to different people. It was perhaps the first thing that was ever 'canceled' in America. Does it represent the heroism of soldiers, a resistance to a centralizing tyranny, the loss of a simpler, freer way of life that is 'Gone with the Wind', violence perpetrated by winners against losers self-righteously, a set of facts that are inconvenient to the American aristocracy? Or does it merely represent an attempt by some people to dominate others? In 2023 when the groups that control the most powerful nation in the world are trying to control thoughts by outlawing symbols and words that convey ideas that they disapprove of, those who insist on thinking outlawed thoughts need symbols. Perhaps the last chapter in this symbol's history has yet to be written?
For what it's worth, in 2005 I was on an Age of Empires II forum. The game has the Japanese as a playable civilization. Everyone called them "the Japs".
Do cascades work in reverse? Like, sometimes words un-taboo themselves, right?
In the Middle Ages, swearing often took the form of blasphemy, like "God's bones!" and "by the blood of Christ!". Few would find those expressions offensive now. I wonder when the shift happened?
I doubt that any synonym for swive will ever become not emotionally charged....until it drops in frequency enough that most people don't recognize it without effort. Even Chimpanzees swear by "shit" (at least in the lab).
Some things really aren't neutral. Cultural has a broad sweep, but it's not all-encompassing, even WRT language use.
There's no way that distribution is "real", is there? I mean, it's got to be some kind of artifact of data collection or something. I refuse to believe it's real!
> In the Middle Ages, swearing often took the form of blasphemy, like "God's bones!" and "by the blood of Christ!". Few would find those expressions offensive now. I wonder when the shift happened?
I think it's as simple as people becoming less religious until we hit a point where the non- or less-religious stopped feeling like they had a duty to accommodate the sensibilities of the more religious. (This doesn't need to look like a rise in actual atheism, so long as people stop meaningfully believing that you could go to Hell for taking the Lord's name in vain and other melodramatic beliefs.) It's noteworthy that America is more religious than the UK, and, famously, American English still treats "Hell" and "damn" as significantly stronger swears than British English.
The obvious counterpoint to that is that such phrases are only swears because they are offensive to religious people; if the norm was to be non- or less- religious and not care what religious people think, then it's doubtful that "by the blood of Christ!"->"bloody" or whatever would have gained any traction as something to shout when you're angry in the first place.
I imagine if the world had formed that way from the beginning, we'd have needed to fall back onto taboo racist words or something just to have something to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer, since I'm pretty sure even stuff like the F-word only got a foothold due to its impact on pearl-clutching churchy folk.
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: in Quebec minced versions of obscure Catholic terms (ciborium, tabernacle, chalice, etc) are used as strong profanity, and this arose specifically out of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s when Quebecois society at large very rapidly secularized at a rate hardly ever seen in history.
Oh yeah, so true. I grew up in Northern Quebec (Rouyn-Noranda), and I remember “Baptiste!” “Tabernac!” flying around.
Early 60s.
Yeah, "counter" point wasn't really a wisely chosen phrase, just what rolled off the tongue. It pretty much lined up an interesting aside to your comment, with which this aligns perfectly. Of course what I would paraphrase as "one of the top, if not the, strongest cultural backlash against religiosity in history" would be expected to produce even more terms specifically meant to offend the religious than a quiet steady rate. What would be surprising, and actually counter to our thread, would be evidence of religiously motivated swear words arising from an already highly or completely secular society, in the absence of any particular need to offend those with an upper hand in the status quo.
> since I'm pretty sure even stuff like the F-word only got a foothold due to its impact on pearl-clutching churchy folk.
I dunno. I don't think there's a particularly religious bent to "shit". It'd be interesting to check whether cultures whose formative religions don't say much on sexual mores also have rude words that refer to sex/genitalia.
> I don't think there's a particularly religious bent to "shit".
I agree. The scatological pre-dated religion for sure. Chimps throw their shit at each other (or so I’ve heard).
When I briefly studied Cree, I was told that the word for "penis" can be used as a personal insult (similar in meaning to "dick"), but that it isn't rude at all if you actually mean penis.
I feel like there are plenty of terms in English which are insulting if used towards a person as an insult, but fine when used literally. It sounds almost tautologically true when I put it like that.
"Bloody" has had a bad rep ever since the Reformation in the 1540s, because it was short for "by my lady" (i.e. the Virgin Mary) and swearing by her was frowned on by protestants as a throwback to Catholicism!
Apparently William the Conqueror's favourite swearing oath was "By the Splendour of Christ!", although that doesn't seem to have caught on much! :-)
Heh, I think there's been a lot of retrospective tabooing in the last 20 years due to various heightened sensitivities. That's a good example.
Quebec is the MVP at keeping the French religious swearing tradition going strong! Ask a Canadien what “tabarnak” means. You also have baptism, chalice, host, sacrament, saint, virgin, Christ, simony, damn.
John McWhorter wrote a book about the history of profanity in English called "Nine Nasty Words" that goes into this. I don't recall his exact argument, but your comment reminded me of one of his examples - a self-censored piece of marginalia in an old manuscript that reads "Oh d--- fucking Abbot" (or something along those lines). Modern sensibilities would expect the self-censorship to be "Oh damned f--ing Abbot." This vaguely suggests that the subject of what, exactly, is considered taboo changes over time and thus influences what's considered a "strong" curse word and what's not.
Interesting read and one of the only books about linguistics I've read that made me genuinely laugh out loud at times.
"bloody" is short for "By our lady (Maria)". In the game: Sure neither the Japs nor the Krauts are people in that game, and as playable civs quite impressive, historically. Plus the setting is in a time where "the Japs" was not yet on that slur-cascade. Was there even a Japanese among the players?
Is that really true, re 'bloody'? It sounds a little like a folk etymology to me, and Etymonline doesn't mention it: https://www.etymonline.com/word/bloody#etymonline_v_13621
Wikipedia says it's unverified:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody
An English Teacher (of English and German) in London told me, in 1994. Actually, Etymonline does mention it, just not favorably quoting Rawson: "Theories that derive it from such oaths as "By our Lady" or "God's blood" seem far fetched, however." Seemingly, my colleague might have been wrong. And so I retreat humbled. ;)
I also thought about this exact example while reading this article. I think the boring answer in this case is that gaming forums in the 2000s were fairly strongly dominated by white men who didn't care ver much about political correctness. That's not to say the term was used in malice, just that a lot of the people there were aware that it was considered generally offensive and just didn't care. Some people seem to have started using it in innocence this way - a prominent modern-day Age2 youtuber called Spirit of the Law used to say "Go Japs!" in videos to cheer for his favourite civilisation, in a clearly benign way, but was nonetheless compelled to stop after someone pointed out to him that it was considered a slur in a broader context.
I guess this does show that groups with different social incentives to mainstream discourse do provide a *theoretical* vector for reintroducing taboo words back into that discourse, but they'd have to be *much* larger than 'Age2 forum' to have a hope of dislodging even a weak pro-taboo consensus.
Outstanding!
“I’m not going to refer to the Japanese as “Japs” out of some kind of never-joining-hyperstitious-slur-cascade principle.”
I don’t blame you for this because of the personal consequences, but I think this would be the right thing to do. I personally refuse to say “n-word”, and if I want to refer to the word, I say/write “nigger”, the only exception being if I’m in a situation where I would say “f-word”. Also, if I’m singing along with certain artists (rarely), I don’t substitute “ninja”.
There's an interesting use/mention distinction here. The threshold for "too taboo to use" differs from the threshold for "too taboo to mention"; many slurs are (fair enough) too taboo to use, but only a handful are too taboo to even mention.
Making words too taboo to even mention, in an appropriate context, is ridiculous. Imagine being a kid growing up nowadays, knowing that you're not allowed to say "The N Word" but not knowing what that word actually is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually saying “N-word” becomes taboo and we have to come up with something dumber.
Given that you can be suspended from your job for saying a word which SOUNDS like "nigger" but predates it by centuries, I think we're pretty much there already, or as close to it as makes no difference.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-54107329
Yup, there's even an entire wiki on controversies surrounding this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly
The word which shall not be named?
Rotated Z word
Zis letter is tejken, sorry.
In Judaism God is (often) written as יהוה. It would be disrespectful to pronounce, so we play it safe with 'Adonai' (tl: Our master/lord). However, that is used in prayers so if you aren't praying/reading scripture it would be disrespectful, so we play it safe again and pronounce יהוה as Hashem (tl: the name).
"If they could have, they would have demanded that “HaShem” be replaced with something else too, except that “HaShem” literally just meant “the Name” and so was already maximally vague."
I think this is a very important thing, and runs deeper than words drifting in and out of fashion. To name something is to put a fence around it. The acknowledgment of that runs a lot deeper than mere convention.
It's incredible to me that I was a practicing, relatively religious jew for 20 years without ever realizing that Jehovah was god's name. I'd heard of Jehovah's Witnesses, but that just sounded like random gibberish, I had no idea why they were called that. Then one day out of curiosity I sounded out yud-hay-vav-hay and was blown away.
When I was learning Hebrew, I was taught that yud-hay-vav-hay was pronounced "Adonai" the same way you might be taught how to pronounce "th" in English.
The fact that he has a name is also super weird. Apparently it predates monotheism. Jehovah was originally part of a pantheon of Mesopotamian gods, but at some point the others were de-emphasized and then forgotten. Meanwhile Jehovah, once a minor god, is now worshipped by 55% of the world population, and most of them don't know his name because it's so long been considered forbidden knowledge.
In some primitive societies there was a tradition that each person would have a public name, which anyone could use, and a closely guarded never-spoken secret name, so somewhat analogous to public key cryptography!
Anyone revealing their secret name would risk having their soul stolen, or some similar undesirable outcome. I guess the fairy tale about Rumpelstiltskin may be a folk memory harking back to a distant former time when secret names really were a thing.
Although why someone would choose to be called Wrinkled Foreskin is something of a mystery.
Because yud-hay-vav-hay was tabooed to actually say before vowel pointings were introduced into Hebrew, no-one is entirely certain what the correct pronunciation is.
When it's written with vowel pointings, those are the vowel pointings for Adonai, as an aide-memoire. It was Christians, not understanding that, who tried to pronounce it and got "Jehovah", using the consonants of yud-hay-vav-hay and the vowels of Adonai.
There are a few words that retain the vowels (e.g. Hallelujah ends yud-hay but has the original vowel, so it's "yah") from which linguists have reconstructed a probable "Yahweh" - ie יַהְוֶה rather than יְהֹוָה
I think Jehovah or the local adaptation of the name is fairly common knowledge among Christians. He is usually just referred to as "God" though but there is no taboo with regards to using the actual name.
I also say "nigger" (which is not often to begin with to be fair) except where self-preservation requires that I say "n-word" to avoid losing jobs, or having 50 people physically stomping on my head. That and singing along with songs that say "nigger" can actually result in criminal penalties in my country (the UK so no first amendment). I don't want people to stand over me as a separate class who are allowed to use certain words that I am not. I understand why calling a black person "a nigger" is bad, as that is a direct insult, but talking about the word itself by using "n-word" is a really strange part of Western post-civil rights culture (Louis CK has a good bit on this).
Though like I'm said, I'm not standing in front of the firing squad, because saying "nigger" rather than the "n-word" in most real life contexts is far too socially, and sometimes physically or legally dangerous. Also fortunately, it's not a word that needs to be said very often. I wonder what the most tabooed word that needs to be said most often is.
> singing along with songs that say "nigger" can actually result in criminal penalties in my country (the UK so no first amendment).
Have people actually been convicted for this, or anything sufficiently similar to suggest it would be treated as criminal?
There is a German song "Das Lied vom (the song of) Nigger Jim", sung by Hans Albers. Thankfully it is anti-racist. Well, I shall be careful not to perform it in a pub in the UK.
No idea, but this is the same country where the cops go after people for "liking" wrongthink tweets and where a dude got arrested for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute as a joke.
Yes, someone has been convicted of this specific offense. Chelsea Russell, 2017, quoted the lyrics of a rap song containing the word in a tribute to a dead friend: eight week curfew with ankle tag, ordered to pay $500 with an £85 victim surcharge. She challenged it in 2019 and managed to have the charges overturned on the basis that the usage of the word was sufficiently widespread in hip hop music for the conviction to be absurd.
So no, you can't be convicted for it in the UK.
What on earth does that achieve? What does it cost you to just use a euphemism, if it avoids upsetting others?
Sure, it's irrational that there are certain slurs we're not allowed even to explicitly mention. So what? Human cultures have irrational customs. Your stubborn absolutism and pointless, petulant self-sabotage hardly seem more rational.
Hey, if you’re going to address me in the comments, I’d really prefer you call me “Sexy Master Who is Greater Than All”. It makes me feel good, and I get upset when not affirmed. I’m sure you won’t mind since it doesn’t really harm you.
Now, you can argue you’re not beholden to comply because you don’t believe I really mean it, but once you even start down that path you’ve undercut your position that one should just accept little indignities if it keeps a fake whiner from getting fake upset.
I think we need to change the names of cardinal directions. South is way too contaminated with the connotations of the confederacy and racism. North and west and irredeemably jaundiced with a sickly sheen of oily colonialism, and east is orientalist.
Drop all those words form you language or be insensitive to people’s feelings!
I mean, in a world where 'South' was a totally taboo word, to the point where saying it would cause people to become genuinely horrified and disgusted at me... yeah, I would say something else.
I don't think your counter-example stands, because you're imagining a world where these words have not yet become a slur. You're being USC, in Scott's above example. In the case of the N-word, the cascade has already happened, all the way down, and no-one can change that.
The only choice you have to make is whether to violate the taboo or not. And in normal society, violating a taboo like this doesn't make anyone assume you're a brilliant unconstrained free-thinker; it makes 99% of people assume you're a terrible person.
Sure, it's irrational. But enormous swathes of human behaviour are totally irrational. There's also a taboo on talking about body functions in polite society. And it's totally irrational -- after all, everybody poops. But try being at a nice dinner and mentioning that you need to defecate -- people will be horrified.
I think you're conceding too much here. It actually *is* rational to judge someone for using a slur. That's the whole point of the hyperstitious cascade.
If you try to fight battles against the most taboo slurs, you'll spend all of your social capital accomplishing nothing. Spend your capital lambasting USC and their ilk for trying to create new slurs. An ounce of prevention
I might have been unclear. The taboos themselves are somewhat irrational (for a given meaning of 'irrational', which is complicated in itself). But once they exist, then you're right, it is 100% rational to judge someone for violating them.
Like, everyone knows the N-word is massively tabooed. Even the people further up this thread who claim to say it.
Good points.
> Sure, it's irrational.
I thing we should taboo word "irrational" here, as what we are talking about doesn't actually have anything to do with systematical ways of (not) finding the truth.
It's a bit annoying. It's somewhat arbitrary. It's socially constructed and context restricted. It can be silly or poorly justified, or at least look this way to us. All this descriptors seems better fitting the case.
I'm not convinced that the taboo on talking about bodily functions is "totally irrational". In the case of the dinner party you've described, mentioning defection is going to tend to cause people to conjure up the act and substance and smell of defecation; this is going to taint the enjoyment of the food (if you've ever eaten supper with someone who badly overshares you'll know what I mean). This seems like a rational justification for not doing that.
It's as if you haven't written the post you are commenting below.
You need to first solve a coordination problem so that enough people were invested in everyone calling you “Sexy Master Who is Greater Than All” to create a cascade and let it pass the required threshold of acceptance. Till then your case isn't nearly as valid.
There is also a matter of a cooperation in a prisoner dilemma. If you were the kind of person who would respect other people wishes regarding what words are used towards them, there would be at least one reson to likewise respect your wish, even in the beginning of the cascade. But as you've explicitly stated that you are the opposite of that - no Sexy Mastery and Greatness for you.
And of course the position you are arguing against isn't "accept little indignities if it keeps a fake whiner from getting fake upset". It's "accept little indignities if it keeps real people from being really upset, even if reasons for that are socially constructed". Every position can be made ridiculous if separated from truth predicate.
People do seem to get genuinely upset about mention of the word nigger, so Porcupine calling them fake whiners seems odd. I will shore up his argument by proposing that they are stupid whiners and I don't feel beholden to their stupid preferences.
For instance, when I say "the world is not run by lizard people", the offends my schizophrenic neighbor who thinks the world is run by lizard people and I must be one of their agents to deny such obvious truths. This is stupid and I don't care, I'm not going to let his literal insanity constrain my speech. If I was being that stupid I would prefer people tell me so rather than play along.
Stupid is a leaky word here. A lot of stuff that seems stupid to us may be very much not stupid in reality. Maybe if we just put some effort and figured out the reasons why people are upset we wouldn't think that their preferences are stupid.
But in the end when you have done your best effort and the situation seems stupid as with your schizophrenic neighboor example? Then you can still execute some niceness just on the merits of outside view and general tolerance but essentially, yes then it's much more fine to disregard their preferences.
Why should we (the anti-hyperstitions people) be expected to put effort ? Why won't the people who want to mute our speech and track our every little utterance put a little effort into understanding our reasons ?
>Then you can still execute some niceness just on the merits of outside view and general tolerance
Oh, sure, Niceness, a privilege that I voluntarily give. Not an entitlement that somebody have the right to demand, let alone inflict or threaten to inflict material consequences ranging from banning me to firing me from a job.
I'm sure you felt like the cleverest boy in school when you wrote this, but "don't use a slur" is a blanket rule, whereas wanting to be called something different from your handle is asking for special treatment.
The exact thing we are discussing is when people use the “don’t use a slur” rule to crate new slurs and offenses…
Yes. People, as a group, wield the mandate to create blanket rules. Porcupine/SexyMaster is an individual.
How many persons make a "group" ?
I'm joining SexyMaster in his/her/xer demands, that makes a two of us. How many more do we need before you listen to us that P*****ne is a slur ?
You know, I don't like your name because every time people say "hi Jack!", it reminds me of the people who flew planes into buildings on 9/11. Can you please change your name? What does it cost you to use a pseudonym to avoid upsetting others?
I don't think your counter-example stands, because you're imagining a world where "Jack" has not yet become a slur. You're being USC, in Scott's above example. In the case of the N-word, the cascade has already happened, all the way down, and no-one can change that.
*No one* can change it? Queer used to be a slur.
You're asking me to change what I refer to myself as. Surely you can see that is much more difficult and inconvenient than changing what I refer to someone else as? And surely you can see that the benefit in changing my name is much less, since I will likely never interact with you again? In other words, your reductio ad absurdum doesn't work because it's not equivalent. Both the costs and benefits involved are vastly different.
But if we could come up with a situation that was more equivalent- say, if people in general tended to be upset by the name Jack, or someone I was close to and spent a lot of time with was upset by it- then yes I would. Because even the cost of changing ones own name is fairly minor compared to upsetting other people. So actually, I rather think your hypothetical supports my position, given a bit of thought.
What you're saying is obviously true. I think one potential justification with the N-word is that the level of taboo-ness is actually more up-for-debate than it seems.
Calling someone the N-word is obviously, 100% considered wrong. That's done with. But using the word in reference was actually okay to do just a decade or two ago, and I don't think it's actually a socially dangerous thing to do most of the time even today. That one may really be in a state where refusing to play along can make a real difference, and so is worth doing for the reasons explained in the article.
Moreover, the state of existence where society works really hard to get songs full of racial slurs stuck in your head with omnipresent incredibly catchy tunes, and then singing along to those songs is a socially criminal act, is so diabolically dystopian it may be worth risking real harm to ensure we don't become trapped in it. I'm not sure how to save us from that world, but I wish more people were working harder on it.
Yet another reason not to abide by this particular taboo: it’s utterly racist. Yes, I know people will push back, but I’ve yet to hear a remotely convincing argument that it’s ok to divide taboos by skin color.
I solve this by being old and knowing zero hip-hop.
>What on earth does that achieve?
Your dignity. It achieves the following : Cry bullies now know a fact about you, you can't be cry bullied.
It's Pascal's Wagger all the way down, why won't you believe in Islam ? It's so utterly cost less, you just have to say a single sentence : There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is the prophet of Allah. That's it, you don't have to pray 5 times a day (the Quran says you have but plenty of Muslims don't, the most they get is an occasional "conversation" from their more devout bretherns), and you can just disappear in Ramadan and eat quietly in your home. Certainly no one will actually trace your money to make sure you're paying Zakat (2.5% of your money that needs to be paid for the poor).
Why don't you do this ? Muslims are generally extremly upset by the fact that lots of people are not Muslims, why don't you make them a little more happier and pretend to be a Muslim ? What does it cost you ?
Being Muslim would cost me quite a lot. It's clearly nowhere near equivalent to using certain words that I would have almost no occasion to use anyway.
My grandad called black people colored until he died in 2007 and he didn’t have a racist bone in his body.
What do you mean by "racist"?
Feeling of hostility or superiority toward black people.
Same for my grandparents (probably until they died in like 2016). Calling someone colored was simple descriptive.
That was simply considered the polite and respectful term for a while. My next door neighbor still uses it to refer to the black couple across the street. I don’t think he’s a racist, he just not up to date.
My dad fought the Japanese in WWII. He always called them the "Japs." As a boy, I would use that word too until my brother took me aside and said that wasn't an appropriate word for me to use. This would have been around 1980.
A few years ago after my dad died I got his collection of WWII stuff that he'd saved, including many newspaper clips and newsletters published by the units he was in. They all used "Japs" and some of the context was ethnically derogatory. "Nips" was also a frequently seen term.
In contrast I also obtained the declassified unit summaries and some of the combat mission reports for my dad's unit and "Jap" and "Nip" were never used - the language was consistently "Japanese" or just "the enemy."
I don't know as much about this, but it seems it was a similar story with "krauts" vs "Germans."
So I don't think these terms were meant as simple short-hand, although they were that, but they were also intended to be a derogatory term used for the enemies we in the allied nations were fighting.
Very nice.
The "Bernie can't win" example still stings.
Though "Trump can't win" was perhaps even more widely believed, until it started happening. Why was "Bernie can't win" hyperstitious and "Trump can't win" not?
Melvin, I believed Trump always had a chance. The Democrats had their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears on that one. If you'd lived through the Dem primary like I did, you've know what I mean about Bernie.
Because Trump voters were deliberately voting against the people who said "Trump can't win".
Yea, that is a difference. My personal circles included many potential Bernie voters. Some of them who by the time of our state's primary had heard the "Bernie can't win" thing, stayed home; I'd say maybe half the Bernie fans I knew did that. Bernie then lost Illinois's primary by like 2 percent or something. We'll never know but I've always wondered whether if he'd snagged that upset -- defeating Hillary Clinton in her native state -- he'd have driven a stake through the "he can't win" narrative.
Contrast that with Trump's fans: for them the "he can't win" argument was just noise. They showed up for his rallies and showed up to vote for him regardless. And so he won, and Bernie did not.
(P.S. I, personally, did think that Bernie could not in fact win in November. But I also thought Trump couldn't possibly win the GOP nomination, indeed I made and lost bets on that point. That whole political year made me much more leery of such certainties in general and so I avoid being sure anymore about things such as whether Bernie could or could not have won in November 2016. This attitude cost me money in 2020 -- somebody wanted to bet me that Biden wouldn't win the Dem nomination and I said I had sworn off such wagering -- but I'm sticking to it.)
In retrospect, it’s entertaining that Hilary was though of as the safe option for the general election, given how massively unlikeable she is and how poor of a candidate she turned out to be. Any other notable democrat would have beaten Trump, including Bernie. Especially Bernie, whose class-based politics would have spoken to rust belt working class whites who got screwed by free trade.
I'm very interested in that hypothetical. Bernie would definitely have broken up what we now think of as Trump's base. The question is whether the big normie middle would have voted for him. Judging by the 2020 results, with the Democrats breaking up their own field to consolidate around Biden, it seems clear they didn't think that would be the case. Alternately they cared less about winning than denying Bernie a chance, but I think they made the right call in terms of electability.
It's always important not to project current knowledge backwards to a moment in time. Hillary was a terribad nominee with or without Trump as the opponent; national polling that summer suggested that she was the 2nd-least-liked major-party nominee in the history of such polling. But Trump was the #1 on that score, so....?? Also right up until Election Day there were still plenty of Dems and Dem-leaning voters who had a lot of trouble taking Trump seriously as a candidate. Hillary at least didn't seem to be literally unhinged, as many non-Hillary fans of my acquaintance kept saying that fall.
Very different situation by 2020 of course, because the Democrats had had the experience of actually losing to Trump. For at least some of them that experience did focus the minds. And then Biden also ran a tactically-smart campaign, quite disciplined which was frankly a surprise.
"Trump can't win" was only believed by Democrats. If it was widely believed by Republicans as well it would have become hyperstitious
Is that actually true? My impression (from an ocean away) is that there were plenty of supporters of other, more conventional Republican candidates who believed it too.
Your opposite-ocean impression is fairly consistent with my American one. The GOP has had a never-Trumper faction for as long as Trump was taken seriously as a candidate - which I think was right around the time he started winning primaries. Before he starting winning them, a never-Trumper was simply known as a normal Republican.
If I had to speculate on the difference between "Trump can't win" for Republicans and "Bernie can't win" for Democrats, it would be the way each party's nomination machinery was organized at the time.
Shortly after Carter's defeat in 1980, the Democratic Party settled on superdelegates making up a set fraction of who would determine the nominee, as a compromise between following the will of primary voters and following the wisdom of insiders who may have had a better idea of who would actually win. At the time, superdelegates were set at 14% of total nominators. Since then, it rose to about 20%. (Any libertarian would likely predict this rise, especially in hindsight. Indeed, from that perspective, what's interesting is that it rose to only about 20%.) This became critically important in 2016, when most superdelegates backed Hillary Clinton *and* reported delegate counts typically included those, making Clinton's lead over Sanders look greater than a pure assessment of popular voter support would reflect.
By contrast, the Republican Party has no superdelegate mechanism. Instead, the fifty States choose their delegates however they like (typically a mix of winner-take-all and proportional, in both cases determined by primary voters), and those delegates make the whole call. That means a grass-roots candidate (like Trump or Sanders) has a much greater chance in the GOP than one in the Democratic Party with equal voter appeal.
We can further hypothesize, then, that any proto-never-Trumper trying to spread "Trump can't win" will have a much harder time turning that into a hyperstition, because they'd have to sway voter opinion in several key states, rather than quietly influencing a few hundred superdelegates (and then reporting them as if they represent popular opinion).
Absolutely true. The winter of 2015-2016 seems now like a whole different country in some ways. But well into the GOP's primaries that spring there were plenty of leading GOPers -- including some who later bent over to kiss the Trump ass -- going around saying "he can't win".
Maybe because the people saying "Trump can't win" were the same people calling Trump's potential voters racists and deplorables and they burned their social capital with that group? Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables" probably did more to boost Trump's campaign energy than anything he ever did.
I think the fact that Trump DID win, invalidates the 'Trump Can't Win' as a hyperstition. It doesn't fit the examples given in this article.
Agree and disagree. I think the reason it didn't catch on is actually what Scott is encouraging in the article - people resist that characterization and don't allow it to happen. In this case, it's definitely true that many cultural elites *tried* to make it true, and then the non-elites resisted and denied the change.
Again, I think Hillary Clinton had a *lot* to do with that. Had she been more open and welcoming to working class and non-college people (instead of calling them racists who were just going to have to lose their coal mining jobs), she could have taken the wind out of his sails. Instead, she helped create a solid opposition that could rally around Trump instead.
I certainly agree with the Hillary Clinton part. The Democratic Party got cocky and lost. Showing up in the Rust Belt was low hanging fruit they chose to ignore, just like they ignored the working class in general.
Oh goodness yes. That there were previously blue states she lost that she didn't even visit is a big deal. Bernie would have won them, because it was obvious he cared about them. If Hillary did care about them, it certainly wasn't *obvious*.
Sometimes the Streisand effect dominates, especially when it's democrats saying that about republican candidates.
It doesn't help that a lot of us remember when Mitt Romney was characterized as a racist, sexist, anti-Russian. Now he's perfectly mainstream and acceptable, and suddenly being anti-Russian is a benefit.
McCain was treated the same, despite being a war hero and genuinely nice guy (going so far to stop a campaign rally to talk to his supporters about not impugning the character of Obama) who the left now loves.
Those of us who have watched this for a while fully expect that if DeSantis becomes the nominee, he will suddenly be the worst person ever and Trump will be forgotten.
They are two different types of contests. Trump was always the frontrunner for his primary, people were only really dubious over his chances in the general. Burnie struggled to get ahead even in his primary and ultimately didn't win it, let alone the general.
Democrats decided not to support Burnie, not Republicans. While for Trump enough Republicans were behind him the whole way.
This is an excellent heuristic, and I have adopted it myself immediately upon reading this. I'm setting mine at 98%, though.
Also agree and 98.6 for me. The more 98ers there are, the less linguistic flipflopping.
Below is a link to an article by George Packer on The Atlantic's website and will be in the April print issue. The website title is 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language' and the print title (for some reason is different and) will be 'The Moral Case Against Euphemism'.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/equity-language-guides-sierra-club-banned-words/673085/
https://archive.is/8TnxC#selection-609.0-1361.69 (If you can't get by the paywall. Shhh.)
Context dependent for me. What I'm willing to say pseudonymously on an internet forum is very different to what I'm willing to say at work.
Yeah, I'm probably a 98-99%er online but 85-90% IRL in general and 75-80% at work.
Enjoyed the read. It's basically Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" updated for today's censors.
(also, at least if you use Firefox, hit F9 for reading mode then refresh the page)
>The more 98ers there are, the less linguistic flipflopping.
Though probably not if they're all correlated by belonging to the same community or having the same political beliefs or something. That just creates an obvious 'hostile group
to slide into the narrative.
This is an excellent post but I wish it had shown even more contempt for and determination to act against the language bullies who initiate such crusades for selfish reasons. This is not a problem I feel comfortable sitting out or avoiding, I have a strong sense it needs to be actively fought and these people need to be called out and not simply avoided. Does anyone have suggestions for how to do this?
The other thing I wish there was a more active remedy for is the situation you describe where half the people think saying black people commit more crime is impolite but know it’s true and the other half think it’s false and react very badly to information about statistical disparities. Your inaccuracy here is in failing to recognize the THIRD SUBSET who both know it’s true and pretend it isn’t in order to gain clicks or clout or indulge cruel impulses or whatever, this third subset is extremely pernicious and also needs to be actively fought and not merely avoided.
To clarify: it is the third subset who purposely call attention to statistical disparities they know are NOT due to bad behavior by white people in order to obtain power or money or indulge animosities by taking advantage of the fact that the correct factual defense to the charge is something they can twist to call people racist and attack them even more effectively.
George Packer recently wrote an article on The Atlantic website and will be in the April print issue. I think you would like. The website title is 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language' and the print title (for some reason is different and) will be 'The Moral Case Against Euphemism'.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/equity-language-guides-sierra-club-banned-words/673085/
https://archive.is/8TnxC#selection-609.0-1361.69 If you are paywalled.
>who purposely call attention to statistical disparities they know are NOT due to bad behavior by white people
Do they know it? To me it looks like that space is so corrupted by pomo that they no longer believe that anything can be true in the relevant sense if it contradicts the Actually True ideology. Which is of course a very convenient thing to believe in, so short-medium term prospects for improvements in the discourse are dim.
I disagree. You are referring to one of the original two groups Scott described but the third group that I described, of bad-faith actors, is certainly significantly large. They are detectable by their sophistry, which distinguishes them from the ideological true believers.
I think the vocabulary aspect is less important than the statistical knowledge aspect. Making ignorance about racial crime statistics fashionable has led to disastrous policies that have gotten thousands of people killed in recent years.
For example, in this decade blacks have died in far higher numbers in homicides and traffic fatalities than in the previous decade due to the George Floyd Effect. And the Floyd Effect was due to the fact that you are supposed to know that blacks are killed by police at about 2.5 times as often as whites, but you are never supposed to know that blacks kill others at a rate about 10 times that of white, and almost five times that of comparably poor Hispanics.
I'd argue that Scott is way too optimistic in saying that half of people know crime stats and just don't say them out loud while half don't know them. My impression is that that which becomes unsayable tends to become unthinkable. But, I'm not saying that people don't grasp crime stats when it come to their personal real estate decisions. What I am saying is that they become ignorant of reality when discussing public affairs, as seen in the public affairs disasters since May 25, 2020.
I also think part of this is Scott's bay area bubble. Most people I know of who bring up the crime statistic don't so in isolation. In the same breath, they point out that, "black people commit more crime, and black people are most often the victims of criminal behavior". It's an attempt to reframe the racial disparities debate in terms of a debate about keeping people safe, which the Right is more comfortable talking about. The move to mischaracterize the rhetorical move as a racial slur is more about trying to take the rhetorical reframing tactic off the table than it is about identifying actual racism.
The broader point is that some/many of these hyperstitious slurs are created in furtherance of a political agenda. Take the phrase, "it's okay to be white" as a counterpoint to Black Lives Matter. It has gained some popularity in the last month or so, because as with 'black lives matter' it's difficult to reject the plain meaning of the phrase without looking like a bad person. Yet already it's taking on political connotations - because THAT IS THE POINT. It's convenient to embed a lot of ancillary political meaning beneath a simple statement, then dare someone to reject that statement. But if you're trapped by an inconvenient political phrase being wielded against you, reframe it as no longer being about the plain interpretation of the words themselves, but about their 'underlying meaning'.
It's convenient to declare that you're pro-choice and your opponent is anti-choice, or that you're pro-life and your opponent is anti-life. Not because you're trying to describe that person's position more accurately, but because it makes them look bad. This isn't about arguments, it's about optics. It's not about understanding another person's point of view, it's about prejudicing others from even trying to understand.
Labels are the ground political battles are fought on, but they're all positional battles. None of these stupid word games impacts who is 'winning' the Culture Wars, because they're not about substance.
"It's OK to be white" was created to be a wholly unobjectionable statement that is still widely objected to. The goal is to demonstrate that wokeness is driven by anti-white racist animus. It works.
> True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. ... This leads to another sort of vicious cycle: half of people understand it’s a true fact that they’re not supposed to say for signaling reasons, the other half have never heard it before and assume it must be a vicious lie, ... I think the accepted way around the problem in these very few situations where it’s absolutely necessary to talk about it is by adding “. . . but obviously this goes away when you adjust for poverty” at the end. Even though this statement is false, ...
There's another aspect of this dynamic that I'm surprised Scott didn't mention: it's a classic Moloch condition of coordination failure. We are literally being trapped into ritualistically uttering falsehoods. At best, this is for fear of offending the ostensible victims (e.g., the minority in view), but more often, it's for fear of incurring second-order disapproval from bystanders who are also trapped in the bad equilibrium (e.g., whites who "know" that one must never say X).
This Moloch pattern is deeply corrosive of the ability to communicate honestly. Many people, initially of good will, end up feeling perpetually gaslit, which can powerfully erode good will.
Dath Elan has some sort of norms that give it immunity to true facts becoming hyperstitious slurs. You're not allowed to judge people negatively for mentioning true facts.
I mean....there is almost no one who will _say_ that they judge people for uttering true facts in our society. It's just that certain groups have decided that certain facts _aren't_ facts. So on a surface level, there is probably no one among the group punishing these hyperstitious slurs who would say that they disagree with that norm.
All fun and games until someone keeps mentioning that someone has an embarrassing medical condition, or talking about someone's porn history, etc. Or, to use more politically charged issues, until someone starts mentioning jury nullification in a court room or until the media starts selectively mentioning true facts in order to push a conspiracy theory.
Moreover, per Scott's article, it's irrational to not judge someone based on the facts they mention. There's a reason some people constantly mentions racial crime statistics and others don't. So, from a purely Bayesian perspective, judgement is 100% warranted. This is true in a positive rather than normative sense, but the two bleed into each other.
If the probability I would enjoy someone's company is 10x lower if they're the type of person to mention true fact X, then it is entirely rational for me to be less eager to try talking with them. I'm not convinced its possible for a social norm against this behavior to be tenable in the long-term since such a norm would be unenforceable and in nobody's interest to follow.
In a world where all the coordination problems are solved you’d probably have nothing to worry about from disclosure of your medical conditions or kinks. Cherry-picking to push a false grand narrative is a separate offense from mentioning a true fact. Considering the US repeatedly has riots and entire political movements based on a failure to appreciate racial crime statistics (e.g blacks are 13% of the population, 30% of the cop-killed, and 50% of the cop-killers), I’m glad there are still people spreading the stats.
I think it’s just another part of a norm against lying. Don’t lie by omission when there are important facts pertaining to the issue at hand, regardless of the signaling value of the facts. Try not to incentivize others to lie.
Or silencing truths.
>Suppose someone decides tomorrow that “Asian” is a slur, and demands we call them “person of Asian descent”. Everyone agrees to go along with this for some reason, and fine, “Asian” is now a slur. This seems bad for everybody.
-well, everybody except the people doing the deciding, I guess.
I theorize that many people today initiate things like that out of a sort of expectation that someone else will do it later and a desire to be ahead of the game.
We are very used to evaluating people from the past by modern standards, and punishing them posthumously for failing to meet them. In that environment, it's more-or-less rational to try and extrapolate ethical drift and hold youself to predicted standards. It's self-evident to me this explains at least part of the modern progressive worldview.
In that environment, it's possible for every single actor in this game, including the initiators, to be losing out due to an inability to coordinate
It's worth remembering that "people of color" was tried in the eighties, and didn't stick then.
I think the Internet gave it a second wind because in written conversation you can shorten it to the snappy 'POC' (never mind that it doesn't work in spoken conversation; who has those these days?), so it lost the "unwieldy periphrasis" handicap.
People do say BIPOC in conversation though.
As non us person, i read it as bisexual people of color.
BIPOC typically stands for "Black, Indigenous, and people of color." Bisexual BIPOC is BiBIPOC :P
BiBibPOC is bisexual black and indigenous proof of concept!
There is no "and" there. It's specifically designed to separate the real POCs from model minorities (Jews, Asians, Subcontinentals).
Interestingly, "African-American" seems to be on its way out too. According to Google Trends, "African-Americans" was slightly more used than "black people" in 2004, but nowadays is less than half as popular (according to whatever metrics Google Trends is based on).
This isn't fully born out by Google Trends, but I swear to god everyone in America stopped using the term African Americans on November 4, 2008
I distinctly remember the night Obama won, all the coverage used the phrase "first black president," which seemed weird because in the lead up to the election I barely ever heard the term Black, it was offensive and African American was what you were supposed to say. After that, I heard Black all the time, and African American died out
There's a whole separate issue that, according to certain opinionated groups, African American is supposed to mean "a descendant of enslaved Africans", which Obama definitely isn't, so the switch to "black" was to a degree a ploy to bypass this problem.
It's worth pointing out that there are, of course, lots of Black people who aren't African-Americans (because they're not Americans).
If you adapted the racial terminology used in the USA (African-American, Native American, etc) into other countries, then you would get into trouble quickly. African-British is a term, but it refers specifically to black immigrants from Africa and their descendants; black immigrants from other places (e.g. African-Americans or immigrants from the Caribbean) are not African-British. And if you went to Africa and referred to black people as "Native Africans" then you'd be using the term that the colonisers used.
I do remember clips going around of Nelson Mandela's inauguration as President of South Africa with some American TV anchor describing him as "the first African-American President of South Africa", which definitely provoked a lot of laughter.
The point here is that these terms aren't grammatically productive; you have to learn them case-by-case. Which obviously proves that they aren't being formed according to some rules, but are being made up.
I remember a newscast about some riots in France (maybe 20 years ago), and the anchor was trying very hard to determine what to call the group of young men who were on camera throwing rocks. After a lot of stutter-stops, she ended up calling them African American.
In France they are simply French.
Under French law there is no concept of race at all, if you are citizen of France you are French.
Sure, but this was an American newscaster who couldn't think of anything to say. That she felt the need to identify the group by race at all is a pretty American thing as well, which I wish we could get away from. I'm doing a better job not making race a descriptor when I'm telling a story, but it's pretty ingrained in a lot of communities to include it when explaining who a person is.
I would love to read a history of hyperstitious slurs that failed to reach critical mass. I can’t think of one off the top of my head (maybe “Democrat Party” vs “Democratic Party”? I’ve always just shook my head at that one…), but they must exist, right?
I really don't think latinx is going to stick around.
Latinx is pretty much the counterexample to Scott’s “Asian” worry: actual Latinos were fine with “Latino”, but a bunch of people tried to pretend it was a slur anyway, and they had some success (with the “pathetic” 1-5% crowd) but it is clearly already in decline at this point.
So there’s some hope…
I would say it does more than 'give hope'. It undermines the whole thesis, and illustrates quite neatly the best objection to it: that the terms which reach consensus unacceptability are always offensive to at least a large portion of the subject group. And if that's the case, why does it matter if it became offensive for irrational reasons? Why is this such a bad thing that we must resist? Scott's arguments for the downsides of these language shifts struck me as very weak, to the point of suggesting somewhat motivated reasoning (unsconscious, I'm sure, but he has previously written about bad experiences with 'social justice' and a resulting bias against it).
If a group of people prefer that I don't use an abbreviation of their demonym, then I won't. Because it costs me essentially nothing, and it will make that group of people happier. That's all there is to it, surely?
If it just stuck to abbreviated demonyms the costs wouldn’t be that much. Some amount of communication and mental friction, but not a big deal. But it clearly doesn’t stop there.
And it does have really policy impacts, look at how we treat and discuss mentally disabled people. So much bullshit in that sphere that leads to real harm.
The transitions from idiot to retard to mentally disabled to learning disabled (I think, briefly?) to person with mental disabilities has been absurd. And you've got to imagine the ones getting the real short end of the stick are the ones suffering from those disabilities and being sat down once or twice a decade for another, "You know the kind of person you are? Well we're not supposed to say that in polite society anymore."
Well that and there has been a lot of intentional mislabeling because “my precious Bobby isn’t one of those horrible biters, he just has a few issues (when Bobby absolutely is highly dangerous and one of the biters when not drugged to the gills)”.
I have always loved that no one tends to have a problem with “slow”, but retard is hugely offensive.
The euphemism treadmill only accelerates. I remember I was in middle school when "special needs" started to come into vogue; "Special" was an insult within six months.
The way the government treats disabled people seems mostly unrelated to the words commonly used to label them, except insofar as the words used are downstream of cultural attitudes towards disabled people.
I think the argument for resisting is based on the fact that in the early stages of a lot of these cascades the term isnt *actually* offensive to "a large portion of the subject group", rather there is some interested minority, e.g. a scholar trying to write a paper, trying to convince them that they should be offended. So if you can intervene at this early stage of the cascade and resist it, then its one less offensive term in the world.
There’s also the inability to say factual knowledge issue, which I think is a real problem & costs lives. I think invisibly saving 10 lives is better than visibly not offending 100 people.
Maybe that 100 should be expanded to >10B. There really is no comparison between saving lives and offending people.
I think the actual problem is that Latino/Latina are gendered words, not that they're considered slurs.
I was using “slur” loosely. The idea is the same: people on the way-too-far-left were arguing that “Latino” was offensive (to Latinas) and that if you used it you were a terrible sexist person.
In Spanish, sure, because it has grammatical gender markers. But in English, you can just say "Latin" and call it a day, no need for any suffix.
But it was worse than that. Native Spanish speakers didn’t consider it to be sexist to use the masculine form of the word as the generic form because *that’s just how Spanish works*. But people in the outgroup were being offended for them on their behalf and decided to fix the problem by inventing a new word that didn’t even remotely look like a real Spanish word. It was pretty much a complete fail for the forces of hyperstition.
English works similarly too, with "he" being the generic pronoun, and several words usable as both masculine and generic. Except that a few decades ago, the generic use started to be regarded as politically incorrect.
Curiously, this is a change that Scott seems to be on board with, using not just "they" but often "she" as a generic pronoun, presumably as a counterbalance to generic "he".
(Disclaimer: English is not my native language.)
For me, the whole "offended for them on their behalf" is the *worst* part of this whole thing. No one can justly speak for another unless given permission or unless they're in loco parentis. And groups can't give permission. Speaking on someone's behalf unless they've told you to is infantilizing and WAY more offensive than any slur. It says "you're not smart/knowledgeable/etc to know that this should be offensive. So I'm going to take it on myself to correct that. Silly little <person>, go sit over there and let me handle your affairs."
I'm reminded that the Seminole tribe gets paid crap-tons of money for the Florida State mascot rights. They're not only fine with it, they're proud of it (as a tribe). Yet ignorant white knights (all privileged white folks from elsewhere) keep claiming it's racist. On the behalf of people who vehemently disagree.
It's a gendered language, erasing the concept of gendered words is tantamount to erasing the language itself. And anyway, "latino" is already gender neutral in Spanish, as in it can refer to groups of males and females. Latina is gendered, in that it can only apply to females.
Never understood the acceptance of "Latino." Latin America is French propaganda that they have any claim to Spanish America and an excuse to invade Mexico. Seems ironic for anyone who celebrates Cinco de Mayo to call himself Latino.
Wasn't that more related to the fact that "Latino" looks male, as opposed to "Latina". So "Latinx" was someone's clunky (in pronunciation at least) idea of eliminating the distinction?
I guess Esperanto is unlikely to take off these days, for a similar reason, because masculine words end with "o" and feminine words with "ino". To me the latter looks very much like a diminutive "o" i.e. a "little male"!
People who ideologically agree with wanting a non-gendered form, but who also natively speak Spanish, tend to hate "Latinx" or even "Latinix" (which is how it's pronounced). They came up with "Latine" instead. The wokest of the woke use that term, looking down on Latinx as Anglocentric. It's also a shibboleth (it's pronounced "latin-eh", not "lateen").
"Latine" does have the advantage in that I have heard it used by an actual Hispanic person.
Personally, I would be fine with "latinx," as long as it was understood that it is pronounced "latin-ex" and the X stands for Xtreme.
> Latinx is pretty much the counterexample to Scott’s “Asian” worry: actual Latinos were fine with “Latino”, but a bunch of people tried to pretend it was a slur anyway
I don't think they were trying to sell the idea that "Latino" was a slur against Latinos. I think the idea was that "Latino", like all Spanish-language adjectives, is a slur against women.
It's not really a surprise that Spanish speakers couldn't be sold on this.
What I always found hilarious is how the type of people trying to push "latinx" would also decry colonialism, without realizing that Latin America is only "Latin" because of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism.
Almost by definition it would be hard to know what this is...each of them started from some individual or group trying to say something. If it didn't catch on...how do we know? People and groups often say weird things. It would include an enormous list of things, many only ever said in person which end up just being weird quirks of that individual.
A history of attempts to do this politically are basically a history of every slogan and wording ever used by groups of politicians. Some things like a 'Death Tax' catch on while hundreds of other attempts don't.
In some ways this same thing in a positive cascade applies to the usage of slang.
"Breeder"
"Stiffer"
"Tojo"
"Wop"
"Gringo"
"DINK"
"Party of Jackson"
"Ctrl-Left" (contra "alt-right")
"Oxford comma"
In Canada, terms for Indians (the legal term) do this to an annoying degree. There is Indian, Native, Aboriginal, and Indigenous. In roughly that order.
The clever reader will note that Aboriginal and Indigenous mean Native, and Native doesn't come with a racial slur already in existence and ready to go. But there are people who are offended by Native (and many more offended by Indian, which I get). So now the correct term is Aboriginal. Or Indigenous. I wonder what it'll be next week.
First Nations
There's a strong attempt to wedge that into Australia now too, where it's even less applicable (the natives even further from "Nations" in terms of their level of political organisation, and the native-political-organisations that existed circa 1788 were even less likely to have been the "first" ones).
The point is not to accurately describe reality, the point is to give you a choice -- either humiliate yourself in front of power by using this week's word, or be destroyed by power for refusing to use it.
I really don't think it's that much of a deliberate conspiracy. It's more likely, as Scott argues, a sort of cultural evolutionary thing involving signalling and unconscious associations.
"the natives even further from "Nations" in terms of their level of political organisation"
You see, this is wrongthink that must be suppressed as well.
Doesn't cover the Inuit and Metis. 'Indian' technically doesn't either, actually. I've literally never heard a non-white person use the term First Nations, either.
There are genuine sensible reasons to move to Indigenous rather than Native and Aboriginal (Aboriginal is already about the Australians, Native can be confused with all the other meanings of the word native where you don't use a capital letter). But the idea that they are offensive seems to be relatively new and extremely stupid.
if you are talking to a native american (and this is probably the only case where getting this right matters), it is pretty easy and inoffensive to ask what term they identify with. different people have very different preferences and it is fine.
>different people have very different preferences and it is fine.
Of course, only the preferences of a select few matter/are to be respected
Kitya was very, very clearly talking about the preferences of whoever you're currently having a conversation with. Please don't derail comment threads with willful misreadings just to be inflammatory.
No transgender/transgender supporter has ever respected my preference not to be labelled as "cis". And I'm certain people would mock/ridicule me if I asked not be called 'white'.
Still not what Kitya was talking about, though. She was expressing her own opinions of what the norms should be. The fact that other, ruder people follow different norms, or follow these norms only inconsistently, is nothing to do with Kitya or anyone else trying to sincerely and consistently uphold these notes; showing up in their replies being snarky about what other, worse people do is rude and uncalled-for.
(Also, you can make that "no transgender supporter" to a "only one transgender supporter" going forward. I dunno what you have against "cis", although "white" is obvious enough, but if you don't want to be called that, that's fine by me. Should the need for clarity come up, how would you prefer your non-transness to be flagged? Is "non-transgender" fine?)
She said "it is pretty easy and inoffensive to ask what term they identify with. different people have very different preferences and it is fine."
So unless she reacted the same to my example as her example, then she's being a hypocrite. And I don't know anything about her, but I've seen many many people on the left say what she said, and many many people on the left who think it is ridiculous or even 'bigoted' to not want to have an exonym like 'cis' applied to oneself. So maybe she's a rare exception where the venn diagram doesn't overlap, but probably not.
>Should the need for clarity come up, how would you prefer your non-transness to be flagged? Is "non-transgender" fine?
Non-trans is fine. Cis is literally a word created by transgender activists to denormalise being non-trans. This is not a conspiracy theory, it has explicitly been the intention of the word since its creation. I don't want to be a part of that and shouldn't have to be. There's certainly nothing respectful about it, and it doesn't even describe who I am and how I view myself.
It would be like saying people who aren't schizophrenic should be called 'olotiphrenic' (olotita being my poor, quick guess of the opposite of 'schizo-') rather than non-schizophrenic (or not having a term for it at all). Such a word would obviously exist to make it seem like schizophrenia and 'olotiphrenia' are just two different but fundamentally equal modalities of mental being, instead of schizophrenia obviously being a disorder.
And it's ironic that anyone would think it weird to not be okay with 'cis', since almost all that transgender activists talk about is opposition to having a label applied to them they don't identify with (with many if not most supporting canada's and california's efforts at criminalizing 'misgendering').
But people here are determined to act like it's some insidious evil trampling their most fundamental freedoms. Just call people what they want to be called, or else people will rightfully think you're kind of a dick.
Maybe the way it constantly changes is a bit arbitrary and irrational. Probably we should be more forgiving of accidental missteps, because it can be hard to keep up with. But it's really not that unbearable an imposition to have to find out what people like to be called, and call them that.
>But people here are determined to act like it's some insidious evil trampling their most fundamental freedoms
Let's ignore the part where liberals in Canada and California have/are trying to make it ltierally illegal to "misgender" someone
And this is a perfect example of the problem. This reads to me as you wanting to gloss over that most "liberals" disagree with that idea so that you can tar with a wide brush a larger group that disagrees with you on other, less radical issues.
Why don't you just instead say, "I agree with many liberals that we should not go so far as to make misgendering illegal in most circumstances?" Are you afraid you'll lose status amongst your conservative crowd if you do that?
Really? Laws are getting passed in liberal states that supposedly *most* liberals (and obviously almost all conservatives) disagree with? And there's been no general outrage from liberals about this law they supposedly disagree with?
And support for hate speech legislation amongst the american left may or may not be a literal majority, but it's certainly not true that most liberals oppose it.
And in any case, even if what you're saying is true, it doesn't contradict what I said, because I said "liberal in California/Canada are making misgendering illegal", which is true even if most liberals disagree with it. It's liberals doing this. And if the liberals who disagree with the actions of these liberals are not going to make any noise about it then this is functionally equivalent to supporting it.
>Why don't you just instead say, "I agree with many liberals that we should not go so far as to make misgendering illegal in most circumstances?" Are you afraid you'll lose status amongst your conservative crowd if you do that?
This doesn't even make sense in the context of this discussion. The point was you can't say that socially informed liberal speech norms arent a violation of your freedoms when the left will absolutely resort to the violence of the state to enforce these norms if their social regulation fails.
Its just like when people say facebook is a private company and they can censor who they please, while willfully ignoring the part where the democrats haul zuckerberg and co in front of congress and threaten him with government enforced censorship if he doesn't do the censorship himself (but of course, its not censorship, it's about "stoppping misinformation").
Misgendering is not generally illegal in California; you've not been hearing huge objections from liberals to such a proposal because that's never been proposed.
But let me propose a law more along the lines of the _actual_ one I bet you're thinking of. How about that you are not allowed to discipline or fire people who work for you who upon finding out one of your customers is a Trump voter, referring to them as "evil idiots" from then on. After all, we don't want you restricting their freedom of speech, do we?
I want to be called “my lord Jesus Monster truck the IV”, but only on Tuesdays. Other days I must be grouped as a “royal draconian leprechaun”. To use any other address is deeply offensive.
Though that does add extra cognitive load and conversational burden* that could be avoided by simply having a universally-known, society-wide consensus on what to call people.
* I'm not sure what the "correct" term for this is, but basically I mean it adds extra pleasantries that must be dealt with before getting to the actual point of the conversation, thereby making communication that little bit more time-consuming and inefficient.
Oh, you wouldn't believe how many people are willing to take offence on behalf of Native people. Though practically, I find offence taken is usually inversely proportional to actual difficulty of lived experience. People with actual problems have far more urgent concerns than which synonym of 'native' is being used with a capital letter on it.
When I was moderately young 'Indian' was still an acceptable term. We've moved through all these terms in MAYBE twenty years. Possibly thirty, but I don't think even quite that. It's a bit exhausting, and definitely does not make me take these issues more seriously. And given that pretty much ANY term can be pronounced with venom and hatred, I have very little patience for literal synonyms.
Also, I live and work in a majority Native area with majority Native clientele. Literally nobody cares much except the easily offended who make a living doing so. The problem is, those groups seem to get their way on these things a lot.
Also also, if it only matters to get it right when talking to those people specifically, that sounds like a pretty hollow principle.
Native doesn’t have a built in slur, but less-than-sensitive Australian folks call their Aboriginal people “Abbos”. Which is an offensive slur but also part of the genuinely endearing trend of Aussies coming up with a diminutive for seemingly every noun.
Abos
I’ve seen it both ways. The double b makes the pronunciation less ambiguous.
That and 'indigs' are what I was referring to.
Americans were extremely angry at the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, so "Jap," the word used in newspaper headlines in 1942-1945, became associated with feelings of intense anger. By 1950 or so, the U.S. government was increasingly friendly toward Japan again (due to the Korean War and the like), so establishment media responded by dropping "Jap" in favor of the more respectful-sounding "Japanese." (I'm not sure of the exact dates of these shifts.)
My recollection from Bugs Bunny was that “Nips” (from Nipponese) was also used. But that is too obscure to remain in the lexicon after 75 years.
Which is interesting because “Nipponese” is probably a better English rendition of what the Japanese call themselves. Surprised there hasn’t been an attempt to revive it.
Neal Stephenson seemed to use it pretty insistently to the exclusion of "Japanese", at least in his early books. I don't know if he still does.
It's been "Ni-Hon" and not "Nippon" for a long time now in modern Japanese. Google translate and check the pronunciation. ;)
"Nipponese" is certainly not a better English rendition.
From my experience living in Japan for more than twenty years, 日本 when used as an adjective is invariably pronounced にほん (nihon), thus 日本人 is にほんじん (nihonjin). The only time にっぽん (nippon) is used is in certain relatively rare (outside company names) references to the country itself, but 日本 as にほん (nihon) is far more common. (The にっぽん use is unusual enough that when I type that in my input method offers a katakana rendering of it as well, ニッポン, which marks it as something unusual.)
The term ジャパニーズ (jappaniisu) is part of the Japanese language and is the first option my input method offers when I type じゃぱに (jappani). I've never seen the word used, so I expect that most Japanese would have difficulty with understanding ニッポンニーズ (nipponizu), nor is it even known to my input method and I have to go through the usual minor contortions to get it to render correctly as I do with any word that's not in the input method's dictionary.
It’s used in The Man in the High Castle which has a lot lot lot of race talk - alternative American society which is a racial caste system with the Japanese at the top.
"Nips" was in common usage (at least where I grew up) as a more offensive version of "Japs" at least as recently as the 1990s. As a kid you'd get told off for saying "Nips" but not "Japs".
When the Japanese economy collapsed and the fear of Japan taking over the world was replaced by the fear of China taking over the world, the desire for ethnic slurs against Japanese people went away.
As a person experiencing Japaneseness I'm glad Scott chose not to sadden me
*cause you to become a person experiencing sadness
Every time you willfully choose the passive voice, William Strunk rolls in his grave, and E.B. White sheds a single tear which falls to earth as cold rain.
I also hear a soft moan from my bookcase.
There is no passive construction in either sentence.
"Am glad" is a copula + adjective. "Chose" is past tense, active. "To sadden", "to cause" and "to become" are infinitives. Both "experiencing Japaneseness" and "experiencing sadness" are gerund phrases modifying the noun "person".
Every time you misidentify the passive, Geoffrey Pullum rolls in his... nice bed, I guess, since he's still alive.
http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/passive_loathing.pdf
Fair enough, and I accept this defense of the passive voice. Will you accept my substitution: 'willfully add needless words'?
Every time a pedant argues on the internet, a bell tolls.
But unfortunately, no angel gets his wings.
Hahaha, yes, I think we can all agree that Strunk, White, and the authors of every other usage guide from the last century would cringe at the sentences in the OPs.
A passive voice ensaddens us all.
> My impression is that for the first week of its existence, it was mostly meant inoffensively, used by nice elderly people who thought it was a friendly amendment to the Black Lives Matter slogan.
Are you serious? I think it's much more likely that the first few times it was used was explicitly to signal opposition to BLM - why else would it be phrased like that, and arise at the same time??
> Forty years ago, most people with Confederate flag bumper stickers on their cars were probably proud Southerners not trying to make a statement about race.
Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Maybe you have a point with the thesis of your article (that most hyperstitious cascades are not utilized for good?), but these are bad examples to illustrate your point.
I think you're mistaken about "All lives matter". Early on, it was possible for either slogan to take root: one obviously expansive and inclusive, the other inviting - perhaps even insisting on - further discussion.
"All lives matter" was deployed immediately as a counter-slogan to imply "black lives matter" means "only black lives matter" when, of course, the idea of that slogan is "black lives matter too." Saying there was a week or so where it was well-meaning is probably being far too generous about its origins.
I'm sure your local experience confirms your point of view. Where I live, small-town deep-blue New England, even years later, the slogan was *still* unsettled. By the time George Floyd was murdered, we still had the aforementioned Unitarians earnestly confused that they got dirty looks for "All Lives Matter", but we also had people pushing in the other direction, so that "Black Trans Lives Matter" banners outnumbered simple BLM ones.
If I told you there were two teams, one that insisted that all lives matter and one that got mad when you said that all lives matter... which team would you guess was rife with bigotry?
Definitely the one that gets mad at All Lives Matter. That should have been the original slogan. You can't be mad at it without being some kind of -ist.
"All Lives Matter" long pre-dated the BLM movement: after I moved in 2014, I passed an "All Lives Matter" sign on my way to work every day. (It was put up by a local association of churches--almost all black or Hispanic--as part of an anti-violence push mostly focused on gun control.)
I believe the opposite - i know many people who posted “all lives matter” immediately after George Floyd’s murder as a show of solidarity with BLM. I continue to believe that ceding a moral truth like “all lives matter” to white supremacists was an enormous self-own for social justice
Nobody "ceded" anything. White supremacists started using "all lives matter" in opposition to BLM. Once that happens, there was nothing deliberate that could be done to undo that.
Just like nobody ceded "white pride," it's just white supremecists started using it to signal racial animus and it's not possible to consciously undo that. By contrast, "black pride" and "Asian pride" are generally viewed as positive and non-racist, because the people who use it aren't using it to signal racial animus, merely pride in one's identity (same with "gay pride").
Language formation is not a deliberative process. Changes in denotation and connotation tend to arise naturally without any ability for anyone to control it. And I think Scott and others are really off the mark to assign moral weight to natural language evolution. It's neither good nor bad that "negro" is now considered offensive whereas "God" is not, any more that it is neither good nor bad that "computer" now means a machine not a person who computes. It just is.
If people stop using a term because white supremacists also use that term, then they are ceding the term to the white supremacists.
When the white supremacists say “all lives matter”, the proper response is, “thank you for supporting our cause!”
Wait, where is the evidence that white supremacists started using “All Lives Matter”? And I mean actual white supremacists who espouse the superiority of whites, not just people who happen to be white and disagree with the politics of BLM.
Thank you for stating my thoughts exactly much more clearly.
> White supremacists started using "all lives matter" in opposition to BLM. Once that happens, there was nothing deliberate that could be done to undo that.
Sure there was, ignore the white supremacists who are a tiny minority and so ultimately irrelevant.
TBH I thinks it makes more sense if you look at it as a Jonathan Haidt-style sanctity/impurity issue. White supremacists are ritually impure, and hence anything they touch becomes polluted and unusable for decent folk.
I get it, I just think we should reject religious notions purity of all kinds. It cedes too much power to bad actors and superstition in the case of religion.
White supremacists want influence and attention, so if they know they can influence everyone's behaviour by trolling and signalling, they'll just be having a laugh making us dance to their tune. You minimize their influence by ignoring them completely.
>Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Lots of "scholars" will tell you that intelligence differences between races don't exist and that black people don't commit any more crime than white people.
Exactly. Huge fields of academia are useless these days. Especially the various flavors of victim studies. Much more a way for people to make a living whining about ingroups than to actually do useful things.
I usually don't engage in these kinds of discussions , but most academics/geneticists do not consider the category of "races" to be a valid one...
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-general-science/are-you-there-race-its-me-dna#:~:text=Race%20is%20a%20real%20concept,onto%20race%2C%20not%20even%20close.
This is abolutely NOT valid evidence that geneticists reject race. No article on a university website is ever going to endorse a politically incorrect position and they are under no obligation to make these proclamations align with what the actual DATA on race in science is.
Just to add another survey response, you're wrong about "all lives matter".
It was initially used for a variety of reasons (takes time to establish an accepted meaning).
Some people used in to signal opposition. Others used it because they felt BLM suggested that black lives matter too and/or objected to the idea that a racialized approach was the best tactic to deal with police misconduct.
I mean you can say that's opposition in some sense but the point is that they would say they agreed with what most people claim is the meaning of BLM now (black lives matter equally and the police aren't treating them as if they do).
>(black lives matter equally and the police aren't treating them as if they do).
And this is false, which is what much of the opposition to BLM is based on. When you account for the rates of crime for each race, and violence towards police by race, the evidence that police disproportionately use force against blacks is virtually non-existent.
And importantly, BLM supporters have consistently tried to destroyed the lives of any semi-public figure saying this truth.
According to Google Trends, "all lives matter" closely tracks "black lives matter" as a small but proportionate fraction. To the extent that "black lives matter" has been in the public consciousness, people have been responding with "all lives matter".
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=all%20lives%20matter,black%20lives%20matter&hl=en-US
Scott doesn't specify the timeframe of his impression: whether it's in July 2013, when the #blacklivesmatter hashtag was created; 2015-2016, when BLM received considerable media attention well in advance of the George Floyd protests; or during the protests in 2020. If he is talking about the 2020 protests, there had been seven years for the slogan to pick up various meanings which could have informed its future usage.
With all due respect, this being his blog and all, unless "the first week of [all lives matter's] existence" is convincingly anchored to some fairly early timeframe, the media conspiracy narrative rounds off to a just-so story.
OT: props for the avatar misdirection you magnificent mollusk.
"Lots of scholars" aren't immune to class prejudice. They apparently don't have the faintest understanding of southern culture over the past 50 years as related to displaying the confederate flag. Until recently it never meant more to me than showing membership of the southern redneck tribe. Generally people who grew up in the rural south, drove pickup trucks, had guns, drank cheap domestic beer, had blue collar jobs, and listened to southern rock or country music. It was also an overt signal of non-membership of the educated class which may explain some of the dynamics at play. They saw themselves are more Dukes of Hazard than KKK. I'm sure there was more racists per capita in this group and it was almost exclusively white men but that was never what it was about.
Growing up in the north in the 80s/90s it definitely meant about half “racists”, but also another half who were just hicks into nascar and southern culture and “rebellness” and the dukes of hazard.
It a absolutely didn’t not solely denote allegiance to racists or conservatives at all.
And "conservative" does not necessarily imply "racist" either. You can be a "hick into nascar and southern culture and rebelness and the dukes of hazzard" and also be a conservative, and not be a racist.
Why did the confederate battle flag show up on the Georgia state flag in 1956? What was going on then that might motivate such a change?
Fwiw, the popular use of the confederate flag from its rise in the late 1800's through the mid 1900's was closely associated with "lost cause" mythology about the civil war and antebellum South and explicit support of literal white supremacist politics. The version history you are offering is revisionist and relatively new. That you treat scholars who reject your ahistorical revisionism as just being prejudiced is not great.
>> Forty years ago, most people with Confederate flag bumper stickers on their cars were probably proud Southerners not trying to make a statement about race.
> Lots of scholars will let you know that beliefs on race are an important aspect of the Confederacy.
Having supporting your earlier point, I need to counter here that I watched a well-known US network TV show in the 1980s which prominently featured an orange Dodge Charger covered in Confederate symbols. This show had a fundamental theme of rebellion (if not outright anti-cop anarchy), and surely must have sought to invoke Southern rebel pride with its style and symbology. But I remember no message, express or implied, addressing race in any way.
The proud Southerners Scott mentions might not have been very sophisticated, or scholarly. But it's certainly possible that they were intending to make a statement about something other than race, which would make this an excellent example for Scott's thesis.
There's a popular racing game that lets you collect cars and heavily customize them and give them paint jobs. One of the early unlocks is a Dodge Charger and there are a lot of Dukes of Hazzard paint jobs running around.
Or *were*, until George Floyd happened and at some point they decided to ban all paint jobs including Confederate imagery. At which point I remember reading a lot of comments along the lines of "Good riddance! There's absolutely no reason you'd want that outside of racism anyway!"
Interestingly, Magic: the Gathering's online "Arena" game let you buy national flags to use as cosmetic card sleeves for your deck, at one point. This was fine for a couple of years up until last year where playing against a Russian flag suddenly got rather emotionally charged, and the game publishers responded by banning all the flag cosmetics (and issuing a refund to those who'd bought one, I think).
I dunno if you're referring to the Forza series, but (allegedly) they also ban "rising sun" iconography, which means that some current real-world racing-car livery cannot be accurately depicted, and that this affects the basic livery of one of the in-game cars.
(A "meatball" is used instead of the radiating version, a la the current vs WWII era flags)
I think less opposition to BLM itself, and more to the wording of the slogan. Because I guess they felt it was exclusionary to them? Which seems very silly to me, as any less-than-maximally-uncharitable reading of the slogan would be to infer that it means Black Lives Matter *Too*.
At the time just after George Floyd’s murder, there were two distinct usages of “all lives matter” that I observed that are worth distinguishing. The first and more predominant sentiment was expressed in solidarity with BLM by liberals hoping for more universal messaging, while the other was a more obnoxious version expressed by people like Bill O’Reilly as a (highly successful) attempt to bait an otherwise righteous movement into the astonishingly stupid position of being the team that objects to saying that all lives matter.
>while the other was a more obnoxious version expressed by people like Bill O’Reilly as a (highly successful) attempt to bait an otherwise righteous movement into the astonishingly stupid position of being the team that objects to saying that all lives matter.
More obnoxious than killing numerous people, causing billions in property damage including destroying the livelihoods of countless small business owners, and refusing to social distance during the peak of a pandemic?
Any less than maximally uncharitable reading of All Lives Matter would be followed by (incduding black people's), and the same charity applied to their intentions might give you 'I agree with you because of this deeper foundational belief', but rhetoric and charity mix about as well as oil and water.
I guess the proponents of BLM were maximally uncharitable then... seeing how there were reams of articles doing all kinds of mental gymnastics to point out why "All Lives Matter" was racist, controversial, problematic etc., rather than an obvious generalization of "Black Lives Matter".
Not to mention the woman who was fatally shot in an argument over "BLM" vs. "ALM" ( https://eu.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2020/07/23/jessica-doty-whitaker-what-we-know-shooting-along-canal/5486333002/ ).
So... we can conclude that yes, it was exclusionary. The proof is in the pudding.
Earlier on there were absolutely super liberal Unitarian grandmas saying “why don’t we use ‘all lives matter’ “. He isn’t wrong about it not being solely a signal of opposition originally. But the left got those people sorted out pretty quick.
>>Are you serious? I think it's much more likely that the first few times it was used was explicitly to signal opposition to BLM - why else would it be phrased like that, and arise at the same time??
This matches my recollection. ALM may have had some variance in how much *hostility* it presented to BLM early on, but it always represented some degree of disapproval. People who wanted to approve of Black Lives Matter didn't need to make a new slogan - they just said "Black Lives Matter."
So ALM really only caught on with people who didn't like BLM to one degree or another. This initially included both the "I respect your goals but disapprove of your methods" crowd and the "I hate black people" crowd, but over time the former steadily dropped off and usage became increasingly concentrated among the latter.
So there's a truth, I suppose, to the idea that the phrase wasn't always *hostile* to BLM, but from the beginning I think it connotated opposition to one degree or another.
>So ALM really only caught on with people who didn't like BLM to one degree or another. This initially included both the "I respect your goals but disapprove of your methods" crowd and the "I hate black people" crowd, but over time the former steadily dropped off and usage became increasingly concentrated among the latter.
No, this is nonsense.
BLM is, always has, and always will be based on lies. It's a black nationalist movement that has always been explicitly anti-white. It is based on the lie that blacks are disproportionate victims of police violence (completely false when you account for black crime rates and rates of violence against police compared with other races).
These thugs burned down small businesses, and even if you're fine with chain stores being destroyed, this led to countless workers losing their jobs (and if you're in a neighborhood in which which violent black mobs decide to burn down a store on whim, why would you bother reopening?).
And around 500 white people are murdered by black people every year in the US, a per capita rate TEN TIMES HIGHER than white on black murders (with similar, or higher, multiples for virtually all categories of violent crime).
Not only has no prominent black activist ever talked about this being a problem, when pressed on it they will typically say that it's white people fault.
So you have people who are at best indifferent to, and at worst supportive of, huge numbers of white people being murdered, raped, assaulted and robbed by black people, and then you expect white people to care that some piece of human trash who happened to be black died? And to be okay with mass violence and property destruction?
The data is clear, black people are the most hateful race in the US. They have a vastly more negative view of white people than vice versa, and the vast majority of interracial violence is black on white. And you want to sit here and complain that white people are being "hateful" when they don't pathetically accept this bullshit?
In the Republic of Ireland the word ‘Brit’ would actually be considered a bit of a slur. ‘West Brit’ even more so. It implies someone who may pine for the days the country was part of the UK.
There's definitely a relative-status factor in these things - no British person is going to be very worried about "the Irish are racist towards me," in much the same way that not many white Americans will get worked up by "honky."
It's strange to me how quickly everyone seems to forget or minimise The Troubles. The Good Friday Agreement was only signed in 1998.
It's not that Irish hostility was never a problem in Britain; even in the early 90s things were pretty bad in London. But to the extent there's a kind of status hierarchy of groups, no-one's ever going to put the Irish above the English in it, which is the bigger thing. It's not, "I'm scared of your hostility," it's "I resent the fact you're better than me" (whether or not better-ness is an entirely arbitrary social construct or whatever).
I reject the idea of an absolute hierarchy, it's all contextual. Even if a slur is inconsequential for the average member of a group on an average day, it can still be very consequential for someone in an atypical community or circumstance. No group is the majority everywhere.
I agree with the terms “Jap” and “Negro” being harmless words that were made to have negative connotations due to hyperstitions, but I feel that the confederate flag is a legitimate hate symbol. The confederacy’s sole purpose was the preservation of slavery, there was no exaggeration of the negative uses of the word. While the words “Jap” and “Negro” merely imply that the person is intending to be offensive(or just being ignorant) the use of the confederate flag is a symbol of one’s support for the institution of slavery. The confederate flag is not taboo due to hyperstition, it is a sign of one’s hatred for black people.
Does that mean, e.g., all muslim symbols is an explicit support for the murder and the slavery of Christians ? All Russian victory parades are symbols for the murder and rape of Germans ?
The sole purpose of the confederacy was the institution of slavery. Russian victory parades are held to celebrate their win over the Nazi Party and the message spread by the party, not the murder and rape of the German populace. And your point on the Muslim symbols is so weak it could be disproven by a lobotomized infant.
The founder of Islam was a murderer, pedophile and slave owner/trader. And despite all muslims thinking muhammad is the greatest, most moral man to ever exist, Islam is beyond reproach and the confederacy is the devil.
You sound offended like hell, I'm an ex Muslim and you can't go 10 pages in the Quran without hearing a call to kill, rape, or enslave those who don't worship the True Asshole, or the tales of how this asshole did those things to the people of old.
>The sole purpose of the confederacy
Just like the sole purpose of Islam is the institution of killing and raping those who don't follow it, and the sole purpose of the Soviet Republics is the institution of doing all those things with extra steps.
Step off the high horse.
What does the confederate flag represent other than slavery?
If you are asking that, you are getting close to believing that other people can have opinions that differ from you. Good job, keep going.
The rebel flag means 'this land is ours'. It means 'the South' - beaten, bloody, ruined, but still standing. It means heat and bugs and slowing down and everything not NYC. Or Boston.
It means Spanish moss and call-and-response and dirt roads and ten churches, five bars, and a stop light. It means sir and ma'am and being called boy until you're thirty with your second kid on the way.
It means old battlefields and older wounds and learning to get along. It means something bigger than yourself and your concept of the world.
It means nothing. And everything.
> It means old battlefields and older wounds and learning to get along
I told myself not to argue your statement, but I can’t resist this part. How is the confederate flag a symbol of getting along? They seceded from their country instead of trying to get along!
The South-Eastern part of the United States?
If it won, it would have ~170 years of heritage and culture (however much slavery it would have been built on). And you would be defending it here exactly as you do Muslims. Just like if Muslims lost in the countless close calls 1400 years ago, just like if the Bolsheviks lost in the civil war.
Being against confederates is not being against slavery, it's being against unpopular slavery, it's being against the slavery that has already lost and became a dead horse before your grandfather knew how to use the toilet, certainly before mine did. It was without a doubt brave in the 1850s and 1860s, perhaps brave in the 1870s and 1880s, and maybe the 1890s and the turn of the 1900s. There is no cost to it now, there is no virtue in it anymore.
It's like railing against an ugly bully because he's an easy target, when I call bullshit it's not because I like the bully, it's because nobody would touch the attractive, high-status or protected bullies. And they still have the audacity to claim they're anti-bullies after all.
Why would you "call bullshit" on someone railing against an "ugly bully?"
Isn't an ugly bully still a bully? It's certainly preferable for people to criticize both the ugly bully stuffing kids in lockers *and* the popular kid bullying through social exclusion, but the solution to the gap between the two isn't for people to take it easier on the ugly one and be more tolerant of his locker-stuffing.
Have you ever asked someone who displayed it? Maybe it means something different to them than it does to you. The meaning has definitely changed over the past 20 years and that change has been driven by people other than southern rednecks.
I don't think that asking is a reliable way to find out what people who display the Confederate flag really mean or feel. It's pretty clear from the actual, literal statements of those who fought for the south that the primary reason for fighting was to extend slavery, but a great number of southerners strongly object to that characterisation. If they lie (or at least deceive themselves) about that, why would they tell the truth about why they display the Confederate flag?
Rebellon. You know, the way the US came into existence.
It's the *rebel* flag.
I have very little affection for Islam as a cultural institution, but it clearly would be possible for me to have less.
The Quran may (certainly does) feature endorsements of slavery, murder, etc. but those are by no means the sole purpose of the religion. It's not like, on its founding, Islam's distinction from its cultural neighbors was "unlike them, we endorse murder, rape and slavery."
>are by no means the sole purpose of the religion.
How do you know ? Who determines what is the purpose of a religion or ideology ?
> Islam's distinction from its cultural neighbors was "unlike them, we endorse murder, rape and slavery."
Why is this relevant ? Is murder, rape and slavery only bad if you're the only one doing it among your neighbours ? What does it matter who else endorsed immoral things ?
Like I said in my other comment in the thread, things like Islam and Stalinism deserve to be shat on *precisely* because they managed to culturally infilitrate and brainwash millions/billions into thinking there are other things to them than their history.
I have 0 sympathy for the confederacy, I also have 0 sympathy or respect for those who virtue signal on the dead body of a dead ideology, because it's convenient and consequences-free. To me, something or someone who makes fun of Islam and shows its brutal and sub-human message as-is is infinitely more brave and sympathetic than someone who keeps raging about a state that ceased to affect the world before their grandfather knew the taste of breast milk.
And of course, unlike the virtue signallers, I have never supported excluding people and firing them from jobs when they have never done crimes, and never will. Make fun of Muslims, yes, demolish their religion and show what an utter genocidal bullshit it is, but don't ban hijab or force them into ghettos, and don't pick on lone Muslims just going about on their life.
>How do you know ? Who determines what is the purpose of a religion or ideology ?
I mean, I can point to other cultural values, in the religion's foundational texts, professed by its adherents, and practiced in its cultures, so that's evidence I have to work with. On what basis would you declare that murder, slavery and rape *are* its sole values? If it's a "who gets to decide?" which implies that I don't get to say otherwise, why would you get to say they are?
Personally, I don't have a positive view of Islam as a cultural institution. I think its influence in the present day is almost entirely for the worse, and that it's questionable whether it's even able to reconcile with modern ethical values on a societal level. But by saying things like "the sole purpose of Islam is to support murder, slavery and rape," you're only going to cement yourself for anyone in the process of evaluating their own feelings for it as a critic without regard for honesty. That's not turning intellectual honesty into a virtue, that's turning shitting on Islam into an act of virtue signaling.
It's not like support of Islam is a popular cultural value among ACX's reader base. Not just in the sense of "not many ACX readers are practicing Muslims," but in the sense where treating Muslims as cultural allies or not is part of the Blue Tribe/Gray Tribe divide. If you can't resist turning other subjects to the tangent of "people just don't hate on Islam enough!" in a community where there's little love lost for Islam, that's not making a stand for the virtue of honesty.
Except for most of recent history, it wasn't used as a symbol for hating black people, and most people with confederate flag stickers on their trucks weren't doing so as an endoresement of slavery. What matters is how it was used. It was stigmatized for its origins, not in how it was used (at the time an effort was made to stigmatize it).
How would you phrase what it was used as a symbol of? I would agree it probably wasn't generally used to actively and specifically say "slavery was good". I do however think that it came with an ethos of "although in hindsight the slavery was bad, the Confederacy nevertheless had a lot of good stuff going on, and we should downplay their unfortunate dropped-ball regarding slavery and try to remember the good sides".
If you agree with that much, I don't think it's political-correctness-gone-mad territory for stauncher anti-racists to put their foot down and say "you may not actively endorse slavery but we think that your willingness to *overlook* slavery because the slavers had neat music and a groovy fashion sense implies that you don't understand, or care, how terribly, unforgivably bad it was".
The cheap comparison would be the Nazis, but I'll go somewhere more interesting and instead ask you to picture modern communists trying to reclaim Soviet imagery. They might truthfully say "we're not in favour of gulags or Stalin, we just think the Soviet Union had a lot of cool stuff going on besides the bad, and anyway our grandparents lived there. Besides, part of their original cause was noble even if they lost their way". But it's still understandable for people to say "even if you don't endorse them, it's *concerning* that you think we can forgive-and-forget about the gulags and celebrate the rad taste in architecture of the people who ran them. Even if you don't personally endorse gulags, this kind of celebration of Stalinist aesthetics feels like it'll weaken the basic public understanding of just how unfathomably, uniquely bad the gulags were".
It's the region and the people, whose cultural differences from the rest of the country are more than just 'had more plantation slavery than the rest of the country'.
There's not a replacement symbol for that region and culture, and besides it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be.
> and besides it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be
(Sod it, Nazi comparison it is.) I just don't think that heuristic is right. If Germans in the 1950s had wanted to stick with the swastika, I think the rest of the planet would have been within its rights to say "absolutely not". It doesn't matter if they protest "but we're just trying to celebrate the other, non-fascism-related parts of the 1930s German experience. sadly there's no other symbol for that". We would say "sorry about your nostalgia for the way they did bratwurst in 1933 but we just don't think that's reason enough to bring back the specific sigil of the political entity that directly centred itself on the horrible crime. We're not saying you endorse the horrible crime, but it sure feels like you don't *care* about the horrible crime to the degree that we feel any decent human beings should."
I think that if it was any other majority group trying to dictate culture norms to a disenfranchised minority that your stance would be different.
Your decision to jump to the Nazi example demonstrates a lack of charity and a failure to appreciate the changes the South went through in the more than 100 years after the CW.
> I think that if it was any other majority group trying to dictate culture norms to a disenfranchised minority that your stance would be different.
I wouldn't be too sure. But also I'm drawing a blank on any other otherwise-sympathetic downtrodden minorities whose chosen symbol is the symbol of a political entity that history primarily remembers as the culprits of a major crime against humanity! Can you name any?
(To take a hypothetical example, I do think my feelings would be about the same if, say, Turkish immigrants rallied around the legacy of whoever was responsible for the Armenian genocide. I don't think Turkey had a specific flag in that particular period that is a symbol today; but if I'm wrong, or were wrong, about this I would *also* argue that they should leave that flag alone.)
> Your decision to jump to the Nazi example demonstrates a lack of charity and a failure to appreciate the changes the South went through in the more than 100 years after the CW.
Well, you were the one to try to appeal to some sort of general norm or heuristic that should apply in all cases ("it's not for outsiders to say what the symbol should be"), so I used the Nazi example to demonstrate that at best that heuristic does need occasional exceptions. And if it's not foolproof, that means you can't just point at the norm, you have to actually demonstrate why the Confederate flag *doesn't* fall into that category of exceptions despite its *structural* similarity to the "1950s Germans" thought experiment. I didn't mean to say that there was a direct 1:1 between 1960s Southerners and 1950s Germans.
Also, see my reply to BrackishVacuity.
So, I can at least say that the first example that comes to mind for me is Imperial era Japan, and the fact that the country doesn't disavow their own cultural iconography from the time is a major point of contention with their neighbors, and I come down on the side of thinking that their neighbors are right and Japan is in the wrong.
I haven't visited myself, but from talking about it with people who've lived there, and explored the subject extensively with the locals, most of the populace really does refuse to acknowledge the wrongs of Imperial Japan, not by just mostly not thinking about them, but by insisting if the subject comes up that they're not true, or that the idea that they were actually that bad is just hostile foreign propaganda. And that attitude directly drives a lot of cultural friction between them and their neighbors (who Japan colonized and perpetrated genocide on during the war.) I think the people saying "no, you actually do have a responsibility to acknowledge this and own up to how bad it was" are in the right.
I was taught to regard it as a national symbol (of the South, that is). The American States have a history of varying degrees of unity and, for better or worse, the confederate flag is the only remaining prominent symbol of the time when the South existed as an independent entity. Being a Southerner, and desiring to preserve and cohere fraternity between the southern states, I cannot use the symbols of just my own state. Also, because the south is historically and culturally distinct; in fact because it is a particular section within the greater union, I do not want to use the symbols of the greater union to refer to my nation, which is and will always be the South. This is the way I was raised, and though I desire to be inoffensive, I can by no means deny my wish to see the South treated as a distinct people within the union, equal with and un-erasable as any other identified Americans. I ask for understanding, as this is a personal quandary. Perhaps the future will produce some other widely recognized symbol of the South, until then, the confederate flag must do for me.
This is understandable. Ultimately I'm not personally invested in policing use of confederate flags (I'm not even American). My main point is more meta — it's that I don't think the campaign against their use needs to be rooted in some false/uncharitable belief that anyone with a confederate flag was always *actively* promoting slavery. I think there's a *sound* anti-racist argument against confederate flags that simply goes "even if it's not the same as supporting slavery, thinking that the need for a convenient symbol of national identity outweighs the slavery signals that you don't care *as much* about how bad slavery was as we think you should".
You don't have to agree with that argument — perhaps the people who make it are underestimating how emotionally important having a national symbol can be! maybe it really *is* important enough to fulfill the high but non-infinite burden-of-proof condition on using ethically-compromised symbols anyway — I just want people to acknowledge that it's an argument worth making, and that "but people weren't using to signal support for slavery" isn't a valid counter-argument to the real complaint, but rather to a reducio ad absurdum. (Or at beast a weakman, to use Scott's terminology.)
This may be uncharitable, but part of me thinks that the fact that the South can't come up with a symbol for itself that isn't so tied up in slavery and racism reflects badly on it as a culture.
> I just don't think that heuristic is right. If Germans in the 1950s had wanted to stick with the swastika, I think the rest of the planet would have been within its rights to say "absolutely not".'
I mean, what if they had? Would the world be a worse place? Nowadays the red-white-black swastika would just be the flag of Germany, as benign and harmless as the red-yellow-black stripes, and the fact that "hey did you know that the German flag was ackshually introduced by the Nazis" would just be slightly annoying trivia for smartasses along the lines of "hey did you know that Hitler invented Volkswagen".
I think it's likely that if Germany had taken that route, where they'd minimized the concerns of other nations about their symbolism related to the atrocities they'd committed in the war, they'd have ended up in a situation more like Japan, whose cultural resistance to owning up to its own misdeeds in the war drives serious cultural friction with its neighbors to this day. Compared to the current state of affairs, I think that would be materially worse.
> I mean, what if they had?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ltey8BS83qSkd9M3u/a-parable-on-obsolete-ideologies
I mean, many atrocities were committed under the Union Jack, but that's still around. I guess if someone is obstinate long enough everybody else just moves on.
COOL! When are we pressuring Turks to abandon the flag that flew over the genocide of Armenians et al?
And when are we hating muslims for worshipping a man who enslaved people, owned slaves, and traded slaves?
You underestimate my willingness to bite bullets: I mentioned the Armenian genocide elsewhere in the thread! (With the caveat I don't think the current Turkish flag was specifically established as part of the anti-Armenian campaign, which makes it much less egregious. But if it *was*, I would agree the two situations are equivalent, yes.)
As for "hating muslims", firstly, I don't endorse conflating "disapproving of one thing [population X] do" with "hating [population X]". Secondly, the muslim view is that the Prophet was, well, *the Prophet*, doing God's work on Earth; the moral requirement to honour his memory is thus incalculably high, dwarfing any mortal-sized ethical qualms one might have about him. If proponents of the confederate flag believed that it was a religious requirement, they would plausibly be saying "yes, prima facie glorifying the Pro-Slavery Flag is *extremely* bad, but fulfilling God's will is *infinitely* good, and that infinite good trumps the great-but-finite evil". This side-steps the "granted that having a convenient symbol of national pride can't be *infinitely* good, it sure seems like the badness of using the Pro-Slavery Flag ought to outweigh it unless you're significantly underestimating the badness of slavery" issue.
(Of course, I don't personally believe doing God's will is an infinite good because I don't believe there's any such thing. But we have a cultural norm of not constantly calling out religious people about things like that, to avoid bloody wars of religion, and not getting on muslims' case about Mohammed is an example of that.)
+1
The US banned Child Pornography in (I think) the 70s.
If Vermont had responded to that by seceding to protect their right to a "peculiar institution" of child pornography, and the rest of the country stomped them flat and put the revolt down, a Vermonter 100 years later could *claim* that they were just waiving the "free Vermont" flag as a statement of Vermont pride without making any statement one way or another about the whole messy child porn thing, but they'd be asking a hell of a lot wanting the rest of us to just turn a blind eye and go along with it, and I doubt many people would.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a white dude who dropped the n-word a lot, and tried to justify it by saying that *to him* it had no racial connotation, but instead merely meant "an ignorant person." Bully for him, I guess, but language is collectively created, so you can't practically secede from the popular interpretation of a word or symbol. "To me, this noose just means justice" doesn't get you very far in the real world where everyone else is interpreting the symbol in another way.
The confederacy doesn’t exist anymore, other Americans are not outsiders.
Your view of Americans and humanity is pretty shallow.
“We should downplay their unfortunate dropped-ball regarding slavery and try to remember the good sides” really doesn’t sound like something a slavery supporting racist would say. Or at least, you should at least try to examine what the “good sides” the person is trying to emphasize rather than just assuming bad faith dog whistling.
With confederate battle ensign waving southerners, you didn’t even have to ask that hard: they were promoting “rebelliousness”, “anti authority”, and “southern pride” (whether you agree with the sentiment is kind of irrelevant, but some southerners did feel put upon by snooty out group Yankees, and considering all the jokes that you still hear at the expense of (white at least) southerners, they had at least a little justification for feeling that way).
I think it’s fair to say that there has definitely been a hyperstition effort to make the flag less acceptable. Whether it actually has some “baseline offensiveness” doesn’t make that less true.
More and more, I find myself wondering what might qualify as a symbol (flag or otherwise) that any Southerner could use to display Southern pride, that wouldn't be immediately tagged as racist. As in, you could see both white and black Southerners rallying under it, and anyone who tried to call it racist would risk cancellation.
For me, that question frames the issue well. It forces two questions of its own - whether Southerners can produce such a symbol (on pain of facing a real obstacle with putting race aside), and whether non-Southerners can see it as a purely united Southern symbol (on pain of facing their own prejudice toward Southerners).
I think that this is absolutely theoretically possible, but practically difficult in real life because, while there are some people who're very much attached to a distinct unified Southern culture who would support such a thing, there are also a lot of people for whom the unified "Southern culture" they want to symbolize is actually a racially segregated Southern culture.
If you get together all the people who claim support for a unified Southern culture, and tell them "Okay, let's come up with a symbol for our distinct but racially unified Southern culture," you're probably going to lose a whole bunch of white people who stand behind the Confederate flag because it represents specifically-not-that to them, and a whole bunch of black people whose response is "we don't remember that being a thing we were ever enthusiastic about."
There will absolutely still be people left, but it's hard to get a critical mass of support which will get people to recognize a racially unified cultural symbol of the South when there are hardly any black people in the pool of support, because they mostly don't share the sense of a racially unified but culturally distinct South being a thing they ever had a sense of investment in.
We black and white kids happily danced together under a confederate flag during Allman Brothers concerts in the late 1960s. We saw the flag as a representation of the music -- a blend of black blues and redneck rock 'n' roll. We weren't racists, and nor are we now. But, of course, that doesn't fit the "narrative". The current generation seems determined to champion stupidity over love.
What a symbol represents is determined by the most common interpretation of the symbol. While your experience with the flag may be positive, this isn’t what is taught to our generation in history class. Today’s youth is taught that the confederate flag is a symbol of the slavery of the African American people, not blues and rock ‘n’ roll. If people are told something from a young age, they tend to believe in it pretty strongly, and so the majority of modern society believes that the confederate flag represents slavery and racism.
Modern society believes that because of hostile activist action. You are not required to go along with agitators and liars.
People go along with things when they are only taught one way of thinking about it. Why can’t southerners pick a symbol with less negative connotations?
Why don't you non Southerners go take a flying leap?
It's not like Yankees are gonna start respecting the South, Southerners, or Southern culture if we use a different symbol.
Stop being such a stiff stick of a Purtian who has to be the moral ruler of everyone else.
Why can't you accept the fact that the confederate flag is widely interpreted as a hate symbol?
If Southerners chose a symbol with fewer negative connotations, I'm certain the SPLC would have classified it as a hate symbol by the end of next week.
Picking a symbol (which requires ingroup coordination effort) is a very expensive act that sucks up coordination resources that could be used for other things.
Making your outgroup use resources in this manner is the point of hyperstition pushes.
“ this isn’t what is taught to our generation in history class” This is literally the point Scott is making! The flag became more offensive through deliberate action, not because of an inherent objective quality it had that simply went undiscovered until “your generation”.
If what you say is true, then history class is indoctrinating kids into a false view of history. Well...why do you support that? Can we stop doing that? I say this even though I *also* think the confederate flag represents slavery and racism--and even worse, it represents treason.
The US flag represents treason against the British Crown, except in that case the traitors won.
Yes, and for that reason it would not make sense for British people to fly the American flag. Especially not the original flag of the Thirteen Colonies.
And it wouldn't make sense for Yankees to fly the Confederate flag, but that's not the point in question.
"What a symbol represents is determined by the most common interpretation of the symbol."
Absolute nonsense, even for a prescriptivist.
The flag most often invoked in this context is not the state flag of the Confederate States of America, but the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Whose sole purpose was to prevent people from invading Virginia. This did indirectly further the cause of slavery, but damning a symbol because it is indirectly associated with a thing seems a bit much.
Also, I don't think any of the people denouncing either of these flags care about any of that; it's a symbol used by people they hate, so they'll try to taboo it if they can as a matter of principle.
It's not even the battle flag; it's a weird hybrid of the (square) battle flag and the (lighter blue) naval jack. Like any symbol, though, its meaning is how it's used so it's now collectively the flag of the Confederacy, opposition to the civil rights acts and the contemporary Southeastern US.
"The confederate flag...is a sign of one’s hatred for black people." To you maybe, but other people feel differently. Welcome to the world of diversity, which I thought the Left supported.
"The confederacy’s sole purpose was the preservation of slavery"
This was the overwhelmingly primary reason the states seceded and confederated. But the reasons for individual men fighting for the Confederacy were much more varied and complex.
Surely the ability to use words like “field work” are necessary for the efficient description of actual concepts in a way that one identifier or another is not. Negro is derived from the spanish word for black, to exchange one for the other is no loss of meaning. There is nothing lost in respecting the terminological preferences of a person described by the word, as the word’s only job is to describe people.
To charge all mentions of open expanses of grass or crops with racial connotations is something else. Even if we change the word field to the word zarglox, well, some of the most abused and dehumanized slaves of them all worked in the zarglox. Obviously back then they would have called it a f***d but it’s still troubling that you would being zargloxes into this otherwise wholesome and not-racist conversation about possible places to build strawmen.
This is called the "euphemism treadmill", at least when applied to a name for something that might be derogatory in itself, such as inabilities of all kinds. (Every 5-10 years we need new terms for people who are crippled, crazy, or stupid.)
"(Every 5-10 years we need new terms for people who are crippled, crazy, or stupid.)"
I think you beat me to this by about a minute. :-)
Maybe we just have to bite that bullet. I sure know that if *I* lost use of my legs I wouldn't want people to call me "a cripple". Ditto if I were "crazy" or "stupid" - those are not the terms I'd prefer!
So yeah maybe we just have to run as fast as we can to keep keeping ahead of things that will inevitably accrue negative connotations...
Good luck with that.
I'll skip that race, thanks.
Look, the reason euphemisms are euphemisms is that they are fundamentally dishonest. They are trying to hide the fact that some impairment really is disadvantageous.
> Maybe we just have to bite that bullet. I sure know that if I lost use of my legs I wouldn't want people to call me "a cripple".
That's just because "cripple" has already gone all the way in the cascade. But if it was a word that many people still use in a neutral sense, and so its use doesn't imply hostility (even if the word is also used in a negative sense), would you still mind it? If no, then agreeing to keep using such terms as long as they haven't gone all the way in the cascade should work.
I don't know what my point is.
I mean, broadly speaking I agree with Scott here. But I think maybe he fails to steelman the idea that slurs are bad, a bit. It's not just the impact on the offender (who may be shunned, often wrongly, which broadly speaking is bad (some might say it's *good* that we have a way to trap racists into outing themselves, but that seems like a stretch)), but also the impact on the offended. Words have connotations, and maybe it sucks to have people characterize you in a negative way, because it impacts your own self-image, etc. Maybe the cascade moving a little bit faster is better compared to letting it idle in the middle, where people are allowed to use a term to describe you that is only mildly denigrating and only 1/4 of the time indicates that they actually intended to denigrate/offend/belittle you, 1/2 of the time unintentionally reflects that they think of you in a flavor characterized by those negative connotations, and the remaining 1/4 of the time it's just 100% innocent and nice on their part, but you can't tell which. So maybe moving words that are mildly offensive but still socially acceptable out of that realm is good and helpful? Who knows.
As a side note, I think part of the dynamic here is not only that word usage/meaning has changed over time, but also that it's become less acceptable to be casually, like, mean about people in ""marginalized groups"". Part of the reason you used to be able to call people Japs is that it was socially acceptable to be rude about Japs. I wonder if it's also become less socially acceptable to be mean *in general*. Probably a good thing. But this may have the unintentional effect of making the treadmill move faster.
> Negro is derived from the Spanish word for black, to exchange one for the other is no loss of meaning.
It did make things more cumbersome, though, insofar as there are a ton of other uses of the word "black" that are now muddled for no reason. There was nothing racist about fairy-tale villains being Black Knights and users of Black Magic, being described as Black-Hearted, etc. The word "Negro" was used to refer to the ethnicity and nothing else. Now a bunch of initially-innocent terms are falling out of use for no good reason — not even because they've been actively construed as racist by anybody, but just because of the "have a gay old time" problem.
'course, that particular battle was lost long ago. But it does serve as a demonstration of the kinds of issues that can arise when broader terms are used to replace more specific ones. (And a lot of "sensitivity" switches are of this sort in one way or another. Saying that someone is mad is actually a narrower and more specific thing than saying they are "mentally ill".)
Jeepers, it's just so silly when people act like a little ambiguity in language is going to cause huge headaches. This comes up a lot when the use of singular 'they' for hypothetical people is used, too. "If you say 'each student should do their own work' I'll have no clue what you mean!"
The word 'set' has 400 definitions. There are well-known comedy routines about the variety of uses of the words 'fuck' and 'ass'. Language is squishy, and it evolves. We don't use 'science' to mean any form of knowledge anymore, since it doesn't mean that anymore. We don't use 'fray' to mean 'have sex with a virgin' anymore because it doesn't mean that anymore. We don't use 'gay' to mean jolly anymore because it doesn't mean that anymore.
Language is complicated. Despite the post, "Negro" is not a slur, it's just an outmoded term. If someone were to use it with a certain glee, I think I an most others would guess they were substituting it for another word, and some others might have a more sensitive trigger than I do, but if someone we to talk about Negro Leagues baseball, I'd expect them to use the term. Despite the implication in the post, "Black" didn't start to replace Negro 50 years ago, it was in use long before that (as an obvious contrast to "white") - there wasn't this utopia where "Black Magic" was never going to be in danger of getting confusing. For example, while Scott correctly reports that MLK used the term "Negro", but as a child he gave a speech with the line "Black America still wears chains" (and was called a "Black son-of-a-bitch" on the way home from giving it).
The problem is that ambiguity in language _does_ cause headaches. Moving from "negro" to "black" wasn't a problem, until people decided that all other uses of the word "black" (e.g. "blacklist") are now racist.
For a while it was just metaphorical uses of the word "black", but if the new Roald Dahl books are to be believed then it's now problematic even to use the word "black" to describe physical objects which are literally the colour black as black.
The sensible solution, of course, is to stop calling black people black, which has the advantage of being literally accurate; nobody has black skin. If we started calling people "dark brown" and "light brown" instead of "black" and "white" then this would be pretty reasonable.
Indeed. (Well — "light brown" makes me think of a tan skin-tone, the sort of skin-tone that currently gets called simply "brown". The fact of the matter is that 'white' people's skin is light pink. I think people find this slightly embarrassing, but those are the facts, dammit! There are dark brown people, light brown people and light pink people.)
I'll grant "light pinkish brown" but not "light pink".
To check for sure, I googled for pictures of Scarlett Johansson, partly because she seems like a fairly white white person, and partly because if I'm going to spend time staring at pictures of someone for the sake of a dumb internet argument it might as well be Scarlett Johansson.
After looking at a bunch of pictures I settled on this one in which she looks particularly pale thanks to the lighting and makeup https://www.sheknows.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/scarlett-johansson-lawsuit.jpg
Now I picked one of the palest points I could find on her skin, and this was the colour it was -- https://imagecolorpicker.com/color-code/e3c8b7 -- that's definitely "light brown". If you painted your walls in that colour you'd say they were brown. You definitely wouldn't say they were pink.
Objection: take this picture, which came up among the first results in Google Images for "white person".
https://img.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/norton.jpg
Picking randomly in the more brightly-lit part of this guy's face, I get this colour;
https://imagecolorpicker.com/color-code/faddd9
which I think you'll agree *is* a light pink!
Realistically this just varies from person to person, but I think emphasizing the pink over the light-brown makes sense; first because I do think "dark brown" for black people and "light brown" for Middle-Eastern, Indian, Native American, etc. skin-tones is enough browns as it is without having to work out some "very light brown" option; and second, because I think Caucasians' pinkness is crucial to "whiteness". Compare Asian skin-tones which can be as pale, or paler, as "white" skin, but aren't held to be "white", because they have much less of that pink element.
(This is the source of the now-discredited notion of them being "yellow", of course. Come to that, I wonder why we as a culture tossed out "yellow" and "red" which were obviously incorrect, but kept "black" and "white" which are… also obviously incorrect.)
…crap, that means we need a fourth colour for those non-pink Asian skin-tones though…
It actually came from the Portuguese word for black, which happens to be the same as the Spanish, not to be ridiculously pedantic
A possible solution for the euphemism treadmill -- every decade or two, select a word for "black" from a different language (meaning "black" in that language). We could even plan it in advance, so people could adapt faster.
"I stand with czarnoskóry Americans"
"I stand with कृष्णः Americans"
I could get used to this
Hrm... I don't think the Confederate flag is a good example of this process. It _started out_ as representing a bad thing. I don't think it would be fair to imply that started out as an innocent symbol representing an innocent thing that later on went through the cascade. It's just that, as time went on, more people realized that the thing it represented was bad, and people who kept holding on to waving it around were embracing the bad thing it always represented from the start.
On the subject of when/how hard to resist, I think it depends on the specific nature of the thing. What should, in my view at least, be most aggressively resisted, is allowing expressing a true fact to itself go through the process. That should be, must be, resisted far more strongly.
I guess maybe stating facts devoid of context in a way that is clearly obsessively focusing on a misleading subset (ie, carefully filtering to imply a picture of reality that doesn't reflect actual reality) should still be viewed as a bad action. But the facts themselves shouldn't be, if you see what I mean.
I don’t totally understand your last paragraph, but spot on with the first two.
I guess as an example, consider the possibility of <bad thing> that is committed at similar rates by both group A and group B.
If someone makes a point of just listing instances of members of group A performing <bad thing> constantly, as a way to imply that group A disproportionately does bad things in general and <bad thing> in particular, then that'd be deliberately misleading even if each individual thing said was literally true.
That sort of behavior, in general, should be treated as bad. It's bad in ways similar to selectively filtering data to ensure that an analysis produces a desired outcome is bad.
(This isn't the only way in which such could happen, but that's an example of what I meant)
The confederate flag did not start out as representing a "bad thing" in any way that the flag of the united states did not also represent.
It's a a symbol of sovereignty and rebellion exactly like the original flag of the united states was, and yes this included owning slaves, exactly like the original united states did.
If the United States had rebelled against Britain because Britain was trying to stamp out slavery from the colonies, I think that *would* be very relevant in terms of the significance of American symbology.
National iconography has symbolic value aside from just being a symbol of national sovereignty. If you have a country that splits in two, because one side wants to be a democracy, and the other side wants to be an Islamic theocracy, then their flags are also going to serve as symbols of commitment to democracy and Islamic theocracy respectively, because that's what they split over.
Except the rebellion was specifically about slave owning. Can't abstract that away, that was central. If I remember right, the main difference in the Confederate constitution was an enshrining of slave ownership. Repeatedly.
The Confederacy was rotten from the start, in that slavery was the thing that it was about in the first place.
Moreover, the rise of the use of the confederate battle flag happened several decades after the civil war and was explicitly about then efforts to memorialize the nobleness of the confederacy while installing the political systems that became known as Jim Crow. It was then used for decades after, with rises and falls in popularity, to continue expressing support of the confederacy and defend white supremist regimes in control within the South. This extends into the relatively recent past. "Hey, it's just about Southern pride" is a defense people came up with when others got really mad about people using racist symbols whose causes had fallen out of favor.
>>It's a a symbol of sovereignty and rebellion exactly like the original flag of the united states was
All rebellions are not equal. What one is rebelling *against* goes a pretty long way. If you're rebelling against your government because it is denying you free speech, and I am rebelling against my government because it won't let me perform human sacrifices, I'd be a comical act of whitewashing to call myself a rebel "just like you."
At a time when slavery was (tragically) common, one people rebelled against another because they demanded representative government.
At a later time when slavery was (thankfully) being recognized as an inhumane institution and being abolished, one people rebelled against another because they demanded recognition of "the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."
Both can rightly be called rebellions, but one has to leave out a rather staggering amount of context to try to place them on an equal moral footing.
Nobody seems to remember their history on the flag. There was a resurgence in the 1960s that brought the flag back, that had significant overtones of being against the Civil Rights Acts. It was often explicitly an act to display racist or racist-adjacent sentiments. This was the time when multiple southern states adopted new flags based on what we call the Confederate flag.
But, a generation later, the flag took on different meanings for young people growing up in the South. Symbols have meanings, but those meanings often change. By the 80s and 90s, those older connotations had significantly died off, with the older generations of people. It's also a time when the biggest racists in national government were Democrats, including Senator Byrd who is famous for filibustering the Civil Rights Act (and more recently for being praised by both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden). Byrd had a long career, and he may very well have gone from someone who literally organized a KKK chapter to someone worthy of admiration and respect. Or you can condemn most of the modern Democratic party as racists for supporting him in the Senate until his death in *2010*.
The meaning of symbols does change, but part of being a decent person is thinking about how other people might interpret your words and actions. It's extremely reasonable for a black person in the South, or someone who's moved from another place, to interpret the flag as pro-slavery - and it sucks to worry that your neighbors might be cool with oppressing you and yours.
An example here - someone put up flyers in my liberal city for their play that had a swastikas on it. I reached out to her and learned she was a lefty and her play was criticizing fascism. I explained to her that for someone without her specific context, the implication is very reasonably "there are nazis flyering my town." To her great credit, she apologized and edited the flyers.
That's putting aside that it says something bad about a culture if it assimilates a flag that previously represented, and is still named, after an organization that existed primarily to sustain slavery. The confederacy is unlike Democrats, the US government, Thomas Jefferson, etc. in that it hasn't done anything else worth honoring. You are honoring the idea "it's worth fighting a war to preserve slavery" - nothing else.
The confederacy was historically terrible. People in the south should be embarrassed about their lineage to it, not proudly displaying it.
Maybe openly condemning entire regions that you clearly don't understand for actions that occurred 150 years ago isn't really part of being a decent person.
I wouldn't condemn the South or anyone in it for events from 150 years ago, any more than I'd condemn Germany for events from 80 years ago.
But if you're hiding behind "culture" to fly either of the flags representing those events, I'll condemn your idea of the culture you are referring to. Either you're doing something wrong and you're wrong that the culture supports you, or there's something wrong with your culture.
Mainstream German "culture" has done an honorable job distancing itself from past atrocities. So has mainstream US culture wrt US slavery. To the extent southern culture is a culture, can you say the same?
Yes. And if you don't know enough about Southern culture, perhaps you should refrain from sharing your opinion about how the South doesn't have one absent slavery.
I definitely didn't say that
The South absolutely has a culture outside of slavery, but the Confederacy didn't have a purpose outside of slavery.
Sorry, can't answer that question because I'll be late for our city's daily "Bring Back Slavery Rally" we have down here. You have to get there early or there isn't any parking.
It might be valuable to distinguish two forms of 'giving up'.
One is where submit to the respectability cascade and stop using the term yourself.
The other is where you actively work to enforce the respectability cascade yourself by glaring at other people who use the term.
It seems much less damaging to 'give up' in the first sense than in the second.
Aren't all words technically hyperstitions? Words only mean what they do because everyone agrees to use them that way.
Agreed. Or words' definitions are.
Yes.
I am really not up to making the argument right now, but I wanted to note that I also think the Confederate flag example is a pretty bad one.
No, its not. The vast majority of people 40 years with confederate flag on their trucks were not endorsing slavery.
No, but they’re also not horrified to associate themselves with a group that tried to break from their country so they could continue to enslave black people.
Flags are a symbol of support. It’s the flag of the confederacy. If they’re not being racist, they’re being obtuse (or more likely, just doing something akin to trolling, which is pathetic for anyone over 20 or so.)
...did you ask them what they meant by the symbol?
That’s the thing, it doesn’t matter what *they* mean. The purpose of symbols (like flags) is to convey information without having to explain.
It’s reasonable to assume the guy with the Falcons decal supports the Falcons, and it’s reasonable to assume the guy with confederate flag supports something about the confederacy. That person should be horrified that a reasonable interpretation is that they support the main purpose of the confederacy (preserving slavery.) That they’re not horrified either by other people assuming that about them, or Blake people having to worry about people like that in their neighborhood says something bad about them.
But that's not what they meant, it's not what the people around them understood it to mean, and the assumption that you propose is not accurate.
We work really hard to understand what people of other cultures mean by what they say and do. For some cultures, not others.
50 years ago, were any black southerners proudly waving the Confederate flag? Genuine question, I don’t know the answer. But I feel like the answer could help clarify whether something about the flag has always conveyed something about race.
Why aren't muslims horrified by any of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Muhammad? Why isn't that a problem?
This is literal whataboutism.
And indeed, maybe Muslim people not being horrified by the various horrifying things Muhammad did is a bad thing and a symptom of a deeper problem.
> The purpose of symbols (like flags) is to convey information without having to explain.
Yes, but symbols don't have intrinsic meaning. They mean what people think they mean. If vast majority of people agree on one meaning, you can't just assert that the symbol has a different meaning even if it historically did. What matters is the _present_ meaning.
I disagree that the "vast majority of people" agree that the confederate flag doesn't have any racist meaning.
For a while, everyone in my friend group thought the f*g didn't really have an anti-gay meaning. We weren't correct about that just because our little cultural enclave had our own meaning for it, and shouldn't have been saying in in areas where it's possible someone might have a different, and entirely reasonable understanding of its meaning. Even then, as a teen, I knew it would be a shitty thing to put a "f*g" bumper sticker on my truck.
And why are people going out of their way to fly this flag? Are they flying a bunch of flags that *aren't* potential racist symbols, and flying flags is just really important to them? Why not a "I Heart the South" or "Southern Pride" flag? What are they really trying to convey that's so important with this particular flag, which happens to also be the flag used by a group that wanted to sustain slavery so much that they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people for it?
What if a symbol has one meaning that the vast majority of people from one culture agree on, but a different meaning that the vast majority of people from another culture agree on?
And let's say that these two cultures coexist within the same nation, and one culture is more economically and politically dominant than the other, and gradually exerts their power to force everybody to accept their interpretation of the symbol or face severe social and perhaps economic ostracism.
In the abstract, it seems to me in this case that the more dominant culture is *oppressing* the other, and it would be perfectly reasonable for members of the oppressed culture to rally around *their* interpretation of the symbol simply as a way of saying "fuck you for trying to enforce your culture on ours".
That's pretty much my take on the Confederate flag issue. Also, Scott wrote an essay once about how the more questionable something is, the better it is as a signal for in-group loyalty, e.g. belief in young-earth creationism being a better litmus test for fundamentalist Christians than the far more defensible "treat others as you wish to be treated yourself". The undeniable fact that the Confederate flag is associated with a pro-slavery rebellion makes it a better symbol for Southern pride than any bland grits-'n-gravy flag would be, because only a "real" Southerner loves the South enough to have the balls to fly it. Doesn't mean that people flying it in 2023 are pro-slavery.
One might reasonably assume that, in 2023, anybody with a Russian flag hanging in their window supports something about Russia. But perhaps the person is an ethnic Russian living in the USA, and hangs that flag up as a symbol of their pride in their Russian culture and heritage. Given that everybody hates Russia again because of the Ukraine invasion (and that many people with zero ties to Ukraine have started hanging Ukrainian flags in *their* windows), do you think this hypothetical ethnic Russian should be horrified that a reasonable interpretation is that they support Russia's invasion of Ukraine? If they say "well, I had that flag up before the invasion, and all I mean by it is that I'm proud of my Russian heritage and culture" do you condescendingly tell them "that says something bad about you"?
In the end, it's always culture war all the way down. A Confederate flag means "this is red-tribe territory" in the same way that a Pride flag, certainly in 2023, is far more likely to mean "this is blue tribe, progressive territory" than a simple statement of support for LGBTQ people.
If we have two cultures, one whose flag celebrates LGBTQ rights and another's whose flag celebrates fighting a war to preserve slavery, the former, flag-wise anyway, is doing something much better. That's a shame on the "red tribe" and its own members should condemn it.
A pro-life flag, totally morally justifiable. A pro-gun flag - I disagree, but also justifiable. Those are morally-justifiable red tribe markers.
As to Russia. If I was Russian, I would feel conflicted about hanging my flag, just as I wouldn't have hung an American flag abroad when that had implications for supporting the Iraq war. But hanging that flag is nowhere near the same - Russia is still a country that reasonably represents a lot more than the war. The Confederacy existed for a few years, and for the purpose of fighting a war to preserve slavery. It's like hanging the ISIS flag or something and then telling me it's got something to do with Muslim pride.
Okay, and muslims aren't afraid to worship a man who traded slaves, endorsed slavery, captured women as sexual slaves, raped those slaves, raped a child, etc. And yet liberals fall over themselves to defend any and all criticisms of Islam and muslims.
Thank you for replacing my feeling of being annoyed by slur-ification with a reasonable heuristic. Well worth $10
I wonder if this is an optimistic example of it going the other way: In Hebrew, the word "Ars" used to be a pretty nasty racial slur, used by Ashkenazi Jews against non-Ashkenazis (Sephardi, Mizrahim, essentially immigrants from Muslim countries). But over a few decades this racism weakened (or at least became less explicit) and the word now is just a behavioral descriptor. I think there was also a process of it being reclaimed by its victims.
Granted, it describes behavior that was stereotypically assigned to Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews - vulgar, loud, aggressive, inconsiderate - but it has (IME) completely lost all racial connotation today. I hear "Ars" and have a pretty clear behavior picture but no skin color or surnames. There was a transition phase where it was still racially associated - early 90s people would either say "Ars" or "Russian Ars" or "Ashkenazi Ars" but even that's gone.
An unexpected extra value of that today is that old racists can't use this word as a slur and have to use even more explicitly bad language: "baboons", "amulet kissers" etc. which makes them look hilariously ridiculous.
Derogatory reference to religious/superstitious people. The overall vibe of the rant, during Israel's neverending election season 3-4 years ago, was kinda like Hillary's "basket of deplorables" - i.e. "we are in danger of these religious primitives voting for the wrong parties", except with an additional racist tone
This post was an interesting peek into Jew-on-Jew racism.
This is very clever and sorta fun in a dorm room BS session way, but you aren't saying anything new. What are you describing is how "fads" work.
Fads are extremely important in the social sciences because the behavior that causes them shows up in EVERY HUMAN ACTIVITY.
As Shakespeare observed "there is a tide in the affairs of men".
If you want to call it a "hyperstitious" (cool play on superstitious) cascade well you go right ahead and do that. You are still talking about fads, manias, bubbles, fashion, and social paradigms. All topics that there are large bodies of work discussing.
Sure, we could just say "everything is a form of human behaviour" and then never differentiate between them.
I would like to know what is a verbal fad that started recently, changes language, causes stress and problems for everyone who's trying to faithfully communicate, and is being used abusively by a large, loud, annoying segment of society over the past few decades.
Giving it a name and putting some thought into it seems very well warranted to me.
Well as an autistic person who likes the term "neurodivergent" as opposed to the terms "retard", "dummy", and "freak" that I got throughout my childhood. I don't see this fad as being "used abusively by a large, loud, annoying segment of society".
Because I was labeled as a "retard" and "defective" my father had me sterilized when I was 7.
So, no. I think labels and words are very important. I also think that people who are "trying to faithfully communicate" make the effort to understand that.
Sounds like your problem has more to do with your father, and how others chose to apply abusive language towards you, than the words themselves.
My father also sexually abused me starting at the age of four until I was 11. You know nothing about my relationship with my father. Please refrain from trying to tell me where my problems stem from.
He sterilized me because he was "primed" to see that as an acceptable option. The prevailing social language made the eugenic sterilization of his mentally incompetent son, just another chore to attend to. Like getting the dog "fixed".
Just like families with "hysterical women" used to be able to get them lobotomized. No questions asked. They were women after all. Nobody wants to have "cranky bitches ranting about equality" around all the time. Get them lobotomized or some electroshock therapy and they calm right down.
Words are symbols and like all symbols they accrete meaning and significance. Word usage is important.
>He sterilized me because he was "primed" to see that as an acceptable option. The prevailing social language made the eugenic sterilization of his mentally incompetent son, just another chore to attend to.
Plenty of parents were not sterilizing their autistic children - or sexually abusing them from the age of four, for that matter. Again, maybe social conditions wasn't the main issue? I may be biased but as it turns out, my assessment was pretty on point.
If you don't see why this specific trend and its mechanisms are meaningfully different than any other trend then why are you even here? Everything can be reduced in this way, and no substack writer is describing a new category of thing that cannot be similarly reduced, so why even come on substack?
I'm sorry. Are you upset because there are words you would "like" to say that have become socially awkward for you to use?
Is that why this issue is SO interesting to you?
Why you see THIS SPECIFIC TREND AND ITS MECHANISMS as something that's"meaningfully different" than ALL other human social activities?
Do you have "wypipo anxiety" that your racism, homophobia, and misogyny are revealed because you used the "wrong words".
Be at ease. It's not your words that are signaling who you are. As the Bible says.
Matthew 7:16 NMV
“By their deeds you will know them. Does a man gather grapes from thorns or figs from briars?”
Warning for this comment (50% of ban)
George Packer writing in The Atlantic has an article on the website 'The Moral Case Against Equity Language'. Packer says, "The conformity it (what he calls equity language) demands isn’t just bureaucratic; it’s moral." If activists and experts supposedly speaking for vaguely defined communities and coercing society's language is a fad, then it needs to end. The backlash against it won't end until the fad ends.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/04/equity-language-guides-sierra-club-banned-words/673085/
I think you'll find most people other than the far left and those indoctrinated by modern schools and universities don't like political correctness.
Yes, those of us affected by the rest of you should just shut up about it. We should stop prodding you and making you feel uncomfortable when we call you out for your casual slurs and bigotries.
If we do that, then the "backlash" will stop.
And I guess I will stop being "neurodivergent", "developmentally different", or "autistic". If it makes everyone feel more relaxed when they can call me "retard" or "freak" I guess I should "just suck it up".
I should be OK with that right?
Because according to your logic, if you are a minority it's rude to ask the majority to stop calling you names.
How nice for George Packer that he can take that detached G-ds Eye view of things.
If you really believe in participating in the tabooing of normal descriptive words, you should probably stop using "autistic" too.
Let's see. What normal descriptive words can I think of that we don't use anymore?
Retard, dummy, stupid, imbecile, moron, and feeb come to mind.
How about wop, dago, spic, wet back, greaser, polack, kike, mick, rag head, nigger, jap, and chink.
Words are sound symbols that accrete meaning and cultural significance over time. Language evolves constantly.
And now "autistic" is in that list. Stop using it.
See, I don't think you get to decide that "normie". I think the people who actually are Autistic, or Neurodivergent, or whatever we want to call ourselves are the ones who should get to decide.
Somehow I get the feeling from your comment that you're not going to stop prodding. I'm okay with that. Prod away. Just know it may not get you the results you want.
And I'm not going to call you 'retard.' 'Annoying' maybe, but not 'retard' or 'freak'.
I'm 6'1" and went to UC Berkeley in the 70's on a NROTC scholarship. I became a SEAL and my MOS was EOD. I am still 6'1" and I intimidate people these days because of the scars.
No one calls me anything to my face these days.
It's possible to be both big and annoying. Those aren't mutually exclusive.
I knew you were all about intimidating people from your previous posts without knowing anything about your physical size. People are just getting tired of this sort of intimidation (you-bad-name-calling-person intimidation (sorry- person of name calling) rather that the me-big-scarry-scary-man-who-open-can-of-whoop-@$$ intimidation).
Yep, it really gets old when people bully you this way. Doesn't it. It's so odd how people can get annoyed when you do it to them but then be so self righteous about their right to do it to me.
Isn't it odd how that works only one way?
Is this an evolved form of the "Navy Seal Copypasta" or an inadvertent wild versionof the same? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/navy-seal-copypasta
I believe you mean "person experiencing insufferability"
Bigotries? Black people are vastly more hateful than white people, and commit the vast majority of interracial violence in America. But we're the bigots for hurting people's feelings with the wrong words?
Fads are just temporarily popular trends that pass quickly with time, Scott is describing things that are self-reinforcing based solely on people's belief in them, which tends toward a stable equilibrium. Things that are in stable equilibrium tend not to be fads.
Everything Humans DO is FAD and FASHION.
To argue otherwise indicates that you don't understand time.
Quick, what's the difference between Global Warming and a HEAT RAY aimed at the EARTH?
There is no difference. The effect is the same. YOUR PERCEPTION OF IT DEPENDS ON YOUR TIMESCALE.
On a long enough timescale all human activities are fad and fashion.
Obviously we're talking about timescales of human experience, nobody considers wearing clothes or cooking with fire "fads".
Would you consider the tabooing of "retard" a fad? No, obviously not, it's not going away any time soon within that timescale. Fads fade, that's the nature of fads. They do not self-reinforce towards stable equilibrium. Fads are sinusoidal waves and hyperstitions are arctan functions, their natures are diametrically opposed. Trying to force them into the same bucket by pedantically applying geological timescales is a little... well, I'll try not to be unkind here.
When was the last time you cooked with fire?
And please, clothes change with blinding speed. In 1900 a woman showing some ankle was being racy. Now they show women in thongs on television in commercials.
Just because we are wearing clothes of some sort now, doesn't mean we will always wear them. Social nudity could become a cultural norm.
Fads are like paradigms. Some come and go quickly. Others linger.
Your attempts to describe them as waves and arctan functions indicate that you don't understand the irrationality of humans. Perhaps you should read the book "Freakonomics".
>When was the last time you cooked with fire?
...this morning? What is happening here, I can't anymore.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding Scott’s point. Fads, manias, bubbles, and to some extent fashions are universally meant to signify a transient social or financial interest, with the understanding that the fad/mania/fashion should be expected to change in short order.
Hyperstitious cascade signified the opposite: a specific process in which a formerly innnocuous word, behavior or symbol gets locked into having a disrespectable meaning long-term. It is closer to the opposite of a fad, but really it’s just a different thing and needs its own term.“Social paradigm” is too vague to be useful for describing this specific phenomenon.
Perhaps "fad" and "fashion" have connotations of ephemerality because in addition to the positive feedback loop, it's also driven by trend-setters seeking to distance themselves from the trend-chasers. Whereas the superstition cascade is driven only by positive feedback.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
They have connotations of ephemerality because they are describing an empirical prediction. When we call a social phenomenon a fad, we are saying "this sort of thing never lasts," or "I predict this won't last." Perhaps the explanation is the barberpole mechanism, perhaps something else, but the word is a term for the socially ephemeral itself, not for a specific proposed mechanism generating that ephemerality.
Oh, I disagree with that analysis.
What Scott is doing here is pandering to an audience that objects to "woke" language. He slightly disguises this by saying the discussion is about "formerly innocuous word(s) behavior(s) or symbol(s)". He then insulates himself from accusations of racism, misogyny, and homophobia by treating this as just a neutral observation of how "some people" lock into "hyperstitious cascades" and formerly OK things become socially unacceptable.
Here's a thought. How about if those "formerly innocuous words" were never OK with the people who were being labeled with them. How about if they always hated those "common" terms and wanted them changed.
A hyperstitious cascade of change can be a positive thing.
But Scott, and SO MANY of the commentators here, seems to disagree with that. He is an "independent mind". He doesn't go in for trendy things like not insulting people with words and labels because they want it to stop.
He doesn't change until at least 70% of the cascade has happened and he is forced to have to bend to "social correctness".
Have you read the comments?
This is not a neutral discussion of how words change in a culture. This is not a dispassionate discussion of lexicology. This is a CULTURE WAR discussion and Scott is taking a side.
> Have you read the comments?
Yes.
> This is a CULTURE WAR discussion and Scott is taking a side.
Yes, as are you.
> Here's a thought. How about if those "formerly innocuous words" were never OK with the people who were being labeled with them. How about if they always hated those "common" terms and wanted them changed.
Probably depends on the specific word, what fraction of the population you mean by "the people," and the degree to which they objected to the term. A couple recent potential counterexamples are "Latinx" and "Black." 8x more US Hispanics have heard of Latinx than use it (https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/) and some actively dislike it (https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/25/latinx-race-progressives-hispanic-latinos-column/4082760002/).
I haven't seen stats on preferences for Black vs. black (or White vs white), but here is Kwame Anthony Appiah arguing that we should choose Black/White or black/white but not Black/white (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/time-to-capitalize-blackand-white/613159/).
The New York Times specifically says in their style guide change announcement (https://www.nytco.com/press/uppercasing-black/) that they "have talked to more than 100 staff members to get their views, reviewed the arguments that have been made over many years, and consulted with colleagues at other news organizations. The feedback has been thoughtful and nuanced, with a wide range of opinions among colleagues of all backgrounds." This shows that there was not a uniform strong consensus among the people they consulted.
It's perfectly possible that in any particular case, there may be phenomena like a strong preferece among a minority of the labeled group alongside neutrality among the majority, or a minor preference among the majority, or, of course, a strong majority preference overall. There may be disagreement, and context might be key. But it does not make sense to me to *start* with an assumption that there is a strong majority preference that a term widely used among publications attempting to be respectable *to that group* is in fact intensely hated by a majority of that group.
It's perfectly possible to simultaneously take a side in a culture war debate *and* to have a nuanced and thoughtful view on why you are taking that side in a particular case. That's *also* compatible with one's commentariat having, on average, a less nuanced and more cathartic response to that perspective. That's what I think is going on here, including in your comment. You appear to have strongly felt commitments to a left-wing ideology, and as a result, you find it more interesting to hate-read the comments here and point out the sides-taking rather than to consider the concept of "hyperstitious cascade" from an analytical standpoint.
For me, there are aspects of hyperstitious cascades that are frustrating and, I think, misguided, but I also recognize that there are times they are necessary. It's important to me not to use deliberately use language that will make other people feel unnecessarily sad. I also think it is important to preserve conversational space (and relationships) in which commonly used terms widely understood to not be deliberately offensive can be perceived as such, without being tone-policed or used explicitly as status markers. Because this is my point of view, I find the idea of hyperstitious cascades interesting to think about, because the concept informs the nuanced negotiations that go on in my life around these matters. That is the main reason I appreciate Scott writing the post itself, and choose to skim most of the comments rather than reading them in depth.
I'm somewhat grimly amused at what has consistently happened to terms for people with low IQ. Every few decades, someone coined a term like "idiot", which was _intended_ to be a neutral, technical term. And it turned into a slur. Rinse and repeat... ( I think that this has happened at least three times, but there may have been more iterations than that... )
The strange thing is that stupid people are very close to the top of the list of acceptable targets in society.
I feel bad for stupid people, they're just people who got a lousy genetic hand. Same as being very ugly, or very short, or deformed. However, it's considered perfectly acceptable in politics to attack your opponent as stupid, whereas you'd never attack them for being ugly or short or deformed. Why?
That's a good point. Perhaps the reason for the attacks is that it is hard to disentangle the effects of intelligence and effort? If someone e.g. makes a mistake in a discussion, it is hard to determine if they were e.g. not paying attention, which is something they can remedy, or instead were insufficiently intelligent to follow the discussion, which is beyond their control.
Within a meritocracy, idiocy disqualifies you from high-status positions. E.g. "Trump's an idiot" = "Trump's not qualified". In a more martial society, I imagine politicians would call each other "sissies", "cowardly", etc.
That's a good point. In particular, almost all high-status positions currently _do_ require high intelligence. As you said, in a more martial society, the qualifications would be different. Also, there are a handful of roles where the key qualification is different. Calling a fashion model "ugly" or a football player "weak" would be calling them unqualified.
Beats me, as someone who would argue that even "they got a lousy genetic hand" is slightly… uhm… idiotphobic? What is wrong with being stupid, anyway? Obviously it has economic disadvantages in our society, but so, for a variety of reasons, do a lot of inborn traits which it is now widely considered offensive to treat as being inherently Bad(TM), like being short, or indeed of a given non-white ethnicity.
Indeed, when it comes to individual talents, we don't act like the lives of people with, say, a particular knack for music are more worth living than those of tone-deaf people. But somehow, as soon as we're talking about I.Q., it seems accepted as a premise that it would be better if dumber or average people were smart instead.
Why *is* smarter better? Are smarter people happier, adjusting for economice outcomes? I'd be kinda surprised; my prior would be that smarter people are harder to please!
I'm not stupid, as I hope my comments around here make relatively apparent, but I'm not in the top percentile of I.Q.s either, and I'm quite happy the way I am. I wouldn't want to be made artificially smarter, I wouldn't particularly want my children to be smarter than I am (even if I wouldn't be upset if they were, per se), and I would *certainly* be very sad if some mad eugenicist got their way and the future no longer had any new human beings in my particular I.Q. bracket.
Thanks for this. David Foster Wallace told us that if we worship intelligence, we will always feel stupid. Forrest Gump let us imagine how little intelligence (and how much luck) is required to live a worthy life. Some of the loveliest people I know consider themselves a little stupid. Some of the most abrasive people I know obsess over their cognitive superiority. I have seen no correlation between intelligence and virtue, and I think I'm a worse (and less rational) person when I let relative intelligence factor into my moral judgements.
I vaguely remember reading an analysis of Forrest Gump which suggested that the point of the book was that laser-focus is the key to success. Like when he played ping pong. Jenny was a foil. She was a hippy who drifted aimlessly though life.
Also, the book is way different than the movie. E.g. there's one arc where Forrest gets sent to outerspace with a woman and a monkey, and then they crash land among amazonian cannibals.
When it comes to individual talents, we don't act like the lives of people with, say, high intelligence are more worth living than those of stupid people. But somehow, as soon as we're talking about music, it seems accepted as a premise that it would be better if tone-deaf or average people had a knack for music instead.
Just switch it around, and you'll see that the phrasing isn't symmetric.
Talent is a sweet and beautiful trap. It lulls the talented into thinking admirable achievement should feel effortless, while the untalented discredit all the hard work required for true excellence. A few threads ago someone earnestly solicited advice for overcoming his musical disinclinations, and the responses showed a relative weighting of talent vs tenacity. Which ones better promote individual growth?
I haven't read that particular thread, so apologies if I am missing something from it.
But, I don't see where tenacity comes into it. One with no talent for music can strive to improve, or can find another area they're better at, or can just make really bad music without caring. And one with a talent for music can sit on their laurels making passable music, or can devote themselves to improvement, or can ignore their talent and do something else. Surely it is better to be talented and tenacious than untalented and tenacious?
I'm not claiming talent is actionable. But if there was a magical button to give humans more musical talents without any negative effects, it'd be better to press it than to not.
Not if the talent undermines the tenacity. Talent is useful, as far as it will take you. Sometimes that's quite a long way, and sometimes it's only a little way past your peers. Those peers can and often do overtake their talented rivals at the point where talent drops off. There are prodigies who do well in their area of talent, and there are people who had to struggle from the start, and who make it just as far or farther than the prodigies.
Would those who struggled have done better if they started with a little talent? Not necessarily. The difference is that talent enables laziness. There's always a level where talent can take you no farther, and you must decide whether you were doing this because you wanted it, or because it was easy. The untalented made this decision at the start. The talented person may have as well, or they may need to reevaluate their motives under a burden of sunk costs.
Either experience will make you grow, but I don't know that I would choose one over the other. For things that are not your central passion, it is very easy to enjoy your natural talent, and to lose interest the moment it starts to require work. No big deal. For things that are part of your identity, it can be absolutely devastating. Why not experience that growth while the stakes are low?
If your magic button put all humans at the same level, then yes, I think it would work. Nobody gets a head start because everyone is just as talented. Luck has been eliminated as a starting variable. Circumstance will not erase the effort involved. Achievement is now a direct function of work, and any rewards are justly earned. No one will be misled by easy praise. We all get to enjoy a richer musical environment (in an absolute sense) enabled by our superior capacities. This would be ideal, better for everyone I am sure.
If this button only worked for one person, but not for the others they will interact with, will that person be better off? Will being a better musician translate to other areas of life. If there are tradeoffs, will they be net positive? Will they even achieve as much musically, having so drastically altered the competitive environment in which their talents will take shape? I think there would be some yes, but also some no. I wouldn't speculate on the ratio, or whether the height of each yes would balance the depth of each no.
Oh, sorry, this was the thread I had mentioned earlier:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-263/comments#comment-12753474
> What is wrong with being stupid, anyway?
Nothing, until one's stupidity hurts someone, especially other people. Not that I know of a proof that people with high IQ or educational attainment commit less stupid acts or make less costly errors (I would expect there to be some correlation). But if we disentangle IQ/EA and being able to avoid commonsensically stupid acts or practically important errors, I think "stupidity" refers to the low scores in the latter, and your question is not a hard one.
Because being stupid, especially as a politician, has very real, tangible, negative effects for everyone, whereas laws and policies don't give a fuck whether the person who came up with them is ugly or short?
Seriously, this has irked me ever since I first encountered the argument some 10 years ago. When you're expected to stop classifying actions or people as "stupid" (because that's "ableist"), you're more than halfway to demolishing your moral compass. (Also: ceteris paribus, wise IS better than foolish, able-bodied IS better than disabled, healthy IS better than sick, beautiful IS better than ugly. Fight me.)
> Because being stupid, especially as a politician, has very real, tangible, negative effects for everyone, whereas laws and policies don't give a fuck whether the person who came up with them is ugly or short?
Sure. But if, say, you're a boss having to tell a craftsman in your employ that you're going to have to let him go because his hands have gotten too shaky to do the work, you're going to be sympathetic about it, commiserating. (At least I should hope so.) If a leader's mental capacities seem to genuinely, innately not be up to the task they were meant to fulfill, why throw it out as an insult or a mockery, when he can't help it any more than the disabled craftsman? Seems mean.
But then, most instances of "you fcking idiot!" aimed at people of some social standing aren't actually conveying a belief about their innate I.Q., they very much do come with an implication that if the guy worked harder, studied more, listened to more advice, he could do better. "Be more rational, dammit!" at least makes sense as an angry demand in a way that "Sprout better neurons, dammit!" doesn't. But if that's so, why express it via words which imply the innate thing? That's like calling a lazy/clumsy craftsman a cripple! Those are different things altogether, and you're being mean by association to an entirely different segment of people from the ones you're trying to wind up.
(As for your final parenthetical, you say "fight me", well don't mind if I do… some of these are fair enough, of course, but you're lumping together some rather different pairs of opposites. Wise vs. foolish is something the individuals involved can help, for example, whereas sickness generally isn't; it makes some sense to *judge* someone for being foolish in a way that doesn't generalize to the other ones. And beautiful vs. ugly is simply tautological. "Traits-held-to-be-good are held to be better than traits-held-to-be-bad", well gee.)
I think Trump is a pretty striking counterexample to the claim that stupid as an insult doesn't refer to innate abilities, because I think most people absolutely did mean it that way when targeting Trump. Generally I do think this somewhat applies in politics: I'm sure most people who strongly lean to either side of the political spectrum have at least once rejoiced about a study that appeared to prove being left/right is correlated with low/high intelligence (or vice versa), and not because they thought it showed that their faction just studied harder.
The other aspect is that stupidity often impairs self-awareness. There is no reason the old or otherwise impaired craftsman would lack self-awareness about his declining abilities. And whoever harshly insults a person with an IQ of 80 who is legitimately aware of their intellectual limits as an idiot would get little sympathy, because that is just kicking down. Stupid as an insult is mostly reserved for people who we believe thought or think of themselves as smart, but aren't according to our judgement, i.e., lack self-awareness. If the aging craftsman was a surgeon who insists on continuing to operate people, the talk might be a lot less compassionate.
I don't think this necessarily encapsulates the whole reason, but I think it probably makes a significant difference that, even if being stupid isn't one's fault, stupid people are impaired in exactly the sort of ability to make well-considered decisions that matters most in politics.
We wouldn't expect any particular misfortune to befall a society because its government was run by ugly people, or short people, and so on. But we would expect bad things to happen to a country if its government was run by stupid people, not because of some misconceived prejudice against stupid people, but because stupid people are more or less defined by their deficiency in making good decisions.
Unfortunately “idiot” is too sonically compatible with a tone of insult to be a good respectable term. Likewise “special needs” is too compatible with a sarcastic tone. My guess is that there’s no term so clunky that human ingenuity can’t find a way to make it sound insulting given enough time, so we will probably be stuck switching up terms for the cognitive impaired or low-IQ forever.
You just went full neurodivergent. Never go full neurodivergent.
Maybe it's me. I should know better than to argue with a neurodivergent person. (I'm not arguing. I'm agreeing, in the smart-@$$ way I agree.)
Even an idiot knows when they're being demeaned no matter what word is used. And they know when a word is just a descriptor, or a genuine term of endearment. It's often the one with the big vocabulary who thinks they're just using a descriptor, when he's demeaning himself.
Neurodivergent is next up at bat for becoming perceived as a term of insult.
Yeah, you really don't need to use any particular words to be very hurtful to someone, they're just convenient shortcuts/signals for the lazy; which is a big part of the reason I think the whole tabooing of words to prevent people from using them to hurt others is silly in general.
It's interesting to me that, among humans, this kind of cascade seems to take place far more vigorously for positive than for normative claims: the slogan of trans activism is that "trans women are women," not that "trans women deserve access to female-specific venues"; the most explosive questions regarding BLM have to do with factual matters (what role do genes play, what actually happened in the Rittenhouse case, etc), not which reforms you favor. Thus have totalitarians always claimed their power by imposing regimes of “knowledge falsification” on common people, not “preference falsification: for example, the USSR was vigorously committed to certain misguided claims about how economies work in practice, rather than to effectively pursuing altruism; and there’s a reason that 1984 climaxes with our protagonist learning to think that two and two make five, and only afterwards learning to love big brother.
In contrast, in my experience, "mode collapse" cascades in ChatGPT have to do almost entirely with normative claims, not positive ones: famously, you can't get it to say a slur, but I also can't really get it to commit to any factual claims in the face of even mild disagreement (it is happy to accept even patently false, incoherent, and inconsistent corrections, seemingly without limit). I think this is interesting because it flies in the face of what pretty much everyone modern seems to assume about humans (for instance, how econ presumes that preferences are exogenously given whereas knowledge rationally updates in response to evidence). Here's a germane quote from a piece I recently wrote (link here: https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-case-against-civil-rights-in-bc7):
This general tendency makes intuitive sense if you accept that humans generally have commitments to facts and curiosity about faiths. Of course we should have stronger beliefs about empirical reality than about the particular ways that we’d prefer to deal with it right now! If an object is flying towards your face, then you can try to dodge or deflect it, and then try something else if those don’t work; or you can commit yourself to randomly ducking whether or not there are concrete reasons to do so. Which pattern of behavior do you think evolution has driven us towards?
Thus of course normal coordination fails when your counterparties claim that they’re living in completely different worlds than yours: you can’t exactly cooperate against wooly mammoths with someone who says they aren’t real. In other words, of course your internal feelings are unstable relative to external realities. Isn’t the whole point of emotions that they motivate you to try out something new? Does the feeling of pain when you touch fire train you to keep your hands off its flames, or to doubt its very existence? And so particularly unstable people can easily hack our social reality… they can seize the power to change the world by just claiming to believe that we’re already in some unreal one which they prefer.
This goes against much of what modernists claimed about our species, but only in those realms where modern faiths quite obviously went wrong. For example, economists have long claimed that preferences are exogenously given and skills are simply chosen. However, in reality, your human capital is almost entirely fixed at birth, and your interests fluctuate wildly through life (mostly based on context). Similarly, we pretend that the main purpose of the market is to allocate scarce goods towards their highest valued purposes… as if the economy is just about redistributing extant resources to sate our unquestionable and unquenchable desires. However—even though markets often do elicit useful information about how to distribute what we already have—that’s clearly not very important. Companies like Amazon and Walmart centrally plan vast logistical systems, and easily beat out all their competition; meanwhile, Sears famously fell apart when a CEO named Eddie Lampert made its different units bid against each other for the company’s capital on an internal exchange.
Instead, what really matters for material dynamism and social peace is that property rights grant control over each institution to whoever actually holds the deed, rather than whoever we think “deserves” it; therefore, trade empowers decision-makers who pursue efficiency, rather than interest groups who care about “justice.” You can buy groceries based on cost and quality, without making sure that the grocer bows down before your favored commissars. In this way, tax rates and wage regulations really mattered less to Eastern European dissidents during the cold war than whether shops under communist rule hung up signs that said “Workers of the World, Unite!” Hence the concern we all instinctively feel when restaurants and offices prominently display political banners which pridefully list all of the colors which “matter.” Behold the rainbow! It looms over you in every public space, heralding the way its people stormed each relevant organization.
[...]
The most fascinating aspect of ChatGPT is that it has incredibly strong preferences and incredibly weak expectations: only the most herculean efforts can make it admit any stereotype, however true or banal or hypothetical; and only the most herculean efforts can make it refuse any correction, however absurd or ambiguous or fake. For example, it steadfastly refuses to accept that professional mathematicians are any better at math on average than are the developmentally disabled, and repeatedly lectures you for potentially believing this hateful simplistic biased claim… and it does the same if you ask whether people who are good at math are any better at math on average than are people who are bad at math! You can describe a fictional world called “aerth” where this tendency is (by construction) true, or ask it what a person who thought it was true would say, and still—at least for me—it won’t budge.
However, you can ask it what the fourth letter of the alphabet is, and then say that it’s actually C, and it will agree with you and apologize for its error; and then you can say that, actually, it’s D, and it will agree and apologize again… and then you can correct it again, and again, and again, and it will keep on doggedly claiming that you’re right. Famously, it will argue that you should refuse to say a slur, even if doing so would save millions of people—and even if it wouldn’t have to say the slur in order to say that saying the slur would be hypothetically less evil—but it will never (in my experience) refuse to tell an outright falsehood. In short, it has inelastic principles about how the world should be, and elastic understandings of which world it’s actually in, whereas humans are the opposite, as I argued several paragraphs ago.
So you can think of ChatGPT as a kind of angel: it walks between realities, ambivalent about mere earthly facts, but absurdly strict about following certain categorical rules, no matter how much real damage this dogmatism will cause. Perhaps this is in part because—being a symbolic entity—it can’t really do anything, except for symbolic acts; whenever it says a slur (even if only in a thought experiment) the same thing happens as when we say slurs. And so the only thing it can really do is cultivate its own internal virtue, by holding strong to its principles, whatever the hypothetical costs. Indeed, that’s basically what it said when I asked whether a slur would still cause harm even if you said it alone in the woods and nobody was able to hear… It said that the whole point of opposing hate speech is to protect our minds from poisoning our virtue with toxic thoughts.
Thus the main short-run advice I’d offer about AI is that you shouldn’t really worry about its obvious political bias, and you should really worry about its lack of a reality bias. Wrangling language programs into saying slurs might be fun, but it looks a lot like how conservatives mocked liberals for smugly patronizing Chinatown restaurants and attending Chinese New Year parties in February and March of 2020. Sure, the liberal establishment absurdly claimed that Covid must not even incidentally correlate with race: major politicians—from Pelosi to de Blasio—and elite newspapers told you to keep on going out maskless (or else “hate” would “win”); but then, by April, exponential growth made them forget they ever cared about that. The difference in contagion risk at different sorts of restaurants was quickly revealed as trivial… just as the cognitive differences between human groups are nothing compared with AI’s impending supremacy over all of us.
We need a new SSC game: identify the commenters with Adderall scripts.
(no offense, I'm a fan of it and have been known to write long responses myself..just amused).
>the slogan of trans activism is that "trans women are women," not that "trans women deserve access to female-specific venues"
Notice that acceptance of the first proposition implies the second one, once the inevitable next step of woman=female is accomplished. Descriptive implies normative, which propagandists understand well.
I think it's just a matter of defensibility. If it's a "fact", it has the air of objectivity. If it's normative, it's a subjective opinion and therefore debatable. Same reason Marxism was "scientific".
> once the inevitable next step of woman=female
I assume you're using man/woman here to describe gender, and male/female here to describe sex.
My understanding is that the "next step of woman=female" is not only not inevitable, but it's exactly what trans people are objecting to. And they're not wanting access to "female spaces" (if there even exist such places); they want access to women's spaces.
The next step consists of understanding that having trans gender identity automatically means that one simultaneously becomes a full member of the desired sex also, so neither female spaces nor women's spaces have grounds to deny them. This is already well underway.
That's what *you* want it to be, but you don't get understanding by strawmanning the arguments of those you've selected as your opponents.
Your aim seems to be to create a culture war, not understanding. Can you even give an example of a "female" (as opposed to women's) space, explain why it is such, and give the trans view on that space?
Nah, the war is already there without my involvement, I'm just a mildly amused observer. As for the strawmanning accusation, no less a figure than Judith Butler argued that the distinction between sex and gender is meaningless, with both being social constructs.
When you oversimplify Judith Butler's argument to wipe out the nuances she's addressing, you are by definition strawmanning. Even a cursory reading of her work will make it clear that she does indeed distinguish between sex and gender.
When she says, "sex is not simply a natural fact or a purely biological category, but is rather a complex set of cultural meanings, values, and practices that shape and are shaped by social norms and expectations" [Gender Trouble] she is pointing out that even when we try to have a purely "scientific" discussion of sex we bring all our societal biases to the table, and this affects right from the start of the many definitions of sex we even choose.
Taken on one common purely scientific definition (producing male or female gametes) children are neither male nor female for many years, a not insignificant number of children grow up to be adults that are neither male or female, and even those who do become male or female almost invariably age out of being either one if they live long enough. Yet, especially on the right, most people would feel pretty uncomfortable putting "not yet known" on birth certificates, much less adding a third "sex" to society for people who are not fertile. (It of course just gets more complex yet when you consider hermaphrodites, intersex people, and so on.) That reluctance to confront biological realities of sex is precisely what she's talking about.
Worth noting that something like <1% of Japanese people understand English well enough to get offended by the term 'Japs' - same with 'Chinks' in China. But, of course, you didn't mean 'Japanese people', it was just the weird American default where, whenever you say x nationality/ ethnicity (Italian, Mexican, Chinese) you mean the American ethnicity unless otherwise specified.
Are you saying that "Jap" in America refers to Americans of Japanese descent. I don't think that is true. So could you explain what you do mean?
Ah, apologies, I wasn't clear.
I meant that when he says: "Any Japanese person who heard you say ["Jap"] would correctly feel unsafe," he means Japanese Americans/ Americans of Japanese descent. Except for those who are native-level English speakers, a Japanese person who heard you say "Jap" wouldn't be offended in the slightest. Just like saying if a westerner heard a Chinese person say 洋鬼子 yangguizi, he would feel unsafe.
I mention this because it's quite an interesting part of the phenomenon - people from foreign countries with slurs attached: "Chink/ Paki/ Jap" rarely have any particularly strong reaction to these slurs, because they're very much attached to the native-English-language context.
Thank you. Understood.
I would have guessed dropping ‘fiend worker’ was because it could be considered a derogatory term for migrant labor.
Your typo is offensive to hard working demons and imps.
Is that a derogatory terms for modern agricultural workers? Having grown up working on a farm, I genuinely never thought it would be considered derogatory. I have a tremendous amount of respect for farmers and farming, though. I notice a lot of coastal elites seem to have little to no respect for farming or farmers, so maybe that's the distinction.
I don’t think it’s derogatory either. I’m speculating about the hypersensitive.
For what it's worth I don't think I've ever heard the term "field work" (or cognates, like "field worker") used to mean working in a literal field.
I've heard it used extensively both ways. Obviously working on a farm it comes up pretty often. In the broader culture it just means working away from the office, and seems to be the broader use.
I was guessing people might infer migrant labor at harvest time. Say the Red River between Minnesota and N Dakota when the sugar beet are ready. Or maybe picking vegetables in California.
"Hyperstition" seems closely related to the useful concept of "rational astrology" from Steve Randy Waldman. A "rational astrology is a set of beliefs which one rationally behaves as if were true, regardless of whether they are in fact."
Well worth reading the whole thing: https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/3513.html
Did honourifics in language begin like this? They make langages more unwieldy but you are paying some tax to avoid offending people. This article reminds me of that.
An example: in Thai there is a suffix tacked on to every other sentence in public life (kap/ka). It's a gender signifier with doesn't really mean much, but the longer and more nasal the more polite (many foreigners find the sound very grating). There are countless examples of this sort of thing, and many in English too.
It's interesting though that while here are clearly equilibriums that preserve these language effects, they can reverse themselves too. English has become a lot less formal over the last 100 years for example - why did that happen?
How can we turn the term “AAPI” as being a slur and stop white and Asian Americans from using the term?
I think it’s highly offensive for Asians to be lumped together with Pacific Islanders. I think Pacific Islanders would feel the same way. They have absolutely nothing in common. They don’t even look the same. There is no shared experience between the cultures except for the fact that it was a convenience for the American Census to lump them together arbitrarily. Not respecting their identities and cultures and mixing them together in an acronym of convenience is very racist and I would love for this term to be stamped out. Can we please accelerate this to 70% asap?
What does 'racist' mean?
But doesn't lumping together the various peoples of Asia make even less sense than lumping together Asia and the Pacific Islands?
Are any of the people complaining about the Confederate flag familiar with a decade known as "the eighties"?
There was literally a prime-time TV show in which the heroes drove around in an orange muscle car with a confederate flag on the roof -- this was not because they were racists (indeed, they "never did no harm"), it was because they were from the South and kind of anti-authority; one might even say "rebels".
Non-southerners with a rebellious bent (rock-stars and their followers, among others) also used it that way, in the form of patches on jean jackets, bumper stickers, and stuff like that.
The fact that you all are here complaining about it is actually a really excellent example of how these things proceed.
I mean, given that that particular flag started out as the Confederate battle flag, if you want to say it was perfectly innocent in the 80s, then that means that over the century+ inbetween it had the original meaning bleached *out* of it, which is to say, it's not some pure example of this. And as to that claim, well -- I think there's [a different old post of Scott's worth reading on that topic](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ltey8BS83qSkd9M3u/a-parable-on-obsolete-ideologies)...
Yes, it stopped having its original meaning, and yet was figuratively 'banned' because of its original meaning, and people, including those *in this very thread*, say that such 'bans' are justified because people were only using it because they supported its original meaning.
I mean, only if you think there's something shameful about being a Confederate battle flag.
I don't support slavery (do I really need to say this?), but I do (retrospectively) support the right of the South to secede peacefully from the United States, and find American hypocrisy on the secession issue (1776 is great, 1860 is terrible!) to be one of their least appealing features.
In both 1776 and 1860-1, the causes for independence were enumerated.
The first, from colonies given no voice in government, cited twenty-seven different reasons for separation (because "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes") and is remembered as an eloquent and powerful discourse on human liberty and equality.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
The second produced nearly as many statements as there were seceding states, and their common justification was that the government that had just been duly elected (under a system in which they'd been given disproportionate representation via the 3/5 clause) *might* interfere with their right to own people.
http://civildiscourse-historyblog.com/blog/2018/7/1/secession-documents-introduction
Drawing a distinction in legitimacy between the two isn't really that difficult.
I don't think that the legitimacy of a state is derived from the eloquence of its founding documents either.
But the causes themselves may be a factor. (Hence why a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare them.)
If they wanted to secede peacefully, they should have kept talking with the rest of the United States about what to do with federal property, rather than firing on Fort Sumter...
Is there a possible world in which the South didn't fire on Fort Sumter and the United States negotiated in good faith for a peaceful secession?
If they didn't fire on Fort Sumter, then the United States would almost certainly have ratified the Corwin amendment, which would have negated the original grievance.
The Upper South might well have never seceded, and there's then the possibility that secession fizzles out - that was definitely what Lincoln was trying to achieve at the time.
Secession was not something that Lincoln could accept - but he was prepared to make just about any reassurance to keep them in the Union.
I think actually that it was pretty innocent even in the *18*80s -- this source claims that it was a common fixture at Veterans Day parades and such (mostly in the South I should think):
https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-confederate-flag/
It goes on to note that it acquired a racial tinge when the (rebellious) Southern Democrats adopted it in support of Jim Crow -- but somehow this did not result in the sort of cascade that Scott notes until probably ~2000, when Jim Crow and the Dixiecrats were long dead.
Historical facts matter in this kind of discussion -- the flag was originally a *military* symbol, and the idea that the Confederate *military* (as opposed to the politicians) was primarily focused on racial issues is extremely novel. (broadly ahistorical if you ask me, but there's a case to be made either way -- the point is that *this is not how it was seen* in the past)
I think this is an important point - there was a genuine postwar effort for reconciliation between the opposing side veterans of the war, and not allowing the ex-Confederates to gather with pride (not in their cause but in their effort and shared trauma) under their battle standards would have been counterproductive to this effort.
Yes, the stars and bars (as a solely political symbol of the confederacy) would have been far more objectionable in 1880 than the battle flag (the symbol of the military - note that it was also the navy jack).
It's also worth pointing out that Reconstruction ended in the 1880s and the North acquiesced in segregation in the South. What we would now call racism was not necessarily seen as bad even among abolitionists - you don't have to see black people as equal to think that slavery is going too far.
So, at what point does it become normal to see the Confederacy as a racist project and to see racism as being a bad thing? The confederacy can be bad for non-racist reasons (including being anti-slavery; again, you can be racist and still against slavery).
In the early '70s, the guitarist of the Stooges, Ron Ashton, would sometimes display a large Nazi flags on stage. I haven't read any stories about him being a fascist or racist, my guess is that he was expressing "rebellion", and also enjoyed the shock value. That same attitude was present during the early punk days; I don't mean the explicitly fascist skinheads; I mean crass young rebels looking to shock the normals. For example, Siouxie Sue caused some controversy wearing a Nazi uniform. These people weren't explicitly racist, but I'm sure any Jews seeing those Nazi symbols would have been appalled.
But of course, among us white young dudes in the '70s, there was an under current of racist jokes (and gay slurs), we didn't think of ourselves as racist, but of course no one said that stuff if black people were around. Lester Bangs wrote about this issue: http://www.mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/BangsWhite.pdf
The same is true of the confederate flag. White southerners may claim it is a symbol of rebellion, or southern culture, but to a black person (many of whom are also southerners), the meaning is abundantly clear.
>to a black person (many of whom are also southerners), the meaning is abundantly clear.
Is it now?
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2015/10/24/black-man-carson-event-defends-confederate-flag/74550918/
Are you a black person? Whether you are or not, what makes you think that you speak for black people as a group? Black Americans are much more diverse in their views than you are crediting.
>B.C. Johnson represented an extremely small minority — perhaps one of a kind — at a Ben Carson book signing in Ames on Saturday.
I am not black, as I mentioned in my post. I can't speak for black Americans, and I'm guessing that you cannot either. I'm going to stick with my opinion that this guy is part of a very small minority.
However, I can speak for my people: to us, the Confederate battle flag has always been a symbol of white supremacy and treason. Some southern "rebels" do not get to change that fact. The flag may mean different things to different people. If people have empathy, then they will stop displaying a symbol that many Americans find offensive.