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.
I was actually born in Oklahoma. My parents got the fuck away from segregation, white councils and bible thumpers when I was 1. This isn't ancient history.
The war never ended, it continues to this day in different forms. What you call "weaponizing empathy" is what I call human decency. Don't fly the flag of slavery, why is that hard to understand?
This attitude is part of the problem -- America needs to move on. If the English were still railing on about Napoleon and his frogs, Europe would probably still be getting wracked by devastating wars every two generations or so.
The Dukes of Hazard was nearly successful at rehabilitating the confederate flag, you're right.
But even in the 80s, as a pre-teen, I noticed the kids in my southern school who were Really Into The Stars and Bars (that's what these folks called it, although I have since learned the actual flag they liked was much closer to the Battle Flag, but no one says kids have to know what they're talking about) had a near 1:1 correspondence with being an acquaintance who would call my black friends niggers.
And I assure you that in the 80s those kids knew what I thought of having my friends referenced in such a way behind their backs.
So I do not subscribe, in my personal lived experience, to the idea that southerners who were big into the flag didn't know they were stumping for something that was hostile to black people.
This does not contradict the point being made -- your friends were part of the ~50% using the flag as a slur (taking the framework from the article), prior to the hyperstitious cascade rendering it useless for anything *other* than a slur.
I don't read the article as suggesting that these words/symbols are universally positive prior to the cascade; quite the opposite.
Scott’s framing is about the percent of people realizing that a term represents a slur.
That a huge fraction of people *actively used it* as a slur, and were well known to do so, makes it extremely different from something like Jap which had no particularly understood valence and then cascaded to have a valence that wasn’t in evidence before hand.
The confederate flag was understood to be actively associated with a slur from the very beginning, for anyone who thinks chattel slavery is evil.
"Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60."
Also suggest that you read the link I provided earlier about how the flag in question was ubiquitous at Veteran's Day events (and not many other places) from ~1880-1955. Then maybe go watch some Dukes of Hazzard; it's fun.
I was a Georgia-born child of the 70s. I have watched a lot of Dukes of Hazzard.
I don't think we're going to come to agreement on the confederate flag. It is nothing like Japs vs. Japanese, is the position I (and several other folks) have been arguing in this thread.
The confederate flag was from its beginning a symbol of people who rebelled against the US government for the explicit purpose of preserving the institution of chattel slavery. That the losers of that rebellion were granted the right to celebrate their fraternity in that rebellion in the decades soon after in no way reduces the fact that that flag was, from its very beginning, an explicit symbol of support for chattel slavery.
A reasonable person could claim they had no idea Jap was a slur. The confederate flag has had many attempts to reconstitute it as something that is not a symbol of support for chattel slavery, but its origin is deeply relevant for whether it's a symbol subject to arbitrary assignment as "bad".
You can *maybe* make the argument that the confederate flag is like "fag", which [I'm told my etymology is an urban legend, sorry!] started its life as a slur for gay men, and has been adopted by the community to mean something semi-positive, except I have never met a black person who has expressed vocal support that they would like to rehabilitate the confederate flag.
I'm actually going to focus on your "faggot" etymology -- have you considered that there may be *other* legends which you've been led to believe were true, by people with an interest in that being so -- but that are in fact ahistorical and self-serving?
We don't need to agree, just think about it. I'm seeing *so much* (sincere) reflexive response on this issue in the comment section -- without passing judgement on the truth of the matter, it seems highly disproportionate to the importance of the issue. I think it is not coming from nowhere.
This is a dark art, the offensive use of rhetoric, and is a tactic for various psyops campaigns by state and non-state actors, or occasionally a simple social contagion with no clear actor behind it.
The fact that it can and often is done intentionally vs how in a certain percentage of the time the change in word/lifestyle/fact/etc. usage becomes associated with tribal mind killing identity politics is not great and means we can't ever do away with this.
This sort of mostly pack of wolves hiding in sheep's clothing is a disconcerting and near impossible to stop factor.
I also think we are seeing a hyper acceleration of this due to the collapse in media ownership diversity. When you have 500+ newspapers all run locally or in various cities or states within even one country it is hard to actually get them to agree and operate the same way. But with the now 3-6 companies who control everything you read, see, hear, and possibly think....this trend of command and control to spread these dark arts is more powerful.
The same could be said for social media where in the past it might take a lot longer and a certain attempt would fail to reach critical mass. But now things can spread quickly and you can seed such ideas into a very wide range of communities. If only 1 in 1,000 members of a given ethnic group or sub-population of whatever variety is plugged into FB/Twitter/Insa/Tiktok and they 'receive the message'.
If this happen sand then those individuals push it in their social circles then some weird idea from one guy in Chicago in some middling importance organisation can spread and take over in ways that were not possible in the past. Suddenly people in New York and London and Denver have all heard about it within a few months of each other. And as we saw with the Twitterfiles and know pretty much 100% this was happening in all the big social media companies, this was directed activity to promote specific agendas.
I think it's also just that there is a greater appetite for signalling partisan affiliation because those fault lines now line up with many other kinds of group identification people care about.
I suspect that if you had Twitter in 1990 you'd have seen people calling out attempts like USC's as exploitative (using the struggles of blacks to signal their own virtue). In the current climate people really want to signal they're part of the team rather than signaling that they're a reasonable moderate.
"Using the latest term for a minority often shows not sensitivity but subscribing to the right magazines or going to the right cocktail parties." Indeed.
I wonder how this applies to sports team names? It's a strange process how the sense of a word changes. I don't think the owners of sports teams name their teams with a pejorative intent. The movement to change the Washington Redskins name struck me as odd. I grew up with that name and for me, the words "Washington Redskins" was very cool. I only sort of vaguely connected it to Native Americans and the word "Redskins" in the context of football didn't feel pejorative at all. If anything, the words "Washington Redskins" vaguely boosted the status of Native Americans in my mind. Then after years of lobbying to change the name, the change suddenly happened. Now it feels appalling that a football team would name itself "Redskins." So somehow, there has been a complete switch in my mind around the word. So much so, I almost feel that I should asterisk the word in this comment. Very strange.
Huh. I've never heard the term "hyperstition" before. It's cool to learn a new word like that.
Is there a word for a disingenuous term whose meaning is not what it actually says, but rather an accusation that "this is what my opponents disagree with"? Because that's what "Black Lives Matter" is. It's not about placing value on the life of black people, and it never was; it's a slur itself, a rhetorical club to beat ideological opponents over the head with by insinuating that they don't care about the lives of black people.
Sadly, this is an exceptionally common phenomenon in political speech. Some of the most obvious examples are things like PETA ("if you don't like our animal-rights extremism, you believe in treating animals unethically,") Patriot Act ("anyone who objects to this wild overreach of the surveillance state is unpatriotic,") Libertarian ("if you oppose our extremist economic system that we call 'capitalism' despite it bearing only a passing resemblance to the work of Adam Smith, you're anti-liberty") and so on. (And just look at how popular it's become in recent years for Democratic politicians conflate opposition to their policies with opposition to democracy itself! Even if the name of the Democratic Party wasn't originally named with this defamatory nonsense in mind, it's become that over time.)
Not sure precisely what you mean here, but the most relevant bits that immediately come to mind tend to be about inherent contradictions in Newspeak and Ingsoc. (The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. To be "blackwhite" is to stubbornly refuse to admit the truth, or to admirably be willing to set the truth aside in service of a noble cause. And so on.)
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm not claiming that PETA themselves don't believe in treating animals ethically, for example, but rather that they chose their name as a cynical slur against those who disagree with them to imply that *their opponents* don't believe in treating animals ethically.
Oh, definitely. The idea isn't confined only to large-scale societal politics; it pops up in political social interactions all over the place. For example, famed computer scientist Donald Knuth's attempt to introduce a new programming paradigm called "Literate Programming" that never ended up getting any real traction. In the paper introducing his ideas, the first section closes with this gem:
> I must confess that there may also be a bit of malice in my choice of a title. During the 1970s I was coerced like everybody else into adopting the ideas of structured programming, because I couldn’t bear to be found guilty of writing *unstructured* programs. Now I have a chance to get even. By coining the phrase “literate programming,” I am imposing a moral commitment on everyone who hears the term; surely nobody wants to admit writing an *illiterate* program.
That's kind of similar, particularly in the last few paragraphs of the article you linked, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. I'm specifically referring to the process of appropriating the name of something generally regarded as good or uncontroversial in order to weaponize that name against opponents and critics.
I disagree. Most people I know who support it (and many of the original supporters) mean: black lives are being treated as if they don't matter and that's bad.
While I have no doubt that there are supporters who sincerely believe that, that doesn't make it true any more than sincerely believing that the Earth is flat or that vaccines cause autism makes it true.
The essence of a tool, the "telos" as Jonathan Haidt likes to call it, is what it's used for. And the use of the term "Black Lives Matter" has always been to cow opponents into silence, or to aggressively silence those who refuse to be cowed, with the claim that those who don't support the cause are racist.
Sorta but you have to distinguish kinds of intention/use. The purpose motivating the adoption of the term 'african-american' or retarded isn't the same as the meaning of those terms (I can say African-American and simply mean to refer to the group)
I agree there are connotations that may be there on top of the meaning but that's distinct from the meaning itself.
Actually it's good to rotate the language that signals deference to groups that are discriminated against. That way we can make people who favor continued discrimination stand out, since they are unable or unwilling to adopt the new language. This will pressure them to change their view to fit in.
That's if you believe that racial and gender discrimination are a continuing real thing. If you think they're fake problems obviously you'll think the solutions are fake too.
So this post reads to me like a long way of saying that racial discrimination is no longer a real or important issue.
I suppose this is the Anti-Racist view, where you have to constantly be reaffirming your moral stance. Do you make exceptions for the people who don't have the luxury time to keep up, or just lean into the idea that those in poverty are necessarily racist?
And how do you ensure that your ideological allies who are also applying anti-racist pressures against people using the old language will also make appropriate and good-faith exceptions?
It's easy to tell the difference by how people react when you tell them language has change. Some will be like "Oh my bad" and will make an effort to get it right next time. Some will be like "Screw you, 'anti-racist' tool."
It's hard to ensure that ideological allies stay on-message. This is true for all ideologies, allies, and messages.
Then, if ideological allies don't always stay on-message or act in good faith, how do neutral parties being told to change their language know whether they're being informed by a genuine anti-racist who's trying to help people, versus a bad-faith actor trying to boss people around for selfish and corrupt reasons? Or someone trying to sneak language that implies deference to a genuinely bad group of people into all of the discriminated groups?
If all language changes imposed by anyone purporting to be an anti-racist must be obeyed without pushback, then anyone can immediately exploit this by putting on the anti-racist hat and advancing their unrelated agenda in the name of anti-racism. I would imagine you would have to enable some sort of common sense rejection of blatant opportunists trying to exploit the system, but if so, where do you draw the line and how do you protect neutral third parties who push back against those people (or yourself if they have reason to suspect you of being one) instead of meekly saying "oh my bad"? And if not, how do you prevent anti-racism from being consumed by opportunists exploiting the lack of common sense?
Two problems with this argument (whether or not you meant it).
First, trends/changes reach different people at different times. I might be the most devoted anti-racist in the world but if I don't use social media and live on a farm in Montana I'm not going to get the message until quite some time later. That means you may actually be making it harder to identify who favors continued discrimination. So, at best, there is some optimal rate of rotation but those pushing change on these words have no idea if we are above or below it.
Second, on this view the number of true anti-racists are probably a minority so (absent a coup) will fail unless they can persuade others to join them. The more others end up having unpleasant experiences because they weren't yet aware of the new language the harder that is.
1. If we agree there is an optimal rate of rotation, I'm happy to concede I don't know if we're above it or below it. Would welcome your thoughts on the subject.
2.a. I don't divide the world into "true anti-racists" and "others". Rather, everyone exists on a spectrum of how much you think racial bias continues to matter.
2.b. Agree that we should assume the best of people and extend charity to people who are still using old language because they haven't heard about the new language or just out of habit. Nothing wrong with that, migrations can be tough.
I see what you are saying now more clearly, but I think there is a fundamental tension between actually producing this kind of *unnatural* linguistic change and not shaming/embarrassing/criticizing those who haven't yet changed.
Sure, when you have a situation like the name "redskins" for the Washington football team that everyone can see really does offend a large number of native americans you might get decent evidence from usage about how much someone cares about that issue. However, that doesn't work when you consider examples like the USC shift away from using the word "fields". The only way you can really convince people not to shrug and go "well I don't think that's really upsetting anyone" is to be judgemental and attach social opprobrium to their failure to use it.
To bring us back to point 1, I think that's why the best rate is the natural rate. People who try to *push* hyperstitions should be pushed back on (e.g. what's your evidence this is actually bothering people and the benefits of change outweigh the harm).
As we've seen with words for mental impairment over the years there will be plenty of cases where a word does organically come to be seen as offensive and those cases have the huge benefit of gauging how much someone cares about not hurting people in the relevant group rather than gauging how much they care about not being *called* insufficently anti-racist/whatever.
We may not be that far apart in the end. For calibration, I think "fields" isn't necessary but I'm a fan of the shift to "blocklisting" and getting rid of "master".
I'm not sure what block listing is referencing. Regarding "master" I'm unsure but after I got some evidence that some black people genuinely disliked (even if not seeing it as most important issue) calling things master/slave systems I stopped using it. Assuming that the information I got is correct and that wasn't just an outlier I agree.
Maybe it wasn't initially, I dunno if it would have bothered blacks in us w/o it being pushed, but once it really is bothering ppl changing it is worth it.
Why do people who favor “continued discrimination” need new slurs when they have perfectly usable old ones? The rotation has less to do with catching bigots and more with signaling virtue (and the privilege of being in the right social circles) among the already long converted anti-discriminators.
What enforced language actually signals deference to, are privileged people in positions of power, not groups that are discriminated against. The powerful ones might sympathize with some of the discriminated, as long as they remain useful and satisfied with cheap perfunctory gestures, but the fact that they've managed to equate support for their agenda to support for the downtrodden in the public view is perhaps the most successful propaganda coup in recent years.
Changing the language doesn't directly do anything to help discriminated-against groups, but the agenda you refer to -- things like affirmative action, reparations payments, high levels of social safety net -- does help those groups.
Well, given that the agenda pushers aggressively disregard all evidence against effectiveness of their policies and assumptions underlying their ideology, I'm skeptical. Of course, it's not like the other side is any better. Everything is terrible and will remain terrible in the foreseeable future. But on the bright side, it's not Putinism-level terrible yet.
This might be true if "we" existed, if there were a common hierarchy or network of trust, but that isn't the case.
There will be racists that resist the rotations, sure, but many more people will resist because they are nonconformists, because the changes come from an outgroup, or because they hear about the new terms from low-status nobodies.
I believe there is also an aspect of power projection when a group asserts that a previously-innocuous term is now offensive. Simply by asserting the offense the group forces other persons to change their behavior and to some degree increases the groups power and prestige. Asserting that “Negro” was offensive increased the profile of the pro-Black movement.
I think this somewhat explains the continuing expansion of the LGBTQ… term. It is a search for societal power.
"But it’s a stupidity we have to fight against, really hard, because if it ever gets a foothold then everyone who doesn’t hate the poor will eventually say “people of poverty”, it will be a stable equilibrium, and we’ll be stuck in it for all time."
You explained very well why transition phase is a bad experience for everyone and it makes sense. But why new stable equilibrium is bad? Isn't it just language evolving and once it evolves and everyone learns new way of the language it is fine again for everyone?
It's not and I don't think he was suggesting it's worse. What I think he's calling bad is moving new words into this category since each time comes with a new transition
Now maybe it's worth it for words that naturally come to be hurtful (eg retarded was introduced to be less hurtful) but taking words that aren't upsetting anyone and forcing us to make the transition is bad.
This is just a reflection on the subject, with examples. I have no answer. I'd just say that as with many things, something's lost and something's gained when a term is, umm, elevated (?) to hyperstition.
The husband of a cousin of mine is Chinese. He insists "Chinaman" is a slur. I confess I've never ever heard it used as a slur, which is not to say that it is not sometimes used that way.
I think it's a pity that so many old songs that use terms like "darkie" in a positive way can no longer be sung with the original lyrics. I find the original lyrics beautiful and sweet. I can no longer sing these songs at all. The original lyrics are verbotten and the substitutes ("people" or "old folks") are so anodyne as to remove all feeling and reference to context. Examples:
On the other hand, songs that used such terms in a derogatory even in the idiom of their day are repulsive to me now even though they were considered patriotic back when they were popular. Carson Robison, We're Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jta97z0Zhg
I'm Jewish, and I notice people replace "Jew" in sentences with "Jewish person." They think "Jew" is derogatory. This strikes me as bizarre. I accept that the term is derogatory or not depending on how it is said, and I would guess the same is true of most of the others. In fact, when someone says "Jewish person", my first thought is that he's an antisemite who is covering up with an attempt to be polite.
Verboten has one "t", as the o is long and it's the Partizip II of verbieten (forbid) - the "ie" a looong iiii , ofc (as in "bean"). Ein Doppel-t ist verboten. Now, I felt tempted to sign as "German grammar-**** writing. But no way. Danke for those fine links - the one to very excellent 1957 (it wast "the tiny tots" then) Stan Fredberg seems dead, but this one does https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLlTlYfqQV4 "Elderly Man River- Stan Freberg and Daws Butler" (but maybe it is just different countries).
Stan died in 2015. To me, his crowning achievements were his "History of the United States" and this one, about two Las Vegas night clubs competing for putting on the biggest show. He calls them the El Sodom and the Rancho Gemorah. All his work was done with very high production values, using the best studio musicians and voice actors in Hollywood.
I don't think "Jew" is all the way slur-ified, but it's certainly somewhere along that path. It's sufficiently tied up in racist implications that it used to be that when you Googled it, Google would put up a disclaimer / apology on the search results page suggesting that you search for "Jewish" instead if you didn't want to get anti-Semitic results: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2004/04/24/google-in-controversy-over-top-ranking-for-anti-jewish-site/
They've since cleaned up the search algorithm. I also do see a lot of Jews fighting back to "save" the word.
I think what's broken in the current situation is that no one on the left critisizes USC (and others doing the same) for trying to start the cascade. I mean they are throwing the people they claim to be interested in protecting under the bus to achieve their own selfish desire to signal how virtuous they are. If people spoke up and called them out on this such cascades wouldn't be likely to start until there really were a substantial group who felt hurt by the term.
I mean, the smart people at USC surely have the capacity not only to appreciate the fact that it's possible to turn a word into a slur but also that doing so makes life worse for the people they claim to be trying to protect. No matter how hard you try to get everyone onboard -- out of ignorance, contrarianess or simple desire to avoid signalling extremely an progressive identity -- some people with no desire to hurt the feelings of slave descendants will be slow to make the change.
Yet despite all this they choose to do it anyway. That looks alot like the kind of behavior that good anti-racists should be horrified by.
All taboos are virtue signals, they imply you need the approval of something or someone. If that something or someone actually holds material power over you, okay, I'm not going to begrudge you if you play nice. I certainly do the same, but there is simply no reason to still respect those ridicoulous rules when you can disrespect them.
Fuck respectability, to be "respectable" is to kneel to those who want to control you like a puppet. It doesn't matter if it's 50-50 or 30-70 or 0.00000001-99.9999999, if you don't want to say a word or to stop saying a word then saying it or refraining from saying solely to please others is contemptible and servile.
The internet is made so that you're able to say nigger freely, and I love it.
How does being pro-slur help? The harm is a result of the change not the mere existence of a word which conveys the fact that you believe/identify with certain views on race deemed unacceptable. It's not like we are running out of ways to put letters together and I think we all benefit from having some words that quickly and easily convey the fact that someone does in fact identify with the faction in modern society that is deemed racist. It lets them recognize each other and others avoid them.
Once something is clearly a slur trying to rescue it from that status imposes the same costs that are inflicted by it becoming a slut: misunderstandings and unnecessary offense.
Well, nobody took my opinion on that change, so I don't recognize it. It's really as simple as that, it's my tongue, my keyboard, my nerve centers; my rules. when you need to make them do something you ask me, and you ask nicely. When you don't ask, you don't get.
When you declare loudly that you're going to persecute me and exclude me if I so much as sing along with a song that mentions the naughty words, you get so much worse than nothing, you get my eternal burning desire to say and do all the things that enrage and disrespect you. Because there is nothing more enraging and disrespectful to me than forcing me to say and do things without my free will.
Somebody can be harmed by those words ? so what, everybody can and is and will be harmed by words all the time. Do you think "Toxic Masculinity" or "Fragile Male Egos" never harmed men and boys ? Are you about to declare them slurs and go after those who use them ? Or is this only allowed with a few select groups ? What are the criteria for this selection and why should I respect it ?
The easily offended deserve to offended, especially considering they aren't offended by REAL problems in society, such as the staggering scale of black on white violence (and I'm using 'violence' here in the quaint, old-fashioned sense of an actual act of physical aggression).
Suffering is suffering. No one deserves any of it. Sometimes it's necessary to impose it on people for deterrence etc.. but if I could reduce the amount Hitler suffered w/o hurting others I would.
And yes, they are flawed like pretty much all people and have inconsistent views. Shocker. If that was enough to warrant not considering someone's feelings we'd have to be jerks to everyone.
2020’s protests threw a lot of kindling on this fire in certain circles.
Ever since 2020, in the tech industry, it’s no longer considered okay to use terms like “blacklist/whitelist” or “master/slave” in your tools. Everyone even moderately respectful retreated to things like “blocklist/allowlist” or “leader/follower”. A company I know of even had a whole “biased terminology working group” spun up in 2020 aimed at deciding which terms were now considered offensive, and working to purge them from their tools and language.
My impression of it is that this was generally pushed by people who saw a lot of people genuinely hurting at the time and who were trying to do *something* to help with “the cause”. Unfortunately they reached for the things that were more in their immediate power to change, which usually weren’t the kind of things that would actually make a dent in the bigger problems.
Not all of these efforts were successful. Some places (e.g. GitHub) took issue with “master” in the absence of “slave”, replacing it with things like “main”, but that was less universally accepted and a lot of companies (including the one with the aforementioned working group) still have a “master branch” in their repositories.
The most memorable of these failed efforts was one guy who proposed to purge the word “sanitizer”, as used in tools like ”clang sanitizer”. His rationale? “Sanitizer” was from the same root as “sanity”, and “sanity” (which was also used on its own in tools like “sanity checker”) is offensive towards the mentally ill, because it implies that not having a mental illness is a more-desirable state. I am *very* glad that guy failed.
It was happening well before 2020. Master/slave was on its way out years before that -- maybe 2010, 2015? I think that's the only one that I felt was clear-cut and really did deserve a new name. Blacklist/whitelist was also well before 2020, although without as much energy, and also without as much justification. (I'm actually fine with denylist/allowlist because honestly they're just less jargon-y.)
The master-branch thing is pretty eye-rolling from where I stand, in light of it never having been in relation to "slave", but I agree with you that it comes from a well-meaning place.
There was never a good reason to replace master/slave. Idk why that terminology was chosen, and I always found it a bit weird, but that's not a reason to replace existing terminology.
I disagree. The fact that you found the terminology weird and that you don't know why it was chosen is a good indicator that it was poorly chosen. That's a good reason to change it all by itself, unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous.
Now, when I first encountered the terminology, I didn't think much of it -- because I was a kid. I knew what slaves were, and knew that it was bad, but didn't have much concept of it overall. So I filed the two terms into different compartments of my brain and never really thought about it again. But as an adult, when someone prompted me to look at it with fresh eyes... yeah, that's a really gross term! Slavery is *deeply terrible*, why would you ever name something after it? This was before there was significant social pressure around it—it just seemed obvious to me once it was pointed out.
Now there are better, more accurate terms used that make it easier for people to learn the subject matter. Primary/secondary, leader/follower, active/replica, etc. The "slave" database was never a slave controlled by the "master" DB, it was a replica, so call it that! And as a bonus it's not named after one of the worst things you can do to a fellow human.
But like I said, I feel like this is one of the few exceptions. The others have had more pushback because they don't have that one-two punch of confusingly-named *and* an offensive connotation or history. And some of them don't make sense at all, being based only on an incorrect folk etymology.
> The fact that you found the terminology weird and that you don't know why it was chosen is a good indicator that it was poorly chosen. That's a good reason to change it all by itself, unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous.
It at most indicates that it was a worse than the alternative choices by a very tiny amount. That's not a good reason to change it unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous; it's a good reason to change it if the process is not even very slightly onerous. That definitely isn't the case.
> Now there are better, more accurate terms used that make it easier for people to learn the subject matter. Primary/secondary, leader/follower, active/replica, etc.
"Which terminology did this particular project chose, again?"
---
Another reason to resist this one is that it gets used as a precedent for the other ones.
I worked on a project that used "master/servant" terminology, which I joked about as sounding rather Victorian, but fortunately I have a non-woke workplace and nothing happened beyond describing the system in faux-Received Pronunciation.
Interesting example is the use of the term "grandfathered" to mean something allowed because it was done prior to a prohibition being enacted.
I think it's 90% plus accepted even though its origin is Jim Crow era voting laws that disenfranchised blacks. Post Reconstruction, in many Southern states you could only vote if your grandfather voted.
I don't think many people know the origin plus it's useful shorthand to express a concept.
It's not "you could only vote if your grandfather voted", but "you were exempted from other requirements, e.g. literacy tests or poll taxes, if your grandfather voted". This allowed the other requirements to be made extremely onerous without disenfranchising poor whites.
By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
I am autistic. I was born in 1957 and my childhood was in the 60's. When I was four, my Father's extended family decided I was retarded. That was the "common" term at the time. The "label" that people just casually assigned to the neurodivergent.
WORDS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, LABELS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
I became a pariah. The Dummy, the simple one, the retard that it was mean to play tricks on and who the adults protected. The one who was never voluntarily included in anything the other kidsbever did unless an adult was watching.
The Family decided that day that I was “retarded” or “defective”. That was the label they gave me. My father believed them and he was ashamed.
A short history lesson on “forced sterilization” in America.
Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law in 1907.
Would it surprise you that the idea of forced sterilization goes back to the 19th century. That sterilization’s first advocates were physicians who saw it as both a punishment and a treatment for criminal behavior.
Gideon Lincecum in an 1849 bill in the Texas legislature, called for the castration of criminals. Castration was represented as therapeutic and as punitive. Furthermore, some saw it as a solution to perceived problems of heredity and society, especially those problems with sexual or racial dimensions.
Hysterectomies were also advocated during this period for women. As a “cure” for those supposedly afflicted with mental disorders understood as originating in their reproductive systems. As with men, this sexual surgery was understood as a treatment for criminal behavior, homosexuality, and excessive masturbation.
While castration would lose its popularity with the advent of the vasectomy in 1897, it set the stage for later eugenic sterilization campaigns.
Inspired by the social Darwinism propounded by Francis Galton, American eugenicists in the late 19th century argued that forced sterilization was in society’s best interest. It became the prevailing paradigm that social ills resulted from characteristics transmitted genetically among “unfit” populations.
Everyone “knew” that “defective” people reproduced at higher rates. That criminals and the developmentally disabled tended to have children with similar disorders, and that reproduction among these populations weakened the gene pool.
In 1907, reflecting the eugenicists’ influence, states began enacting laws allowing involuntary sterilization of the developmentally disabled.
Indiana was the first. Thirty-one states followed suit. State-sanctioned sterilizations reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s.
State Courts initially declared early sterilization statutes unconstitutional when they were challenged.
But POPULAR SUPPORT for such legislation grew after World War I. MAINSTREAM Politicians CAMPAIGNED ON getting such laws passed. You had to be "pro sterilization of retards" if you wanted to get elected in many Midwestern states.
At first, sterilization programs targeted white men. By the 1920's this expanded to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like “feeblemindedness” and “mental defective.”
The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany.
The Third Reich’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. Under this law, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults, mostly Jews and other “undesirables,” labeled “defective.”
In 1927 the issue made its way to the Supreme Court.
A 1927 Supreme Court ruling upheld these laws. In Buck v Bell, a case of an institutionalized woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child, the court ruled that forced sterilization was constitutional under certain circumstances. Justice Holmes’ opinion read:
It is better…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or…let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those…manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Buck v Bell unleashed a wave of forced sterilizations.
Buck v Bell has never been overturned. It is "the law of the land".
Whereas physicians had performed 10,877 sterilizations of institutionalized persons through 1928, they performed 27,210 between 1929 and 1941. Public authorities institutionalized some women solely for sterilization and then released them.
Between 1907 and 1963, more than 60,000 Americans, mostly women, were sterilized without their consent in institutional settings.
Forced sterilization fell out of favor after 1940 as Nazi atrocities led to a rejection of eugenic tenets. In the 1960s, some states repealed sterilization laws completely. That didn’t mean it stopped.
Women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism.
It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid.
The backlash involved the reassertion of white social control. Specifically through the control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization.
In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States — 7,600 people from 1929 to 1973 — women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were disproportionately sterilized.
Analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.
In the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding non-consensual sterilizations. More than 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected.
During the 1970s, the forced sterilization of Black women was so common in the American South that it was sometimes referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Forced sterilizations Never Stopped. We still do this.
In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on approximately 1,400 women in California prisons. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the operations were cost-saving measures.
During the "Trump Years". Brown women, the "illegal sub-human" kind that we must "build a wall" to protect ourselves from, were sterilized in ICE Detention Centers. So that they, "wouldn't keep getting pregnant and sneaking across the border until they drop an anchor baby".
ICE is accused of sterilizing detainees. That echoes the U.S.’s long history of forced sterilization.
More immigrant women say they were abused by ICE gynecologist. More than 40 women submitted testimony claiming abuse, alleging they underwent invasive and unnecessary procedures
However, forced sterilization of the “developmentally disabled” became more difficult in the LATE 70's.
A scandal involving the sterilization of a developmentally disabled girl without her consent in a federally funded clinic brought attention to the issue. It resulted in 1978 guidelines that forbade the use of federal funds for sterilizing anyone younger than 21 years, incompetent, or institutionalized.
BUCK v BELL IS STILL THE LAW OF THE LAND THOUGH.
Most states allow forced sterilization today. Laws allowing forced sterilization exist in 31 states plus Washington, D.C.
Live in the wrong state and you can be forcibly sterilized for being mentally incompetent.
While many think of forced sterilization as a relic of the past, some of the laws are quite recent: The two most recent state laws regarding forced sterilization were passed in 2019.
My father’s family labeled me as “retarded”, he was afraid they were right.
It changed the way he saw me. It changed the way he felt towards me. It made him ashamed and it made him angry.
My father saw me as “defective”.
There are no returns on a “defective child”. You are stuck with them. They will be a drain on you until they die. That’s what he was hearing from his aunts and uncles. That’s the message society had primed him with.
So, one day when I was seven, he took me to a doctor “friend” of his and had me sterilized. It didn't take long. I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on. He told me to be a “brave boy” and seemed pleased by my stoicism.
I would have crawled through broken glass to please him. To earn his praise. To feel his love bestowed on me. The love he mostly reserved for my “perfect” younger brother.
The doctor didn't have a problem doing the procedure. He told my father that he was “doing the right thing”. That it would keep me from getting some little girl in trouble. That it would make sure he didn’t have to worry about paying for any “little bastards”.
That’s the power a label has. Get the wrong one put on you, and people stop thinking of you as human. Get the wrong one put on you, and people get the power to decide for you “what’s best”.
Get the wrong one put on you and they can sterilize you when you are Autistic, or Black, or Brown, or a Homo.
Words and Labels are important. They have consequences in real peoples lives.
Right. We used to lobotomize people who were schizophrenic. We still have schizophrenic people, and we still use the term “schizophrenia”, but we don’t treat it with lobotomy anymore.
We wouldn’t diagnose “autism” as “retarded” anymore, but we also don’t sterilize people anymore for being developmentally disabled with low IQ, and I doubt we would even if “mentally retarded” was still the preferred clinical term.
You would be wrong. It's legal in 31 states. New laws making it easier in several Conservative states were passed in 2019. And parents still do this to "retarded' kids.
>During the "Trump Years". Brown women, the "illegal sub-human" kind that we must "build a wall" to protect ourselves from, were sterilized in ICE Detention Centers. So that they, "wouldn't keep getting pregnant and sneaking across the border until they drop an anchor baby".
Then perhaps they should stop sneaking over the border to have anchor babies?
>Words and Labels are important. They have consequences in real peoples lives.
People's conditions have consequences on people's lives. Weither you call one a "moron", a "retard" or a "special need person", the condition remains the same. And if a parent sterilize his child because of this condition, he will do it regardless of the label (especially considering "retard" is already some way onto the euphemism treadmill that alters labe to make them less offensive).
"A rose, by any name, would smell just as well", and all that.
My conservative older sister used to refer to an attractive boy as a 'straight arrow', in our high school years. But the OED gets all bipolar over the term: "a person who is very honest or who never does anything exciting or different." Now, our sexually-disoriented betters try to use 'straight' as an insult. Apparently they like the second half of OED's definition. When I hear the term' straight' used in a derogatory fashion, I just smile and say 'Straight is great'. (My housemate in the 1970s liked to tell me 'Gay is good'.)
'Unhoused' for homeless, is baffling, though. Do the 'unhoused' sleep in the rain any less than the homeless? Do they qualify for food stamps and Government cheese, while the merely homeless don't?
But 'progressive' for extremely liberal is too comic. It trips over itself. You have to repeat "moving forward" at the end of every sentence; it's just too much work. Talk about ChatGPT, one could feed all the pop culture shibboleths into it and it would probably look just like the internet -- full of disinformation and half-truths and jingoistic slogans.
> if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
I. Uhm. This is embarrassing but my instinctive response on this example "yes, absolutely"? The quote that comes most readily to mind being the "eat the rich" slogan, I think "the rich" is in fact generally used pejoratively in this day and age, and you'd say "rich people" if you wanted to sound friendlier to the idea that it's morally okay for there to be rich people in the world. "The rich" is slightly less politically coded than "the bourgeoisie", but I'm still going to assume that anyone who uses it has left-leaning political opinions and disapproves of the existence of rich people to some degree. "Dehumanizing" is going too far, of course, but I do agree there's a pejorative aspect to it. It's not quite neutral.
(With that said I agree with this post, just nitpicking your example.)
It’s maybe not “dehumanizing” but “de-individualizing” (literally you’re replacing a plural with a singular). Sort of lumping a bunch of people into a presumably homogeneous mass.
Then again I think you’d get laughed out of the room if you talked about “persons experiencing wealth” so there’s still an imbalance.
But the thing is, "persons experiencing mental illness" is a silly overcorrection and people don't actually use that one either unless they're being self-consciously politically-correct. Otherwise we find the matching pairs "the mentally ill"/"mentally-ill people" and "the rich"/"rich people"! (Also "the poor"/"poor people", of course.)
“Person first language” is absolutely a big deal in psychology and social work circles right now. You must talk about “persons with bipolar disorder” not “bipolar people”.
The battle between identity-first language and person-first language is hilarious; both groups are pointing at the other and saying they are doing it wrong.
[As a rule of thumb: identity-first for things that people with them don't want to get rid of, person-first for ones they do]
And just to add to the fun is the whole class of things where whether it should be considered something to get rid of is itself a subject of acrimonious debate (e.g. autism and deafness(?!))
The funny thing is that de-individualization the whole shtick of the Left, from Marx straight on through to the BLM. But of course, when the "good" groups happen to end up with negative associations, that's Bad and Wrong.
Yeah, I came to say this. And my experience is that if you do say "the rich" around a rich person, they'll quite often jump down your throat and remind you that not all rich people are the same, and you shouldn't make assumptions about them.
Yes, people try to signal things through their communications, often things about themselves. They try to signal that they are helpful, smart, worthy of care, skilled, fun to be around, etc. Sometimes people use very indirect signals to show that they have certain qualities. You could get extremely indirect with these, to the extent that it might be hard for the parties involved to be consciously aware there is an attempt at signalling at all. There are also very direct, very literal attempts to signal, like in the examples here, where people literally say, "if you use [this word], you are [this type of person]". I don't think that this is limited to this context, the context of trying to prove that you are not a racist. I guess because racism is such a polarizing concept in American politics, that's why this is the way the topic gets framed? But I don't know, the idea that your communication says something about you is not something you can get out of... I don't know why it is being framed as if it were a nefarious strange thing that only applies to Wokeism. Communication communicates, and not just the literal content of your words.
Have you heard of "deconstructionism"? It's a useful concept and extremely handy in the analysis of social discourse.
Because it argues that everything about us sends signals about who you are and what you believe in. That's the main premise of Gladwell's"Blink". That we judge each other 'in a blink' based on these visual and spoken signals.
Ask ANY woman about this and she will laugh her ass off. Welcome to their world.
EVERY ASPECT OF THEIR EXISTENCE IS JUDGED BY MALE THOUGHT POLICE 24/7.
When you say, "the idea that your communication says something about you is not something you can get out of". You nailed it. You can't.
A lot of commentators here seem to wish that wasn't true.
Male thought police? Most people in the US who actually want to imprison people for speech acts are....WOMEN
Of course, I'm sure you have a long-winded rationalization for why imprisoning people for saying offensive things is actually good because (certain) words directed at (certain) people are actually 'acts of violence'.
Politeness is a mark of being "cultured" and "educated".
Civility is the essence of civilization. It's what allows people to coexist in cities. The foundational marker of civilization.
Rudeness and impoliteness is not a mark of bravery.
It's the sign of a bully.
It states very clearly that I don't have to care. I don't have to be polite, or courteous, or civil. I will cut in line ahead of you if I'm bigger. I will call you slurs if I want to because there is nothing that you can do about it.
What exactly is it that you want to say that you feel so much anxiety about?
There are "safe spaces" for people who want to "speak freely".
KKK meetings and WHITE Power Nationalists groups (the ones that yell about Jews not replacing them with Brown and Black people) are both safe spaces for FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTISTS. They won't judge you if you want to use politically incorrect terms.
Umm...have you heard the story about an Emperor with no clothes?
This sort of behavior is hardwired into our brains. We engage in "groupthink" and "mob justice" at the drop of a hat. Do you not remember what high school was like?
Rules and social conventions are what protect us from that. Civility, matters.
Your read on "All Lives Matter" is fundamentally different than mine and I think it doesn't make a very clear example. Before people started saying "Black Lives Matter", "All Lives Matter" was absolutely an inoffensive phrase that might actually get used twice a decade in a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church.
In the first weeks of "Black Lives Matter", it was used maybe 1% of the time by nice elderly people as a complement to "Black Lives Matter" in the sense of, "yes black lives matter - of course they do, because all lives matter". It was used 99% by TV personalities who needed to represent the opposing side of the culture war but couldn't exactly make a slogan of "no, black lives don't matter." When *they* and their viewers started saying "All Lives Matter", the implication wasn't "Yes, black lives matter, all lives matter." It was "No, you can't say black lives matter because that's reverse racism. You have to say all lives matter."
The cascade from there was predictable. Yes, other TV personalities, on the other side of the culture war, then started convincing their viewers that it was "a racist attempt to erase black lives".
To those for whom it was obvious what he meant by it the first time Tucker Carlson (or whoever) said it, we didn't need any help to realize that it was a badge that said, "I'm on the opposite side from Black Lives Matter, but I have to be careful how I express that". Not all of us equate that to the media formulation of "racist attempt to erase black lives", but we all know it's *some kind* of reaction against BLM.
>It was used 99% by TV personalities who needed to represent the opposing side of the culture war but couldn't exactly make a slogan of "no, black lives don't matter."
None of these TV personalities think that black lives don't matter. Talk about having a bad read on the situation, then you say something like this.
What is meant by all lives matter is that focusing on one particular race is bad and unwarranted, especially when all so often the representatives of this race being talked about are very bad people and yet garner more support and attention than the many, many white people murdered by black people every year, most of whom were not people assaulting police officers or neighborhood watch patrollers or the kinds of people who rob pregnant women at gunpoint.
George Floyd got more attention and outrage than the 500 or so white people murdered by black people every year (which is rate ten times higher than white on black murders), and yet to hear BLM supporters talking would make you think that black people are under attack from white people.
And if you want to say its different because of the police, firstly Zimmerman wasn't a police officer, but secondly, this is just another case of why 'all lives matter' is meaningful. All lives matter, even if they weren't taken by a police officer, even if they were taken (as the absolute and per capita majority of them are) by black people.
>None of these TV personalities think that black lives don't matter.
I didn't say that these TV personalities *did* think that. I can't read TV personalities minds. I guess a few of them may have have noxious views about race. I guess a few of them enjoy getting the white grievance demographic to tune in so they can sell ads. I guess a few are just committed to one side of the culture war, and for them all arguments are soldiers.
There are probably some that do none of he above. There are probably some who see an issue with the subtext of BLM. Some who would have something intelligent to say to try and deconstruct that subtext. But you don't catch them shouting back "ALM". They have better things to say.
This seems to take the naive view that “black lives matter” was itself a neutral term, rather than encoding a whole host of culture war positions that went way beyond just “black people have inherent value”. Both sides were intentionally self-describing using language designed to make the other side look bad.
It may "seem" to take that naive view (that BLM didn't encode some culture war positions from the start). And yet, it doesn't in any way presuppose that naive view, and I don't personally hold that naive view....
That’s fair enough, and reading more carefully I get that from your last paragraph, so sorry for implying otherwise. But still, I think there is a tendency in discussion around the topic to basically declare “black lives matter” as neutral and “all lives matter” as racist without the nuance that both are loaded political slogans (what you dub “the media formulation”)
What needs to happen is that people on the left need to start calling out people for starting these cascades by using (and harming) an underprivileged group as a way to advertise their virtute.
Unfortunately, I fear it doesn't happen because people are hungry for ways to advertise their partisan affiliation.
I think when the replacement makes more sense, then I'm inclined to go with it anyway; changing a term requires someone to make a big deal of it or it won't happen. If you just have a better word, no-one will be bothered enough to do the work (even when that's only ten seconds work) to change.
So, let them make their big deal because that's how you get the activation energy to make the change.
I am interested in the feeling when a familiar word becomes tainted by this hyperstitious slur cascade. Like "Karen", and the awkward moment when calling my friend Karen "Karen" started to feel irrationally uncomfortable and somehow disrespectful, even though it is her real, given, legal name. I can imagine the process was unpleasant for her as well, but she was already losing control of her OCD on her way to lewy body dementia when that cascade began, so I never had the poor taste to ask her directly. At this point she would not understand, much less care, what has happened to her name. Small mercies.
Also, writers (like you, but not just you) have pulled "the the" duplication trick too many times in my sight, and now I am distracted whenever a word is innocently duplicated. I keep waiting for the argument that draws attention to the instance. time time (see what's become of me?)
> But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
He keeps going. This is probably the most singularly damning example, but there are thousands of Confederate-era documents detailing why they seceded, why they thought secession was worth a civil war, etc. The central, common elements are slavery and racism. That's what the Confederate Battle Flag stands for: a racism so deeply entrenched in one's worldview that one is literally willing to kill one's own countrymen, even relatives, to preserve the racial order of chattel slavery.
Yes, symbols can change their meaning organically, but that's not what happened here. People didn't gradually shift toward seeing the flag as a symbol of something else. They didn't stop using it, forget what it meant, and then rediscover it a hundred years later and adopt it as a symbol of something else. What actually happened was that they almost immediately started lying about it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy), some people in the younger generations believed them, and it became impossible to tell who was intentionally using it as a racist symbol and who just believed the lies.
This post doesn't make it clear whether you believe the lies yourself or just believe that the people who believe them are somehow still innocent. I have to assume it's the latter. But if they are innocent, telling them that they're making a terrible mistake is not irrational symbol-policing, and it shouldn't be grouped in with "people experiencing Frenchness."
The confederacy included lots of virulent racists who absolutely morally supported slavery (so did the north, to a lesser degree). It also contained a lot of Jeffersonian types who were clearly conflicted about the institution while nevertheless participating in it. And some genuine “states righters” or state patriots ambivalent about the question. And many thousands of barefooted badly fed rebs fighting for reasons that I can’t personally fathom but clearly weren’t “to make sure that rich SOB down the road can get richer by undercutting the value of my labor with chattel slavery”.
Why would they “lie about it” if they still proudly believed what it originally stood for? Why is it impossible to posit that they genuinely wanted to express pride in certain parts of their heritage while being genuinely ashamed of other parts?
I mean, the regular American flag (and many others) flew over slave plantations and Indian massacres for much longer than the confederate battle flag, yet the idea that the American flag is inherently a symbol of slavery is still pretty fringe (but there’s a hyperstition effort in that direction too, it’s just been so far much less successful).
One bad effect of all of this not mentioned is that I believe some people deliberately rachet up the cascade within their social group, so that the people outside their social group, who catch on less slowly, look bad because they're at the other end of the cascade.
The Confederate flag example is an interesting one. I grew up in the south, and it was common to see Confederate flag bumper stickers, rebel flag posters on dorm walls, that sort of thing. What it meant to the people who used it in those contexts was overwhelmingly as a symbol of rebellion, rather like the rock-n-roll “horned hand” gesture. You know, more like “stick it to the man” than “stick it to the blacks.” I’ve lived in the north for a long time now, and not a single Yankee believes me about this. They tediously tell me that the only, unchangeable, and eternal meaning of the Confederate flag is the racist promotion of slavery by violence. Now, I couldn’t care less about the rebel flag, and have never and would never display it. But I do think it’s a test case of who gets to decide the meaning of these sorts of symbols, whether it is the people using them, or those observing them.
Only partial agreement. You’ve got to know that the horned hand is some sort of symbol of rebellion, or at the very least that your parents hate it. But no amount of moral panic that it is really and truly a sign of devil worship is going to prove that rock really is Satan’s soundtrack.
I've seen a surprising number of rebel flags in rural Ohio. I haven't asked, but I suspect they're using it to signal being Republican. (Lincoln would not approve.)
For that matter, neither would the Confederates, who literally tried to leave the Union rather than accept the election of a Republican president.
Though the most perverse place to see Confederate flags is a tie between southern Illinois (the literal Land of Lincoln) and West Virginia, a state which only exists because its inhabitants rejected the Confederacy in all its forms.
>>You know, more like “stick it to the man” than “stick it to the blacks.”
The two aren't exclusive. Speaking as somebody who's lived in the South from age 11, a big part of the popularity of the symbol as I've seen it employed here has been "stick it to the man, because he wants you to stop sticking it to the blacks."
There's a reason the symbol isn't popular with all Southerners, and it doesn't take many conversations with those who fly the flag and those who don't to see the racial animus pattern emerge.
I'm not sure what to make of another form of language policing I've seen:
I've heard people call successful suicides "completed" suicides, and object to having them called successful. Does this fall in the same category as hyperstitions? Whatever it is, it strikes me as bizarre. In every other case that I'm aware of, from baking a cake to performing a massacre, one normally talks of the effort succeeding or failing.
Do we talk about "successful massacres" all that often, though? Maybe if we did then people would start to get bothered.
Suicide is one topic on which I have a bit of sympathy with the language police. The way people talk about suicide does seem to have a genuine real-world effect on marginal suicides.
Actually, none of the Google hits are like that. A bunch of them are:
John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children
Others include:
The king and Haman drink and share a toast for a successful massacre.
"When one [raiding party] returned after a particularly successful massacre, they were admonished for having brought back alive the chief's...
A successful massacre needs time and planning, as well as expertise and organised action.
The massacre of the refugees has taught us that a successful massacre is not one where the killing is carried out with efficiency, ...
Whatever the overall politics of these Google hits are, they _don't_ look like local policing of the language (unlike the successful suicides being pushed to being called "completed")
Well, the overall politics of these hits seemed to generally disapprove of the massacres (particularly the Thanksgiving ones). But they didn't use local language policing to do it. I was a bit surprised at it myself. Personally, I prefer to see as little language policing as possible. I would rather see views expressed in clear language, and then agreed with or disagreed with.
True! "prolific" seems like a really poor choice of adjective in that case. I'm not sure what a good choice is. Most adjectives which suggest that what they describe kills, "deadly", "lethal", etc. suggest a high _probability_ of death, but don't generally imply a large _number_ of deaths, which is the information the word needs to convey...
> A distant relative of mine who lives in the South and has no known political opinions still has a Confederate flag sticker in his room.
Noting that "no known political opinions" is sort of what you would expect if their political opinions were the sort to get them in trouble if known (in the same sort of way that "no known romantic partners" is a hint that they have romantic partners that are socially unacceptable, especially when society was less accepting).
Eh, most people with no known political opinions just literally don't think about politics, as a political junkie, it is shocking to talk to them. There are probably a few with "unthinkable opinions" who try pretending being apolitical, but most have plenty of other controversial but not unthinkable positions that they hold and will articulate and defend.
"The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the."
Interesting as always. Makes me think of a few points though.
Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
What about individual terms? "The most offensive thing you can ever do to me is to call me by my assigned at birth gender. Even when talking about my birth."
What about the extremes? If you use the n-word and get punched, all right-thinking people, even pacifists, will say you deserved it.
Religion? I say I don't appreciate hearing God damn, people tell me it's a free country.
>Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
Probably not, I don't think she became transphobic just because people believed she was transphobic, her views were (presumably, for the most part) independent of other people's beliefs.
I guess I meant that rhetorically, because "matter" is so undefined. But if 99% of people say "Jap" is a super racist term, then it becomes one. If 99% of people say JK Rowling is a symbol of modern-day transphobia, one had better not go around saying they like her unless you're prepared for some online hate.
"She's a symbol of modern-day transphobia" is a different statement than "she's transphobic" though. The former, like all symbols, could be a hyperstition, and the latter is independent of that, though you could argue they're likely to be correlated.
>Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
Allow me to introduce Dieudonné Mbala Mbala (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieudonn%C3%A9_M%27bala_M%27bala), Camerounese-French comedian. Rise to a moderate fame by doing a comedic duo with a Jewish comedian (Elie Semoun). Very mainstream, he event appears in the most famous comedy movie of the last 20+ years. Shorty after, in late 2003, he does a sketch on tv where he portray an Israeli settler that performs a nazi salute. And oh boy, we didn't have the name at the time, but it was a hell of a cancel. Thing is, unlike most cancellation target, he didn't apologize. He doubled down, and in a great illustration of "toxoplasma of rage", he was soon:
1- Never booked on TV, movie, or mainstream scene ever again
2- Doing one-man-show in a theater he owns, that became increasingly antisemitic (or antisionist, or both, depending on who you ask), as other venues he attempted to book would get cancelled by prefects, mayors or protests.
It's a pure case where hostility fed itself into turning a harmless comedians (who maybe held un-kosher thoguhts beforehand, idk, but was certainly not very vocal or obvious about them) into an antisemitic figurehead.
>I feel the same way about people of Frenchness. Yes, the French example was silly, but that’s not my actual point. The point is, there’s nothing at all dehumanizing about the phrase “the poor”.
>(if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that? It seems more dehumanizing to say the poor are in their own special little category of people who are so bad that we have to refer to them through a special circumlocution that tries to linguistically protect them from their own adjective.)
This particular bit missed the point a bit. Skipping straight to "people of x" when "x people" exists as a middle point feels an oversight. It's a much simpler and more natural change that still follows from the reasonable (although debatable) idea that describing a group as people rather than general objects helps identify their humanity.
I think this is worth acknowledging if at least to Ironman the argument you're against. Placing the other side as wanting to use "French people" rather than "people of Frenchness" feels much less silly.
And FWIW I do thing "the rich" is often used antagonistically. There's a reason "eat the rich" gets said and not "eat rich people."
I agree with this. I think "people of Frenchness" sounds weird mainly because it's a hypernominalization, and alternatives like "French people" and "people from France" sound much less ridiculous. That said, I don't myself object to "The French", though it does sound slightly like it's treating France's people as a monolith.
Both your points are well taken. To the first one, I would add that you could say something like "The French team" or "the German delegation" if you were following the AP style guide. For the second, you can also of course have the converse e.g. "The French have a range of opinions on the new agreement with the Germans." - words do of course tend to come in sentences, and only rarely does one word choice outweigh the entire rest of the sentence. It's still a choice, though I'll agree it's a small one.
Frog memes... I posted a frog and a close friend of mine said, "isn't that the right wing extremist frog?" "No no, Katy Perry posted one on twitter." "Oh phew!"
They are a very effective shorthand. I made a large number of assumptions about you when I first saw your avatar, and I am simultaneously pleased and horrified that they were all correct.
Fascinating. If you’re correct about the %s sloping, I’m all over the shop. Being a rather reclusive writer, if my rather small circle of family/friends objects to a label/term I use, I might react adversely inside but I guess I quickly decide to “obey.” But terms that change in public discourse might see me resisting until the 80% or 90% point.
Matt Yglesias had a blog post, saying quick changes are purposely about signalling exclusivity. "You said aboriginal? Um... its indigenous, you should know that."
I would swear when I first saw this comment there was a link included, but there is not now - has it gone it was I dreaming? Is there another similar comment with a link I missed?
> (if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
The terms "the rich" and "the poor" are kind of a special case because they separate people from the rest of society, when those people would probably prefer to not be separated (you're not supposed to be proud of being rich or being poor, it's not polite to talk about it or point it out, etc). Japanese/French/Southerners probably see that category as part of their identity and they don't care if you talk about it (assuming that you don't use a slur).
I had a paper held up in peer review for using that term. Reviewer (who is Mormon) demanded we use their approved term to get his approval for publication. So we changed the paper to talk about the unwieldy LDS. Granted, not a lot of Mormons in science, so this doesn't happen often, but it does happen at least once.
What is an official term? It's the normal term for this group of people used by just about everyone. The only people who object are themselves and maybe a few people who are offended on others' behalf.
In Denmark, "neger" (negro) became unusable recent due to American influence about their "negro" word, so the reach of Stokely Carmichael is surely great. Obviously, these words come from the same Latin root, so really it was all pointless.
By those caught up in the cascade going bankrupt, hopefully. This effect was/is pretty noticeable with any betting market having anything to do with Trump, presumably due to their inconvenience/low market caps, with odds skewed by pro-Trumpers being happy to lose money over unrealistic propositions.
I'm constantly irritated by a version of this. The word 'polak' is the word in the Polish language for a Polish person. I should know, I'm Polish. It has never been considered a slur by Polish people. Ever. Yet multiple times in my life I had to sit though a condescending lecture from an American telling me I'm saying a slur **in my own language**. You can see this same thing right now on the English Wikipedia page talk page. Multiple Polish people are writing to inform that this word is a literal endonym and has never been a slur, and every time a sanctimonious American tells them they are wrong.
Imagine going to Poland and finding out "American" is considered a slur and Polish people telling you the correct reaction is to be offended and you are wrong for trying to correct them.
Slavoj Zizek once said that Yugoslavs have no aspirations of dreams, there is no room for it. Others are too busy dreaming for us for us to be allowed ourselves. Having Americans 'correct' me in this regard is literally the only time I've ever felt discriminated against. Certainly not when I'm being called the Polish word for a Polish person.
This is a pretty interesting example. Polish immigration to the USA was high in the 1920s, then dropped like a stone during the 1930s and stayed low for decades. Very few second-generation Americans speak Polish; the two cultures were largely separate during the Cold War.
The word “polack” went through a hyperstition cascade in one culture but not the other.
When I waa a child in the 80's, "polaks" were the proverbial butts of ethnic jokes, i.e., the term was equivalent to "stupid person". As I was growing up I remember coming to notice that every actual Polish person that I met or even heard of was quite smart, and realizing how unjust those jokes were. "Polak" in American English has had a different connotation than in Polish, and Polish people are not the authorities on that connotation, even though the word originates in Polish.
This usage seems to be going extinct. I have not heard an American tell a "dumb Polak" joke in this century, though I heard them occasionally in the 90s.
Hmm, I wonder how much of this is directly downstream of A Streetcar Named Desire. If you're not familiar with the play, the Polish-American Stanley Kowalski takes offense over being called a "Polack" and insists on "Pole." Of course, he's the villain, but I think that part was intended to be taken sympathetically.
I'm reading a biography of Alan Burns, one of the last generation of British civil servants in the colonial service. It was interesting that in the first part of the twentieth century most thoughtful people in the service *and* in the colonies understood their job to be preparing their colonies for self-government, toward which some colonies progressed faster than others. It all got derailed when demagogues and Soviets and the UN saw colonialism as a club to beat The West with, which is why lots of former colonies are in the fix they are in today.
Anyway, part of the process of preparing the colonies was building and staffing a school system. I was startled by this tidbit from the early *fifties*:
> Alan found solace in dry humor. One session was held up when the Iraqi delegate insisted that the term "teacher training" was archaic and should be replaced in all UN documents with the swanky new term "teacher preparation". Training, the Iraqi theorist declared, was for horses. "I spent many years being trained as a civil servant," Alan insisted, "and I most emphatically deny that I am a horse."
> But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular
(re 'All Lives Matter')
You probably know this but that's a pretty uncharitable / confused reading of what happened (it was used by actual people to express that their contempt for the "black lives matter" people; the media had nothing to do with it). I can't imagine any reason to be uncharitable about this unless you're bitter about it or something.
You must be very VERY careful not only to define your denominator, but also not to be misled by the extremely large and pestiferous crowd whose professional or self-appointed personal mission involves making the majority think they are actually the minority about some opinion, what I like to call “intellectual stolen bases”.
You may find, in fact I would wager that you WILL find, that many of the new norms of language that you have adopted are in fact approved of by fewer than 70%, or even fewer than 50%, of American, and certainly by fewer than 50% of English-speakers around the world, which I would argue is the better reference class.
Also, in what context? Formal/workplace, colloquial, everything? Companies and other organizations can very quickly force people to go quite a way through the cascade in workplace speech, and some people may pick some of it up in colloquial speech as well, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous in informal speech.
Company-policed speech may even make up 70+% of all speech in some contexts, such as programming. Avoiding terminology like blacklist/whitelist may well become ubiquitous in corporate projects and not in hobby projects. (Another form of signalling that became widespread since the late 2010s is adding SJWesque codes of conduct to open source projects, but I mostly see it in corporate-sponsored projects, and not in independent, hobbyist-driven projects.)
---
Even generally, I think 70% is too low. If 30% or even 10-20% of people still use a term in a neutral sense in a given context (e.g. work, or colloquial), then
>(if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
FWIW, the AP does in fact bite this bullet. They've since deleted the screen-shotted tweet and put out a new version which replaces "the French" with "the wealthy".
I feel like it would be more reasonable to have different thresholds in different contexts.
For instance, maybe I'm willing to give up using a once-inoffensive slang term for some group (that I never come into contact with anyway) when we reach 50%, because it's no skin off my nose to stop using "tranny" or "pickaninny".
On the other hand, I would hope that the threshold for actually stopping mentioning true and relevant facts might be a lot higher.
I feel like Scott has often become sloppy in this kind of "anti-woke" post, like he detests his opponents so much he can't give the solid argument he does on other topics. For example, is it really true that "society demands that politicians resign if they use" the word "Negro"? The link goes to the chairman of the RNC calling on Reid to resign to follow the standard of Trent Lott. In other words, it's a kind of trollish hypocrisy claim by Reid's political opponents, not a serious argument that using the word is egregious. Did "society" demand Reid resign? Not really, and he stayed majority/minority leader until he retired. Also, people were offended by Reid's comments for reasons other than the word "Negro." This kind of thing (or other weak examples like the confederate flag/all lives matter) doesn't destroy the whole argument but it does make me think I cannot trust Scott not to exaggerate the evidence to make his opponents seem more ridiculous than they are.
Yeah, I think he's about 20% down the Scott Adams "contrarian public commentator to punchline" pipeline at this point.
My personal bellwether is to track how many of the HBD/"I'm just seeing where the data goes" commentators shed their cocoons and join the out-and-out "black people are genetically inferior and must be expurgated" crowd. And how likely you are to get banned by calling them racist idiots.
agreed, the 'All Lives Matter' example seemed either just misunderstood or very poorly argued to me, and in general this post did not seem as sensitively or well argued as I've come to expect from Scott. I agree with many of his examples but the post as a whole decreased my opinion of him a bit.
Not sure about the US, but after the anti-vaxx trucker convoy in Canada displaying a bona fide Canadian Flag, the Maple Leaf, became a sign of being anti-left. That is not the Union Jack, or some other niche thing, but openly displaying the official flag is now viewed with suspicion, "Are you one of THOSE?"
There have been times when wearing or displaying the US flag has been right-coded to some extent along with other overt displays of patriotism. It probably hit its high point somewhere between Vietnam and 9/11, which last kicked bipartisan flag displays and pins into high gear for a while.
Which is crazy because the current Canadian flag was brought in by the Liberal party they hate to replace the far superior Red Ensign which should be our flag.
There was an attempt to hyperstitious campaign the Red Ensign into something racist, but I think that's largely failed due to the strength of the "We literally fought the Nazis under this flag" argument.
Surely, some of this is regional. Maybe in SF Bay Chick-fil-A is taboo, but in many parts of the country, it's one of the most popular fast food joints.
Likewise, all lives matter might be taboo in places where people put out black lives matter signs, but it's far from a universal taboo.
The AP tweet commentary mostly focused on "the French," which is obviously silly. But I haven't heard nearly enough commentary about why the AP would have said it is "dehumanizing" to refer to "the college-educated."
Huh? Since when do college-educated folk object to being mentioned?
> This is a compromise between principle and self-preservation, but I don’t know a better way to do it.
If the people who started it are contemptible, and the early adopters are pathetic, then the whole thing is a bad idea no matter how many join in on it. In situations like this, I find the wisest words are those of C. S. Lewis:
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
The better way to do it is not to simply "stand on principle" and not join in the cascade, but to do what you're doing here and explain the process behind what's going on. "Stop doing this, you're being manipulated by contemptible people. We should turn around and go back to where we were." The better way is more than just not giving in, it's pushing back.
BIPOC and Latinx seem to be attempts at hyperstition cascades that are on their way to failure. Is this an actual turning point or are there other examples of failed hyperstitions from the past?
The one I really wish we could turn back is “person first language”. Just such a ridiculously circumlocutious way of talking, and I can’t imagine any homeless person feels better about their plight now that the do-gooders insist on calling them a “person experiencing homelessness”.
If BIPOC is going to fail, it will be for entirely different reasons than for Latinx. I've never seen any "BIPOC" person express offense over the term, whereas Latnix is widely hated.
I think that what a lot of people overlook is that "Latinx" was never about raising the status of Latinos. It was about raising the status of feminists and/or gender diverse people. Latinos don't like it in large part because it wasn't for them, and because it was specifically designed to promote an ideology most of them don't buy into.
BIPOC, on the other hand, was coined to raise the status of black and indigenous people.
Have you talked to Asians and Hispanics? POC was an umbrella term for minorities. But with BIPOC we have blacks moved to the top of intersectional primacy with Asians and Latinos just lumped into the unimportant "other".
I listened to an episode of Code Switch in which a number of Black people discussed their feelings about the term. Opinions were mixed. Some liked its creation of a sense of unity across different groups, while others felt it erased or minimized the unique Black experience and Black culture by lumping Black people in with other groups.
If I’m understanding the ASX theory of hyperstition, the term itself should have some organic origin before it gets politicized, polarized, and gnawed-over. BIPOC and Latinx were delivered fresh from PMC/academia regimes. For contrast, Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and MLK all casually debated the term “Negro.”
What about “LGBT….” and the numerous letters getting added onto it? That one seems to be an inorganic, but successful (at least up to “Q”) hyperstition.
I’ve been seeing additions and alterations to “LBGT...uhhh...” since the late 90s/early 2000s. I think clearly it signifies disparate groups under a political umbrella that is assumed to provide protection (both serious, life-preserving protection, and rhetorical cover). There is no Machiavellian council deciding which letters in the acronym get put where.
The constant shifting of acceptable language can be confusing and stressful for people, and I agree that it often happens for insubstantive reasons. But it's a pretty minor issue that causes more inconvenience than harm, and lamenting it in an article that *leads* with the example of 'Jap' burns respectability with very little to gain.
AFAIK Scott is financially independent now. He's self-employed and makes money off both his self-owned private psych practice and ACX. Why fear the self-appointed woke censors when they can't meaningfully harm you?
Scott clearly didn’t lead with “Jap” because it’s the term he most wants to go back to using (I mean he specifically says he has no intention of making it part of his lexicon). I think he picked that one because the etymology is so obviously benign compared to how negatively the term is now viewed.
I think it’s worthwhile to note that not all slurs are hyperstitions—some words are intended as slurs from the very beginning.
“A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true.”
Similarly, it seems like the correct (or at least uncontroversially correct) version of this line is “A hyperstition is a belief that becomes TRUER if people believe it’s true”. I think a lot of people would claim that hanging a confederate flag was always racist, by virtue of signaling support for the confederacy. But it’s pretty undeniable that it’s become a much stronger signal for racism over time.
(Similarly, it’s unclear if “hyperstitions are bad” is endorsing the take “People shouldn’t have promoted the claim that the Confederate flag is racist.”)
Not a big distinction for me, but some people I’ve linked this too have definitely been put off because of this, and that’s sad because I think this article makes a lot of great points!
The adoption of the confederate flag as a bumper sticker/home decoration/logo is 100% enmeshed in the history of Southern racism and the Jim Crow legal regime. Most of the statues and cultural signifiers (like street names, school names, etc.) that have been cultural flashpoints of late (as in Charlottesville) were not built or instituted as war memorials in the sense that most people understand that process. It probably wouldn’t surprise most folks to know that building war memorials is not an activity usually undertaken by recently subjugated populations. As they say, the victors write history. The high point for the proliferation of Confederate war memorials was just post-1900, and concentrated around post-WWI, when black veterans were returning to Southern towns and asserting what they thought were their rights. The flag iconography rose in tandem with this.
That is all true. But there really was a segment in the south in the 70s-90s that largely was oblivious of the connotational baggage and used the flag as a symbol of regional pride, even while others used it more deliberately. The symbols lost their salience over time as hate-symbols for at least sub-segments of the white population.
Sure, once it got watered down into a shorthand for liking Lynyrd Skynyrd. But I don’t think that’s the claim our friend above is defending. (source: I grew up around the remnants of Lost Cause ideology in the South, which was by my time Boomer dads saying “it’s just about Southern Heritage. I have black friends at work!” who mysteriously never came over to our barbecues... )
By London soccer team is an interesting case. Tottenham Hotpur FC ("Spurs") is a north London team that had a long history of support among the Jewish community (which eventually moved out of Tottenham of course). Opposing teams took a lot of pleasure in baiting the Yids.
Tottenham fans eventually adopted Yids as their own nickname for their fans (Yid Army), and proudly shouted "Yiddo' at players doing will - including black players amongst others.
Various Jewish groups have tried to stop this: they argue that using Yid is inherently antisemitic, and hurtful (it's ironic that the most active group is led by a Chelsea fan - their fans were for a long time know to be horrifically racist and antisemitic).
The club itself commissioned a survey which inevitably generated split results (only a relatively small minority of fans in the ground are now jewish btw). The club has rather awkwardly tried to ask fans not to us "Yid" or "Yidddo," but this appears to have had zero impact.
For myself, I'm a yes: I like the idea of reclaiming a slur. In a way it's even better that non-Jewish fans use the former slur approvingly....
You have this with a lot of normal words, like "master and slave", the image of hanging and nooses; using "he" as a baseline pronoun; etc. It happened really quickly, it's extremely bothersome at how quickly these campaigns to turn something into a bad word become real. I understand how someone ends up being the old fogey who's worked in the office for 50 years and still stubbornly uses outdated terminology that is viewed as a faux pas. It's because this sort of transformation in the language keeps happening, but now it happens at ridiculous speed. And somethings don't take, maybe because they're too ridiculous. But some things do, and you find yourself conforming because you don't want to be offensive and you're good at picking up on these cues, but it's really not a good thing.
This reminds me of a passage from "Flowers for Algernon." The protagonist is mentally handicapped at the start of the book, but undergoes a medical procedure that makes him exceptionally intelligent. When that happens, he reflects:
"Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional-a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody."
When I read the book I thought that if nobody had ever used the word "retarded" with derision, it probably would be a fine word to this day. If anything, it's a hopeful label - this person will progress in their learning, but their progress will be retarded. I hadn't considered the notion that a word could start its path to becoming a slur by someone trying too hard to be nice, like your USC example.
This is called the euphemism treadmill. A word starts out as a euphemism, but because it describes something that people look down on, people start using the euphemism ironically, and before long it's a slur.
Japanese has several second-person pronouns like omae, kisama, and temae that, based on their etymology, seem like they should be the kind of very polite words reserved for addressing nobility. And they were, centuries ago. But then people started using them ironically, and now they're basically fighting words.
"Mormon" is another one. I have some Mormon coworkers all the way out here on the east coast. One day the topic came up and in response to me saying the word "Mormon" one of them when he responded very emphatically said "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" with the unspoken but obvious subtext that "Mormon" is something I must not say. No, I'm not going to say that mouthful. If I'm trying to be conflict averse I might compromise at "LDS" (which according to the new church doctrine is a forbidden term too) but I will not under any circumstances say that mouthful.
The position of the Mormon church, btw, is that if we must insist on a short term for Mormons, we are to call them "Saints". Lol ok, not happening.
This might not have been true 20 years ago, but I feel like these days the determination of how established in society the norm of a word being unacceptable is is totally warped by the fact that the most vocal and scolding people are the ones pushing it. If the norm isn't established organically, how do we know if it really is X percent who are buying into it?
Not only are we not supposed to mention 13/50 / 13/52, it's now listed as a "hate symbol" by the likes of the ADL. They even have the audacity to say "In this numeric shorthand, the number 13 refers to the purported percentage of the U.S. population that is African American. The number 52 refers to the alleged percentage of all murders committed in the U.S. that are committed by African Americans. Some white supremacists use the number 50 instead of 52."
I assume that the "allegedly" is in there because the actual number has been a bit higher recently.
Worth noting that this is usually claimed to be the percentage of violent crime or even total crime committed by black people, which is not true. It's really only homicide and robbery that are majority-black. If the ADL wanted to say that this is false, they could have gone with one of the weakman versions that actually are false. Instead they went after the version that's approximately true.
> deliberately thumbing your nose at the prevailing signaling equilibrium - which is itself a statement about race.
It isn't, though. Once hyperstition is locked in, meaning is effectively gone. One can say that a statement is unacceptable, but not why it's unacceptable, because any meaningful difference of beliefs is just as possible among the acceptable-signalers as it is between the acceptable-signalers and the hold-outs.
By this point the whole thing is on simulacrum level 3-- "I belong with the acceptable people". Or think of Havel's greengrocer: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." And the reverse signal-- "I don't belong with the acceptable people"-- could equally be a dissent from *any* consensus; the notional meaning of the symbol is drowned out just by the act of dissent. This explains the behavior of Trump-style populists who seem actively eager to be rejected by the Overton Window consensus, but just for the sake of the rejection; they're careful to maintain plausible deniability about holding any *actually* unacceptable views. They're signaling opposition to the In Crowd in general, not making a statement about anything in particular.
Scott has made several points that are only true from a center-left perspective.
In downtown Helena, Montana about 80% of the businesses have either a rainbow flag sticker or some related virtue signal about being "safe" or how "all are welcome" or whatever.
This is not San Francisco. Its 99% white cowboy Montana!
It already makes me nervous that I don't have such a sticker in my window (I am a business owner) and I have done nothing wrong. According to Scott's logic, resistance to the trend is a statement about sexuality whether I want it to be or not. No matter how I personally feel about the issue.
Putting one up now is giving in to the Satlinesque social scape we are rapidly building. Smile and repeat the lie or lose your livelihood.
A newspaper comic I used to casually enjoy, was cancelled by the Los Angeles Times and I believe other papers because, *in a flashback set in Literal World War Two*, an allied military officer was shown referring to the presumed pilot of a fighter plane with big red meatball insignia as a "Jap". And with a tone of curiosity, not contempt.
I want to "make them work for it" a whole lot more than you do, even in the case of morally neutral shorthand terms like "Jap". I don't want to annoy them; I want to infuriate them. And for the simple plain-language statements of unquestionably morally virtuous things like "all lives matter" and "it's OK to be white", I think a Rorschachian unwillingness to compromise is called for, because the enemy won't stop at just one or two ways to express that sentiment.
Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.
*ahem*
From the horse's mouth (by proxy):
'After the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, activist Alicia Garza woke up crying in the middle of the night and decided to write about her emotions in a Facebook post. In the post, Garza stated that she was surprised "at how little Black lives matter". The post would inspire Garza's friend Patrisse Cullors to create the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on July 15, 2013.'
"All lives matter" is and should be a perfectly fine thing to say. As a retort to the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, it's witless.
The problem with that is that "black lives matter" has become a shibboleth for defunding the police, bailing out killers, and general hatred of whites as well as those who have worked hard and achieved things. Black lives matter, yes, of course. But that doesn't mean I will sign on to the slogan that has become a signifier of hateful political psychosis.
I don't have a simple reply to whether I support "Black Lives Matter". The phrase? The slogan? The organization? The movement? The social organism? But that doesn't preclude an honest assessment of the slogan on its own terms.
Two it is a slogan of hatred and racism and most of the people fond of it are actively racist. Absolutely the most racist group of people in society by far are the far-left racial activists.
Fuck them I hope they all get raptured into some other dimension they can slowly turn into hell.
Pronoun-sharing ("he/him/his") occurs to me as the case that is at like 40% right now.
One interesting point to the 70% rule.... such a cascade can still occur even if almost all people use a fairly high threshold like 70%. The Schelling segregation model provides an illustration of how this happens: https://youtu.be/dnffIS2EJ30. Residential segregation can result even when people only move out of a neighborhood when heavily outnumbered by people of other races/ethnicities--much like the 70% rule. Replace "neighbors of a different ethnicity" with "people you read or talk to who share their pronouns" (or whatever) and the model shows that even a fairly strict rule may not prevent such cascades.
(The analogy is not perfect because in the Schelling model people move and are replaced, rather than actually changing their ethnicity)
Seems like the NYT style guide writers are the only individuals with much power here.
You also have local cascades. There are communities, organizations, and regions where 70% might be reached before the broader country or anglophone world. I think introducing pronouns has problem crossed that line in certain groups
I was at a company once for a summer internship (tech company full of woke yuppies in downtown Chicago) where when I started out a few people had pronouns next to their names on Slack. Maybe 10-20%. By the end of the summer it was over 80%. I still refused to comply. This was four years ago. I will never comply with forced pronoun sharing. I am a man. That is immediately obvious by looking at me. If you don't know how to refer to me, that's a you problem, not a me problem.
I've had the misfortune of encountering a few people who adamantly insist on referring to everyone as "they" until explicitly being told pronouns. Extremely grating. Kill it with fire!
For most hyperstitious cascades there's a point around 80-85 percent where I give up and resign myself to it. But the pronoun thing is so obnoxious and grating that I just will not comply. I refuse to debase myself like that. If I am ever forced to, they'll have to fire me if it comes to that. I'll find a job somewhere else.
I was in a meeting where 4 separate times I was asked to provide pronouns and each time just met them with a stony glare. Luckily I am highly coveted in my small area, so I knew there would be no consequences I couldn’t handle.
I feel like pronoun-sharing is one of those attempts that is going to stall and fail and then everyone will go back to pretending like it never happened.
The current form, wherein people include both the direct object and indirect object (and occasionally possessive) version of their preferred pronoun is a weird carryover from that brief period when people were seriously trying to use things like "xim/xir" and "yot/yir". The bizarre nonstandard pronouns seems to have receded but we're left with "he/him".
Like a lot of good articles from Scott, this one had me thinking about something I kinda knew but hadn't identified.
I think this hyperstitious concept goes a long way to explaining my move from a more libertarian mindset to conservative. I realized that "live and let live" wasn't going to work out, because 51% of people (or a very vocal 10%) was going to take my hobbies, my lifestyle, my flag and my statues and decide, in a reverse respectability cascade, that they were really emblems for all that was ill in this world. If I wanted to do my own thing, I'd have to find a large community to make sure random things I loved didn't become universal signs for hatred.
As much as I'd like to unite with the fellow Libertarian minded, there just aren't enough of us.
Yes. A few years ago I was fine with statues of Confederates being taken down. Didn't care much and didn't see how it affected me. Now I want Monument Avenue in Richmond restored to its former, resplendent glory. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Don't get greedy.
The left really did a great job of losing centrists ok that issue. We went from “oh just because we want to rename this lake doesn’t mean we will be tearing down statues of Lincoln”, to actual requests to tear down statues of Lincoln and rename schools named after him in like 5 years.
It was amazing how fast that slippery slope was actualized.
There should never be a public statute of any person for more than 20 years.
After 20 years sell it and commission something new. It might be the same person or it might not.
Hagiography is for saints. But the secular society has no way making that determination because it is out of their realm of competence in a pluralistic democracy.
Full employment for sculptors and no secular hagiography.
I disagree about "live and let live" not working. I think the phenomenon is very much downstream from government action, namely hostile workplace environment (aka harassment) laws, and guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws. Notice how corporations tend to be among the earliest and most effective enforcers of speech policing, and how the most discussed risk of speaking up is getting fired. It's partly because not policing speech would itself be a lawsuit risk; and partly because all the executives are either SJWs or keep quiet, because hiring an outspoken opponent of them would be a lawsuit risk. And notice how ubiquitous this is at major companies (while on a free market one would expect that if one company chooses to cater to progressives, then a competitor would fill the opening and cater to right-wingers).
It's not that all of wokeness is mandated by law. But I think the laws are essential components of the feedback loop. Repeal harassment laws and anti-discrimination laws (laws that violate the libertarian principle of freedom to choose who you do business with), and the edifice collapses. Or, to stay closer to the Overton window, keep anti-discrimination laws, but make it very clear that proof of discriminatory intent is required, and hostile workplace environment or statistical disparities can't be used as evidence.
David Bernstein's recent book ( https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Classified/David-E-Bernstein/9781637581735 ) has a good discussion of the efforts of Polish activists to get the same protections that blacks were given. The law is very clear in making nationality parallel to race, but judges and federal departments refused to protect Poles, or to establish data collection to track whether or not Poles should receive any protection, because -- in their eyes -- the point of the law was to protect blacks!
This is a case where the law says one thing and it doesn't matter because everyone involved in enforcing the law chooses to enforce something different. The immediate implication is that, if you try to change the law, it won't matter because the people who interpret what you meant are still the same people.
Note that two things are historically true:
1. After the civil rights act passed, government actors specifically tried to protect blacks, because that was what they had already wanted to do. They weren't trying to implement a new law, they were appealing to the new law to implement their preexisting agenda. This contradicts the theory that the agenda is caused by the law.
2. When activists appealed to the actual text of the law, the same government actors ignored them. This contradicts the idea that the law has an agenda-setting power independent of what the enforcers wanted before it was passed.
Courts and executive agencies will twist the law and enforce it differently for different groups, but that doesn't mean that the law has no effect whatsoever. After all, there's a reason they made a law in the first place, instead of just enforcing what they wanted without any law to back it up.
Also, more broadly my point is that wokeness is a result of government actions, of all three branches combined. Which means that it wouldn't have power under a live-and-let-live (i.e. libertarian) governance; and that getting rid of these laws and/or their enforcement is a necessary (and probably sufficient) condition for eliminating the power of wokeness.
that's how it could be ended, but how would one get the support for those legal changes, without conservative support? Libertarians won't get it changed on their own; we're too few.
Conservatives+libertarians together need the numbers. That's not a reason to be a conservative over a libertarian: it doesn't change the sum.
I do support allying with conservatives, voting alongside them, and even illibertarian tactics to get there (such as cracking down on companies pushing politics in a progressive direction).
---
Btw the lowest hanging fruit for an American libertarian or conservative political organization (or rich person) with a few million dollars would be to offer to pay the legal costs (and in case of a loss, the award) of a company that makes a First Amendment challenge against verbal harassment law. I'm unaware of any SCOTUS decision upholding it, and it doesn't fall under any of the established exceptions to the First Amendment; it's not a content-neutral time/place/manner restriction. The difficulty in challenging it is that the employees don't have standing when fired under lawsuit risk, only the employer does when actually sued. It's censorship by proxy.
I like this post but think it goes too far in stretching the word "slur" to include things that are more like "categories of un-person" such as cops or drone pilots or whatever.
I also think it's EXTREMELY important to remember that there is not just one culture and quite often things can be slurs (or whatever) to 50 percent of people without actually being part of any kind of cascade, and I think there can be hateful equilibriums that hold for decades. Republicans think badly of democrats and vice versa and neither side is coming close to turning the other word into an unspeakable slur or an un-person category of people in general, even if being a republican makes you an un-person to a lot of dems.
It's interesting that you use Asian as an example of a term that could become a hyperstitious slur without mentioning that this already happened--my mom, who lived in Asia for many years and certainly has the opposite of animus for people from that continent whatever they might be called, is still mad that she's apparently not allowed to call them Orientals anymore.
That’s another of those weird ones where both the preferred and deprecated term mean literally the same thing (e.g. “negro” and “black”) - Asia and the Orient both mean basically “the East”. Eurocentric to be sure but not obvious why one would be more offensive than the other.
The words are not offensive. The people are offended -- or at least they are claiming to be offended. And they are choosing to be offended by one word and not the other. The great push-back which is needed is to re-orient the world to a default position where everybody is presumed responsible for their own feelings. This is unlikely to happen because for the USC authors, this is not about feelings, but about power. This is a society-level hazing operation.
We can outright rule out the idea that it refers to "the eastern shore" of the Aegean, since the term appears to come from Hittite, and they were located to the east of there.
That might not be an example - during the Nixon administration, a couple of Indian pressure groups successfully campaigned to get out of the "white" category and into the legally-preferred "Asian" one.
In the modern day, this has really hurt them in college admissions, but it continues to have monetary value post-college when dealing with the government.
Anyway, that would have necessitated a shift away from "Oriental", since Indians are obviously not Orientals.
As someone who has been called 'Oriental' once or twice, I've never been offended by it, but I would probably think your mother was strange in the "probably doesn't get out much/hasn't consumed any media in the past fifty years" sense - no real judgment implied, but that's the sentiment it gives off. As a side note, it's a lot more common in Europe ("Oriental barber shops") which is a little funny to me to see because it seems to mean 'Turkish' here more than 'East Asian'.
I'm always amused how people on the right wilfully confuse rainbow washing with poor corporations being enforced to comply with totalitarian culture or else.
Do you know that a lot of the pride participating corporations actlively lobby anti-lgbt politicians?
I am always amused that everyone, left, right and middle believes that moral progress is inevitable and that all progress bends in a leftward arc. But, I have to live here in this bizarro world.
Corporations can do whatever they want, because they are rich and they are corporations. But the difference between legal ramifications (like Obegfeld for example) and what the left likes to call "consequences" of canceling for the little guy when you have mouths to feed is a distinction without a difference. Its cynical, coy sophistry.
Oh no, of course moral progress isn't inevitable. It requires a lot of effort. Thankfully humanity is doing this effort. As for the direction - it actually just goes forward but for historical reasons right wing people are to a significant degree conservatives and reactionaries, so of course it would seem to bend leftward if we judge it with such dychotomy.
Yeah, cancel culture is a problem and civilized society will have to figure out a way to deal with this edge case of freedom of speech. Please tell me, a person living in Russia all my life and currently executing moderate effort to hide from the government in order not to be sent to die in imperialistic war, more how being expected to support lgbt is totally like totalitarianism. It's another things that totally amuses me.
It's funny that you complain about "racism loosing all meaning" in the different thread while keeping insisting that people being fired from jobs is literally totalitarianism.
Yes, it's bad when your kids can't eat. No, it doesn't make it totalitarisnism. Easy as that.
I'm not sure I am tracking what is so funny about it. Totalitarians seek to control not only your behavior, but the thoughts and words you use to express those thoughts. (Hence the prefix "total"). They don't need gas chambers and gulags to accomplish those goals.
PC and woke movements come from this totalitarian instinct, which is very strong on the left I am afraid.
The mere idea that someone like me exists, with my little heteronormative nuclear intact family living our Christian life and actually believing what we pray around the table while being allowed to earn a living is deeply troubling to these people.
It is funny to watch a series of nice or euphemistic terms go through the process of becoming slurs because the thing they're trying to describe isn't good and people develop the superstitions belief that some it's the word's fault, and if we just change the word we use, the badness will go away. Sort of like the old idea that the word "bear" isn't really the name of the animal, it's what we say INSTEAD of its name because if you say its name, it will hear you and attack.
I think that "ephemism" angle should have been mentioned here. Otherwise we are getting a pretty one sided picture where stupid sjw keep making things slurs for nearly no reason other than to signal their wokeness and conformism, while in reality it's a memetic battle between forces in a culture war.
Some things are both wrong and forbidden to say like "Black people are inherently inferrior to white people". Some people want to say them but not to loose all their social capital. So they create an ephemism, say "Black people commit more crimes than white people", which is both technically true and not forbidden to say and keep using it in the context of Black people inferriority. They now have plausible deniability of "just saying facts" and trying to appear clueless normies which is improved when the ephemism become popular enough that actual clueless normies start using it. As a result there is no more neutral way to talk about "Black people commiting more crimes", because just saying it out of context can very well be an ephemism for racist views. So people on the left talk about systemic racism, consequenses of slavery, adjustments for poverty and all other things that put the phrase in the context that explains it without defaulting to racism. And yeah, also the fact that black people commiting more crimes is partly a hyperstition as well.
There is also a matter of virtue of accuracy that people will inevitably confuse with hyperstition cascades. Saying "gender assigned at birth" is strictly more accurate than just "gender" or "sex" when talking about whatever was written in your birth certificate. Noone reallychecked your gender identity, chromosomes or hormones. There was just made a reasonable guess based on your genitals. That's not how people actually define sex or gender.
Also there is a matter of, not sure how to call that, linguistic truth? I've never heard that "the X" is potentially dehumanising before. But now when you brought it to my attention - indeed it seem to be ruder form than saying "X people". Try rephrasing "Eat The Rich" to "Eat Rich People" - it immediately becomes less snappy and more awkward. And yeah, to answer the question, obviously "the rich" is just as dehumanising as "the poor". The difference is in the fact that being rich is more high status than being poor and being attributed to a faceless high status mass is better than to a faceless low status mass. Also rich people can handle a little dehumanisation much better due to having much more resources. So I think I'm joining the cascade early on the grounds of basic niceness and will make some effort to say "X people" instead of "the X".
And of course there is also the revese process of "reclaiming a slur", which happens occasionally without any intervention of the King of Language. It just have to be an initiative from the group that the slur is against. "Queer", I think, is the very good example here. So yeah, if a lot of Japaneese people coordinate and proclaim that "Jap" isn an acceptable short form to talk about them - soon it won't be a slur anymore.
Part of the problem is the notion is that if people say (certain) wrong things, even in veiled forms, they need to loose all their "social capital" (in practice we're talking about suffering material penalties like not being able to get a job), and this is even more important than letting people say true things.
Why? One of the common justifications is that black people shouldn't have to work side-by-side with openly racist people and tolerate them; that's a hostile environment, unfair and illegal. But notice that this doesn't even mean black people don't have racists around them! It just means they are not allowed to know who they are: to the extent the system is effective, they don't know that any particular co-worker is racist, but they also can't know that any particular co-worker isn't racist, because everyone is forced to pretend not to be racist.
Or maybe it's to prevent racists from spreading particular racist ideas? But the whole point is that they are prohibited from signalling racism in any way, even by saying things a non-racist may say too (or might if they didn't signal racism).
Or maybe to prevent racists from making it common knowledge that there are many other racists, and feel emboldened by that? But then why do the anti-racists themselves spare no effort convincing people that society is full of racists?
In practice, it's because every company wants to fend off racial harassment/discrimination lawsuits by convincing courts that "there are no racists here, everyone here is an enthusiastic anti-racist, all the racists must be employed somewhere else", and this works relatively well even if everyone is actually just forced to pretend that they're enthusiastic anti-racists.
I think I agree with you on net, but to steelman the other side with an example: if you believe racism toward black people is common enough to be a threat to individual black people (this doesn't have to be very common), black people would benefit from having at-least-slightly-costly signals of non-racism. By using hyperstition cascades, you can keep the goalposts moving, which keeps people working to perform non-racism. "colored" signals likely racism, "African American" signals being out of touch so not fully trustworthy, "black" signals being likely trustworthy, and "person of color" signals paying active attention (that one has probably mostly lost its value by now, but still). I suspect that does pay genuine dividends to individual black people, even if it's annoying and looks a bit silly and costs society some.
In the Japanese example, when anti-japanese sentiment was common, having flags for trying-to-be-decent was probably really valuable?
I guess overall, being in the first 1% means you're a dick, but being 5-15th% probably signals trustworthiness?
The problem is, the goal of creating trustworthy signals of non-racism inherently conflicts with the parallel goal (of the same people) of making it impossible to signal racism and get away with it.
Either let people say what they want—then racists will say racist things; but if someone doesn't say racist things, you can easily trust that he isn't racist. Or punish people for behaving in any way that suggests that they might be racist, but then you have no way to trust that anyone is definitely not racist. Choose one.
(Similarly, let racist whites segregate themselves from black people, and then black people can surround themselves with people who are definitely not racist against them. Or do your best to make it impossible for racist whites to segregate themselves, and black people have no way to avoid being around racist whites, as long as there are any. At that point, you can choose whether to let them know which whites around them are racist and which ones aren't.)
EDIT: Why does the signal of non-racism have to be costly? I guess because even racists are pressured to signal non-racism. But again, do you want black people to know who's not racist? If yes, then don't incentivize racists to dishonestly signal non-racism, and then no racist will dishonestly signal it even if it's cheap. If no, don't create signals (costly or otherwise) that allow non-racists to signal their non-racism.
Humans are ridiculously social animals. Some even think primarily in terms of what's socially acceptable, and secondarily in terms of what's true. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ regarding food preferences.) So for some people, seeing other people signal being racist will convince them that it's ok to be racist, and increase the total amount of racism.
This article is good But you chose two poor examples.
The Confederate flag is a bad example.
It was added to bunch of state flags in the 1890s. It was part of enacting Jim crow.
It was added to Georgia's in 1956 as part of defending Jim Crow.
So yes there was some "innocent" use I guess, but the "first 5-10-25%" of making it a racist hate symbol was done by the actual Confederacy (We kind of had a war over it.) and then Southern legislatures using it as a sticker to brand the reassertion of a racist caste system.
Similarly, you live in California.
You probably have been to some Japanese internment memorials. You've probably seen some of the surprisingly racist dr. Seuss cartoons. The use of Jap was not innocent after 1941.
The Confederate flag is a superb example. Most people flying that flag are not (or at least were not until the last 10–20 years) "racists" in the old meaning of that term; they are expressing their Southern pride/rebellious spirit. It is (or was) primarily an anti-*Yankee* symbol, not an anti-*black* symbol. You can argue that its history and connotations make it inherently racist, but that's just exactly the process being described.
Again, look when it was put into the state flags. It wasn't put up during the war or right after. It was put up as part of Jim Crow and as a way to say fuck you to civil rights in the 1950's.
While I agree those uses existed, the uses that Calion describes also definitely existed as the primary “meaning” of the flag over some period that ended recently (let’s call it the “Dukes of Hazzard” era). The DOHE lasted until at least the mid 90s - I distinctly remember the WalMart in my (very Northern!) hometown having merchandise with Rebel Flags (and that’s always what it was called) printed on it. Around the schoolyard it was absolutely understood that this was a cool symbol you’d use to signal “rebelliousness” and “anti-authority” and “yay Lynyrd Skynyrd” not “I hate black people”. Punk perhaps, but not racist.
So there absolutely was a “hyperstition cascade” centered on the flag that occurred over the last 2+ decades. And the centering of discussion on the flag’s “anti-civil rights” meanings rather than on “them Duke boys” is one of the mechanisms of the hyperstition.
The “truth” about how offensive / racist the flag “should” be is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion of the hyperstition phenomenon. The people who insisted “black” should be used instead of “negro” were very sincere believers that the latter had always been racist in its origins.
How old are you? Honest question, not a gotcha. I feel like there is a fairly hard generational split in what people grew up thinking about it. I’m an “old millennial” and as a (northern) kid it was definitely “cool anti-authority, disdain for ‘fancy’ culture, ‘redneck’ pride” (I recognize it’s viewed differently now, and maybe rightly so, but I’m not going to retroactively pretend it was being used that way back then). But every Zoomer I encounter is sure it’s super racist and always has been. There may be other shifts farther back.
I'm in 60s, so a boomer. I personally have known people who marched with King.
The Confederate Flag has always been racist, anti-urban, and anti-multicultural competency. To not acknowledge that it has always been that way is nonsense.
The "it's just a southern thing" is a covering up of the real truth. It might even be self-deception that parents and grandparents weren't racists. But the truth is the truth. I think it should also also be called the "Traitor flag". Just like the fiction that the Civil War was not about slavery - of course, it was. Parrhesia!
Right. But I’m not talking about hiding grandma being racist, I’m talking about a nontrivial number of my actual early 90s peers adopting it for reasons orthogonal to racism or slavery (not me personally, so I don’t have a totally inside view into their hearts I guess). I get that I’m asking you to take my word for it, but that’s also “the truth”.
I wasn’t in the south to be fair so maybe it lost that context when it migrated north.
So maybe boomers -> it’s racist, Gen X / old millenial -> loses some of its racist connotation, late millenial / zoomer -> it’s totally racist again.
“The Civil War was about slavery” is true (with caveats and complexities, but sure, that’s your one sentence root cause). But “the Civil War was fought between abolitionists and slave owners / people who personally supported slavery”, which seems to be how that gets spun these days, is misleading.
That people pretended it wasn't and maybe fooled themselves, I don't what to say.
That zoomers don't really know how bad it actually was is a whole different question.
Maybe by the 90s, grandchildren of immigrants from the 20s started imagining that they were whites and WASPs and so took on the racist Southern WASP culture especially after Reagan recession/depression of 80s broke people economically without really understanding it.
Maybe Clinton, Gore and Gingrich made it seem like there was a new South and the meaning of symbols was muddled.
The southern traitor states attempted to violently cede specifically and directly to preserve the institution of slavery. And then continued the oppression by different means Jim Crow and traiter flag and confederate monuments. Like also gnostic movements secret unspoken but known symbols of the "cause" - WASP supremacy.
The traitor flag can never be a symbol of "the South" because it is an FU to a at least 30-40% of the southern population (blacks descended from enslaved).
As to the non-black population of South how possibly could traitor flag be a symbol of foreign immigrants who overwhelmingly came after civil war or northern transplants who overwhelmingly came South recently as rust Bowl dislocations and as Atlanta and NC (medical research) became cosmopolitan.
To assert that the flag is in any way benign is really a crypto-racist and crypto-no nothing tell.
No, you’re right, a spirit of rebellion cannot be part of a culture, which is why the culture of the United States is not based in large part on its rebellion against the British..
But American culture is certainly bound up not in "rebellion" but in the use of violence to reject laws.
Probably one of the most important motivator of revolution in south was avoidance of somerset v stewart, in north it was avoidance of laws against smuggling (basically tax scofflaws).
In 1772, King's Bench, ruled in the case of Somerset v Stewart that it was unlawful for Charles Steuart (or Stewart) to transport James Somerset, an enslaved African he had purchased in Virginia, forcibly out of England.
You're always going to be able to find the odd ball. Maybe he thinks he can be a as vanguard appropriate it and flip it. But we should not discount the amount of self-loathing and attention seeking behavior involved in that process.
>>It is (or was) primarily an anti-*Yankee* symbol, not an anti-*black* symbol.
This falls apart when one interrogates why the South had an "anti-Yankee symbol" to begin with. If the Yanks had been cool with slavery, no symbol. Same if they'd later been cool with Jim Crow. So yeah, it's anti-Yankee, but only to the extent those damned Yanks insist on abolishing slavery, desegregating schools, etc.
Yeah…that is ridiculously simplistic. To think the only reason Southerners don’t like Yankees—or the only reason for the Civil War—was that the South hated blacks and wanted slavery and the North did not hate blacks and wanted to abolish slavery is not only oversimplified, it’s flatly false.
Also, your generous overuse of the word "racist" is telling.
It is a perfect example of why this policy you have prescribed doesn't work. "Racist" now no longer contains any useful rational meaning for the majority. Same with "misogyny" and all the rest of it.
90% of people who display confederate flags are signaling their "racism" to you? Yikes. What a drag it must be to have to deploy such an obtuse screening measure against your fellow Americans.
There is a giant spectrum of positions on race and the role it should play in society and almost none of it is hostile toward any particular race. But we are no longer allowed to explore those options because of the stable equilibrium of which you write.
I think his point is the way it is widely seen is often wrong. Large swaths of people written off as “irredeemably racist”, are not particularly “racist” in the traditional sense at all. They just have some beliefs about racial matters that don’t correspond to the current HR orthodoxy. That isn’t the same thing.
“I don’t want to live next to black people because I hate darkies” is racist. “I don’t want to live next to black people because it is a good sign that a neighborhood has high crime and low social functioning/compliance”, is not.
Yeah it is annoying it is hard to tell the two types of people apart, but life was never guaranteed to be easy, and lumping them together creates more problems than it solves since you create more actual racists by branding non-racists racists (once they are already called racists injustly, the social cost of going the rest of the way becomes nil).
Not only that, but “I don’t want to live next to black people because it is a good sign that a neighborhood has high crime and low social functioning/compliance”, when spelled out that way, points to actual problems that can and should be addressed and whose solution would benefit black people as well. Making it taboo to mention the problem prevents any attempt to even think about a solution.
Non-substantive posts like this are strongly discouraged here (as I discovered when I received a 1% ban for doing so). Please spell out your claims if you have them.
"A friend's black neighbor flies a confederate flag to celebrate south" implicitly suggesting that its not racist. This is dubious on many accounts and not credible to me.
Yes, absolutely. Because you can make that point about black neighborhoods and be honestly curious about the causes of it without hate or condescension.
Seeing how NOT making that point has probably cost the lives of thousands of black people over the last two-and-a-half years, maybe a little less preemptive mindreading and a little more attention to facts would be worth a try?
Truth and reconciliation is always possible and guaranteed when loving one's neighbor as yourself is embraced. Solidarity is possible and the true human condition.
It's mildly amusing that “negro” became unacceptable explicitly because of its ~european etymology, to be replaced by another term “black”, also has a ~european etymology.
True. Of course, if you wanted to choose a word of African etymology, there are probably hundreds of languages to choose from, and choosing one would exclude the others.
Would someone please explain how "Oriental" got added to this train? It just means "Eastern" for Chrissakes! How in the world is that offensive? <oldmanyellsatcloud.jpg>
Likely because not many people use the word. The only major examples I can think of involve quite racist British 'Orientalists'. If you've grown up in a group where most people use the word, then it won't be a useful signal to you, but if you're from Asia then likely the only times you've heard this word is in reference to these Orientalists, and people who agree with their views.
Hyperstition ⊂ Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, i.e. hyperstitions are a subset of self-fulfilling prophecies but pertaining only beliefs (quote: "...a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true.")
I didn't see any reference to self-fulfilling prophecies mentioned (please forgive me if this question / observation was already commented). Wikipedia, Self-fulfilling prophecy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
Second: with words for which an easy substitute can be found, 70% sounds reasonable (although 90% would probably be better)... but for important facts, can we please please agree to set the threshold at 99.999%? We're getting close to where pointing out that there are exactly two biological sexes in animals gets you labeled as a transphobe, and that way madness lies.
Well, if “Jap” is to be re-admitted to polite discourse, there are some other candidates that have been used for other peoples in similarly derogatory ways. In no particular order: spic, mick, coolie, wetback, nip, bohunk, jock, sambo, Canuck, kraut, greaser, frog, slope, Uncle Tom, wop, Dago, guinea , spade, Papist, babu, wog, chink, fritz, gook, hymie, whitie, tonto, jungle bunny, dinks, redskin, injun, polack , portugee, ruski, banana, oreo, mulatto, half breed, mongrel, beaner, Buddha head, rag head, Charlie, goombah, honky, beastly hun, white trash, trailer trash, zoot suit. As Whizzer White said of pornography, I can know a slur when I hear one. Only when a target group adopts a term, like Chicano, and uses it outside the group should we think about rehab for slurs.
Polak isn't a slur. My grandpa'd have told you off if you tried to tell him he wasn't a polak.
Maybe in general, people who don't consider a word a slur should be more willing to state their case. Angry people are always going to be the more vocal ones otherwise.
The people who started the screaming about the redskins team name weren’t native Americans. Offense is largely performance to show you are the good people and to demand that others also perform to demonstrate membership on the correct side.
Speaking as a non-american, I actually had no idea "Jap" was considered offensive.
Some light googling seems to hint at this being a really terrible slur in the US, whereas in most other places it's considered at worst slightly offensive? Kind of interesting that such language siloing can still exist in these internet days.
And now I'm not sure if I should stop using it out of kindness towards japanese-americans, or continue using it out of principled resistance to US cultural hegemony and trying to stop/reverse the cascade outside of the US. When talking to an actual person it's easy to choose of course, but when broadcasting to the entire internet?
To Englishmen of my generation - I was born in ‘57 - ‘Brit’ certainly is a slur. It was introduced by the IRA. I hate the way it is used casually today.
Someone needs to tell the “BritBox” UK content streaming service I subscribed to recently. Or rather, keep the apparent respectability cascade going and don’t tell them.
'Practicum' sounds more worthy than 'field' yet ‘Practicum’ is derived from late Latin, neuter of practicus ‘practical’. Since the Romans were slave owners, colonisers by conquest, despoilers of colonial resources, cultural appropriators, and global polluters through their smelting of lead, the use of ‘practicum’ seems even more inappropriate.
My gosh, "social dominance" would be a breath of fresh air. That would mean you can still survive in this society if you openly hold an alternative viewpoint.
Tell all the people who have lost businesses, been canceled, etc that what they are facing is just "social dominance."
Very common to hear “jap” in Singapore, eg “Let’s go to a jap restaurant.” If you told the locals that’s offensive, they’d just chuckle over Americans and they’re missionary zeal.
I just commented to a friend via text message that some people think a period at the end of sentence in a text message is somehow viewed as strict or offensive, and that for now on I'll start using more periods when I text.
Text chatting usually consists of messages no longer than a single full sentence, so capitalization and periods are omitted. Using both of them definitely sends a formal/hostile vibe, and using periods only would be just weird/silly.
Definitely? If I never thought it was hostile or silly, should I start thinking it looks that way now? If you get offended whenever you see a period in a text message, and that feeling you have was not at all the intention of the writer, where does that hostility come from?
"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, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case."
I didn't know that that was false (which I realize is the obvious consequence of people that I usually consider to be in good standing saying exactly that). And while I assume you wouldn't make a statement like that without some strong evidence, it's still difficult for me to believe it. Also linking to that evidence could act as a lightning rod for undue viral "look at this covertly racist blog" attention.
I was with you until your passage about the AP style guide regarding "the poor" etc. Even though I had never heard of this issue before, it was quite easy to see what they meant. It *is* dehumanizing to refer to "the rich". Whatever sentence that phrase occurs in is likely to make some generalization about the group, rather than treating them as individuals, making wealth the defining characteristic of its members; and the generalization is likely truly only a tendency (not a tautology). That it seems obvious to you that this is not a problem is because being rich has been seen positively by most people in the US for most of its history, or at least more so than in some other times and places. Referring to a Lavoisier as a "person with wealth" rather than simply a member of "the rich" might lead marginally enough people to consider his other personal characteristics, to allow him to keep his head. You posed what you seem to think is a rhetorical question, but it doesn't seem to me that you thought it through.
This example aside, I do find your exposition of affective connotation as a dynamical system insightful and illuminating. And I admire the phrase "hyperstitious slur" that you came up with to summarize the phenomenon, it's delightfully apt.
I doubt it is, because I also had this thought - saying 'the rich' makes it easy to make broad generalisations than e.g. 'rich people'. It's just how language works - 'the rich' conjures up an image of a faceless mass. 'The rich' is less likely to be considered insulting, but no less 'dehumanising' in a literal sense.
Consider two slogans - 'eat the rich!' and 'eat rich people!'. The second sounds ridiculous.
I think on some level slurs and taboos taken too far by a society are equivalent to religious and superstitious thinking: think of how in islamic culture it’s taboo to mention the name “Mohammed”, in certain southern African cultures women must never say the names of female in-laws, and even in Harry Potter, saying “Voldemort” is taboo!
1) does any group EXCEPT the Brits get abbreviated in a non-offensive way? And I'm not that sure about "Brit".
2) "Poor people" rather than "the poor". "Rich people" rather than "the rich". The distinction is slight, but consider how "eat the rich!" sounds compared to "eat rich people," and then decide if the former language is dehumanizing or not.
The thing that annoys me most is when the "slur" gets replaced by something functionally identical, or arguably MORE offensive, and pointing this out causes people to bite your head off.
"Coloured people" was seen as an offensive term for non-white people for decades, to the point that even woke actors like Benedict Cumberbatch have caught flak for using it casually. In woke circles, the preferred term for this group of people is "people of colour", which is just the same words in a different order. And this distinction doesn't apply to any of the subsets of "people of colour": no one demands that you refer to Asian people as "people of Asian" or black people as "people of black", though maybe they will now that I've put the idea in their heads.
10 years ago, a common point in geek feminist circles was admonishing men not to refer to women as "females", as it's subtly objectifying to reduce someone to their sex. Fair enough, point taken. But the modern trans-inclusive variety of feminism wants us to refer to female people as "breastfeeders", "people who menstruate" or "vagina-havers". If someone can explain to me why calling a woman a "female" is objectifying or dehumanizing, but calling her a "menstruator" isn't, I'll buy them dinner. I believe noting this absurdity was one of the first things that landed JK Rowling in hot water.
> If someone can explain to me why calling a woman a "female" is objectifying or dehumanizing, but calling her a "menstruator" isn't, I'll buy them dinner.
Let me try.
Using "menstruator" as a direct substitute for a "woman" would indeed be offensive. That's where the offensivness of female is comming from, as you already understand.
But the thing is, such words as "menstruator" or "brestfeeder" are not supposed to be used like that. They are only supposed to be used in the specific relevant context where they are unoffensive. For instance, if we are specifically talking about breastfeeding, a word "brestfeeder" is relevant and actually more accurate than "woman", because not all women brestfeed and not all brestfeeders are women. Likewise, when we are specifically talking about menstruation, or gynecology etc. This is just using a more accurate term and there is nothing offensive about it.
Only a biological woman can actually breastfeed. Anything else is performative and I refuse to play along. If this is offensive, so be it. Words do not change biology but they can confuse. I’d like to be around when some new generation rediscovers what humans have observed for thousands of years. Surgery and drugs, much less a dress, cannot turn anyone into a biological female.
And some of these "biological females" are not women, yet they can still breastfeed whether you "play along" or not.
Notice that "breastfeeder" is still a more accurate term than "biological female", when we are talking specifically about breastfeeding. Because not all females breastfeed.
Sure, well, kind of. But plenty of biological women *can't* breastfeed, so saying it is still more specific and intentional than including a wide swathe of non-breastfeeding people.
>This is just using a more accurate term and there is nothing offensive about it.
Well, again, that's your assertion. Some people (JK Rowling, for instance) are very offended by this creepily clinical language and preferred the old way of doing things. Perhaps you think the offense they're taking is unwarranted - if that's what you say, come out and say so. Present to me a convincing argument why the offense taken by (a minority of) trans people is legitimate and worthy of accommodation, and the offense taken by TERFs is illegitimate and silly.
I could equally counter that there's "nothing offensive" about using the word "women" as synonymous with "adult human females", and if a tiny minority of extremely online, extremely neurotic trans people (not trans people as a whole, most of whom, in my experience, are nowhere NEAR as thin-skinned as this) get bent out of shape about it, that's their problem.
I see you disagree with me on "there is nothing offensive about it" part. I'll address it, but firstly, do we agree on "more accurate" part?
Also, your initial question was "why menstruator isn't offensive for the same reasons that female is offensive" The answer is that menstruator isn't used in the same context female is (as a substitute for woman) thus the situations are different. Do you understand this?
I find it important to clear this points first, before we can talk about other reasons why people can be offended and their validity.
Before trans activism became a mainstream, highly influential phenomenon, mainstream media outlets could publish an article aimed at women with advice about breastfeeding. Perhaps cis women who didn't (personal choice, or unable to have kids) or couldn't (had previously undergone a double mastecomy) breastfeed were insulted by this, because "not ALL women breastfeed", but I'm not aware of it.
Nowadays, a tiny minority of the people who breastfeed don't identify as women (only a tiny minority of female people identify as trans men; of whom only a tiny minority have children [many of them are unable to because medical transition has rendered them infertile]; of whom only a subset breastfeed their children [personal choice, or having undergone a double mastectomy as part of medical transition]). A minority of extremely online trans activists (to reiterate, I personally know several trans people, only one of whom was offended by the term "pregnant women" as opposed to "pregnant people") have complained that talking about "breastfeeding women" is trans-exclusionary because of the aforesaid group,. They request that the people in question be referred to as "breastfeeders" or "chestfeeders" instead.
I accept that, in the narrow sense, this terminology is more precise than referring to "women", because not every woman breastfeeds and not everyone who breastfeeds identifies as a woman. But we're not just talking about accuracy and precision here; we're also talking about tone. The term "chestfeeders" is CREEPY. Referring to body parts as distinct from the person they belong to is clinical, mechanistic and off-putting. To many people (myself included) it's unnervingly reminiscent of the kind of intentionally distancing and dehumanizing language used in dystopian science fiction.
Maybe the subset of trans men who breastfeed their children, as a whole, prefer this language to the previous arrangement, and don't find it creepy or off-putting. Fair enough, everyone is entitled to their preferences. But I reject the claim that, because the terms "breastfeeders" or "chestfeeders" are ACCURATE, they are therefore INOFFENSIVE. I think finding this language creepy and off-putting is a perfectly understandable human reaction, which can't be simply dismissed on the grounds that it's "accurate" or "inclusive". Trans people don't simply get to declare by fiat that THEIR emotional reactions to language are valid and legitimate, and other people's aren't.
Disability rights advocates talk a lot about "reasonable accommodations". Completely restructuring the way the English language discusses sex and gender so that 1% of the population feels more "included" or "centred" is an accommodation, to be sure, but I don't think it's a reasonable one.
Okay I'm glad that we are in agreement about the accuracy part.
I also agree with your point that just the fact that something is preceise, doesn't mean that it's inoffencive, in the sense that noone will ever be offended. Probably nothing is inoffensive in this sense.
But here is the thesis that I'm making: word accuracy actually correlates with their inoffensiveness. The more preciese are the words the less possibilities for misinterpretations there are. When we say that women breastfeed, we exclude actual people, invalidating their identities. This is a perpetual reason for offense, that isn't going anywhere untill we fix the language. When we say that brestfeeders brestfeed we do not commit similar mistake.
We can still creep out people who dislike the term brestfeeder. But it's a very different class of offense, one that will naturally dissapear just by people being exposured to the language and accepting it. New generation wouldn't mind. Thus more accurate language is inherently less offensive, even though there may be some dissatisfied preferences in the transition period.
And it's not just about accomodating the 1% minority of trans people. It's also about people who care very much about trans people, people who care very much about the accuracy of the language or making language less offensive in general and other groups of people invested in the issue. And the reason we see that the situation gets traction is that there are a lot of such people so the accomodation is pretty reasonable.
>word accuracy actually correlates with their inoffensiveness
This just strikes me as wishful thinking. It would be more "accurate" and "precise" to tell someone "you smell really bad and it's making me feel ill", but doing so would be far more rude and offensive than politely hinting that someone take a shower or apply deodorant. It would be more "accurate" and "precise" to tell someone "I don't find you sexually attractive because you are ugly and overweight", but doing so would be far more rude and offensive than telling them "I think we'd be better off as friends". In fact, I would go so far to say that cases in which bluntly and accurately stating the factual state of affairs is LESS offensive than couching it in a veiled euphemism are the exception rather than the rule.
>And it's not just about accomodating the 1% minority of trans people.
No, it's not about accommodating the 1% of minority of trans people. It's about accommodating <the subset of the 1% minority of trans people> who are offended by phrases like "pregnant women" or "women who breastfeed", which is vastly smaller than trans people as a whole, most of whom are unbothered by this phrasing. I also care about trans people, which does not mean that I believe that every demand made by every single trans person should be instantly acceded to without question, no matter how unreasonable.
Again, I simply do not understand why we must default to accommodating the most neurotic, thin-skinned and easily offended members of our society. Why does the offense experienced by an unusually neurotic trans person by the phrase "pregnant women" automatically supersede the offense experienced by the average cis person by the phrase "chestfeeders"? At what point am I allowed to say "sorry, but if you're offended by this that's a you problem"?
Excuse you, ape, the correct term is "chestfeeder". "Breast" is unnecessarily gendered and may be provocative of dysphoria in people who do not have positive associations in the matter of possessing these secondary sexual organs.
"Transgender dad Trevor MacDonald writes that, “It is equally important to note that some trans people experience severe gender dysphoria when breast or chestfeeding, and that they may decide not to nurse their babies for mental health reasons. Trans parents choosing to breast or chestfeed and those choosing to suppress lactation and bottlefeed may require the support of breastfeeding counsellors or lactation professionals.”
My native language doesn't have a distinction between between "chest" and "breast". But I can see why people whose language does, may feel uncomfortable.
I think it's completely reasonable if people who are more comfortable with the term "chestfeeding" used it regarding themselves.
[EDIT: this was meant as a half sarcastic, half "intellectual Turing test" description of the thought process behind attempts to restructure the language so that there isn’t a convenient way to refer to biological men and women anymore. It is not what I actually believe.]
Trans-inclusive feminists don't want you to refer to female people as "vagina-havers". In fact, ideally, you shouldn't have a convenient way to refer to "female people" as a distinct group at all. If all the available words for that group are awkward, offensive, inappropriately clinical, or all of those at the same time, and not something you could use in casual conversation, that's a feature, not a bug!
There's just women, with or without a vagina, and men, also with or without a vagina. In the ideal world, there wouldn't be a separate word for "biological females" any more than there's a short succinct commonly-used term for "people whose belly-button is an outtie". Why would you need to have a word for that?
>Trans-inclusive feminists don't want you to refer to female people as "vagina-havers".
Yes they do, I've seen this exact phrasing in writing dozens of times. I've personally witnessed people being admonished that the phrase "pregnant women" is transphobic, for instance. Here's an article (in that famous hive of scum and TERFery The Guardian) debating the merits of trans-inclusive language in a medical context https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/06/inclusive-language-on-maternity-care-risks-excluding-many-women. Stop telling me that something I've personally seen happening isn't happening.
>In the ideal world, there wouldn't be a separate word for "biological females" any more than there's a short succinct commonly-used term for "people whose belly-button is an outtie". Why would you need to have a word for that?
If "people whose belly-button is an outtie" were able to experience a vast range of medical conditions and illnesses (including, but not limited to, pregnancy, menstruation, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, cervical cancer, endometriosis) that "people whose belly-button is an innie" are incapable of ever experiencing, we absolutely WOULD need a specific term for "people whose belly-button is an outie". People whose belly-button is an outtie is almost always a clinically irrelevant fact; sex is not, ever. This might amaze you to hear, but a person's sex is actually an extremely important fact about them in a medical context, probably more important than any other single fact about their body. You can build the most trans-inclusive society imaginable, your "ideal world", and it won't have the slightest bit of bearing on the fact that uterine cancer only affects one half of the population (the half that actually HAS A UTERUS), regardless of how the members of that half might identify. It boggles my mind that you seem to think that biological sex is some kind of trivial point about someone's body, like eye or hair colour. PLEASE tell me that's not what you ACTUALLY believe and I'm just misinterpreting you.
Thank you. Now we’ve come to the crux of the thing. Some people actually believe that using different words to describe reality changes the underlying reality. Shakespeare had a neat phrase about this.
> PLEASE tell me that's not what you ACTUALLY believe and I'm just misinterpreting you.
It's not; I was trying to sarcastically summarise what I believe to be the underlying reasoning behind such language policing.
I fully agree with everything you wrote about how, as long as humans procreate primarily via sex and pregnancy, reproductive biology is going to be a lot more relevant to ordinary people's daily lives than belly-button shape. But this does appear to be the idea behind e.g. people complaining about "pregnant women": they want to posit a world in which self-identified gender is the only thing that matters 99% of the time, and biological sex is just some unimportant technicality which may be relevant in some highly specific medical contexts but should not come up in 99% of regular conversations.
No problem, I could certainly have made my sarcasm more obvious! In fact I guess I was kinda going for an "intellectual turing test" style attempt at describing their views in words which they would actually agree with and consider a fair a description.
If you honestly cannot see the difference between "person who possesses this set of biological organs" and "person who possesses a different set of biological organs", I don't know what to say.
Why do we have different terms for different countries, in that case? Why do we make distinctions between species of animals? Heck, why do we need a special word for "animals that live in the sea"?
EDIT: I see below you were in fact being sarcastic. Thank you. Though the problem is there are some people who express attitudes not a million miles away from "there's no need for separate words", and you never can be 100% in the know about who is really meaning what they say and who is only spoofing.
> the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible
They want power and they get it if the cascade takes off. I can't do better than to quote MM in the argument at Scott Aaronson about some scientists ('scientists'?) who ran a campaign trying to make 'quantum supremacy' a slur: (how did that one end, I wonder?)
---
There is another perspective on this debate. The other perspective says that whatever you think you are doing, what you are actually doing is: bullying computer scientists. Whoever you think you are doing it for, bullying computer scientists does not affect those people at all. It does affect the computer scientists. And it does affect you. It makes you feel strong and proud and important. So does cocaine. Your career might even profit from it — you can certainly profit from cocaine.
There is really very little that we human beings enjoy more than telling other people what to do. Once we have a socially accepted rationalization for exercising dominance — like the idea that bullying computer scientists can protect the underprivileged from the vast anti-underprivileged conspiracy — anything in the hominin clade will be on it like a piranha on a meatball.
Maybe you could call it the Karen cascade. Wow, did I just use a slur there? Why yes I did. But it’s much less important what the actual word is than that some will object to its coinage. We could all be talking about the annoying Beckys who want to police you. Words like this are handy shorthand. I believe this re-naming fever is less about bossing people and more about virtue signaling. Saying the correct word makes you a better person. As if. But it does signal that you have the correct ideas and belong to the correct “good people” group.
"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."
Forty years ago was only twenty-eight years after Emmet Till's lynching, and a time when a majority of Americans did not support interracial marriage, so I warrant that a lot of people displaying the Confederate flag then were out and out white supremacists. The idea that the Confederate flag has ever been an uncontentious symbol, free of any racist connotations, is extremely bizarre, to say the least.
"Supporters of the Confederate battle flag often argue that their support is driven by pride in the South, not negative racial attitudes. Opponents of the Confederate battle flag often argue that the flag represents racism, and that support for the flag is an expression of racism and an attempt to maintain oppression of Blacks in the Southern United States. We evaluate these two competing views in explaining attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag in the Southern United States through a survey of 526 Southerners. In the aggregate, our latent variable model suggests that White support for the flag is driven by Southern pride, political conservatism, and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks. Using cluster-analysis we were able to distinguish four distinct sub-groups of White Southerners: Cosmopolitans, New Southerners, Traditionalists, and Supremacists. The greatest support for the Confederate battle flag is seen among Traditionalists and Supremacists; however, Traditionalists do not display blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks, while Supremacists do. Traditionalists make up the majority of Confederate battle flag supporters in our sample, weakening the claim that supporters of the flag are generally being driven by negative racial attitudes toward Blacks.
...The bulk of our findings relate to White Southerners, who have been the focus of popular discussions and most of the empirical work surrounding support for the Confederate battle flag and Confederate symbols. In general, we found support for three theoretical perspectives. In line with the Southern heritage perspective, Southern pride was strongly associated with support for the Confederate battle flag even while controlling for blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks. While this accounted for the largest association, both political conservatism (principled-conservatism perspective) and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks (racial ideology perspective) were also both associated with positive attitudes toward the flag. However, there is a complex interweaving of political ideology, Southern pride, and racial attitudes revealed by the cluster analysis.
Our cluster analysis revealed four distinct groups of White Southerners who hold distinct attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag and have these attitudes linked to distinct make-ups of political ideology, Southern pride, and negative racial attitudes. The most positive support for the Confederate battle flag came from two groups: the Supremacists and the Traditionalists. Both groups reflected a non-statistically significant difference between their Confederate battle flag support and yet their strong support was linked to different profiles. For Supremacists, it was a combination of strong conservatism, pride in the South, and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks; however, for Traditionalists it was only a combination of strong conservatism and pride in the South, without blatant negative attitudes toward Blacks. Traditionalists held similar positive attitudes toward Blacks as did Cosmopolitans and New Southerners. Of the Supremacists and Traditionalists, who tend to favor maintaining the Confederate battle flag on government premises and as part of official state flags in the South, Supremacists make up the minority in our sample. The majority of supporters in our sample show positive racial attitudes toward Blacks."
And to refer back to our exchange around Emma_M's anecdote, while there is overwhelming majority of black opposition to the Confederate flag, there *are* a tiny minority of black people who do have positive attitudes, so maybe her friend's neighbour really does exist and is a black Southerner flying the flag more as "fuck you and your pissy attitudes looking down your noses at the South, I'm from the South and proud of it":
"Black Support for the Confederate Battle Flag
As previous work has indicated (Agiesta, 2015; Webster & Leib, 2001), Blacks are in overwhelming opposition to the Confederate battle flag. Our results also confirm this. Our results generally demonstrate an antagonism toward the Confederate battle flag among Black respondents and no factors examined were significant predictors of Black support for the flag. This may be due to a lack of heterogeneity in flag support among the Black respondents. Only 7.3% of the Black sample scored above the midpoint for positive attitudes toward the flag and 60.6% scored the lowest possible value.
Despite the significant bivariate and partial (controlling for all factors) correlations between Southern pride and attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag among Blacks, this association disappeared in our structural equation model, which reduces the influence of measurement error. While this is the first quantitative study we are aware of that evaluates factors possibly impacting attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag among Black Southerners, we are unable to provide any strong conclusions as to the motivations of the minority of Black supporters. However, we can suggest that anti-White racism does not seem to be involved in Black opposition to the Confederate battle flag, as is sometimes portrayed within the Southern heritage view (Woliver et al., 2001). Qualitative research on Black Southerners who support the flag may help identify more useful variables to analyze in the future."
Anecdotally, as someone who grew up in the South in the '80s (not the deep south, but still a southern state with strong connection to the Confederacy), I didn't associate the flag with racism. It was the cool flag from the General Lee. This was an area with a very homogeneous population, so displaying the flag wouldn't have even made sense as an overt FU to anyone.
It's possible I was naïve. Realistically I think some people at that time used it as a racist symbol, others as a symbol of southern pride, and others because of the Dukes of Hazzard.
> Now if you still have a Confederate flag bumper sticker on your car, you’re either making a statement about race, or deliberately thumbing your nose at the prevailing signaling equilibrium - which is itself a statement about race.
The distinction between these two should be emphasized (and even more so in cases that are less far along the cascade). One is "I hate black people and want to offend them". The other is "I oppose hyperstitious slur cascades". Part of the tactic of pushing the cascade along is pretending that only the former exists.
I think the elephant in the room in this post is how important the euphemism cascade is for signalling where people are on causes dear to one’s heart.
For example, I think 20 years ago if you found a nurse wearing a rainbow pride lanyard, you would expect them to be almost certainly gay, and definitely a strong sympathiser with gay rights, well educated and engaged with the cause. Now you’re probably going to think that their employer got a big box of lanyards and handed them out for pride month. Signalling and language change over time, as things become mainstream (which is what campaigners want, and is success!) you need a new signal on the top for ‘I still care more than averagely about this issue.’
The _benefit_ of having a euphemism cascade is to allow huge nuance in that sort of signalling in language. You can avoid the people who use words at the 99-1 point as almost certainly actively prejudiced against you. You can assume that people using the standard middle of the road acceptable language of the day mostly don’t care too much and want to not hurt you if it’s not too annoying or inconvenient for them. And the people who are early adopters at the 5-95 point are almost certainly not just keeping up with new euphemisms but isolated from the rest of the debate - you can expect them to be on side with any other contentious issues of the day as well.
I think the whole point is that it _has_ to be an exhausting ever-changing thing to try and stay on top of, when the practical positions underneath the language are also changing. To take your civil servant example, pedagogy changes at a very surprising pace (well, I think it’s surprising, given we’ve been teaching people things for thousands of years, in the UK there are still big changes in things like how to teach reading and maths every decade or so.) Making the word for ‘teaching’ be a clear signifier of what you think teaching is like is handy. Making your word for people in group X be a clear signifier of what rights you think people in group X should have is also handy. And that means in any politically active space some sort of euphemism cascade will happen.
The signalling doesn't need to be ever-changing in order to allow nuance. It's only ever-changing because signalling anywhere near bottom sympathy is punished, and so people are continuously forced to adopt stronger signals that were previously only used by stronger sympathizers. This, of course, hurts the ability to discern with nuance how much any given person sympathizes with a group.
Why do much more people wear rainbow lanyards than 20 years ago? Maybe because much more people sympathize strongly with gay rights, or those who do are more willing to show it. If so, you don't need a much stronger signal. Or maybe because their employer handed them out and they feel pressured to wear it even if they don't actually sympathize with gay rights: well, then if you want gay people to be able to tell who sympathizes with them, then don't pressure people to pretend to sympathize with them even if they don't. (Granted, maybe they wear the lanyard voluntarily, but it now only signals weak sympathy. But then you just need signals for each level of sympathy, you don't need them to constantly change. Indeed, if you let people signal different levels of sympathy, you don't even need complex signals, you can just let people say what they think.)
(I don't fully understand your last paragraph. What pedagogy example?)
The rainbow thing is kind of an example of this phenomenon for a positive, non-slur symbol -- I once bought a car from an old guy with a rainbow sticker in the window, which looked to have been applied sometime in the seventies. I'm pretty sure he wasn't gay, he just liked rainbows in the seventies.
By the nineties (when I bought the car) this was enough for people to make gay jokes about my car; now it would be a signal that I was pro-LGBTQ2+ or whatnot.
In Scotland (years ago) it was common practice to refer to a corner shop run by Pakistanis as ‘the Paki’ as in I’m just nipping down the Paki do you want something? I moved to England and used the phrase and was very firmly corrected.
Many decades ago, I was writing against someone who had advocated management style that might be a caricature of the dumb athletic type "leader" reving people with slogans and team emotion.
In America, we might use term jocks derived from jockstrap.
I said that "jock management" was useless. Not knowing the original advocate was Scottish and that jock might be a slur against Scots. He was very upset about my "dishonoring" of him and his people. He did not know the American term.
("We'll sing a song of liberty, for Paks and Blacks and Jocks..." -- also I promise I'm not stalking you, these comments just jumped out as I scrolled the thread)
I don't think the term 'jock' has ever been a slur against Scots. At least whenever I have heard it it has been affectionate. But the thing about the term Paki is that in Scotland it was completely neutral whereas in England it was definitely used as a slur. 'There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so' seems to apply. So I was of course happy to not use the term once I realised how it was used in England.
I can easily imagine a timeline in which "jap" never became a racial slur.
It's much harder to imagine a timeline in which displaying the confederate flag didn't end up generally seen as a sign of racism. That was baked in from the flag's origin. So I don't think it's a good hyperstition example.
I'm not sure if this is quite equivalent, but consider the standard peace sign. It originated as a combination of the semaphore signs for N and D, as a symbol of the movement for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I don't think many people today believe we would be better off if the U.S. and its allies had scrapped all their nuclear weapons in 1958, when the symbol originated. And yet, instead of being seen as a symbol of policies that would have led to a Soviet conquest of Europe, it's seen as a feel good symbol of being against war.
Some interesting thoughts about labeling, but using examples that are in some cases very unfortunate. A couple of examples that troubled me:
“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.” I don’t know what evidence this is based on, but it is very much contrary to my experience of 40 years ago that the Confederate flag was actually a very strong indicator of racism. OK, maybe there's some study somewhere to contradict that, but you don't reference it and I would think it would have caused a big brouhaha. The Confederate flag has been deeply associated with racism since it was created and always evoked a society where racist slavery was a very big part of its culture and economy. So why use this example to make a point about how labels shift, unless there were some strong evidentiary foundation that the statement is actually evidence supported?
And this one: “True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime”’ Now it’s certainly true that in the USA and many other countries, Black people are arrested and convicted at much higher rates than White people, and sentenced longer — though at least for a time, laws limiting judicial discretion in sentencing actually dramatically reduced the disparity. (indicating that race indeed is a factor when judges are given discretion.) But, how can one say with any confidence that “Black people commit more crime” when most crimes go unsolved? You have to assume that race plays an insignificant role in selection of who gets arrested and convicted. Again perhaps there’s some study I don’t know of that supports the assertion that “Black people commit more crime” doesn’t depend on arrest and conviction rates, and therefore isn’t confounded with biases in our criminal justice system, although methodological issues would be daunting. Lacking that, I think this assertion would be a good example how “commonly held but unsupported beliefs” can be hyperstitious slurs. (To me, an interesting angle on what you’re saying would be, to look at how false or unsupported statements can move in the opposite direction, from being recognized widely as wrongheaded to becoming acceptable.)
I really like what this piece says about hyperstitions and how we use labels, and agree with your main point, but I do think that sometimes changes in how labels are responded to isn’t just a matter of which labels are ideologically acceptable but also can be a result of understanding the content of the label better.
"But, how can one say with any confidence that “Black people commit more crime” when most crimes go unsolved?"
- when the discrepancies are large enough, even if a large number of crimes go unsolved, the ones that don't are enough to make the case.
- for some crimes (like homicides), the rate of unsolved crimes isn't that high, and it's not plausible that a large number of them don't get reported, or are swept under the rug.
- in many cases, even though the actual culprit isn't caught, people still have an idea what he looks like.
- related to that - most crimes are committed within communities, and the distribution of victims gives you a pretty good idea of the distribution of perpetrators. And if there were an epidemic of white criminals sneaking into black neighboorhoods to rob black people at gunpoint, someone would notice.
Do read some of Steve Sailer's articles to get a feel for the numbers. We're not talking about a few percent more or less here.
>- for some crimes (like homicides), the rate of unsolved crimes isn't that high, and it's not plausible that a large number of them don't get reported, or are swept under the rug.
Well, I don't know where you get your statistics, but according to a report from Pew Research (“Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. go unsolved””, 2017) less than half of violent crimes get solved / cleared. Then there's the problem if there's bias in the selection of the crimes that do get solved, how would you unconfound it from factors other than race, without an unbiased sample to work from.
Note we're only talking about violent crime here. Scott's assertion was Blacks commit more crime generally, which I don't take literally, because I don't think that's what he means. If you include financial crimes such as frauds, securities law violations, tax evasion and wage theft for example, environmental crimes, drug usage, and other non-violent crime categories, I think it would substantially weaken any claim that there's actually a racial disparity in criminal behavior overall.
To your point, as I understand it, that the subset of crimes that are solved and the higher rate of Black offenders in this subset are large enough that the unsolved crime subset couldn't overcome this racial discrepancy in crime rates, in might be true if these numbers came from an unbiased selection of cases. But if there are large biases in the sample, they will create large discrepancies.
With less than half of violent crimes being reported, and overall less than half solved, we're working a sample I'd described as filtered, with bias in the law enforcement system potentially skewing the results quite a bit. But I concede this is very hard to measure given the limits on available data. You could assume there's little or no racial bias in our criminal justice system, but then your conclusion that Blacks commit more crimes would be based on that assumption. I'm not saying it's impossible that would turn out to be correct, though personally I doubt it, but I am saying, the assertion that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites is based on an assumption that isn't supported by actual evidence.
To your point about homicide, according to the 2017 Pew Research study, the rate of murder cases solved is higher than other violent crimes. (I'm not sure whether or not the statistic is actually referring to homicides or murder, which is legally speaking a smaller subset of homicide), but there is data that conflicts with that. According to the Murder Accountability Project report ("The quest for America's missing murders, 2022) (which apparently is using "homicide" and "murder" interchangeably), "Local law enforcement agencies reported only 14,715 homicides while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so far have counted 25,988 murders. This means police reported only 56.6 percent of the nation's homicides in 2021, the worst reporting rate on record." Which would mean solved cases are far lower percentage than law enforcement reports indicate. And beyond that, no study I've seen accounts for cases in which homicides are classified incorrectly, for example, as accidental deaths, or cases where no crime is reported to the police (for example, someone who isn't missed and no identifiable body is found). But nevertheless, Scott didn't say, Blacks commit more murders than whites. He said, Blacks commit more crimes than whites.
As to reports of race of perpetrator where he or she isn't caught, if you have any solid data supporting that, I'd certainly like to know where I can see that. Also, this kind of eyewitness report can be quite unreliable.
To your point about most crimes committed within communities, again, I've seen no actual evidence supporting this, though it seems like a fairly plausible suggestion when talking about crimes of personal violence, though certainly not when it comes to other sorts of crimes such as economic or environmental crimes, for example . And, a recent Department of Justice report referenced in a more recent Pew Research study, ("What the data says (and doesn’t say) about crime in the United States", 2020) suggests that there is only a very small difference in rates which Black and White people are victims of violent crime. In any event,a plausible hypothesis is very different from evidence based truth, which is how Scott described the proposition that Black people commit more crimes.
But like I said earlier, from what I know of the actual evidence about this issue, there just isn't solid information on race of perpetrators except perhaps for crimes charged and convictions, and even with that reporting seems to be somewhat uneven between different jurisdictions. There's weaker evidence about crimes reported, and virtually nothing about crimes that aren't reported. But if you do have some actual evidence I haven't seen, please point me to it.
As for your points: I can almost feel the cognitive dissonance oozing from your writing. So you want to include white-collar crime as well, because you hope that would dilute the statement that you disagree with... and the table I cited shows that blacks are overrepresented in fraud, embezzlement and forgery as well.
Okay, so not all crimes are reported, and not all crimes are solved. Go ahead, paint me the picture where in an apparently peaceful, wealthy suburbia a vast number of crimes go unreported, unsolved or unprosecuted... whereas inner-city areas that appear to be riddled with high unemployment, regular outbursts of violence, a culture of "snitches get stitches" and an under-funded, under-trained police force (increasingly so after a "defund the police" campaign") are actually the victims of a vast conspiracy of the criminal justice system to frame black men for crimes they didn't commit, and to make sure that every one of them is counted in the statistics. And all of this in a political climate where everyone who says anything negative about black people is immediately targeted by a storm of outrage. Then, maybe!, you could explain away the discrepancies in the statistics.
Sorry, but saying "the assertion that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites is based on an assumption that isn't supported by actual evidence" when every statistic you care to pull up paints the same picture that can only be cast into doubt with advanced mental gymnastics (that are themselves not based on any evidence that you cite), reeks of motivated reasoning.
> indicating that race indeed is a factor when judges are given discretion
Or whatever they make discretionary decisions based on correlates with race, even after controlling for the factors non-discretionary sentencing is based on.
Regarding the Confederate flag - the Dukes of Hazzard tv show ran on CBS as a quite popular prime time show until 1985. The main protagonists drove a car with a confederate flag on the roof. While I’m sure some folks contemporaneously thought this was racist, it was not broadly perceived as racist. Another anecdote, I grew up near Gettysburg. As the site of a major civil war battlefield, it was full of historic sites and tourist shops. Driving through the town in the 80s - you would see hundreds of confederate flags displayed around the town and little desktop confederate flags for sale in every shop. The flag WAS used by racists for racist purposes but it was also used for a lot of other cultural markers too. As an 80’s kid, my experience is that Scott is correct on this one. Also, to be clear, I am not denying that racism was more prevalent and tolerated in the 80s and that surely had something to do with a causal acceptance of the confederate flag being displayed for reasons not rooted in racism.
Nice counter examples to my point. Yes, there was more winking at racist symbols in the 80's, in particular the Confederate flag which would tend to weaken my point.
Nevertheless, I still think that the Confedeerate flag is a poor example of the hyperstitious slur phenomenon that Scott is examining. This is a symbol that as you recognize was widely recognized in the 80's as a racist symbol, but also tolerated more widely than it is today, as your examples illustrate. Hardly comparable to the much better example Scott offers of the word "Negro" which went from a generally acceptable term with very little or no racist undertone to a hyperstitious slur in only a few years. With the Confederate flag, you're talking about a symbol whose racist roots went from being winked at to being winked at less. Different in that way from examples when due to social pressure a neutral term was turned into a socially unacceptable symbol by forces of political correctness. That's why I objected to Scott's asseertion that the Confederate flag was basically a neutral symbol in the 1980's and called it out as a poor example of hyperstitious slur.
On another level, it's a question of political balance. Most of the examples Scott uses are of leftist crowdthink pressuring to turn previously acceptable words into tools for pushing their ideology onto the public discourse. Confederate flags are surely no better example of this than drag shows, which only a few years ago were considered harmless play common in the collegiate Greek world and network TV comedy, for example. Suddenly right wingers (including several with their own personal history of playful drag episodes) in an upsurge of political correctness have suddenly demonized drag and even passed laws declaring it to be illegal. In my view a much more apt example of a hyperstitious slur than an increased tendency for people to object to the racist roots of the Confederate flag being winked at. Going to show that this sort of poisoned politics isn't the province of one particular side of the political spectrum.
But it's also true, even liberal CBS seemed to have no compunctions about using the Confederate flag in the 1980's as a prop in a popular lightweight situation comedy. That aslo goes to show, hyperstitious slur is the kiind of concept which might apply or not, depending to no small degree on the point of view of the person making the evaluation.
Another example is that apparently some American academics have decided that you can't say "slaves" anymore, not even in a context where it's clear that you agree slavery is bad. You have to say "enslaved people" or "enslaved persons". Well OK, I can actually kinda see the point of that one, tbh.
But when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. So recently some Dutch media have started to do the same thing. Except that Dutch doesn't have an adjective meaning "enslaved". So they went with the incredibly clunky and unwieldy "tot slaaf gemaakten" -- which, translated back to English, means something like "those who were made into slaves".
Which is not only very grating and cumbersome when used in a sentence, but also totally pointless as a euphemism because it still contains the word "slave" as a noun! If the idea of the original English coinage was to emphasise that the person is still a unique individual with hopes and dreams of their own, and the enslavement does not erase the individual, then the Dutch translation totally fails to achieve that. In fact it pretty much does the opposite: it seems to go out of its way to *emphasise* that whatever the person may have been before, they have now been transformed into, first and foremost, a slave.
That's what happens when a culture becomes so dominant that it can force its shibboleths not only on its own members, but even on people from different cultures where those shibboleths make no sense. It's quite annoying.
It's not *solely* a result of the American phrase, but that and that, apparently, the Netherlands, too, has the idea that racism is the absolute evil, and if there is ever a more anti-racist and a less anti-racist choice, one must choose the more anti-racist choice (even if it doesn't make sense), else one is racist and evil. Though you quite possibly got this from America too.
Regarding "the rich" and "the poor", I think there is a sense where it is inherently dehumanizing in certain contexts.
Consider, by analogy someone wanted to claim that tall people are more likely to be professional basketball players. But they choose to phrase this by saying
"The Talls are more likely to be in the NBA"
That would be weird. It would be more normal to say "Tall people are more likely to be in the NBA" or "Tall people are more likely to be NBA players"
the 2 descriptors here "being tall" and "being an NBA player" could either be phrased as predicates/adjectives ("tall (modifying people)", "in the NBA") or as identities ("NBA players", "Talls")
For one of the descriptors (NBA player) either is normal but for the Tall descriptor only the predicate usage is normal, not the identity.
I think this is partially because being in the NBA is perceived as an identity .For people in the NBA, the fact that they are in the NBA forms societies' entire perception of who they are as a person. And it possibly also forms their own perception of themself. And this is true for most full time jobs. For someone who is a plumber, their plumberhood is a significant enough part of their identity that they probably think "I am a plumber" and not "I am a person who works in plumbing"
When you say "the poor" and not "poor people" you are centering the poorness as being part of their identity. In this light the point about "the French" is interesting. If French people are proud of their French identity and centralize their this aspect of their identity then it's fine to say "the French". But if you are referring, not to French people who live in France but rather to people who maybe have French grandparents but who themselves don't live in France anymore and don't attach any significance to their ethnicity then you are centering a part of them that they don't consider part of their own identity.
I think I get your point - like, if there's something akin to a membership card for being a Something, it's fine to use "the Somethings", and if it's more incidental, it's not. Sounds plausible.
But two aspects about this rub me the wrong way. First off, it's apparently fine to reduce people to only one aspect of their existence in other contexts - like, has anyone complained about news articles speaking about "consumers" or "voters" or "employees", instead of "people who make consumer decisions" or "people who vote" or "people who are employed"? No, because in that context, you are only interested in that aspect of their lives, and that's okay. The absence of the group-forming (and therefore "dehumanizing") word "the" is only due to a grammatical quirk that requires it when you're using a naked adjective to describe a set of people, and doesn't when you're using a noun.
Second - aren't the people who push for these language changes largely the same people who insist that identity labels are super-important and in fact trump any attempt at being an individual who makes their own choices, regardless of their being "white" or "black" or "gay" or whatever it is?
I accept your point and admit that I was probably wrong in my comment and you are probably right.
If I were to try to defend my original position I would say that since very few people think being a consumer is fundamental to someone's identity either usage is fine. But being poor is something where people are more afraid that their poorness will be used to identify them on a more fundamental level and therefore more care must be taken to avoid that impression. But I'm not sure if I believe that that's what's actually going on here or not.
That's actually a great point - being a consumer, or an employee, is morally neutral. Being poor isn't, at least in the eyes of many people (whether being poor is a sign of moral virtue or failure depends on your political position, but in the US it's mostly considered bad), so people worry about the possible moral implications of that one property bleeding unnecessarily into a categorization of the whole person (poor = bad -> member of "the poor" = bad person).
But I don't think that recasting the language helps remove the associations in the long term. The taint just carries over to the new terms (poor = bad -> "poor person" = "bad person" - not a long stretch).
It doesn't remove the association completely but it makes it harder to claim the association is true by calling attention to the generality of the claim.
Consider the following statements:
1) "Poor people are more likely to be evil than non poor people"
2) "All poor people are evil"
3) "poor people are evil"
4) "The poor are evil"
(2) is obviously false and also very damaging if believed seriously.
(1) is (very slightly) less obviously false and also less damaging if believed seriously.
(3) and (4) are both ambiguous if they mean (1) or (2). Therefore statements of the form (3) or (4) are great motte-bailees for people who want to discriminate against poor people since they can claim they mean (1) when asked to provide evidence but (2) when they want to justify discrimination.
However with (3) the ambiguity of the sentence is more obvious. Since you are saying "poor people" you are calling attention to the fact that there are multiple "poors", multiple people and in associating the predicate of "evil" to them you are asserting a generality.
In this context, that might not be true anymore since "the poor" as gone out of fashion and therefore sounds weird.
But consider "Millennials are tech savvy" VS
"people born in between 1981 and 1996 are tech savvy"
where the first phrase sounds like something someone might say seriously whereas the second sounds weird without some qualification about "do we mean all people born then? Most of them? some of them?"
So committing not to using certain words as "identity descriptors" makes certain types of ambiguous motte/bailey statements about them harder to make.
On the other hand, I doubt if the APS balloted the entire population of La Belle France on their preferred way of being referred to by les rosbifs when gabbling their inferior language 😁
Love that post. And as I have no social standing to lose - hell, even my wife is younger than me -, I will go on doing the Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura*-thing and insist that WORDS HAVE MEANINGS, and thus ALL LIVES MATTER is a hill I am willing to literally die on. As an extra: indeed if you are "in doubt" whether "it is ok to be white" , yes, I do consider you a full racist already and your existence on the same planet as me triggers fear in me. Really. Could you please stop to dehumanize me just because I am from Northern-Europe? - And that is true even if you get polled by a not-so-excellent poll-firm. Am I in the slightest doubt that IT IS OK to be black/PoC/gay/trans/vegan/"person of Asian descent"? (for whatever that means - could s.o. do some field-work to check it triggered Bengali oder Cantonese, ever)
No. Never ever. (btw: Dilbert is great, his creator is sometimes less so. Still.)
*(PoW, shot, famous last words: Slava Ukraina - btw: I prefer PTN PNX. That war sickens me too much to say "glory".)
Ok, so let us stop this silly condescending each other. Obviously words and even phrases have meaning and also obviously and including their connotations.
Even 2+2=4 (connotation: 1984)
ALL LIVES MATTER.
ALL as in all. No exception.
LIVES Dumb, smart, no matter what continent you great-grandparents were born or what passport you hold. Even evil or good. Even Putin. Even animals, plants and mushrooms. E. coli.
For me as for most humans: humans matter most. And really all matter.
MATTER as in "make a difference". A human life is not nothing. Even a fetus, btw.. Does the life of a rapist/school shooter matter more or his victim's - well, I expect the police to decide "no" and shoot him - if no better option available. But even his life matters. A lot.
That is the MEANING of the statement. And if XY say: "No. The meaning of this sentence is: Black lives do not matter." - then I will insist that it does not mean that. And I will continue to say it. NO FUCKING MATTER WHAT. KILL ME. But I will not say that ALL LIVES MATTER is wrong. It is right and it is true. And it is a better thing to die for than most stuff suggested in the last 10 k years.
And IT IS OK TO BE (insert whatever-you-call-your-type-of-skin-when-dermatologically-fine). And if someone says: "I am not sure it is ok to be black" - then that someone is doing a racist statement. And probably is racist. And if it is about "white"/or-whatever: same. And do I wish to live near people who are outspoken racists? Not really. Do you? Do I feel SAFE near racists who consider people of my heritage/appearance to be "not ok"/"his life does not matter"? HELL, NO. And by historical experience: Near those people one usually is not safe.
"Moral: Run, don't walk to the nearest desert island."
The reason it would cause offense is that one of the meanings of "bitch" is "a woman who behaves badly," with the meaning of "behaves badly" depending on context and society. So "woman" and "bitch" don't have the same real world referent — in the context you are considering, one refers to a subset of the group the other refers to.
My understanding is that the ranking of offensiveness in using terms for female animals to refer to female humans was: cow - bitch - mare. Seeing as how "bitch" is the word used most often in swearing or aggressive language, that always intrigued me: I don't think I've heard anyone referred to as a "mare" in recent times. I heard of the TV drama "Mare of Easttown" but they seem to be forcing a pun on "Mare (short for Marianne)/Mayor" there, rather than "female horse as term for female human".
Historically (only a few decades ago) it was a slur when used by some Irish as you say.
However, it was reclaimed by the British and rebranded successfully and was used in the title of the "Brit Awards" (for music) by the late 80s and early 90s.
As a mainland British person I knew it as a slur in the 70s, although I was well up on politics even as a child. The newspapers of the time had black and white pictures of "Brits Out" painted on walls.
I still don't particularly like the term which wasn't heard on the mainland until the media picked up on it in the 90s probably related to the whole "Cool Britannica" thing. I doubt many British people use it to describe themselves or use it regularly.
"Britisher" was an American English term which seems to have picked up popularity in the mid 19th century and peaked around the time of the Second World War. I know it always grated on my ear when I read it in fiction because it sounded much clunkier than British, and I'm not British myself.
Interesting, didn't know "Britisher" was originally an Americanism. Indians almost exclusively use the term "Britisher" nowadays. Both in negative and neutral context. Brits are almost never referred to in a positive context so not applicable.
But why was it imported into British English? I recall seeing what I believe was an authentic UK military recruitment poster (from one of the World Wars) that included "Calling All Britishers." Why would anyone use that when "Briton" is so much better?
It seems to have been also an older English/British term, that fell out of favour in the UK but was retained by the Americans. and Canadians It also seems to have been used widely in India during the Raj.
It does sound clumsier than "Britons" but maybe it was intended to appeal to Englishmen living overseas, or those who might identify as "Britishers"? According to Collins online dictionary, it was also used for "any British subject", so for overseas recruiting drives?
EDIT: God bless Google, I think I found the poster you mean! And it does seem aimed at overseas recruitment - it has a soldier in France shaking hands with a civilian in the USA:
Isn't "Brits" also away to present a unifying symbol/mythology of the unity of Great Britain in face of Scottish and Welsh desires for autonomy and even independence.
Irish using "Brits" as a slur has no impact. Its like blacks calling whites, "cracker". Again zero impact. You just can't take it seriously. In return all the Brit has to do is call the Irishman, a potato or something. Or for a white person, the "n-word". Now those words have an impact!
1) to clear up some confusion in the comments: obviously not all slurs are hyperstitious. Some words start nasty, and I think we should treat them differently than words that begin neutral.
2) these thoughts are admittedly quite nascent, but might there be some upside to hyperstitious slurs? I'm thinking particularly in a society in which bigoted ideas are held proudly by large chunks of the population. In this context, a slur becoming hyperstitious might represent genuine progress.
3) you talked a bit about how hyperstitious slurs make life worse for just about everyone, but I think they harm some groups more than others. Hyperstitious slurs, along with the related euphemism treadmill, penalize anyone lacking the knowledge networks, social intelligence, or mental acuity to learn and effectively navigate these sociolinguistic rules. Among those most disadvantaged are groups the rules purport to protect: the neurodivergent, low formal education, low SES, etc.
Words are only nasty as the result of an agreement that they are. There is a word in wide usage that is only a slur when certain people use it, but not others.
Sort of related: I was examining the word "with" across languages. You well see pretty clearly how "with" is in some languages related to "against", eg con. Initial that this was a switch, like calling something bad many it was good. There are these opposite flips.
But a little closer thought probably spurred by "avec", I came to understand that when something is lean against a tree or house it is with the tree or house.
Sometimes it Is difficult to tease out whether there is a flip to an opposite or if there never was a flip but the illusion of flip.
Like "jap" in English pre Japan meant to splash and might have some urinary associations. Not enough time to fully explore.
The n-gram viewer shows a spike in usage of jap around 1700 which might have nothing to do with Japan at all. So while it looks like jap is just short version of Japan it might have already included this urinary splash meaning. (So it wasn't offensive just a shortening might just be a "cover story". History is often politics projected into the past.
I'm not sure about this at all, but this whole phenomenon might be an American invention. In the cultures I live in (Turkish and Dutch), we have labels and stuff but not this thing where normal words become slurs. It's only people who do what the Americans do emulate it sometimes, but that's it and they don't have much traction.
Why would you do this to everybody? Just keep using the words like they're intended to be used. Sometimes I use being a foreigner and having English as a second language to my advantage and say whatever and feign ignorance. It's the least I can do to pushback and help.
I have already spent far too much time here, slaughtering pixels in what is likely to no avail.
But in this forum, like most others in the West, it is acceptable to use symbols associated with the USSR, the CCP and of Communism in general. These tokens of murderous illiberal brutality are not seen as hate symbols.
The difference between this tolerance (and even endorsement) and the intolerance of the South using the rebel flag is outgroup vs ingroup.
We should all ask ourselves what we think we know, that just isn't so, and why.
Because victims and their descendants of those regimes aren't right there being an uncomfortable eyesore to respectable Western societies, to state the obvious.
I think one possible solution (or part of a solution) to this is for everyone to have enough personal autonomy that you could give no shits about something being or not being a slur. (Bar the obvious "fossilized" slurs.)
I couldn't tell if this had been said already, but I didn't find it before Substack and my phone fell out again:
Your strategy as stated is a recipe for defeat. You are telegraphing to the Enemy (whoever yours may be) that all they have to do is choose some meaningful bit of your culture, organise a hyperstition cascade, rinse and repeat. Either it works or it doesn't- if it doesn't, it's costless to try again; if it does, they have in perpetuity (or as good as) denied you some ground.
Unless some effort is made to reclaim lost ground, Cthulhu only swims left.
Right now any contempt we feel for those who start the cascade is directed nowhere. If instead, there was a widespread reaction/influential celebrity who said, "Banning 'field work' is ridiculous. Everyone start using the word 'Negro' again to show you're not one of these clowns," then the Enemy risks actually losing ground and might start thinking more carefully before initiating the campaign.
But as stated, your 70% heuristic might as well be a big Kick Me sign.
Well, when you've already decided which side is right once and for all, adopted 100% soldier mindset and is now only interested in getting more points against the enemy, then maybe the only difference is time.
But, thankfully most of the people are not this much mindkilled by politics.
My comment to Scott was explicitly pointing out how his approach is a bad idea when dealing with actors waging a culture war against you.
I wasn't sure what your first reply was going for, as it didn't seem to follow on from what I wrote. Your second response didn't develop from your first, and doesn't seem to be doing much else either. At best it's making an unrelated claim about tribal mindsets, at worst it's just an excuse to throw insults at me.
All in all I'm not sure what value you're bringing to this discussion.
As a poster above noted “continued oppression requires a constant flow of new rules.” armchair warriors look to be offended to have an excuse for condemning the designated baddies
The alternative hypothesis is the euphemism treadmill, namely:
1. Group is viewed negatively
2. Group's name acquires negative connotations due to association with group
3. People use name of group as insult
4. Group invents new name for themselves
5. New name acquires negative connotations due to association with group
6. People use name of group as insult
7. Group invents new name for themselves
This clearly applies to all the terms associated with learning difficulties over the years; your playground taunt was your parents' respectable term. "Jap" is probably unusual as a one-off change (although cf. "Nip"), but that's because the popularity of the Japanese went from "unacceptably foreign, but basically exotic and mysterious" to "subhuman goblin-like monsters" to "our allies, the bastion of freedom in Asia" at break-neck speed. Similarly, the sodomite/invert/homosexual/gay treadmill stopped when being gay stopped being viewed negatively.
So far as social spread is concerned, that's partly sympathy (not wanting to define people as part of the negatively-affected category they're in), partly signalling ("I'm one of the nice people who says Native American") and partly social pressure in the later stages, which is where the cascade effect would start to come in. I don't think a cascade could start from 51/49 and move purely on its own steam though; I think it has to get to something more like 66/33 before it can move on its own momentum.
"The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended."
That may be one possible excuse but I am not sure it explains the process very well.
1. When we are moving something from 100:0 to 99:1, like it was done with the N-word or might be done with "field work"', there is a period of 80:20 and 60:40 when the word is already considered offensive by many but still has not been purged from the pages /re-educated from mouths. During this period, the amount of offense is likely higher than it was during 100:0. So this process is pretty counter-productive way to reduce offense and yet there are now many people whose full time job is to find such words!
2. If the aim is to reduce offense, why would anyone take the name of a racial group, then invent a new concept with strong negative connotations based on this name, but not to try to change the name of the racial group afterwards? This seems to be pretty counterproductive as far as reducing offense goes, and yet this is what was done with "whiteness".
A more plausible explanation for both is that the aim is not to reduce offense/raise the status of one group but to lower the status (aka oppress) another group. With this explanation, it makes sense that the rules are constantly changing: as people get used to old rules and internalize them, these rules become less oppressive and continued oppression requires a constant flow of new rules.
This explanation is also consistent with a non-uniform enforcement of the rules, with some groups retaining the privilege of using the N-word.
It's pretty easy to ignore all this nonsense. I still hear words like Oriental, Redskin, and even Jap, used by people who don't mean offence. Actually it is particularly often that I hear "Jap", because I hang out with a lot of Anime/Manga artists, and they can't be bothered to say "Japanese" when the Japanese artists they interact with don't care or lack the context to care. They invariably mean Japanese in Japan anyway, so you get the situation where an American of Japanese Descent uses this.
Or take another example. I got a friend who's next door neighbour has a confederate flag waving in his yard. This neighbour is black. To him, the flag just means "yay southern United States". Because the only people who really got the memo about the flag being racist are people who watch the news or follow politics, which is honestly almost nobody.
Their social credit is issued at a different bank, you could say.
In the end, I say give up never, because that social credit line you're trying to take out is from bad people, and the percentage of people with that line of credit is almost never actually 70% or higher. Exceptions may be made based on context, IE, formal settings require formal language.
Y'know, this is what annoys people. The "lived experience" types who are all about "you must prioritise person B, their lived experience of prejudice over-rides whatever you say or write, don't question their narrative, if they say it, then it's true and that does not have to mean factually true" suddenly become all "name, rank, serial number" when it comes to this kind of contradiction.
Someone relates an experience that does not fit with their stereotypes. "You're lying. You made that up. I know you did because I know it can't be true".
Isn't it more stereotypical to think you know all about the opinions of every single black person born and reared and living in the South, so you know what they would or would not say, think or do in every instance?
Maybe it is a made-up story, but you can't jump to that conclusion on the bare bones of "it can't be true because my mental model of all persons of D type doesn't include such outliers".
If it was her neighbor, then I wouldn't have called BS.
But it is presented the way falsity happens. A friend of a friend. But then you push on the friend, well it was actually their cousin who told the story. And you push on the cousin and well they heard it at a party.
I'm a litigator, there are very good reasons for the hearsay rule!! And I have a very good crap detector.
So Emma_M can tell me the City, state and neighborhood.
We do not have to take everybody at "their word". Especially when it is presented as and hearsay that also has a pretty high degree of incredibility and which is being used to shield offensive stuff.
On here we generally do take people at their word, because this is not a court of law. If everyone here is presumed from the start to be liars and fabulators (everyone is a dog on the Internet), then what good is this place?
How do I know that you are, in fact, a litigator? Why couldn't *you* be inventing that fact to make your story seem more convincing? Are *you* going to produce your law licence to prove that you are who you say you are? I'm not asking for you to do that, I think the anonymity afforded here is valuable and I don't want people feeling like they have to doxx themselves in order to be taken seriously.
But you see my point? You don't believe Emma_M because. I can equally disbelieve you because. At the moment, Emma_M's previous contributions on here have not marked her (him/them) out as a liar or troll. So I extend to her/him/them/the five racoons in a raincoat the benefit of the doubt.
"A random black person flying the Confederate flag as a celebration of the South." No. Not a credible story.
Could it happen sure? It might have even been on TV. Like an undocumented complaining about undocumented. There is also all kinds of weird stuff.
If she made the claim that it was her black neighbor who did this. Then, I would not have challenged. I would not have believed it but I would not have challenged. But once it gets asserted in the hearsay kind of way with plausible deniability, then it is suspect.
State, City, Neighborhood request is not doxxing her. It is about the "friend" who ostensibly has a black neighbor who ostensibly flies Traitor Flag as way to celebrate the South. And it is sufficiently vague to not be doxxing anyone.
I don't find Emma_B's story incredible. I don't live in the South, but I have family who do, and it's a complex place.
On the other hand, your incredulity would seem to partake of a cartoonish stereotyping of the South that is so commonplace among coastal and Northeastern soi-disant sophisticates that one is put in mind of the saying about how much fish notice water.
(There's actually a few more if you Google "black man with confederate flag", but the articles are paywalled and I'm not dealing with that)
Clearly it's a "man bites dog" kind of story, but the fact that papers don't seem to struggle to find men biting dogs makes me think that the probability of Emma's friend's neighbour flying the flag is way more than zero.
America is still segregated not as much as before but still. So what percent of non-black people in South have a a black next door neighbor. Not just on the block or in the neighborhood, next door. What percent of blacks fly a traitor flag to celebrate south?
The is the man bites dog story. And then some says oh they were there and saw it. Really? This is how "urban myth" spreads. And as it spreads well it starts down the path where a man biting dog really is ostensibly not that unusual.
Then we have alleged stranger danger and putative rampant satanic cult, and pretty soon pedo pizzagate.
So you are calling Emma a liar? Seems uncouth, given that the possibility of having a Black neighbour in the US is naively ~2/10. (I didn't notice Emma specifying the race of her friend)
Nobody is saying that there are a shitload of black people out there flying the confederate flag, just that it's not out of the question -- from which it follows that there are definitely other reasons for that behaviour than (anti-black, I guess) racism.
Just to give a few details, without Doxxing anybody.
My friend is Native American/Caucasian mixed race. He lives in what could be uncharitably described as a "white trash" neighbourhood, the kind of place where everybody has about an acre of land, everybody lives in trailers, and everybody's yards are piled with various objects that look like detritus but which get used for various purposes, like rusty go-karts, cinder blocks, lawn chairs, grills, and cars that don't work.
Why is the black neighbour waving this flag? I actually don't know, my friend and I speculated years ago it was because "yay south" but for all I know it could be he's a fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Maybe it's ironic flag waving, but nobody gets it because this is exactly the kind of neighbourhood to display that flag. Maybe the guy has a wife who's white, or he's half black? I've never spoken to this man, I just see the flag, and the man.
This story is not meant to be an "ahah! Gotcha!" account. It's a real thing I've seen that illustrates my intended point, that conforming to the culture you are in is more important and easier to do, than conforming to what are ultimately top-down declarations from outside cultures that probably have bad motivations.
On a previous contract, I had a coworker who was a gearhead (car hobbyist, for those who haven't heard the term). Middle class (we're all software developers). One of his favorite shows growing up was the Dukes of Hazzard. By pure coincidence, we noticed several cars with very custom paint jobs regularly parked in the garage near our office. One of them was a modern Dodge Charger, done like the General Lee, right down to the lettering and the flag. It was his favorite car. He's black. I never had an opportunity to ask him explicitly, but he clearly wasn't bothered in the slightest by its history.
Several people have commented that "eat the rich" feels snappier than "eat rich people": are you sure that's not just because "eat the rich" is an idiom, and if "eat rich people" were the known idiom, it would feel the same way?
But regardless, for every case people try to turn a phrase into a slur, there's a story why it's bad, or worse than the alternative. The point isn't that there isn't one. It's that just because one phrase has marginally different connotations than another doesn't mean it's reasonable to demand everyone to only use one, and treat the other as wrong. Just because one phrase is a micrometer less humanizing than another, that doesn't mean it's dehumanizing and should be suppressed. Just because one phrase is a micrometer less anti-racist than another, that doesn't mean it's racist and should be suppressed.
I think the point is that many “slurs” aren’t, in any meaningful sense, slurs at all. Negro is actually a good example. It pisses me off because all the good people who used it before it was “bad” - and who are dead now - have absolutely no defense. I guess the NAACP can hide behind their initials but what about all the quotes that become obsolete from “negroes” themselves? Frederick Douglass is rolling in his grave. Any honest educator should have to explain how we later decided to change our minds. This essay is a valuable service.
"They have perfect defence: in their time it wasn't a problematic word."
Not good enough, chronological distance is no defence. Haven't you heard about editing Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming? While there is much more of a case for cutting the racist etc. references out of Fleming's Bond books, the Dahl ones are less defensible.
We mustn't say "fat" so the replacement term is "enormous".
Evil child-eating witches can't be said to work as supermarket cashiers, that is the glass ceiling! Now they must be scientists. Because the offence there is them being limited as women to low-status jobs, not that they are - you know - evil, child-eating witches?
Absolutely, offensive terms like "Negroes" can and should be removed from works written in the past; if it's offensive at any time, it is offensive at all times, and just because the author has been dead for a hundred years is no excuse to go easy on them.
And I disagree vehemently. Even offensive terms should stay where they are. You’re such a baby you can’t handle historical reality, go suck your thumb instead. Leave the books alone.
Yet. He wasn’t a perfect man, and soon some bored, self righteous lefty will start a purity cascade on him. Because who’s going to be left to go after?
> are you sure that's not just because "eat the rich" is an idiom, and if "eat rich people" were the known idiom, it would feel the same way?
Yeah, I feel pretty confident about it. I'd say that the reason why "eat the rich" became an idiom instead of "eat rich people" in the first place, is because the former is more snappier and less awkward then the latter. Not vice versa.
>Just because one phrase is a micrometer less humanizing than another, that doesn't mean it's dehumanizing and should be suppressed.
Well, there is a difference between supression and prefering to use something else. I agree that we can use more tolerance regarding the terms people use and be generally nicer about it. I'm not going to shame people for saying "the X" instead of "X people" but I myself will try to be a better person in this regard even if a tiny bit more.
"Eat the rich" is a succinct distillation of a political principle: opposition to the notion of a class such as "the rich" in the first place, the idea of wealth being unequally distributed, a call for the little streets to rise up against the great.
"Eat rich people" is much foggier. Which rich people? All rich people, or just some rich people? What counts as a rich person? Are we eating them because they're rich, or because they're people? If the latter case, what other people can/should we eat?
The same way that "eat your greens" is more actionable and a snappier slogan than "eat healthily". Eat greens, got it, I know what green vegetables are, I can do that. Eat healthily requires a lot more effort to figure out and is cloudier: is meat healthy? wine? what size portions? should I eat fruit or avoid it because of sugar?
I feel like this is that old propaganda saw "jumping on the bandwagon", and since your average person wants to be part of the group more than spending time engaging in critical thought on issues that aren't personally relevant, onto the bandwagon everyone goes. It's survivalist instinct pure and simple and makes sense from that perspective. Sad too though. Somehow, mankind can do all the things we've done to create a world today where it's better than it has ever been before, and yet, we've found no anecdote for demagogues using propaganda to advance their own interests made possible by most people's sheer/intrinsic desire to support said nonsense because they want to be validated by groupthink.
In the Russian language, there is a presposition "v" which means "in" and is usually used with relation to countries (e.g. in Poland, in Argentina), but with an exception for Ukraine, where preposition "na" is used instead (something like "on Ukraine"). It is caused by the fact that the word Ukraine etmologycally means "boundary", "frontier", "perifery", and was used with respective preposition (on the boundary, on the frontier). There was a long and protracted discussion if it was offensive, with the same hyperstition dynamics. But the start of the war a year ago gave a huge boost the the divisevness of the hyperstition (that was the point when I gave in).
There is a weird assumption that if you “give in” that life will be unbearable. But language already is filled with stuff where people “gave in” and we are all fine. It’s annoying how language changes. But this post reads like someone saying “I don’t like how language changes and I’m going to be the friction that tries to stop it”. But you can’t stop it. And it’s already changed so much already. And the endpoint isn’t horribleness, it’s where we are now. These fights have already happened a million times over. They have literally been happening my entire life. Trying to fight this stuff is like trying to fight the weather. Go ahead and try. Or try to be a dick to people that are on the vanguard of the change. But all you are doing is being a dick to people and accomplishing nothing. The best approach is probably to be generally ignorant of the fight rather than hyperfocused on it so when it comes to your attention, you change because you know by that time it’s the preferred position in society. Or you can be a dick and fight the weather. Do whatever you want.
Change is inevitable, but so is resistance to change. You can't stop it, but you can slow it down. And I'd say resistance to change is more important than change. If people didn't have any preference to keep language mostly as they are used to, it would change so fast that parents wouldn't understand their children, and grandchildren wouldn't understand their grandparents. If people didn't change language at all except to give names to new concepts, nothing bad would happen.
As far as people getting offended (feeling like others are "dicks to" them), those responsible are first and foremost those who start propagating the idea that this-and-this term is offensive. Most "offensive" words are only offensive to the extent listeners think the speaker means to offend, hates them, or similar. If well-meaning people keep using a word, listeners don't think it indicates hatred, so they don't get offended.
Right. See right in there is the “fear”. “If we allow this to happen then language will change so fast overnight that no one will be able to understand each other”. No. It will be just like it is currently. You think your doing something. But your taking a teaspoon out of the ocean. This post and others efforts will have no affect. And again, there have already been millions like you in the past who bemoaned “political correctness” and the move to “flight attendant”. If you want to pretend you are defending something or someone by being a dick, go ahead. But it’s doubtful anyone will thank you for the friction you cause and more likely you will just come off as a dick. Some stuff you can fight. How language changes isn’t really a fight anyone can win.
The same applies in the reverse: what's the point of complaining about Scott's post? After all, in the grand scheme of things, any one person, or even Scott and this entire commentariat, doesn't change things by more than an infinitesimal amount: why bother?
Indeed, do you ever vote? Should no one? Your vote is a teaspoon out of the ocean; the chance that it affects anything is negligible.
Nobody says life will be unbearable, this is just your strawman. What somebody does say is that we should not let pathetic nobodies control how we talk, which is a categorically different thing from linguistic change, which 99% of people who invoke it to justify their ingroup's demands don't understand nor care about.
> you can be a dick and fight the weather.
This is what 4chan calls a "Cope", a delusion that you make up so reality is more bearable and you appear stronger to your outgroup than you really are. In actual reality, none of the pathetic "vanguard of change" is as secure or as stable (let alone as cute) as my 4 years old nephew, they are extremly fragile and contemptible creatures held together by insincere praise and meaningless buzzwords, and the slightest opposition or pushback, on the scale of 1 among hundreds of thousands, sends them crumbling to the soil like dust. They can literally be demolished by words, like the monsters of myths.
If fighting weather was as easy as this, Climate Change would be a walk in the garden.
What makes it unbearable is the rapidity of change, for what seems no good reason.
"Don't say X, that is offensive, you should say Y". Ordinary person agrees and goes along using Y, until someone else gasps in horror about "You said Y? Don't you know how offensive that is? Why aren't you using Z, the term everyone knows is the only acceptable way to speak?"
However, Z just came into being ten minutes ago and nobody outside of a circle of particular highly-wrought purists even know it exists. That doesn't stop them from condemning everyone who doesn't use Z of malice, rather than ignorance or error.
I would say that it becomes more important to struggle against a cascade the more annoying the new word is. There are a variety of factors that contribute to how annoying a new word is, but here are five of them:
1) Is the new word longer? (Because we want to waste less time)
2) Is it easier to pronounce/type? (Because we care about easy of use)
3) Is it less descriptive? (Because we care about people quickly grasping the concept)
4) Is it dissimilar to the old word? (Because we want to minimize transaction costs)
5) Is it likely to cause another cascade? (Because we dislike cascades)
If tomorrow people say that "black people" is bad but "black peoples" is good, I would jump on board at 55% because it scores well in all aspects (except 5). If however people want to replace it with "abcedifoguhajekilomun" that's worse in all aspects (except 5) so I would strongly push against it (maybe 98%).
Conversely if people want to *reclaim* a word and start a *respectability* cascade I would jump on board rather quickly (I like having the freedom to use a lot of words), but I would jump on board even more quickly the better it scores in those different aspects.
For example, I'm on board with trying to reclaim "queer" because lgbt is longer and more annoying to say, requires an explanation for a new user, and quickly causes another cascade (what about intersex? Okay we'll say lgbti. What about asexuals? Okay we'll say lgbtia etc).
Queer on the other hand scores well on all aspects (even transaction cost since we still have a lot of books lying around about "queer theory" etc).
I don't think we should be trying to put a number on this (e.g. I add 10% to my 70% for every negative aspect it has) because a lot of it depends on social context. With rarely used jargon I value descriptiveness over brevity, with words I use in everyday life it's the opposite. Let's all agree we jump onboard a disrespectability cascade at more than 50% and onboard a respectability cascade at less than 50%. How much more or less we'll change depending on a lot of hard to quantify social factors.
EDIT: This is just a heuristic and moral reasoning obviously takes priority. Queer people wanting to make "queer" a respectable synonym of "lgbt" is fine. But if the nazi-party wants to start a respectability cascade to make "holocaust" a respectable synonym of "morality" you should probably resist jumping on board even once the majority of the population has.
The discussion about “the poor” and “the rich” seems to me to be clearly about privilege. One could be considered unintentional punching down (the poor) while the other is punching up.
How much of this resistance to accepting slurs as slurs is straight up privilege?
• Missing closing quote mark in the following sentence: Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’ every time someone refers to them.
• Repeated word in the sentence "This is just a bad time time on all sides."
If you're going to seriously think about this maybe you should have started with n-gram viewer of "jap", "japs", etc. (Put time frame to 1700 and compare American English to English data sets.)
I recall Spiro Agnew's usage.
Mcwhorter's and Randall Smith's and others' before thinking about how words are slurs or become slurs might have been useful. (ie the literature review is important.) It's not like nobody has been thinking about this stuff for decades!
To mildly equivocate brits with japs as a set up is kind of lame. How long has the word Brits been used?
Again where is a literature and historic review. I remembered Safire writing about it and it wasn't hard to find.
The lack of the long or serious view is disheartening.
And then there is the logarrhea. You're not getting paid by the word. Edit yourself. Distill. You aspire to be an essayist but seem unwilling to hone your craft.
...is it? You've basically described the process of language evolving based on past events. How is that bad?
"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."
'For some reason' is doing a tremendous amount of work here. Either there's a good reason, and this is fine, or there isn't a good reason and this doesn't actually happen. Or you can admit that people do irrational things and adjust all your beliefs (including the belief in efficient markets, etc, which your writing indicates you're very attached to) accordingly.
"This seems bad for everybody."
This is the same 'everybody' that agreed to go along with this one sentence ago?
It's indeed easy to imagine scary scenarios like "what if everybody spontaneously coordinate to do something terrible" But the assumption that people successfully coordinated around something already contradicts most of the terrible scenarios. Not all of them, though.
The whole point is that it's not everybody spontaneously coordinating. It's a small number of people coordinating initially, then some more people joining in because they are ideologically motivated to always choose the most anti-racist etc. option available, no matter how silly it is, then more people joining in because they are pressured to conform, then more people because they start to worry that the old terms may actually be offensive to some people, then more people because (after many of the least racist people already avoid the old term) a few people of the race referred to actually start to get offended by it, and so on.
A positive feedback loop, where there's a gradually increasing number of people avoiding the old term, along with an increasingly good reason to avoid it, even though originally there was no reason to change terminology at all, or nowhere near a sufficiently good reason to go through the process.
I doubt the "no matter how silly it is" part. After all field work, isn't cancelled and I don't think there is any controversy around quantum supremacy anymore. There indeed is a mechanism that leads to changes but it doesn't seem to be capable to create absolutely any change.
There are definitely people who join in no matter how silly it is, though it sometimes fizzles out at the next stage or the one after that.
But, more importantly, the reason it sometimes fizzles out is that *enough people behave like Scott suggests* and don't join in just because someone tells them some term is offensive. That's not an argument *against* Scott's post.
I guess an argument against Scott's post could be that it's enough for people to just judge if the request is silly, and if they judge it silly, it will fizzle out. But when people request you to change some terminology, and you say "this is silly", they'll often say "it costs you nothing to do it, and someone might get hurt if you don't, so why don't you do it?" That's when you can link to Scott's post to defend yourself.
The argument against Scott's post is that while he kind of presents the mechanism as all powerful and unrestricted thing that can make any change in the language which isn't the case as there is hidden machinery inside, which is responsible for which changes get adopted and which not, which Scott didn't include in his model.
The other argument is that the changes that actually happen, contrary to potential scares and failed attempts, are often good and we should take it into the account.
But yes, the fact that someone have to stand ground occasionally to prevent outright stupid changes is true.
"A positive feedback loop, where there's a gradually increasing number of people avoiding the old term, along with an increasingly good reason to avoid it"
Okay. Seems fine.
"even though originally there was no reason to change terminology at all"
That was then, whenever "originally" was. People respond to changes in their environment. This is normal and healthy and good.
"or nowhere near a sufficiently good reason to go through the process."
The people who went along with the process probably disagree. That's why they did it.
> That was then, whenever "originally" was. People respond to changes in their environment.
But quite possibly it would be better if the process didn't start at all, and their environment didn't change at all (in this manner).
> The people who went along with the process probably disagree. That's why they did it.
Wrong. Many of the same people who went along at a time the original term became somewhat widely regarded as offensive may well have preferred if the whole process hadn't started at all. That's why they only joined in later. Only a small minority necessarily wanted it when compared to not having the process started at all (or having it fizzle out early on).
Also, some people are forced/pressured to join in by employer policies, social pressure and so on, and these still contribute to the continuing feedback loop. (Here I'm not even opining on whether said policies, pressure are right at the time they happen. My point is that they should be counted as opposing the process, not supporting it.)
> But quite possibly it would be better if the process didn't start at all, and their environment didn't change at all (in this manner).
"Quite possibly" isn't exactly a slam dunk argument.
> Wrong. Many of the same people who went along at a time the original term became somewhat widely regarded as offensive may well have preferred if the whole process hadn't started at all. That's why they only joined in later. Only a small minority necessarily wanted it when compared to not having the process started at all (or having it fizzle out early on).
So their preferences changed as the situation around them changes. This is normal and healthy and good.
> Also, some people are forced/pressured to join in by employer policies, social pressure and so on, and these still contribute to the continuing feedback look. (Here I'm not even opining on whether said policies, pressure are right at the time they happen. My point is that they should be counted as opposing the process, not supporting it.)
When it's a thing you like, it's "responding to incentives". When it's a thing you don't like, it's "pressure".
> So their preferences changed as the situation around them changes.
Their preference changed as to whether people should continue using the word. It didn't (necessarily) change as to whether it would have been better if most people had kept using the old term, and had not started to treat it as offensive.
The problem is, in these cases it only takes a small number of people to float the idea that something is a slur (or otherwise offensive) for any silly reason, and that's enough to start the cascade if everyone else tries to behave maximally non-offensively. That at least a small number of people behave irrationally (or more specifically, are radicals blinded by ideology) is hardly news. (More generally, it's never been my impression that Scott thought most people behaved rationally when it came to politics(-adjacent things).)
"The problem is, in these cases it only takes a small number of people to float the idea that something is a slur (or otherwise offensive) for any silly reason, and that's enough to start the cascade if everyone else tries to behave maximally non-offensively."
And this is...bad? Because...???
"(More generally, it's never been my impression that Scott thought most people behaved rationally when it came to politics(-adjacent things).)"
He has an entire day of the week set aside for prediction markets, pretty much every one of which includes some market on politics(adjacent things). Either people behave rationally or those markets are useless. You can't just switch between the two whenever it's convenient for the thing you're arguing for. It's almost like a thing, with a castle and some farmland.
As opposed to all of human history up until now, where nobody was status hungry and the complacent majority instead imposed their (lack of?) will on those ultra committed?
I guess its the subject matter if the imposition. Here unlike imposition of a normal religious value or prohibition on criminal act, there is no conceivable utility in these constant linguistic landmines, other than for those who start these trends, who get to catch others in landmines, creating new opportunities for posturing and inflicting social ostracism on others. ie: the contemptibility of those who start these cascades
"You're arguing about a particular manifestation of a problem, but that problem is actually much older and general than this particular instance, so you shouldn't do anything about this instance."
Not a good argument. Yeah, committed power-hungry minorities often try to impose their will on majorities, and it's natural that we try to fight back against them when we disagree with their will.
EDIT:
> What are you actually arguing in favor of?
If someone tries to pressure you to change some terminology to avoid allegedly offending some group, resist the pressure if it's unlikely to actually offend people. And perhaps keep using the old terminology if you think there was originally no good reason to change it, even if at this point it does offend some especially easily offended people, but not once it's universally regarded as offensive.
> "You're arguing about a particular manifestation of a problem, but that problem is actually much older and general than this particular instance, so you shouldn't do anything about this instance."
I'm saying the problem is being misidentified. If the problem is "humans are status hungry and the majority is complacent", then saying more slurs doesn't actually solve anything.
> Not a good argument. Yeah, committed power-hungry minorities often try to impose their will on majorities, and it's natural that we try to fight back against them when we disagree with their will.
Are you sure that you aren't the committed minority here? You're arguing in favor of using more slurs.
People who put money on prediction markets have strong incentives to do their best to be right, and to bet specifically on markets about which they are likely to be right. People joining Twitter campaigns have... different incentives.
But anyway, is it your impression from Scott's general writing about politics (not the prediction markets stuff, more his earlier stuff on SSC) that he thinks most people behave rationally about politics? If no, and you see a contradiction between that and the prediction market posts, take that up with him, not me.
> People who put money on prediction markets have strong incentives to do their best to be right, and to bet specifically on markets about which they are likely to be right. People joining Twitter campaigns have... different incentives.
Twitter sucks, I agree, and you won't ever catch me defending it. But I think this is the first time Twitter has actually come up in this discussion.
> But anyway, is it your impression from Scott's general writing about politics (not the prediction markets stuff, more his earlier stuff on SSC) that he thinks most people behave rationally about politics?
It is my impression that Scott thinks most people behave at least rationally enough that markets work on general and that the results of a market (prediction or otherwise) can be taken as a reasonable analogue for ground truth.
> If no, and you see a contradiction between that and the prediction market posts, take that up with him, not me.
I did, when I left my original comment. You lept to his defense. I didn't know who you are before you responded and largely still don't.
Some morons recently decided that calling a country the "Philippines" is offensive[*], so Scott is actually being pretty mild here as far as this idiocy can go.
>This is the same 'everybody' that agreed to go along with this one sentence ago?
Yeah, in nazi germany everybody agreed to go one way, and it ended badly for every single one of them and a good part of their descendents. Herds Follow Their Stupidest Off A Cliff.
If real Asian people demanded it, it might be worth considering. But in reality, it'll be some dumb liberal white person striving for ever greater purity of consciousness who is getting offended on behalf of others and declaring the old usage is bad, we must now all say the new phrase.
"Some morons recently decided that calling a country the "Philippines" is offensive[*], so Scott is actually being pretty mild here as far as this idiocy can go."
This is missing the crucial "everybody goes along with it for some reason" step.
It's a 3 months old proposal, you think the parasites who came up with this bullshit won't spend the rest of their sad lives trying to force it on every professor and student whose miserable luck made them fall under their authority ? With a very high probability of success ?
Sure thing, send an application to the university in question using one of the words mentioned in the naughty list, if you got accepted for an interview report back the results to me and any amount of money you want me to pay.
You're thinking too small. Scott describes (and I objected to) a situation where "everyone" would be forced to stop using the term "Asian". In that context, what does one university's hiring department matter? It's less than a drop in a bucket. This is the exact nature of my objection; it's not hard to find someone advocating for something dumb. You could even call it the human condition. And some of those people might even be in situations of petty authority. But what they aren't going to do is transform the culture through sheer force of will. For purposes of our bet, I graciously won't hold you to the strictness of "everyone", 1/2 or even 1/3 of "everyone" would suffice to convince me. But it's certainly going to take more than a handful of people at one university.
And then there's the outcomes we're measuring; do you honestly think a university refusing to hiring a Robert Bigdick is evidence of...anything? Do you know whether or not I am of Filipino heritage, and thus the point would be moot anyway? Could you possibly come up with a less shitty way to test your claims? Something that doesn't involve reminding you of a comment five years from now (Assuming I can track you down) to harangue you for money? Isn't Scott pushing prediction markets for exactly this kind of situation?
"Asian" is two syllables. "Person of Asian descent" is seven.
Go through this process with enough words, as is currently happening, and our language becomes less concise, less succinct, and less usable.
One of the worst offenders is how we are now expected to stop saying "Mormon" (two syllables) and say "member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" (14 syllables!).
The replacement words almost always seem to be much more of a mouthful than those which came before.
If this is the crux of your complaint, then the rationalist community is throwing stones in glass houses. Neologisms abound here. We're in the comments section for a blog post that just introduced the world to the word "Hyperstitious", for fucks sake. And you want to talk about how language is becoming less susinct and less usable?
I'm not a Rationalist nor do I claim to be one. Regardless, this is a bad comparison anyway. "Hyperstition" is a very specific thing that previously had no term. We have a perfectly good word for Asians already: Asian. I am not going to substitute that for the mouthful "person of Asian descent" which means the exact same thing.
I pick option three, "there isn't a good reason, and it does happen".
Seemingly now DEI is DEIB, where the "b" stands for "belonging", because being diverse, inclusive, and equitable was too limiting and not accepting enough. There comes a point where you look at what is being plopped down in front of you and go "this is a con job".
"But DEI leaders are now calling for the word “belonging” to join the acronym."
Who are these leaders, why is anyone listening to them, and does this sound like anything more than a way to squeeze more money out of training, workshops, consultancy, and "you need to hire me at great expense to lecture all your staff about this new thing"?
No idea. This is the first I'm hearing about it. It must not actually be a big deal.
"why is anyone listening to them"
I'm not sure anyone is (except you). This news would never have reached me if it didn't have you signal boosting it, even though you are doing it for toxoplasma reasons.
"and does this sound like anything more than a way to squeeze more money out of training, workshops, consultancy, and "you need to hire me at great expense to lecture all your staff about this new thing"?"
Again, the only perspective I have on this is yours, so it sounds like whatever you describe it as. You've intentionally chosen some obscure thing that nobody else could possibly have a chance to form an independent opinion on beforehand. But I'll give it a naive and uninformed shot:
This is fine. I already use the acronym "DEI" approximately never, I project using the new acronym about as much, I think belonging is fine as an idea, and the very idea of fighting in this particular trench in the culture war fills me with a weary headache. If (again for emphasis, IF) it's all a grift, it's not a grift on the scale of, say, crypto, and the blog's stated stance on crypto is "less than maximally hostile", so the appropriate level of hostility here would be even less than that.
Come now. It's not a vastly different skill from the one you're using to detect your supposed con jobs. We're both reading text other people have written on the internet and making judgements about the writer's motivation. If you think this is wildly unfair, I'd gently suggest not making it the crux of your argument.
I'll grant that the DEIB thing is an obscure issue that may or may not become a bigger problem down the line, but there are clearly other instances of "there isn't a good reason, and it does happen" that have already been proven out.
For example, see the "blacklist" issue - the origin of the word has nothing to do with race or the colour of anyone's skin, but it's now been declared verboten by some navel gazers [1] somewhere because it might associate negative sentiments with the word "black" which makes it somehow a slight against black people.
Is that a good reason? I would argue no, it doesn't actually serve the supposed telos of solving any real issues of racial inequality, it's authoritarian language policing that only demonstrates and boosts the social power of the aforementioned navel gazers. But this triggered a cascade resulting in many companies having to spend thousands of engineering hours to strike "blacklist" and "whitelist" from all their assets to signal they're not racist. This is a form of tyranny - it gives a few dedicated social engineers the power to inflict heavy costs on society for little real world benefit except to themselves, which does not seem socially beneficial to me for all the same reasons classical tyrants are generally a bad form of government even if some turn out to be wise and good - the abuse potential and downsides are too high.
[1] - Wikipedia cites https://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/490/744 as the originator of this trend to strike the word from use. You can judge whether their reasoning is valid for yourself, but that little kafkatrap at the end tells me all I need to know.
> For example, see the "blacklist" issue - the origin of the word has nothing to do with race or the colour of anyone's skin, but it's now been declared verboten by some navel gazers [1] somewhere because it might associate negative sentiments with the word "black" which makes it somehow a slight against black people
You're misunderstanding my argument completely. Scott posits a situation where someone makes up something dumb and then (something something handwave "everybody" agrees and it takes over the world). My issue isn't with the first part, where people make up dumb stuff, that happens all the time. It's happening in these very comments as we speak. I take issue with "somehow everyone agrees for some reason and it takes over the world". That doesn't happen, and when pressed on this the only counterexamples I'm presented with are things that someone made up that _haven't_ convinced everyone and _hasn't_ taken over the world. You yourself admit that this blacklist thing is something "some navel gazers" made up. My router continues to maintain a blacklist, and I don't see any open tickets on Ubiquiti's forums to request such a change. I feel kind of silly for checking.
>I take issue with "somehow everyone agrees for some reason and it takes over the world". That doesn't happen, and when pressed on this the only counterexamples I'm presented with are things that someone made up that _haven't_ convinced everyone and _hasn't_ taken over the world. You yourself admit that this blacklist thing is something "some navel gazers" made up. My router continues to maintain a blacklist, and I don't see any open tickets on Ubiquiti's forums to request such a change. I feel kind of silly for checking.
You may not have experienced the effects yourself, but as someone in the software industry, I have been made to participate in large scale efforts to strike "blacklist", "whitelist", "master", and "slave" from our codebase and documentation. This is not an isolated phenomenon; smaller companies like Ubiquiti might get away with not conforming to the signaling, but major players like Apple [1], Microsoft [2], and Amazon [3] have already hopped onboard.
I take your point that not all hyperstition cascades ultimately "take over the world", but regardless of whether penetration ultimately reaches 99.99%, as the cascade grows we incur a huge amount of unnecessary costs based on nothing but silly, made up things. Counterexamples here and there don't make those costs go away.
> You may not have experienced the effects yourself, but as someone in the software industry, I have been made to participate in large scale efforts to strike "blacklist", "whitelist", "master", and "slave" from our codebase and documentation. This is not an isolated phenomenon; smaller companies like Ubiquiti might get away with not conforming to the signaling, but major players like Apple [1], Microsoft [2], and Amazon [3] have already hopped onboard.
I'm not sure I understand why your grievance here. Is it that, in the course of employment, you've had to do things that you personally think are "silly" and pointless? Sure, that happens. I would point to "meeting that could have been an email" as a much more regular, widespread, and costly. My wife is a software engineer and at there are entire days lost to meetings. Your concern for "unnecessary costs" strikes me as particularly hollow, given that in this particular case the "unnecessary costs" are your paycheck; you yourself are the one being paid to make these changes. You could argue that if you didn't have to make these changes, you could be spending your time on doing other more important work and changing the world for the better, but you and I both know that isn't true and that time would instead be spent on another meeting. The entire "unncessary cost" argument boils down to "This is less than 100% optimal", to which I would say "Yeah, this and literally everything else in the world". In deciding what to fix first, do you _really_ think this ranks at the top of the list? The top 10%? The top 50%?
Are you sure that Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are actually under some genuine pressure to make these changes that they couldn't resist, or that it's simply a case of large corporations doing the large corporation thing of making token goodboy gestures to distract from their constant bad actions? Any article about Apple changing its terminology is an article that isn't about labor issues in Apple's supply chain. Amazon putting this front and center on their blog suggests that this isn't begrudgingly capitulating to external pressure but a movement from within Amazon. Weak evidence in favor: Ubiquti is generally well regarded and doesn't have any need to employ any such distraction tactics. More weak evidence against: Amazon, Apple, etc have literal PR departments whose literal job it is to put out statements like this. Someone got paid to write that blog post you're linking to. Is that an "unnecessary cost"? I guess so, but now we're talking about signaling games in general. How far are you willing to take this line of argument? Are luxuries "unnecessaryt costs", and therefore as a society we should commit to only having trabants as cars? Do you get as upset at seeing a Rolex as you do at those articles you linked?
Are you, in particular, attached to the terms "blacklist", "master", slave", etc? I don't think this is the case, but in absence of anything else I have to wonder why anyone cares. Indeed, nobody can muster up any more venom than calling this phenomenon "silly". Clowns are silly. How much time in the past month have you spent thinking about clowns?
> I take your point that not all hyperstition cascades ultimately "take over the world", but regardless of whether penetration ultimately reaches 99.99%, as the cascade grows we incur a huge amount of unnecessary costs based on nothing but silly, made up things. Counterexamples here and there don't make those costs go away.
"Huge" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for your argument here. How "huge" the costs are will necessarily scale with things like how deep the penetration gets, and what the remedy is. I'll point that, for example, not saying slurs in everyday conversation is basically free.
I'll also push back on the implication that just because something is """made up""", it doesn't matter. Scott's definition of Hyperstitious is so wide that it includes all language (Words only have meaning because we agree they do) and not just slurs, and also like the concept of money and value, which is pretty necessary to your whole "huge costs" argument.
Lastly, let's take stock of just how far the goalposts have moved, from start to finish. We've gonefrom "Someone is going to say you can't say 'Asian' anymore, and then the next day it's going to become a universally agreed rule by mysterious means" and arrived at "Amazon makes some meaningless token changes to the name of some database fields to distract from how it can't stop killing warehouse workers locked in warehouses during tornados". I'm unimpressed.
> On the other hand, the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible.
This doesn't seem very well-supported in the rest of the essay. It also seems like fundamental attribution error to me.
> if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
I think a significant percentage of the time we are, but no more so that when we talk about "rich people" and "poor people". Generally, when we categorize people, we end up attributing characteristics to the category that we either identify with or identify against. I believe the people who advocate for using "X people" are doing so because they want to center the fact that they are people, and not the categorical fiction that we've created in our heads. Ultimately, I think that endeavor is pretty futile.
Reminds me of the language-change index in Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage, which tracks the progess of a linguistic innovation from "clear mistake" to "perfectly acceptable usage".
Many forms linger in the first stage or two forever, but some make steady progress up the ladder. And then the question is when do you, as a careful writer and speaker, adopt the new usage?
This is one of the first times I have felt like a column of yours is not so well thought out. Applying statististics (where do these come from, in this case, really?) does not make much sense to me. Language is a living, breathing thing: it evolves, it lives in context (and what counts as context could take up an entire book or ten) -- and sometimes history is part of that context. I do feel much of what you express; that the language police are not just annoying but also sometimes do real damage (I saw a faculty member not just run out of her job but of her next job, by students who went online and said awful things about her, when her original "crime" was stating: "I care about the pronouns you all want, and they are still confusing to me, and I will be clumsy sometimes in what I say as I am still learning it all." She cared, and was bullied out of the situation and a job. She was an excellent teacher, beloved by many students, apparently not all.) I also think you are in one way over-thinking your own response, using stats to justify a gut reaction, and making some real assumptions or at least harsh judgements based upon very little ("the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible.") Are those in USC's SW dept really contemptible? We don't know enough. Maybe they, too, are just clumsy. Weird that you say "the people" (plural) ... "want to be the first person in a new cascade...." Do you know what propeled them and if that is their main goal? No. To me, much as I dislike some of the swing, the pendulum swings esp. when new ways of life, new understandings, new things to notice, are emerging, and we can all over-react about the motivations of others. I don't think they ("motivations:) are "private" in the philosophical sense (the old idea of inner things we can never know about in principle, which is debateable and I would come down upon the side of not-privacy; its not a thing, except poetically and circumstantially, not metaphysically or ontologically...) but I do think here you haven't shown any knowledge or research into USC's motivations. And on and on. Lots of things people are observing here are annoying to me too, but we reduce and define and assume at our peril. That said, I do think inviting real discussion, as you do, and as we are all I think trying to do here, is generally good, though I don't have any stats to back up that assumption. Still, let language breathe, folks. Let people grow and struggle with the new. Just don't forbid stuff create reductive analyses too quickly.
> Weird that you say "the people" (plural) ... "want to be the first person in a new cascade...."
What's supposed to be weird about that? The notion is that more than one person hopes to be the first person in a new trend scourging their enemies. Do you think only one person at a time can hope to win any given contest?
Language is our common property, and sometimes words get busted up and abused and we have to collectively replace them, just like you need to buy a new suitcase every now and then. They just accrue bad associations and connotations, and there's a need to start again with fresh terms.
Probably most of us can agree that sometimes people force this process too early or completely unnecessarily. But a lot of the time, it's good that the processes of language change happens; terms for poorly treated classes of people really do start to feel inherently insulting for example, or old-fashioned in some other way.
I'm not sure if this conservative view of protecting every word, as if they're irreplaceable and we might not manage to find others, is coming from a thoroughly thought through mindset, and it seems to contain a worry for the poor left-behind users of outmoded language that outweighs the small amount of inconvenience they are actually enduring.
I'd probably be less opposed to this phemomenon if the replacement words weren't almost always so much more of a mouthful than those words whose places they are taking. The cold, clinical, academese feeling of most of them doesn't help either. I'm a man, not a robot or a sociology postdoc. Human language is both connotational and denotational.
> terms for poorly treated classes of people really do start to feel inherently insulting for example, or old-fashioned in some other way
Do you feel like this about some word for a poorly-treated group that's still formally neutral, in the sense that people use it whether they like the group or not? Or have you felt like this about a word at a time it was still formally neutral? Can you give example(s)? I'm trying to get at whether you might feel like this because the words in question were already at least starting to be perceived as offensive (the group starting to consider it offensive and/or people friendly to the group starting to avoid it).
Probably in my case for the most part it's only words that are already starting to be considered offensive by others. I'd say I usually get on board about 40% of the way through the so-called hyperstitious slur cascade! (Joking with the number, I couldn't quantify it)... I'm trying to think of examples where the terms are still 'formally neutral' but they feel uncomfortable for me to say. I would say 'tory' perhaps qualifies. That's a term happily used by conservatives in the UK to describe themselves, but in the mouth of a political opponent it's often said in a derogatory way. I would try not to use it because I think it can sound ranty and a bit contemptuous.
I think that makes sense, Scott. I'm probably kind-of-sort-of, in a fuzzy "I haven't thought deeply about it" way, at around the same point for the same reason.
Why are you moralizing this process? Sometimes it’s good to notice signals and amplify them. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the underlying behavior is itself significant and sometimes it isn’t. Saying that this is wrong or bad implies that teams shouldn’t choose colors because suddenly they’re creating their own hyperstitious cascades.
I think what moralizes it is the real emotional and social effect it can have on people. The author describes this in his “Asian” example (“White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian... When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist ... If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new... Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides”).
Language has the power to accomplish this in a way that I’m not sure something as arbitrary as team colors can. And inasmuch as team colors do affect our emotional/social situation, it is with respect to something less impactful/serious (sports) than race
I think that is something specific about how we deal with race, not how the general process of people starting to associate a word with a signal of group membership and then enhancing and reifying it. Just think about all the words that people have done this with that *aren’t* racial, like “problematic” or “prior” or whatever.
Moralizing usually happens when the choice in one's personal interest may differ from the choice according to a greater good, or otherwise right for whatever reason. In this case, a particular cascade may be bad on the net, but one may be under social pressure to participate.
Scott isn't saying that all "hyperstitions" are bad; indeed, commenters have pointed out that every word is a hyperstition". "Slur cascades" are highly unusual process compared to normal changes of meaning.
Team Green wears green, Team Orange wears orange. People identify Team Green members by their green shirts, because that's what they wear; they wear green because they want to be identified as Team Green. If a Green member accidentally puts on a white or orange shirt, chances are he realizes the mistake and changes to a green shirt. Vice versa if an Orange member puts on a green shirt. This is how words normally work; approximately like stable equilibria.
Now let's say that if a Team Green member puts on a white shirt for some reason, somehow the color green is relinquished to Team Orange, all the Team Green members have to change to white, and Team Orange now mixes orange and green. This is how "slur cascades" work. (The analogy isn't complete, it doesn't explain the mechanism of the positive feedback.) This is a much less stable system. Unoffensive words on sensitive topics are like they're in unstable equilibria.
I'd guess because it's so vividly moralized by the people trying to kick off new cascades, often as a weapon - which is miserable even when it's heartfelt and not just a status battle.
There's some interaction with social class, too. I once had a college roommate who was full-blooded Japanese-American, grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Honolulu. He applied the term "Jap" to himself, and taboo terms to other ethnic groups. Apparently these were valuation-free in informal speech among his peers growing up. Vague press reports suggest this is true more generally in working-class America, and that the various hyperstitious taboos are s.significantly limited by class.
There is a strong (and strongly ignored) aspect of classism in political correctness in general. To keep up with all the taboos and their recent updates, one must spend a lot of time online, which is much easier in a white-collar job.
(The very idea that words are thing that can hurt you most already suggests that the person who believes it does not live in a ghetto nor work in construction.)
I spent five years almost full-time learning Japanese and probably 80% of learners (myself included) have no idea Jap is a slur and use it before getting corrected. It's doubly absurd because no Japanese people have any idea it is a slur either. Pretty much the only thing keeping it offensive are automated reddit/discord bots and a small number of overzealous do-gooders.
Maybe now [old, not current] Jordan Peterson's fight about pronouns makes more sense.
[I realize there are going to be people who feel the need to reply "Yes, but I still hate [old or current] Jordan Peterson". Sure. Granted. Have at it. But it's not germane.]
> Is being a Civil War re-enactor (on the Confederate side) sufficient for condemnation these days? I don’t know, but it depends on whether other people think it is.
I have heard that some groups that do historical war re-enactments assign the roles by a coinflip, to discourage potential members who would only be interested in playing a specific side.
I have a wargaming friend who is a re-enactor. He is a white libertarian gun enthusiast. I know what you're thinking, and I can guarantee, it's not what you think. Among his re-enactments (and not a simple costume; very high quality replica gear) was the Vietnam war... as a PAVN (North Vietnamese) soldier. According to him, the Vietnamese practically rolled out the red (heh) carpet for Vietnam War re-enactors of both sides (or at least American re-enactors for the 'other side'; no mention was made of any ARVN re-enactors).
When I think back on this, my initial reaction to remembering his re-enactment when it comes up is always that his re-enactment was somehow wrong, but when I try to figure out how it was wrong, my brain can't process it.
“Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’”
This is a feature-not a bug-for those who set off most hyperstitious cascades, which after all are mostly about clout-seeking and setting social landmines for others
Where do people think that the new interpretation of "squaw" falls right now? I had literally never heard anyone say this was offensive before the last year or so (and it is an actual indigenous word for "woman" in several languages), but it has gotten far enough that lots of place names are being changed. It seems silly and borderline bad to me, but I think I agree with the 70% rule.
I remember a Jules Feiffer cartoon from about 1970, syndicated in the newspapers. I can't find it on Google, although I did find a couple of other cartoons by Feiffer based on the same idea.
A five-frame strip. The image in each one is a black man (my reason for choosing "black" here will become clear) addressing the reader.
First frame: "At first, we were called 'black'."
Second frame: "Which was replaced by 'negro'."
Third frame: "Which was replaced by 'people of colour'."
Fourth frame: "Which was replaced by 'coloured'."
Final frame: "Which was replaced by 'black."
"Black" was at the time the ordinary, neutral word. Older readers may remember the slogans of the time, "Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful". Also the Black Panthers, and the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. The cartoon was a few years later.
I remember "coloured" being the ordinary, neutral word back in the earlier 60's (in the UK -- the history may have proceeded differently in the US). One occasionally encountered the words "people of colour", but it sounded to me then as very old-fashioned, and also as if those using it were straining to be politer than they felt like being to the people that each of these expressions, at different times, neutrally referred to.
There's a treadmill of social history there. The neutral word is used by everyone. The people vocal in their hate for the group use it too. It becomes associated with the haters. A replacement is found and the cycle repeats. Nowadays we seem to be back to "people of colour" and "BIPOC", a mixture of recycling the old and inventing new ones. "POC" strikes me as potentially troublesome, though. How do you pronounce the plural? What word does that sound like? How long before the haters start spelling it with an X?
Nit: "Black people commit more crime” is too vague to be either true or false. More than... what? There is a version of that statement that is true, but that ain't it.
Virtually everyone in the US is committing a crime of some sort right now. Do you have any expired prescription medication in your house somewhere? Congratulations, you're committing a crime, and so am I. Therefore, since there are more "white" people in the US than black, white people commit more crime. Yes, black people commit proportionally more of certain types of crime, and are charged and convicted much more proportionally than that.
“and are charged and convicted much more proportionally than that.” Not sure what the intended meaning here is, but if you mean blacks are charged disproportionately, wholly untrue
"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."
When I read this line, I thought of the 1960s, but realized, forty years ago was 1983. Time goes by too quickly :(
“Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."”
It's even more annoying when two camps are fighting over the correct term. Consider: "people with disabilities" vs "disabled people".
The argument for the former is that it puts the "people" term first to signal that they're people first and disabled second, which is clearly the correct order of priorities.
The argument for the latter is that the former sounds like disability is an inherent attribute of certain people but not others, whereas in the social model of disability, a disability is something that society does to people by being insufficiently inclusive, thus disabled people are people who are being disabled by not having their needs accomodated well enough, whether that's kerb cuts or captioning or something else.
I have seen both these arguments advanced in good faith by different groups of people within the general category of people who these terms could apply to. I've even heard similar arguments for autistic people vs. people with autism.
> I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”.
I presume there were a lot of Japanese-Americans with memories of forced relocation and internment, who had been called "Japs" a lot at the time.
From the outside perspective of someone with no stake in this internecine warfare, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the social model of disability. Do people actually believe it, that there's no such thing as an inherent disability? Or is it simply a fashionable luxury belief and/or a justification for certain types of advocacy?
If I ask myself "what is it true of?", I certainly come up with some good examples: someone needing a wheelchair but with no pain or mental problems, someone with a sight or hearing impairment etc.
The original "motte" claim was not that there's "no such thing as a disability", but that how much a condition (like having no legs) "disables" you is dependent on society: whether Oscar, a hypothetical person with no legs who uses a wheelchair, can walk is not a social question; whether he can shop in his local store, go to the cinema, use public transport, vote, work as a programmer at the local tech company is a question of ramps, lifts, accessible toilets and other accommodations that society can provide (or legislate) more or less of.
In the sense of "every disadvantage of a disability that society reasonably can fix, it should fix", our lawmakers certainly do believe it; a lot of corporations in Europe state that they believe in the social model of disability as part of their values statement or code of conduct.
For me, the limts of the model is that it basically only works for "nice" disabilities and not "horrible" ones. You can have no legs and still have a good quality of life in the right town; if you have complex PTSD you basically by definition have lower quality of life and society can do far less about fixing it (though legalising certain drugs might be worth a try). Chronic pain conditions, CFS/ME, anxiety disorders etc. pose the same kind of challenge for the model.
On another note, Freddie deBoer has blogged about how antipsychotic drugs have helped his condition in a way that activism and social changes have not, so unless you put the availability of such drugs in the first place on society's balance sheet, the model would seem not to apply too well here either. And there are certainly "there's no such a thing as a disability and therefore treating a supposed one with drugs is bad" kinds of activists that Freddie, and myself, have very little time for.
I bet 70% number is partially composed of personal preference but also influenced by circumstances. Scott here may be in a position where he could accidentally offend someone and not be too hurt by the ordeal; professionally and socially.
I would guess younger people with less clout and life stability may need to be more cautious. I am thinking collegiate and new workforce age, 17-23. I support this with two examples:
1) younger people are less stable in their career as they are newer and less experienced. Therefore using a slur could be much more harmful in someone's professional career when they are younger
2)Social bubbles are newer, possibly more personally impactful, and possibly more important professionally. A misstep here (i.e. using a slur) could be much more detrimental than an older person.
3) Younger people are expected to be more respectful and are reinforced to be overly polite.
With these points I would hypothesis that younger people would have a natural tendency towards lower thresholds for using a slur. I can't back this up with data.
I am less sure about the following ideas, what follows is epistemically lower than the above point.
Naturally I would argue if you are someone who is trying to convince people for a living, or even adjusting people's biases (like in rational debate), wouldn't lowering your threshold for slurs make your argument more appealing to young people. In the same way if I speak both English and Portuguese, I may write my blog posts in English so they have a larger effect size.
Would lowering your threshold for slurs- so it has a larger effect size, be worth the tradeoff here? Especially through the lense of my pet theory above "younger people have a lower slur threshold" should I adjust my threshold downward to be more inclusive as I get older?
One of the risks here is that sometimes there is a pre-existing reason for something to be genuinely offensive, and people can have different views on this. To take one example, I think it wouldn't be surprising for someone to take offense at "All lives matter" even in the first week of its existence, given that the phrase is a retort to "Black lives matter" and carries the implication that BLM is incorrect in prioritizing black lives. I agree that I dislike people who join a cascade simply out of fear or conformity, but what if the person believes that there is a real reason to take offense?
In a sense all language is a hyperstition. Does “dog” refer to the canine animal? It does if people agree it does. Does “heavy” mean serious? Not in 1955, but it did in 1985, and now it doesn’t. Did “fetch” happen? Does “literally” mean what it supposedly means, or the opposite? Does “I’m dead” refer to a serious medical problem or a funny joke? How do any of these come to mean what they mean, and change over time? Mostly the same was as with the slurs, right?
As far as I can tell, there was no group of leftist elites telling people they have to use "dog" to refer to the canine animal while everyone was using a different word, who then accused anyone who didn't go along with the diktat of being racist, sexist, and homophobic. Or if there was such a group of elites, it existed in the Old English days (<1000 AD) and is long gone by now.
I'm quite happy to grant that SJWs are moderate compared to primitive Papuans, Islamic fundamentalists, Spanish Inquisitors, or whatever other brutal primitive people come to mind. That's a really low bar. It's like being proud about knowing more science than the uncontacted tribe on Sentinelese Island, or more English than a toothless peasant from 2nd century China.
This is weird because... isn't *all* language usage a hyperstition, by definition? More generally any communication protocol is a hyperstition.
"Suppose someone decides tomorrow that 'hammer' means a weight at the end of a handle, used to hit things.
This becomes widely accepted for some reason, and now anyone referring to such a tool uses that word. Someone using a word like malleus will be met with incomprehension.
This is terrible for everybody. People have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk about construction, trying their hardest to remember the unwieldy word 'hammer', and somehow restrain themselves from saying malleus or anything else. Meanwhile, carpenters now have to police everyone's behavior, saying "Actually, that device is called a hammer". When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person really doesn't care about woodworking. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Rock-Shaft Alliance will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords explaining that a mudgara actually means a hammer. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time on all sides.
This whole thing is stupid. But it’s a stupidity we have to fight against, really hard, because if it ever gets a foothold then everyone who cares about percussion will eventually say 'hammer', it will be a stable equilibrium, and we’ll be stuck in it for all time."
> This is weird because... isn't *all* language usage a hyperstition, by definition? More generally any communication protocol is a hyperstition.
Yes, but Scott's post is specifically about hyperstitious *slur* cascades. In your hypothetical, nobody's asserting that the word "malleus" is an intrinsically insulting term, or that it's associated with offensive and dangerous subcultures. There is some other reason why the change is being enforced.
The problem with hyperstitious *slur* cascades is that they enforce periodic language changes for reasons that can, at least sometimes, be pure costs for the overwhelming majority of the population. That cost is not primarily the extra time it takes to say the longer word, as some here claim. The cost is the social disharmony that the phenomenon creates as people negotiate fundamentally pointless language shifts, or as people weaponize these language shifts to criticize, ostracize, and intimidate.
Other hyperstitious cascades are pretty much fine. I have no objection to using the word "raspberry" to refer to raspberries, for example. In other cases, we have good reasons for enforcing suboptimal lock-ins. For example, referring to electrons as "-" and drawing current backwards from the flow of electrons is universally understood to be an unfortunate historical accident, but it still makes sense to teach this as the normal convention because there would be huge costs to creating confusion in the work of professional electrical workers.
Personally, I don't use the word "Negro," so I don't mind not using it at all. By contrast, I feel that choosing between the words "Latino" and "Latinx," or "Black" and "black," or navigating conversations on the topic of disability where I'm at risk of being called out for saying "disabled people" rather than "people with disabilities," create real costs in my life and don't obviously produce social benefits of any kind. So it's not the specific result of the hyperstitious lock-in that's the problem, but the churn of unnecessary hyperstition. "Hammer" and "malleus" are both fine, but let's pick one and stick to it as much as we possibly can. In the case of, say, "Black" vs. "black,"
I'd love it if we had a culture capable of engineering the final properly respectable form of these terms, and then permanently enforcing that term as "respectable by fiat," in the same way that we enforce dollars being a form of currency. The design of the dollar is a largely arbitrary shape (certain security features aside), but it is good and useful that we not only respect earlier denominations as just as good, but that design alterations to the dollar are declared as just as good as the old ones. We can imagine a culture that declares that black, Black, Negro, and so on are all equally acceptable terms, and that only a racist would ever think it was somehow insulting to write "black" or say "Negro." That culture could still enforce the various universally agreed upon slurs, or regulate them in other ways. But the point is that this culture would be creating and enforcing long-term standards rather than a constant churn. We don't live in that culture, and I would prefer it to the one we do have now.
this is an interesting example, I think we are now past the tipping point where one can safely assume that someone using the word niggardly is intentionally 'making a point' rather than just taking it as a synonym for parsimonious or miserly, but apparently this was not the case as recently as 1995:
"In 1995, London-based magazine The Economist used the word "niggardly" in an article about the impact of computers and productivity: "During the 1980s, when service industries consumed about 85% of the $1 trillion invested in I.T. in the United States, productivity growth averaged a niggardly 0.8% a year." The Economist later pointed out with amusement that it received a letter from a reader in Boston who thought the word "niggardly" was inappropriate. "Why do we get such letters only from America?" the British magazine commented.[19]"
or 1999 when they wrote this leader about the David Howard incident. which also includes a detour into comedy AAVE:
"The dictionary assures us that it has nothing to do with the Latin niger, black, meaning only “miserly” in Old Norse; but as a former head of the National Bar Association asked the New York Times, “Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?” Good point. They'd already discovered America, hadn't they? Straight off the longship on to the Bronx Expressway, and who knows what they heard through those horns on their helmets. “But it turns up in Middle English, too,” you protest, “as nig and nog, meaning miser.” Right: so racism was alive and well in the era of Sir Gawain. Who do you imagine was actually sent to lif' dat Grail?"
What if you have it backwards? What if the society is wrong or racist and eventually that comes to light over several generations and these terms that first appeared so innocent/ innocuous begin to be seen in their true light? I'm thinking of George Lakeoff's work with framing and metaphor as he says that language is never neutral because it is constructed/ shaped through whatever frames the culture is using to shape its reality.
There's no such thing as "true light". It's blinkered to insist that we have finally reached the end-all and be-all of human existence, given how many people thought we had found "truth" in the past and turned out not to have. Study history.
I think "do the people in question like or dislike the word?" is a better rule of thumb than "70% of the way through the respectability cascade". Like, I guess at some point you need to switch over purely for self-preservation reasons, but the thing that actually matters here is whether you are bothering the group you're referring to imo. If everyone is saying "Native American" then I don't think it matters that it's at 90% if the actual people indigenous to America prefer being called "American Indians." And if the people hate a term, maybe you should start pushing it down the cascade even if it's at 0%.
Some people arguing it's not a slur because it's apparently just the literal Albanian translation of "black people", others arguing that it is a slur because it's often used in a derogatory way, others arguing that it's not a slur because most references to black people in Albania are derogatory regardless of what terminology is used because Albania is pretty racist etc. Lots of black Americans arguing that the Albanians claiming the term isn't racist aren't really qualified to do so because they aren't black (which is a fair point), and lots of Albanians arguing that the black Americans claiming the term is racist aren't really qualified to do so because they don't speak Albanian (also a fair point). Just stuck in my mind as an example of a pointless, unproductive twitter argument.
Every term for black people in every non-African language is often used in a derogatory way. That's going to continue to be true until their behavioral profile changes dramatically.
True. It seems ridiculous that every so often some zany idealist gets the idea that you can improve people's lives by changing how other people treat them socially, which must be possible to be done by making this or that word taboo. Asians and Jews have been called lots of different names in this country, but surprise, surprise, those words had no effect on the cultural wealth of valuing family, education, civic stability, et cetera-- nor on the compounding or dividend-paying of their actual wealth. Those words are taboo many places nowadays, it's true, but their wealth-building happened beginning long, long before that.
I mean, I think that's because of racism more than black people being objectively worse than every other group on earth, particularly somewhere like Albania where less than 0.1% of the population is black
> USC was just annoying and everyone else was gullible and conformist!
No, USC was gullible and conformist. When challenged on the extreme stupidity of their policy, they defended themselves on the grounds that other schools were doing the same thing. You heard about USC because it has a higher profile.
> compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
My sense is that "the rich" actually is mostly used as a slur. I would suggest that the balance of slur use vs non-slur use makes no difference to whether something is seen as a slur; your focus on "Jap" developing more slur use than non-slur use is beside the point.
> hyperstition
Finally, I should point out that if you want to shift "superstition" into Greek, the word you're looking for is "hyperstasis". 😜
> Actions can be hyperstitious slurs; consider eating at Chick-Fil-A. If enough people who care about gay rights boycott them, then eating there actively signals that you’re defecting from the boycott and must not care about gay rights very much.
But suppose enough people who do not care about gay rights started to boycott them too. Wouldn't it stop the cascade? Your theory of signalling says that no correlation means no cascade. Isn't it?
I'm asking, because I'm in a doubt really. I think it will work in any case. I think it might, but some other ingredient is needed.
I know one of the families that was instrumental in changing the name of “Jap Road” near Beaumont, Texas. The power to change the name belonged to the local (county, basically) not state authorities. It was multi-year saga, ultimately involving several out-of-state advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League. After the local authorities agreed to change the name of the road, there was a vote on what the new name should be. The descendants of the original Japanese farmer for whom the road was named and other people of Japanese and Japanese-American origin wanted the road name changed to the farmer’s family name, although several other more “acceptable” references to the farmer (including “Japanese”(!)) were offered as options. The locals overwhelmingly voted for “Boondocks,” the name of a popular but by then defunct restaurant that had been on the road. Boomdocks, of course, had nothing to do with the farmer or Japan. The supporters of changing the name from “Jap Road” considered the “Boondocks” vote to be strong evidence that the arguments of the locals that “Jap” was meant to be a tribute and an honor were insincere. The locals argued that they were annoyed by the whole process and exercising their right not to be bossed around by outsiders who might never drive on that road again. In any case, “Boondocks” was deemed not offensive, so that’s now the name of the road.
The most hilariously dumb hyperstition is "people of colour": good, vs "coloured people": bad.
BTW Jap is still used as an abbreviation for non-personal (things not people) media headlines where space is at a premium. "Jap economy doing well" or "Jab sub deal sunk" would be uncontroversial, but "Customs arrest Jap smuggler" or "Jap tourists staying away" would not be used.
Interesting and well written. Another slightly irritating situation is when things that are slurs in one culture (perhaps for good reason) then infiltrate other countries where they have historically never been slurs and start to take over. The N-word (!) is treated as a magical incantation with more care than the name of God. Some journalists won't even say it to Samuel L Jackson when he demands they do.
Where all the argument starts to fall down a little is just how angry people are about having their words changed a bit. This may reflect my relatively enbubbled life, but these social changes where I keep up with them have not been particularly onerous for me, and when I get it wrong, I'm normally corrected gently. To my experience at least there's really no cause for the level of animosity, anger and backlash.
We probably should have been fine to keep 'master' in git, but I don't really have a problem with 'main' either. It was always somewhat arbitrary, things change, in this case, if anything, the accuracy of language is perhaps improved with no cost to awkwardness.
The left is quite right that words matter. By demanding that you change the language you grew up speaking, they are asserting their power over you, your culture, and your mode of self-expression. By complying, you are demonstrating submission. Most free adults quite rightly believe that submitting to one's enemies is humiliating and debasing, and that the animosity, anger, and backlash that comes with forced submission is more than justified.
Just try asking anyone on the woke left to stop using the word "socialism", because it's associated with the deaths of tens of millions of people. Or to stop using the word "white privilege", because it demeans the suffering of unprivileged whites. Will they listen to you? Of course not. They will use language specifically designed to offend conservatives, while demanding that conservatives stop using words that nobody in their right mind thought was offensive just a few years ago.
This is exactly the point I'm making. It's very difficult for me to imagine the kind of headspace where you see a request to change a word from 'master' to 'main' as humiliating, and debasing and the people who ask you to do it as enemies. Now I appreciate that we all have different experiences and that it might be possible to have such negative experiences with people that this seems like a reasonable stance, but from my bubble, this is such a weirdly negative way of looking at the world with a level of hostility and emotion that seems completely excessive.
Think about people you consider enemies. They ask you to stop using the word "negative", and replace it with "upsetting", for a reason that's completely spurious. They say that if you don't do it, you're a bad person. Do you do it? Let's say you do. The next day, they ask you to replace the word "bubble". Then the word "excessive". At what point do you say that enough is enough, that you're not a slave to the whims of people who hate you and won't dance to their tune? At what point do you stop being played like a fiddle?
As for my level of hostility or emotion, I'm talking about people who explicitly say they want fewer people of my race and gender in the workplace, and want to rid it completely of people with my political opinions. They're not my enemies because I want to make them enemies; they're my enemies because they see me as an enemy.
Also, what part of wokism is *not* hostile and emotional?
> I'm talking about people who explicitly say they want fewer people of my race and gender in the workplace
There are always extreme weirdos you can find, but surely this is an astonishingly tiny number of people? Too few to even be worth worrying about? I can imagine there being a lot of people (including myself) who would like to see the workplace more evenly representative when it comes to race and gender, but none of the people I am aware of would want to reduce the number of white males in the workforce, they'd want a larger workforce overall with people from more backgrounds in it.
> what part of wokism is *not* hostile and emotional?
My part I guess? When people start throwing around terms like 'wokism' or 'the right' or 'the left', it generally becomes very difficult to work out who exactly they're talking about, and I often wonder if they're talking about me.
"There are always extreme weirdos you can find, but surely this is an astonishingly tiny number of people? Too few to even be worth worrying about?"
They include Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, widely recognized as leaders in the movement, by adherents to that movement. That's just OTTOMH; if I looked longer, I'm sure I could turn up more. I think it'd be hard to categorize them and their followers as both an "astonishingly tiny number" and leading voices simultaneously.
As for your part of the movement not being hostile and emotional - maybe I can take you at your word, but you would probably benefit from understanding how hard that is for someone on the other side to believe. Imagine for example some outgroup of yours, and then someone claiming to belong to it and also claiming they're actually pretty easygoing and reasonable. The best face I could put on this is that you are indeed easygoing and reasonable as advertised, but also consequently pretty quiet - which means the facet of your group non-members are most likely to see are the loud ones - who tend to be hostile and emotional.
I see that as a fairly universal problem to political movements, regardless of party, class, gender, etc. Everyone outside the bus only hears the squeakiest wheels. But while understandable, it's a problem nevertheless.
> they'd want a larger workforce overall with people from more backgrounds in it
Social justice people often demand equal representation of all demographic groups in all kinds of (especially prestigious) jobs (at least implicitly by treating underrepresentation as proof that there is a problem). I don't think it's feasible to expand employment in all prestigious jobs until all groups are equally represented: there's just not enough need for that much more people in those jobs than there are today, or else more people would be employed in those jobs even today. And I don't think most people who support affirmative action think it should be accompanied by a major realignment of employment structure either. They support policies that reduce the number of white men in prestigious jobs, even if they wouldn't put it that way.
Another way to think of dionysus' point is that woke people are asking other people to { do something for them }. The fact that it's a tiny thing (use this word in place of that one) helps, but it's still something the non-work people have to do. It's like if your sibling deliberately pokes you gently while you're riding in the car. It doesn't have to be a hard poke; just a touch, just enough that you have to notice it. And they keep doing it. And those pokes are considered acceptable in only that direction.
I think you are demonstrating how much you live in a bubble, Scott. No one says "All Lives Matter", it's true, but that's because there's no longer any particular need to; BLM has largely faded from prominence. (Perhaps discovering how wealthy the founder was had something to do with it.) But you live in an area rife with members of the far Cultural Left. It might be socially unacceptable to say something like that in one of the areas of greatest hegemony of the Woke Cult, but that's like saying that in the 1600s the world was 99:1 against heresy based on what was said in public in 17th century Spain. In most places in the world today you would at best be looked at askance for saying "Black Lives Matter" or having one of those signs up. You'd be looked at askance for saying "All Lives Matter" too, but that's because it would be a truism without context.
Gotta agree with you RWP, but then we all live in bubbles and at least Scott isn't cowed by popular dissent, so that's a big plus in my book because we get to hash this stuff out thanks to his honesty.
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.
"Your people"? Like, Yankees? The war has been over 150 years man, let it go.
(also weaponizing empathy will get you none from me)
I was actually born in Oklahoma. My parents got the fuck away from segregation, white councils and bible thumpers when I was 1. This isn't ancient history.
The war never ended, it continues to this day in different forms. What you call "weaponizing empathy" is what I call human decency. Don't fly the flag of slavery, why is that hard to understand?
This attitude is part of the problem -- America needs to move on. If the English were still railing on about Napoleon and his frogs, Europe would probably still be getting wracked by devastating wars every two generations or so.
The Dukes of Hazard was nearly successful at rehabilitating the confederate flag, you're right.
But even in the 80s, as a pre-teen, I noticed the kids in my southern school who were Really Into The Stars and Bars (that's what these folks called it, although I have since learned the actual flag they liked was much closer to the Battle Flag, but no one says kids have to know what they're talking about) had a near 1:1 correspondence with being an acquaintance who would call my black friends niggers.
And I assure you that in the 80s those kids knew what I thought of having my friends referenced in such a way behind their backs.
So I do not subscribe, in my personal lived experience, to the idea that southerners who were big into the flag didn't know they were stumping for something that was hostile to black people.
This does not contradict the point being made -- your friends were part of the ~50% using the flag as a slur (taking the framework from the article), prior to the hyperstitious cascade rendering it useless for anything *other* than a slur.
I don't read the article as suggesting that these words/symbols are universally positive prior to the cascade; quite the opposite.
Scott’s framing is about the percent of people realizing that a term represents a slur.
That a huge fraction of people *actively used it* as a slur, and were well known to do so, makes it extremely different from something like Jap which had no particularly understood valence and then cascaded to have a valence that wasn’t in evidence before hand.
The confederate flag was understood to be actively associated with a slur from the very beginning, for anyone who thinks chattel slavery is evil.
Suggest you read the article again:
"Maybe “Japanese person” was used 60-40 positive vs. negative, and “Jap” was used 40-60."
Also suggest that you read the link I provided earlier about how the flag in question was ubiquitous at Veteran's Day events (and not many other places) from ~1880-1955. Then maybe go watch some Dukes of Hazzard; it's fun.
I was a Georgia-born child of the 70s. I have watched a lot of Dukes of Hazzard.
I don't think we're going to come to agreement on the confederate flag. It is nothing like Japs vs. Japanese, is the position I (and several other folks) have been arguing in this thread.
The confederate flag was from its beginning a symbol of people who rebelled against the US government for the explicit purpose of preserving the institution of chattel slavery. That the losers of that rebellion were granted the right to celebrate their fraternity in that rebellion in the decades soon after in no way reduces the fact that that flag was, from its very beginning, an explicit symbol of support for chattel slavery.
A reasonable person could claim they had no idea Jap was a slur. The confederate flag has had many attempts to reconstitute it as something that is not a symbol of support for chattel slavery, but its origin is deeply relevant for whether it's a symbol subject to arbitrary assignment as "bad".
You can *maybe* make the argument that the confederate flag is like "fag", which [I'm told my etymology is an urban legend, sorry!] started its life as a slur for gay men, and has been adopted by the community to mean something semi-positive, except I have never met a black person who has expressed vocal support that they would like to rehabilitate the confederate flag.
I'm actually going to focus on your "faggot" etymology -- have you considered that there may be *other* legends which you've been led to believe were true, by people with an interest in that being so -- but that are in fact ahistorical and self-serving?
We don't need to agree, just think about it. I'm seeing *so much* (sincere) reflexive response on this issue in the comment section -- without passing judgement on the truth of the matter, it seems highly disproportionate to the importance of the issue. I think it is not coming from nowhere.
This is a dark art, the offensive use of rhetoric, and is a tactic for various psyops campaigns by state and non-state actors, or occasionally a simple social contagion with no clear actor behind it.
The fact that it can and often is done intentionally vs how in a certain percentage of the time the change in word/lifestyle/fact/etc. usage becomes associated with tribal mind killing identity politics is not great and means we can't ever do away with this.
This sort of mostly pack of wolves hiding in sheep's clothing is a disconcerting and near impossible to stop factor.
I also think we are seeing a hyper acceleration of this due to the collapse in media ownership diversity. When you have 500+ newspapers all run locally or in various cities or states within even one country it is hard to actually get them to agree and operate the same way. But with the now 3-6 companies who control everything you read, see, hear, and possibly think....this trend of command and control to spread these dark arts is more powerful.
The same could be said for social media where in the past it might take a lot longer and a certain attempt would fail to reach critical mass. But now things can spread quickly and you can seed such ideas into a very wide range of communities. If only 1 in 1,000 members of a given ethnic group or sub-population of whatever variety is plugged into FB/Twitter/Insa/Tiktok and they 'receive the message'.
If this happen sand then those individuals push it in their social circles then some weird idea from one guy in Chicago in some middling importance organisation can spread and take over in ways that were not possible in the past. Suddenly people in New York and London and Denver have all heard about it within a few months of each other. And as we saw with the Twitterfiles and know pretty much 100% this was happening in all the big social media companies, this was directed activity to promote specific agendas.
I think it's also just that there is a greater appetite for signalling partisan affiliation because those fault lines now line up with many other kinds of group identification people care about.
I suspect that if you had Twitter in 1990 you'd have seen people calling out attempts like USC's as exploitative (using the struggles of blacks to signal their own virtue). In the current climate people really want to signal they're part of the team rather than signaling that they're a reasonable moderate.
Scott, what do you think of Steven Pinker's euphemism treadmill
( http://archive.today/s9l7w ), especially as it relates to non-political language.
"Using the latest term for a minority often shows not sensitivity but subscribing to the right magazines or going to the right cocktail parties." Indeed.
I wonder how this applies to sports team names? It's a strange process how the sense of a word changes. I don't think the owners of sports teams name their teams with a pejorative intent. The movement to change the Washington Redskins name struck me as odd. I grew up with that name and for me, the words "Washington Redskins" was very cool. I only sort of vaguely connected it to Native Americans and the word "Redskins" in the context of football didn't feel pejorative at all. If anything, the words "Washington Redskins" vaguely boosted the status of Native Americans in my mind. Then after years of lobbying to change the name, the change suddenly happened. Now it feels appalling that a football team would name itself "Redskins." So somehow, there has been a complete switch in my mind around the word. So much so, I almost feel that I should asterisk the word in this comment. Very strange.
Huh. I've never heard the term "hyperstition" before. It's cool to learn a new word like that.
Is there a word for a disingenuous term whose meaning is not what it actually says, but rather an accusation that "this is what my opponents disagree with"? Because that's what "Black Lives Matter" is. It's not about placing value on the life of black people, and it never was; it's a slur itself, a rhetorical club to beat ideological opponents over the head with by insinuating that they don't care about the lives of black people.
Sadly, this is an exceptionally common phenomenon in political speech. Some of the most obvious examples are things like PETA ("if you don't like our animal-rights extremism, you believe in treating animals unethically,") Patriot Act ("anyone who objects to this wild overreach of the surveillance state is unpatriotic,") Libertarian ("if you oppose our extremist economic system that we call 'capitalism' despite it bearing only a passing resemblance to the work of Adam Smith, you're anti-liberty") and so on. (And just look at how popular it's become in recent years for Democratic politicians conflate opposition to their policies with opposition to democracy itself! Even if the name of the Democratic Party wasn't originally named with this defamatory nonsense in mind, it's become that over time.)
Is there a formal name for this kind of slur?
Isn’t that basically Newspeak from 1984?
Not sure precisely what you mean here, but the most relevant bits that immediately come to mind tend to be about inherent contradictions in Newspeak and Ingsoc. (The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. To be "blackwhite" is to stubbornly refuse to admit the truth, or to admirably be willing to set the truth aside in service of a noble cause. And so on.)
That's not what I'm referring to. I'm not claiming that PETA themselves don't believe in treating animals ethically, for example, but rather that they chose their name as a cynical slur against those who disagree with them to imply that *their opponents* don't believe in treating animals ethically.
And some EAs agree that this name is unfortunate, and have proposed less confrontational terms, like "quantifiable altruism".
Oh, definitely. The idea isn't confined only to large-scale societal politics; it pops up in political social interactions all over the place. For example, famed computer scientist Donald Knuth's attempt to introduce a new programming paradigm called "Literate Programming" that never ended up getting any real traction. In the paper introducing his ideas, the first section closes with this gem:
> I must confess that there may also be a bit of malice in my choice of a title. During the 1970s I was coerced like everybody else into adopting the ideas of structured programming, because I couldn’t bear to be found guilty of writing *unstructured* programs. Now I have a chance to get even. By coining the phrase “literate programming,” I am imposing a moral commitment on everyone who hears the term; surely nobody wants to admit writing an *illiterate* program.
( http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf in case anyone cares about the context.)
I don’t know if I agree with you on all of those, but I think what you’re describing is called the “motte-and-bailey doctrine” around these parts: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-brick-in-the-motte/
That's kind of similar, particularly in the last few paragraphs of the article you linked, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. I'm specifically referring to the process of appropriating the name of something generally regarded as good or uncontroversial in order to weaponize that name against opponents and critics.
I disagree. Most people I know who support it (and many of the original supporters) mean: black lives are being treated as if they don't matter and that's bad.
While I have no doubt that there are supporters who sincerely believe that, that doesn't make it true any more than sincerely believing that the Earth is flat or that vaccines cause autism makes it true.
The essence of a tool, the "telos" as Jonathan Haidt likes to call it, is what it's used for. And the use of the term "Black Lives Matter" has always been to cow opponents into silence, or to aggressively silence those who refuse to be cowed, with the claim that those who don't support the cause are racist.
Sorta but you have to distinguish kinds of intention/use. The purpose motivating the adoption of the term 'african-american' or retarded isn't the same as the meaning of those terms (I can say African-American and simply mean to refer to the group)
I agree there are connotations that may be there on top of the meaning but that's distinct from the meaning itself.
Oh, also, SMBC on this subject: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/adverse
Actually it's good to rotate the language that signals deference to groups that are discriminated against. That way we can make people who favor continued discrimination stand out, since they are unable or unwilling to adopt the new language. This will pressure them to change their view to fit in.
That's if you believe that racial and gender discrimination are a continuing real thing. If you think they're fake problems obviously you'll think the solutions are fake too.
So this post reads to me like a long way of saying that racial discrimination is no longer a real or important issue.
I suppose this is the Anti-Racist view, where you have to constantly be reaffirming your moral stance. Do you make exceptions for the people who don't have the luxury time to keep up, or just lean into the idea that those in poverty are necessarily racist?
Make exceptions, of course.
How do you tell the difference?
And how do you ensure that your ideological allies who are also applying anti-racist pressures against people using the old language will also make appropriate and good-faith exceptions?
It's easy to tell the difference by how people react when you tell them language has change. Some will be like "Oh my bad" and will make an effort to get it right next time. Some will be like "Screw you, 'anti-racist' tool."
It's hard to ensure that ideological allies stay on-message. This is true for all ideologies, allies, and messages.
Then, if ideological allies don't always stay on-message or act in good faith, how do neutral parties being told to change their language know whether they're being informed by a genuine anti-racist who's trying to help people, versus a bad-faith actor trying to boss people around for selfish and corrupt reasons? Or someone trying to sneak language that implies deference to a genuinely bad group of people into all of the discriminated groups?
If all language changes imposed by anyone purporting to be an anti-racist must be obeyed without pushback, then anyone can immediately exploit this by putting on the anti-racist hat and advancing their unrelated agenda in the name of anti-racism. I would imagine you would have to enable some sort of common sense rejection of blatant opportunists trying to exploit the system, but if so, where do you draw the line and how do you protect neutral third parties who push back against those people (or yourself if they have reason to suspect you of being one) instead of meekly saying "oh my bad"? And if not, how do you prevent anti-racism from being consumed by opportunists exploiting the lack of common sense?
Two problems with this argument (whether or not you meant it).
First, trends/changes reach different people at different times. I might be the most devoted anti-racist in the world but if I don't use social media and live on a farm in Montana I'm not going to get the message until quite some time later. That means you may actually be making it harder to identify who favors continued discrimination. So, at best, there is some optimal rate of rotation but those pushing change on these words have no idea if we are above or below it.
Second, on this view the number of true anti-racists are probably a minority so (absent a coup) will fail unless they can persuade others to join them. The more others end up having unpleasant experiences because they weren't yet aware of the new language the harder that is.
1. If we agree there is an optimal rate of rotation, I'm happy to concede I don't know if we're above it or below it. Would welcome your thoughts on the subject.
2.a. I don't divide the world into "true anti-racists" and "others". Rather, everyone exists on a spectrum of how much you think racial bias continues to matter.
2.b. Agree that we should assume the best of people and extend charity to people who are still using old language because they haven't heard about the new language or just out of habit. Nothing wrong with that, migrations can be tough.
I see what you are saying now more clearly, but I think there is a fundamental tension between actually producing this kind of *unnatural* linguistic change and not shaming/embarrassing/criticizing those who haven't yet changed.
Sure, when you have a situation like the name "redskins" for the Washington football team that everyone can see really does offend a large number of native americans you might get decent evidence from usage about how much someone cares about that issue. However, that doesn't work when you consider examples like the USC shift away from using the word "fields". The only way you can really convince people not to shrug and go "well I don't think that's really upsetting anyone" is to be judgemental and attach social opprobrium to their failure to use it.
To bring us back to point 1, I think that's why the best rate is the natural rate. People who try to *push* hyperstitions should be pushed back on (e.g. what's your evidence this is actually bothering people and the benefits of change outweigh the harm).
As we've seen with words for mental impairment over the years there will be plenty of cases where a word does organically come to be seen as offensive and those cases have the huge benefit of gauging how much someone cares about not hurting people in the relevant group rather than gauging how much they care about not being *called* insufficently anti-racist/whatever.
We may not be that far apart in the end. For calibration, I think "fields" isn't necessary but I'm a fan of the shift to "blocklisting" and getting rid of "master".
I'm not sure what block listing is referencing. Regarding "master" I'm unsure but after I got some evidence that some black people genuinely disliked (even if not seeing it as most important issue) calling things master/slave systems I stopped using it. Assuming that the information I got is correct and that wasn't just an outlier I agree.
Maybe it wasn't initially, I dunno if it would have bothered blacks in us w/o it being pushed, but once it really is bothering ppl changing it is worth it.
Ohh did u mean blacklisting? If so i agree there too.
Third, some people just don't like performative social conformity. Maybe that's anti-social in a sense, but it seems like a fucking drag.
I'd say human nature is to be pro-social so the non-conformers are the ones being performative.
Well that's just a non sequitur, lots of pro-social things are performative. See pretty much all of social signaling.
Lmao, "it's human nature to be a sheep, stop being such an attention whore with your 'Independent Thought' mister".
Why do people who favor “continued discrimination” need new slurs when they have perfectly usable old ones? The rotation has less to do with catching bigots and more with signaling virtue (and the privilege of being in the right social circles) among the already long converted anti-discriminators.
Discrimination-favorers don't "need new slurs". It's the rest of us who need to update slur_requirements.txt, to check who's starred the Github repo.
"Racial discrimination *against specific groups* is no longer a significant factor" might be more accurate.
Does anyone in the US significantly discriminate against Italians these days?
Sure.
Straussian reading. Done well.
What enforced language actually signals deference to, are privileged people in positions of power, not groups that are discriminated against. The powerful ones might sympathize with some of the discriminated, as long as they remain useful and satisfied with cheap perfunctory gestures, but the fact that they've managed to equate support for their agenda to support for the downtrodden in the public view is perhaps the most successful propaganda coup in recent years.
Changing the language doesn't directly do anything to help discriminated-against groups, but the agenda you refer to -- things like affirmative action, reparations payments, high levels of social safety net -- does help those groups.
Well, given that the agenda pushers aggressively disregard all evidence against effectiveness of their policies and assumptions underlying their ideology, I'm skeptical. Of course, it's not like the other side is any better. Everything is terrible and will remain terrible in the foreseeable future. But on the bright side, it's not Putinism-level terrible yet.
Elaborate packaging for conformity for the sake of conformity.
> That way we can make people who favor continued discrimination stand out, since they are unable or unwilling to adopt the new language.
I really don't think this is actually a good way to tell whether someone favors continued discrimination.
This might be true if "we" existed, if there were a common hierarchy or network of trust, but that isn't the case.
There will be racists that resist the rotations, sure, but many more people will resist because they are nonconformists, because the changes come from an outgroup, or because they hear about the new terms from low-status nobodies.
Mask off moment.
I believe there is also an aspect of power projection when a group asserts that a previously-innocuous term is now offensive. Simply by asserting the offense the group forces other persons to change their behavior and to some degree increases the groups power and prestige. Asserting that “Negro” was offensive increased the profile of the pro-Black movement.
I think this somewhat explains the continuing expansion of the LGBTQ… term. It is a search for societal power.
I like this term but all I can think of is The Office's Michael Scott. "I'm not superstitious...but I am a little stitious."
"But it’s a stupidity we have to fight against, really hard, because if it ever gets a foothold then everyone who doesn’t hate the poor will eventually say “people of poverty”, it will be a stable equilibrium, and we’ll be stuck in it for all time."
You explained very well why transition phase is a bad experience for everyone and it makes sense. But why new stable equilibrium is bad? Isn't it just language evolving and once it evolves and everyone learns new way of the language it is fine again for everyone?
It's not and I don't think he was suggesting it's worse. What I think he's calling bad is moving new words into this category since each time comes with a new transition
Now maybe it's worth it for words that naturally come to be hurtful (eg retarded was introduced to be less hurtful) but taking words that aren't upsetting anyone and forcing us to make the transition is bad.
makes sense, thanks!
This is just a reflection on the subject, with examples. I have no answer. I'd just say that as with many things, something's lost and something's gained when a term is, umm, elevated (?) to hyperstition.
The husband of a cousin of mine is Chinese. He insists "Chinaman" is a slur. I confess I've never ever heard it used as a slur, which is not to say that it is not sometimes used that way.
I think it's a pity that so many old songs that use terms like "darkie" in a positive way can no longer be sung with the original lyrics. I find the original lyrics beautiful and sweet. I can no longer sing these songs at all. The original lyrics are verbotten and the substitutes ("people" or "old folks") are so anodyne as to remove all feeling and reference to context. Examples:
Louis Armstrong, Sleepytime Down South (his themesong): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8C8v-ulrXE
Jimmie Rodgers, Mississippi Delta Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0-zOsciwUc
Fiddlin' John Carson, Log Cabin in the Lane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haj4mqN_uhA
Perhaps Stan Freberg said it best, presciently, in 1957. Elderly Man River: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi2n4xX9
On the other hand, songs that used such terms in a derogatory even in the idiom of their day are repulsive to me now even though they were considered patriotic back when they were popular. Carson Robison, We're Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jta97z0Zhg
I'm Jewish, and I notice people replace "Jew" in sentences with "Jewish person." They think "Jew" is derogatory. This strikes me as bizarre. I accept that the term is derogatory or not depending on how it is said, and I would guess the same is true of most of the others. In fact, when someone says "Jewish person", my first thought is that he's an antisemite who is covering up with an attempt to be polite.
I find it amusing and telling when "victims" of hyperstition start using the verbotten terms proudly or humorously about themselves: https://sluttygirlproblems.com/column/my-life-as-a-sex-positive-slut/ Or when black people use the N-word when talking to each other.
Chinaman is probably an obscure slur adjacent word. Consider this rhyme from my mother's childhood (I think sung while jumping rope).
Ching-a-chong a Chinaman sitten on a fence,
trying to make a dollar out of 99 cents.
One, two, three...
Verboten has one "t", as the o is long and it's the Partizip II of verbieten (forbid) - the "ie" a looong iiii , ofc (as in "bean"). Ein Doppel-t ist verboten. Now, I felt tempted to sign as "German grammar-**** writing. But no way. Danke for those fine links - the one to very excellent 1957 (it wast "the tiny tots" then) Stan Fredberg seems dead, but this one does https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLlTlYfqQV4 "Elderly Man River- Stan Freberg and Daws Butler" (but maybe it is just different countries).
Thank you for the correction!
Stan died in 2015. To me, his crowning achievements were his "History of the United States" and this one, about two Las Vegas night clubs competing for putting on the biggest show. He calls them the El Sodom and the Rancho Gemorah. All his work was done with very high production values, using the best studio musicians and voice actors in Hollywood.
https://youtu.be/2XlHdVdsjOA
I don't think "Jew" is all the way slur-ified, but it's certainly somewhere along that path. It's sufficiently tied up in racist implications that it used to be that when you Googled it, Google would put up a disclaimer / apology on the search results page suggesting that you search for "Jewish" instead if you didn't want to get anti-Semitic results: https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2004/04/24/google-in-controversy-over-top-ranking-for-anti-jewish-site/
They've since cleaned up the search algorithm. I also do see a lot of Jews fighting back to "save" the word.
I think what's broken in the current situation is that no one on the left critisizes USC (and others doing the same) for trying to start the cascade. I mean they are throwing the people they claim to be interested in protecting under the bus to achieve their own selfish desire to signal how virtuous they are. If people spoke up and called them out on this such cascades wouldn't be likely to start until there really were a substantial group who felt hurt by the term.
I mean, the smart people at USC surely have the capacity not only to appreciate the fact that it's possible to turn a word into a slur but also that doing so makes life worse for the people they claim to be trying to protect. No matter how hard you try to get everyone onboard -- out of ignorance, contrarianess or simple desire to avoid signalling extremely an progressive identity -- some people with no desire to hurt the feelings of slave descendants will be slow to make the change.
Yet despite all this they choose to do it anyway. That looks alot like the kind of behavior that good anti-racists should be horrified by.
Can you define the word 'racist' as you've used it here?
That's why I'm pro slurs.
All taboos are virtue signals, they imply you need the approval of something or someone. If that something or someone actually holds material power over you, okay, I'm not going to begrudge you if you play nice. I certainly do the same, but there is simply no reason to still respect those ridicoulous rules when you can disrespect them.
Fuck respectability, to be "respectable" is to kneel to those who want to control you like a puppet. It doesn't matter if it's 50-50 or 30-70 or 0.00000001-99.9999999, if you don't want to say a word or to stop saying a word then saying it or refraining from saying solely to please others is contemptible and servile.
The internet is made so that you're able to say nigger freely, and I love it.
How does being pro-slur help? The harm is a result of the change not the mere existence of a word which conveys the fact that you believe/identify with certain views on race deemed unacceptable. It's not like we are running out of ways to put letters together and I think we all benefit from having some words that quickly and easily convey the fact that someone does in fact identify with the faction in modern society that is deemed racist. It lets them recognize each other and others avoid them.
Once something is clearly a slur trying to rescue it from that status imposes the same costs that are inflicted by it becoming a slut: misunderstandings and unnecessary offense.
Well, nobody took my opinion on that change, so I don't recognize it. It's really as simple as that, it's my tongue, my keyboard, my nerve centers; my rules. when you need to make them do something you ask me, and you ask nicely. When you don't ask, you don't get.
When you declare loudly that you're going to persecute me and exclude me if I so much as sing along with a song that mentions the naughty words, you get so much worse than nothing, you get my eternal burning desire to say and do all the things that enrage and disrespect you. Because there is nothing more enraging and disrespectful to me than forcing me to say and do things without my free will.
Somebody can be harmed by those words ? so what, everybody can and is and will be harmed by words all the time. Do you think "Toxic Masculinity" or "Fragile Male Egos" never harmed men and boys ? Are you about to declare them slurs and go after those who use them ? Or is this only allowed with a few select groups ? What are the criteria for this selection and why should I respect it ?
The easily offended deserve to offended, especially considering they aren't offended by REAL problems in society, such as the staggering scale of black on white violence (and I'm using 'violence' here in the quaint, old-fashioned sense of an actual act of physical aggression).
Suffering is suffering. No one deserves any of it. Sometimes it's necessary to impose it on people for deterrence etc.. but if I could reduce the amount Hitler suffered w/o hurting others I would.
And yes, they are flawed like pretty much all people and have inconsistent views. Shocker. If that was enough to warrant not considering someone's feelings we'd have to be jerks to everyone.
2020’s protests threw a lot of kindling on this fire in certain circles.
Ever since 2020, in the tech industry, it’s no longer considered okay to use terms like “blacklist/whitelist” or “master/slave” in your tools. Everyone even moderately respectful retreated to things like “blocklist/allowlist” or “leader/follower”. A company I know of even had a whole “biased terminology working group” spun up in 2020 aimed at deciding which terms were now considered offensive, and working to purge them from their tools and language.
My impression of it is that this was generally pushed by people who saw a lot of people genuinely hurting at the time and who were trying to do *something* to help with “the cause”. Unfortunately they reached for the things that were more in their immediate power to change, which usually weren’t the kind of things that would actually make a dent in the bigger problems.
Not all of these efforts were successful. Some places (e.g. GitHub) took issue with “master” in the absence of “slave”, replacing it with things like “main”, but that was less universally accepted and a lot of companies (including the one with the aforementioned working group) still have a “master branch” in their repositories.
The most memorable of these failed efforts was one guy who proposed to purge the word “sanitizer”, as used in tools like ”clang sanitizer”. His rationale? “Sanitizer” was from the same root as “sanity”, and “sanity” (which was also used on its own in tools like “sanity checker”) is offensive towards the mentally ill, because it implies that not having a mental illness is a more-desirable state. I am *very* glad that guy failed.
Server/Client was the first example.
Of what? I'm not aware of it either replacing or being replaced by other terminology.
Client/Setver was adopted at the start to avoid saying Master/Slave.
It was happening well before 2020. Master/slave was on its way out years before that -- maybe 2010, 2015? I think that's the only one that I felt was clear-cut and really did deserve a new name. Blacklist/whitelist was also well before 2020, although without as much energy, and also without as much justification. (I'm actually fine with denylist/allowlist because honestly they're just less jargon-y.)
The master-branch thing is pretty eye-rolling from where I stand, in light of it never having been in relation to "slave", but I agree with you that it comes from a well-meaning place.
There was never a good reason to replace master/slave. Idk why that terminology was chosen, and I always found it a bit weird, but that's not a reason to replace existing terminology.
I disagree. The fact that you found the terminology weird and that you don't know why it was chosen is a good indicator that it was poorly chosen. That's a good reason to change it all by itself, unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous.
Now, when I first encountered the terminology, I didn't think much of it -- because I was a kid. I knew what slaves were, and knew that it was bad, but didn't have much concept of it overall. So I filed the two terms into different compartments of my brain and never really thought about it again. But as an adult, when someone prompted me to look at it with fresh eyes... yeah, that's a really gross term! Slavery is *deeply terrible*, why would you ever name something after it? This was before there was significant social pressure around it—it just seemed obvious to me once it was pointed out.
Now there are better, more accurate terms used that make it easier for people to learn the subject matter. Primary/secondary, leader/follower, active/replica, etc. The "slave" database was never a slave controlled by the "master" DB, it was a replica, so call it that! And as a bonus it's not named after one of the worst things you can do to a fellow human.
But like I said, I feel like this is one of the few exceptions. The others have had more pushback because they don't have that one-two punch of confusingly-named *and* an offensive connotation or history. And some of them don't make sense at all, being based only on an incorrect folk etymology.
> The fact that you found the terminology weird and that you don't know why it was chosen is a good indicator that it was poorly chosen. That's a good reason to change it all by itself, unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous.
It at most indicates that it was a worse than the alternative choices by a very tiny amount. That's not a good reason to change it unless the process of doing so is particularly onerous; it's a good reason to change it if the process is not even very slightly onerous. That definitely isn't the case.
> Now there are better, more accurate terms used that make it easier for people to learn the subject matter. Primary/secondary, leader/follower, active/replica, etc.
"Which terminology did this particular project chose, again?"
---
Another reason to resist this one is that it gets used as a precedent for the other ones.
I worked on a project that used "master/servant" terminology, which I joked about as sounding rather Victorian, but fortunately I have a non-woke workplace and nothing happened beyond describing the system in faux-Received Pronunciation.
In contrast, master/servant doesn't actually bother me. I mean yeah, it sounds archaic and weird, but that's about it.
Interesting example is the use of the term "grandfathered" to mean something allowed because it was done prior to a prohibition being enacted.
I think it's 90% plus accepted even though its origin is Jim Crow era voting laws that disenfranchised blacks. Post Reconstruction, in many Southern states you could only vote if your grandfather voted.
I don't think many people know the origin plus it's useful shorthand to express a concept.
What's your cite for it being post us CW in origin?
Here's one of many
https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/real-estate-condemnation-trust/practice/2021/grandfather-clause-racist-origins/
Thank you.
It's not "you could only vote if your grandfather voted", but "you were exempted from other requirements, e.g. literacy tests or poll taxes, if your grandfather voted". This allowed the other requirements to be made extremely onerous without disenfranchising poor whites.
Here's a thought. "Labels" have consequences. Language has consequences. To "real" people, IRL.
Labels have consequences.
Because I was a “retard”, my father had me sterilized.
https://medium.com/artfullyautistic/my-autistic-life-03-9e0c057ca76b
By 1913, many states had or were on their way to having eugenic sterilization laws. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
https://collections.countway.harvard.edu/onview/files/original/3f02811d6a83b0f896c4eaa6794ecffc.jpg
I am autistic. I was born in 1957 and my childhood was in the 60's. When I was four, my Father's extended family decided I was retarded. That was the "common" term at the time. The "label" that people just casually assigned to the neurodivergent.
WORDS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, LABELS HAVE CONSEQUENCES
I became a pariah. The Dummy, the simple one, the retard that it was mean to play tricks on and who the adults protected. The one who was never voluntarily included in anything the other kidsbever did unless an adult was watching.
The Family decided that day that I was “retarded” or “defective”. That was the label they gave me. My father believed them and he was ashamed.
A short history lesson on “forced sterilization” in America.
Indiana passed the world’s first sterilization law in 1907.
Would it surprise you that the idea of forced sterilization goes back to the 19th century. That sterilization’s first advocates were physicians who saw it as both a punishment and a treatment for criminal behavior.
Gideon Lincecum in an 1849 bill in the Texas legislature, called for the castration of criminals. Castration was represented as therapeutic and as punitive. Furthermore, some saw it as a solution to perceived problems of heredity and society, especially those problems with sexual or racial dimensions.
Hysterectomies were also advocated during this period for women. As a “cure” for those supposedly afflicted with mental disorders understood as originating in their reproductive systems. As with men, this sexual surgery was understood as a treatment for criminal behavior, homosexuality, and excessive masturbation.
While castration would lose its popularity with the advent of the vasectomy in 1897, it set the stage for later eugenic sterilization campaigns.
Inspired by the social Darwinism propounded by Francis Galton, American eugenicists in the late 19th century argued that forced sterilization was in society’s best interest. It became the prevailing paradigm that social ills resulted from characteristics transmitted genetically among “unfit” populations.
Everyone “knew” that “defective” people reproduced at higher rates. That criminals and the developmentally disabled tended to have children with similar disorders, and that reproduction among these populations weakened the gene pool.
In 1907, reflecting the eugenicists’ influence, states began enacting laws allowing involuntary sterilization of the developmentally disabled.
Indiana was the first. Thirty-one states followed suit. State-sanctioned sterilizations reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s.
State Courts initially declared early sterilization statutes unconstitutional when they were challenged.
But POPULAR SUPPORT for such legislation grew after World War I. MAINSTREAM Politicians CAMPAIGNED ON getting such laws passed. You had to be "pro sterilization of retards" if you wanted to get elected in many Midwestern states.
At first, sterilization programs targeted white men. By the 1920's this expanded to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like “feeblemindedness” and “mental defective.”
The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany.
The Third Reich’s 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. Under this law, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults, mostly Jews and other “undesirables,” labeled “defective.”
In 1927 the issue made its way to the Supreme Court.
A 1927 Supreme Court ruling upheld these laws. In Buck v Bell, a case of an institutionalized woman who had given birth to an illegitimate child, the court ruled that forced sterilization was constitutional under certain circumstances. Justice Holmes’ opinion read:
It is better…if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or…let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those…manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
Buck v Bell unleashed a wave of forced sterilizations.
Buck v Bell has never been overturned. It is "the law of the land".
Whereas physicians had performed 10,877 sterilizations of institutionalized persons through 1928, they performed 27,210 between 1929 and 1941. Public authorities institutionalized some women solely for sterilization and then released them.
Between 1907 and 1963, more than 60,000 Americans, mostly women, were sterilized without their consent in institutional settings.
Forced sterilization fell out of favor after 1940 as Nazi atrocities led to a rejection of eugenic tenets. In the 1960s, some states repealed sterilization laws completely. That didn’t mean it stopped.
Women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism.
End part One
Part Two.
It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid.
The backlash involved the reassertion of white social control. Specifically through the control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization.
In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States — 7,600 people from 1929 to 1973 — women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were disproportionately sterilized.
Analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.
In the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding non-consensual sterilizations. More than 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected.
During the 1970s, the forced sterilization of Black women was so common in the American South that it was sometimes referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy.”
Forced sterilizations Never Stopped. We still do this.
In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on approximately 1,400 women in California prisons. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the operations were cost-saving measures.
During the "Trump Years". Brown women, the "illegal sub-human" kind that we must "build a wall" to protect ourselves from, were sterilized in ICE Detention Centers. So that they, "wouldn't keep getting pregnant and sneaking across the border until they drop an anchor baby".
ICE is accused of sterilizing detainees. That echoes the U.S.’s long history of forced sterilization.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/25/ice-is-accused-sterilizing-detainees-that-echoes-uss-long-history-forced-sterilization/
More immigrant women say they were abused by ICE gynecologist. More than 40 women submitted testimony claiming abuse, alleging they underwent invasive and unnecessary procedures
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/22/ice-gynecologist-hysterectomies-georgia
Forced Sterilization Accusations at ICE Facility Fit with Trump’s Poor Treatment of Immigrants.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/forced-sterilization-accusations-ice-facility-fit-trumps-poor-treatment
However, forced sterilization of the “developmentally disabled” became more difficult in the LATE 70's.
A scandal involving the sterilization of a developmentally disabled girl without her consent in a federally funded clinic brought attention to the issue. It resulted in 1978 guidelines that forbade the use of federal funds for sterilizing anyone younger than 21 years, incompetent, or institutionalized.
BUCK v BELL IS STILL THE LAW OF THE LAND THOUGH.
Most states allow forced sterilization today. Laws allowing forced sterilization exist in 31 states plus Washington, D.C.
https://nwlc.org/resource/forced-sterilization-of-disabled-people-in-the-united-states/
Live in the wrong state and you can be forcibly sterilized for being mentally incompetent.
While many think of forced sterilization as a relic of the past, some of the laws are quite recent: The two most recent state laws regarding forced sterilization were passed in 2019.
My father’s family labeled me as “retarded”, he was afraid they were right.
It changed the way he saw me. It changed the way he felt towards me. It made him ashamed and it made him angry.
My father saw me as “defective”.
There are no returns on a “defective child”. You are stuck with them. They will be a drain on you until they die. That’s what he was hearing from his aunts and uncles. That’s the message society had primed him with.
So, one day when I was seven, he took me to a doctor “friend” of his and had me sterilized. It didn't take long. I wasn’t even really aware of what was going on. He told me to be a “brave boy” and seemed pleased by my stoicism.
I would have crawled through broken glass to please him. To earn his praise. To feel his love bestowed on me. The love he mostly reserved for my “perfect” younger brother.
The doctor didn't have a problem doing the procedure. He told my father that he was “doing the right thing”. That it would keep me from getting some little girl in trouble. That it would make sure he didn’t have to worry about paying for any “little bastards”.
That’s the power a label has. Get the wrong one put on you, and people stop thinking of you as human. Get the wrong one put on you, and people get the power to decide for you “what’s best”.
Get the wrong one put on you and they can sterilize you when you are Autistic, or Black, or Brown, or a Homo.
Words and Labels are important. They have consequences in real peoples lives.
Unless you don't think "retards" are people.
Right. We used to lobotomize people who were schizophrenic. We still have schizophrenic people, and we still use the term “schizophrenia”, but we don’t treat it with lobotomy anymore.
We wouldn’t diagnose “autism” as “retarded” anymore, but we also don’t sterilize people anymore for being developmentally disabled with low IQ, and I doubt we would even if “mentally retarded” was still the preferred clinical term.
You would be wrong. It's legal in 31 states. New laws making it easier in several Conservative states were passed in 2019. And parents still do this to "retarded' kids.
They just cannot use Federal funds for it.
>During the "Trump Years". Brown women, the "illegal sub-human" kind that we must "build a wall" to protect ourselves from, were sterilized in ICE Detention Centers. So that they, "wouldn't keep getting pregnant and sneaking across the border until they drop an anchor baby".
Then perhaps they should stop sneaking over the border to have anchor babies?
I think the problem can be isolated to the perlocutionary effect of the diagnosis.
My personal heuristic is to judge utterances by their intent.
>Words and Labels are important. They have consequences in real peoples lives.
People's conditions have consequences on people's lives. Weither you call one a "moron", a "retard" or a "special need person", the condition remains the same. And if a parent sterilize his child because of this condition, he will do it regardless of the label (especially considering "retard" is already some way onto the euphemism treadmill that alters labe to make them less offensive).
"A rose, by any name, would smell just as well", and all that.
My conservative older sister used to refer to an attractive boy as a 'straight arrow', in our high school years. But the OED gets all bipolar over the term: "a person who is very honest or who never does anything exciting or different." Now, our sexually-disoriented betters try to use 'straight' as an insult. Apparently they like the second half of OED's definition. When I hear the term' straight' used in a derogatory fashion, I just smile and say 'Straight is great'. (My housemate in the 1970s liked to tell me 'Gay is good'.)
'Unhoused' for homeless, is baffling, though. Do the 'unhoused' sleep in the rain any less than the homeless? Do they qualify for food stamps and Government cheese, while the merely homeless don't?
But 'progressive' for extremely liberal is too comic. It trips over itself. You have to repeat "moving forward" at the end of every sentence; it's just too much work. Talk about ChatGPT, one could feed all the pop culture shibboleths into it and it would probably look just like the internet -- full of disinformation and half-truths and jingoistic slogans.
> if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
I. Uhm. This is embarrassing but my instinctive response on this example "yes, absolutely"? The quote that comes most readily to mind being the "eat the rich" slogan, I think "the rich" is in fact generally used pejoratively in this day and age, and you'd say "rich people" if you wanted to sound friendlier to the idea that it's morally okay for there to be rich people in the world. "The rich" is slightly less politically coded than "the bourgeoisie", but I'm still going to assume that anyone who uses it has left-leaning political opinions and disapproves of the existence of rich people to some degree. "Dehumanizing" is going too far, of course, but I do agree there's a pejorative aspect to it. It's not quite neutral.
(With that said I agree with this post, just nitpicking your example.)
It’s maybe not “dehumanizing” but “de-individualizing” (literally you’re replacing a plural with a singular). Sort of lumping a bunch of people into a presumably homogeneous mass.
Then again I think you’d get laughed out of the room if you talked about “persons experiencing wealth” so there’s still an imbalance.
But the thing is, "persons experiencing mental illness" is a silly overcorrection and people don't actually use that one either unless they're being self-consciously politically-correct. Otherwise we find the matching pairs "the mentally ill"/"mentally-ill people" and "the rich"/"rich people"! (Also "the poor"/"poor people", of course.)
“Person first language” is absolutely a big deal in psychology and social work circles right now. You must talk about “persons with bipolar disorder” not “bipolar people”.
The battle between identity-first language and person-first language is hilarious; both groups are pointing at the other and saying they are doing it wrong.
[As a rule of thumb: identity-first for things that people with them don't want to get rid of, person-first for ones they do]
And just to add to the fun is the whole class of things where whether it should be considered something to get rid of is itself a subject of acrimonious debate (e.g. autism and deafness(?!))
The funny thing is that de-individualization the whole shtick of the Left, from Marx straight on through to the BLM. But of course, when the "good" groups happen to end up with negative associations, that's Bad and Wrong.
The point being that people who think 'the' is dehumanizing tend to be people who hate the rich.
Yeah, I came to say this. And my experience is that if you do say "the rich" around a rich person, they'll quite often jump down your throat and remind you that not all rich people are the same, and you shouldn't make assumptions about them.
Yes, people try to signal things through their communications, often things about themselves. They try to signal that they are helpful, smart, worthy of care, skilled, fun to be around, etc. Sometimes people use very indirect signals to show that they have certain qualities. You could get extremely indirect with these, to the extent that it might be hard for the parties involved to be consciously aware there is an attempt at signalling at all. There are also very direct, very literal attempts to signal, like in the examples here, where people literally say, "if you use [this word], you are [this type of person]". I don't think that this is limited to this context, the context of trying to prove that you are not a racist. I guess because racism is such a polarizing concept in American politics, that's why this is the way the topic gets framed? But I don't know, the idea that your communication says something about you is not something you can get out of... I don't know why it is being framed as if it were a nefarious strange thing that only applies to Wokeism. Communication communicates, and not just the literal content of your words.
Have you heard of "deconstructionism"? It's a useful concept and extremely handy in the analysis of social discourse.
Because it argues that everything about us sends signals about who you are and what you believe in. That's the main premise of Gladwell's"Blink". That we judge each other 'in a blink' based on these visual and spoken signals.
Ask ANY woman about this and she will laugh her ass off. Welcome to their world.
EVERY ASPECT OF THEIR EXISTENCE IS JUDGED BY MALE THOUGHT POLICE 24/7.
When you say, "the idea that your communication says something about you is not something you can get out of". You nailed it. You can't.
A lot of commentators here seem to wish that wasn't true.
Male thought police? Most people in the US who actually want to imprison people for speech acts are....WOMEN
Of course, I'm sure you have a long-winded rationalization for why imprisoning people for saying offensive things is actually good because (certain) words directed at (certain) people are actually 'acts of violence'.
Hyperstitious slur cascades have always happened, but I'm getting the impression that we're is experiencing a cascade of hyperstitious slur cascades.
Anybody who can't even find the courage to be *impolite* doesn't deserve the right of free speech.
Why?
Rudeness is a sin against civilization.
Politeness is a mark of being "cultured" and "educated".
Civility is the essence of civilization. It's what allows people to coexist in cities. The foundational marker of civilization.
Rudeness and impoliteness is not a mark of bravery.
It's the sign of a bully.
It states very clearly that I don't have to care. I don't have to be polite, or courteous, or civil. I will cut in line ahead of you if I'm bigger. I will call you slurs if I want to because there is nothing that you can do about it.
What exactly is it that you want to say that you feel so much anxiety about?
There are "safe spaces" for people who want to "speak freely".
KKK meetings and WHITE Power Nationalists groups (the ones that yell about Jews not replacing them with Brown and Black people) are both safe spaces for FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTISTS. They won't judge you if you want to use politically incorrect terms.
Black people are more rude (not to mention violent and hateful) than white people.
You can't set a resolution to stop falling in line with cascades, you know, the *next* time one starts up. You'll fall in line with that one, too.
'I will only start condemning the outgroup when 70% of my contemporaries do so.'
And that's the rub - it's not everyone, it's the loudest 5% who have cowered everyone else into believing them instead of their lying eyes.
Umm...have you heard the story about an Emperor with no clothes?
This sort of behavior is hardwired into our brains. We engage in "groupthink" and "mob justice" at the drop of a hat. Do you not remember what high school was like?
Rules and social conventions are what protect us from that. Civility, matters.
Your read on "All Lives Matter" is fundamentally different than mine and I think it doesn't make a very clear example. Before people started saying "Black Lives Matter", "All Lives Matter" was absolutely an inoffensive phrase that might actually get used twice a decade in a sermon at a Unitarian Universalist church.
In the first weeks of "Black Lives Matter", it was used maybe 1% of the time by nice elderly people as a complement to "Black Lives Matter" in the sense of, "yes black lives matter - of course they do, because all lives matter". It was used 99% by TV personalities who needed to represent the opposing side of the culture war but couldn't exactly make a slogan of "no, black lives don't matter." When *they* and their viewers started saying "All Lives Matter", the implication wasn't "Yes, black lives matter, all lives matter." It was "No, you can't say black lives matter because that's reverse racism. You have to say all lives matter."
The cascade from there was predictable. Yes, other TV personalities, on the other side of the culture war, then started convincing their viewers that it was "a racist attempt to erase black lives".
To those for whom it was obvious what he meant by it the first time Tucker Carlson (or whoever) said it, we didn't need any help to realize that it was a badge that said, "I'm on the opposite side from Black Lives Matter, but I have to be careful how I express that". Not all of us equate that to the media formulation of "racist attempt to erase black lives", but we all know it's *some kind* of reaction against BLM.
>It was used 99% by TV personalities who needed to represent the opposing side of the culture war but couldn't exactly make a slogan of "no, black lives don't matter."
None of these TV personalities think that black lives don't matter. Talk about having a bad read on the situation, then you say something like this.
What is meant by all lives matter is that focusing on one particular race is bad and unwarranted, especially when all so often the representatives of this race being talked about are very bad people and yet garner more support and attention than the many, many white people murdered by black people every year, most of whom were not people assaulting police officers or neighborhood watch patrollers or the kinds of people who rob pregnant women at gunpoint.
George Floyd got more attention and outrage than the 500 or so white people murdered by black people every year (which is rate ten times higher than white on black murders), and yet to hear BLM supporters talking would make you think that black people are under attack from white people.
And if you want to say its different because of the police, firstly Zimmerman wasn't a police officer, but secondly, this is just another case of why 'all lives matter' is meaningful. All lives matter, even if they weren't taken by a police officer, even if they were taken (as the absolute and per capita majority of them are) by black people.
>None of these TV personalities think that black lives don't matter.
I didn't say that these TV personalities *did* think that. I can't read TV personalities minds. I guess a few of them may have have noxious views about race. I guess a few of them enjoy getting the white grievance demographic to tune in so they can sell ads. I guess a few are just committed to one side of the culture war, and for them all arguments are soldiers.
There are probably some that do none of he above. There are probably some who see an issue with the subtext of BLM. Some who would have something intelligent to say to try and deconstruct that subtext. But you don't catch them shouting back "ALM". They have better things to say.
This seems to take the naive view that “black lives matter” was itself a neutral term, rather than encoding a whole host of culture war positions that went way beyond just “black people have inherent value”. Both sides were intentionally self-describing using language designed to make the other side look bad.
It may "seem" to take that naive view (that BLM didn't encode some culture war positions from the start). And yet, it doesn't in any way presuppose that naive view, and I don't personally hold that naive view....
That’s fair enough, and reading more carefully I get that from your last paragraph, so sorry for implying otherwise. But still, I think there is a tendency in discussion around the topic to basically declare “black lives matter” as neutral and “all lives matter” as racist without the nuance that both are loaded political slogans (what you dub “the media formulation”)
What needs to happen is that people on the left need to start calling out people for starting these cascades by using (and harming) an underprivileged group as a way to advertise their virtute.
Unfortunately, I fear it doesn't happen because people are hungry for ways to advertise their partisan affiliation.
This happened recently-ish with git branches. “Master” is racist I guess? Same with databases being master and slave.
Also blacklist and whitelist.
In both cases the replacements make more sense but that clearly wasn’t the motivation because people make too big of a deal of it.
I think when the replacement makes more sense, then I'm inclined to go with it anyway; changing a term requires someone to make a big deal of it or it won't happen. If you just have a better word, no-one will be bothered enough to do the work (even when that's only ten seconds work) to change.
So, let them make their big deal because that's how you get the activation energy to make the change.
I am interested in the feeling when a familiar word becomes tainted by this hyperstitious slur cascade. Like "Karen", and the awkward moment when calling my friend Karen "Karen" started to feel irrationally uncomfortable and somehow disrespectful, even though it is her real, given, legal name. I can imagine the process was unpleasant for her as well, but she was already losing control of her OCD on her way to lewy body dementia when that cascade began, so I never had the poor taste to ask her directly. At this point she would not understand, much less care, what has happened to her name. Small mercies.
Also, writers (like you, but not just you) have pulled "the the" duplication trick too many times in my sight, and now I am distracted whenever a word is innocently duplicated. I keep waiting for the argument that draws attention to the instance. time time (see what's become of me?)
Some symbols actually originate as signals of hostility. The Confederate flag is a prime example. From the Vice President of the Confederacy in the middle of the Civil War: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech
> But not to be tedious in enumerating the numerous changes for the better, allow me to allude to one other though last, not least. The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.
He keeps going. This is probably the most singularly damning example, but there are thousands of Confederate-era documents detailing why they seceded, why they thought secession was worth a civil war, etc. The central, common elements are slavery and racism. That's what the Confederate Battle Flag stands for: a racism so deeply entrenched in one's worldview that one is literally willing to kill one's own countrymen, even relatives, to preserve the racial order of chattel slavery.
Yes, symbols can change their meaning organically, but that's not what happened here. People didn't gradually shift toward seeing the flag as a symbol of something else. They didn't stop using it, forget what it meant, and then rediscover it a hundred years later and adopt it as a symbol of something else. What actually happened was that they almost immediately started lying about it (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy), some people in the younger generations believed them, and it became impossible to tell who was intentionally using it as a racist symbol and who just believed the lies.
This post doesn't make it clear whether you believe the lies yourself or just believe that the people who believe them are somehow still innocent. I have to assume it's the latter. But if they are innocent, telling them that they're making a terrible mistake is not irrational symbol-policing, and it shouldn't be grouped in with "people experiencing Frenchness."
The confederacy included lots of virulent racists who absolutely morally supported slavery (so did the north, to a lesser degree). It also contained a lot of Jeffersonian types who were clearly conflicted about the institution while nevertheless participating in it. And some genuine “states righters” or state patriots ambivalent about the question. And many thousands of barefooted badly fed rebs fighting for reasons that I can’t personally fathom but clearly weren’t “to make sure that rich SOB down the road can get richer by undercutting the value of my labor with chattel slavery”.
Why would they “lie about it” if they still proudly believed what it originally stood for? Why is it impossible to posit that they genuinely wanted to express pride in certain parts of their heritage while being genuinely ashamed of other parts?
I mean, the regular American flag (and many others) flew over slave plantations and Indian massacres for much longer than the confederate battle flag, yet the idea that the American flag is inherently a symbol of slavery is still pretty fringe (but there’s a hyperstition effort in that direction too, it’s just been so far much less successful).
One bad effect of all of this not mentioned is that I believe some people deliberately rachet up the cascade within their social group, so that the people outside their social group, who catch on less slowly, look bad because they're at the other end of the cascade.
There's a time to use statistics, and a time to stand for what's right. Those two things don't always line up.
The Confederate flag example is an interesting one. I grew up in the south, and it was common to see Confederate flag bumper stickers, rebel flag posters on dorm walls, that sort of thing. What it meant to the people who used it in those contexts was overwhelmingly as a symbol of rebellion, rather like the rock-n-roll “horned hand” gesture. You know, more like “stick it to the man” than “stick it to the blacks.” I’ve lived in the north for a long time now, and not a single Yankee believes me about this. They tediously tell me that the only, unchangeable, and eternal meaning of the Confederate flag is the racist promotion of slavery by violence. Now, I couldn’t care less about the rebel flag, and have never and would never display it. But I do think it’s a test case of who gets to decide the meaning of these sorts of symbols, whether it is the people using them, or those observing them.
Only partial agreement. You’ve got to know that the horned hand is some sort of symbol of rebellion, or at the very least that your parents hate it. But no amount of moral panic that it is really and truly a sign of devil worship is going to prove that rock really is Satan’s soundtrack.
I've seen a surprising number of rebel flags in rural Ohio. I haven't asked, but I suspect they're using it to signal being Republican. (Lincoln would not approve.)
For that matter, neither would the Confederates, who literally tried to leave the Union rather than accept the election of a Republican president.
Though the most perverse place to see Confederate flags is a tie between southern Illinois (the literal Land of Lincoln) and West Virginia, a state which only exists because its inhabitants rejected the Confederacy in all its forms.
>>You know, more like “stick it to the man” than “stick it to the blacks.”
The two aren't exclusive. Speaking as somebody who's lived in the South from age 11, a big part of the popularity of the symbol as I've seen it employed here has been "stick it to the man, because he wants you to stop sticking it to the blacks."
There's a reason the symbol isn't popular with all Southerners, and it doesn't take many conversations with those who fly the flag and those who don't to see the racial animus pattern emerge.
I'm not sure what to make of another form of language policing I've seen:
I've heard people call successful suicides "completed" suicides, and object to having them called successful. Does this fall in the same category as hyperstitions? Whatever it is, it strikes me as bizarre. In every other case that I'm aware of, from baking a cake to performing a massacre, one normally talks of the effort succeeding or failing.
Do we talk about "successful massacres" all that often, though? Maybe if we did then people would start to get bothered.
Suicide is one topic on which I have a bit of sympathy with the language police. The way people talk about suicide does seem to have a genuine real-world effect on marginal suicides.
'Do we talk about "successful massacres" all that often, though?'
Well, at least I haven't seen some special alternate term for one, as I have for suicides.
I do see 9700 hits in google for "successful massacre"
I would imagine that most people are prefacing it with something like "Horrifyingly successful massacre."
Actually, none of the Google hits are like that. A bunch of them are:
John Winthrop was proclaiming a thanksgiving for the successful massacre of hundreds of Pequot Indian men, women and children
Others include:
The king and Haman drink and share a toast for a successful massacre.
"When one [raiding party] returned after a particularly successful massacre, they were admonished for having brought back alive the chief's...
A successful massacre needs time and planning, as well as expertise and organised action.
The massacre of the refugees has taught us that a successful massacre is not one where the killing is carried out with efficiency, ...
Whatever the overall politics of these Google hits are, they _don't_ look like local policing of the language (unlike the successful suicides being pushed to being called "completed")
Huh. Well I'm surprised, I generally try to add a negative modifier before referring to (literal) massacres as "successful" or "efficient".
Well, the overall politics of these hits seemed to generally disapprove of the massacres (particularly the Thanksgiving ones). But they didn't use local language policing to do it. I was a bit surprised at it myself. Personally, I prefer to see as little language policing as possible. I would rather see views expressed in clear language, and then agreed with or disagreed with.
Conversely, "incompleted suicide" doesn't sound good at all!
True! And some of the situations it can describe can be most unpleasant...
This reminds me of the phrase "prolific serial killer," which always struck me as fundamentally confused.
True! "prolific" seems like a really poor choice of adjective in that case. I'm not sure what a good choice is. Most adjectives which suggest that what they describe kills, "deadly", "lethal", etc. suggest a high _probability_ of death, but don't generally imply a large _number_ of deaths, which is the information the word needs to convey...
> A distant relative of mine who lives in the South and has no known political opinions still has a Confederate flag sticker in his room.
Noting that "no known political opinions" is sort of what you would expect if their political opinions were the sort to get them in trouble if known (in the same sort of way that "no known romantic partners" is a hint that they have romantic partners that are socially unacceptable, especially when society was less accepting).
Eh, most people with no known political opinions just literally don't think about politics, as a political junkie, it is shocking to talk to them. There are probably a few with "unthinkable opinions" who try pretending being apolitical, but most have plenty of other controversial but not unthinkable positions that they hold and will articulate and defend.
"The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the."
Interesting as always. Makes me think of a few points though.
Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
What about individual terms? "The most offensive thing you can ever do to me is to call me by my assigned at birth gender. Even when talking about my birth."
What about the extremes? If you use the n-word and get punched, all right-thinking people, even pacifists, will say you deserved it.
Religion? I say I don't appreciate hearing God damn, people tell me it's a free country.
>Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
Probably not, I don't think she became transphobic just because people believed she was transphobic, her views were (presumably, for the most part) independent of other people's beliefs.
if 99% of people agree she's transphobic, does it matter how she really feels?
It matters to people who care about the fact of the matter rather than just the public perception of the matter.
I guess I meant that rhetorically, because "matter" is so undefined. But if 99% of people say "Jap" is a super racist term, then it becomes one. If 99% of people say JK Rowling is a symbol of modern-day transphobia, one had better not go around saying they like her unless you're prepared for some online hate.
"She's a symbol of modern-day transphobia" is a different statement than "she's transphobic" though. The former, like all symbols, could be a hyperstition, and the latter is independent of that, though you could argue they're likely to be correlated.
Much less than 99% understand what that word even means.
>Can a *person* be hyperstitious? JK Rowling comes to mind.
Allow me to introduce Dieudonné Mbala Mbala (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieudonn%C3%A9_M%27bala_M%27bala), Camerounese-French comedian. Rise to a moderate fame by doing a comedic duo with a Jewish comedian (Elie Semoun). Very mainstream, he event appears in the most famous comedy movie of the last 20+ years. Shorty after, in late 2003, he does a sketch on tv where he portray an Israeli settler that performs a nazi salute. And oh boy, we didn't have the name at the time, but it was a hell of a cancel. Thing is, unlike most cancellation target, he didn't apologize. He doubled down, and in a great illustration of "toxoplasma of rage", he was soon:
1- Never booked on TV, movie, or mainstream scene ever again
2- Doing one-man-show in a theater he owns, that became increasingly antisemitic (or antisionist, or both, depending on who you ask), as other venues he attempted to book would get cancelled by prefects, mayors or protests.
It's a pure case where hostility fed itself into turning a harmless comedians (who maybe held un-kosher thoguhts beforehand, idk, but was certainly not very vocal or obvious about them) into an antisemitic figurehead.
>I feel the same way about people of Frenchness. Yes, the French example was silly, but that’s not my actual point. The point is, there’s nothing at all dehumanizing about the phrase “the poor”.
>(if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that? It seems more dehumanizing to say the poor are in their own special little category of people who are so bad that we have to refer to them through a special circumlocution that tries to linguistically protect them from their own adjective.)
This particular bit missed the point a bit. Skipping straight to "people of x" when "x people" exists as a middle point feels an oversight. It's a much simpler and more natural change that still follows from the reasonable (although debatable) idea that describing a group as people rather than general objects helps identify their humanity.
I think this is worth acknowledging if at least to Ironman the argument you're against. Placing the other side as wanting to use "French people" rather than "people of Frenchness" feels much less silly.
And FWIW I do thing "the rich" is often used antagonistically. There's a reason "eat the rich" gets said and not "eat rich people."
I agree with this. I think "people of Frenchness" sounds weird mainly because it's a hypernominalization, and alternatives like "French people" and "people from France" sound much less ridiculous. That said, I don't myself object to "The French", though it does sound slightly like it's treating France's people as a monolith.
Both your points are well taken. To the first one, I would add that you could say something like "The French team" or "the German delegation" if you were following the AP style guide. For the second, you can also of course have the converse e.g. "The French have a range of opinions on the new agreement with the Germans." - words do of course tend to come in sentences, and only rarely does one word choice outweigh the entire rest of the sentence. It's still a choice, though I'll agree it's a small one.
Frog memes... I posted a frog and a close friend of mine said, "isn't that the right wing extremist frog?" "No no, Katy Perry posted one on twitter." "Oh phew!"
Frog memes are a revolutionary act
They are a very effective shorthand. I made a large number of assumptions about you when I first saw your avatar, and I am simultaneously pleased and horrified that they were all correct.
Fascinating. If you’re correct about the %s sloping, I’m all over the shop. Being a rather reclusive writer, if my rather small circle of family/friends objects to a label/term I use, I might react adversely inside but I guess I quickly decide to “obey.” But terms that change in public discourse might see me resisting until the 80% or 90% point.
Matt Yglesias had a blog post, saying quick changes are purposely about signalling exclusivity. "You said aboriginal? Um... its indigenous, you should know that."
"The law is literally called the Indian Act!"
9/10 Indians I meet strongly prefer "Indian" to any of the other general terms, they hate the political correct name games being played by academics.
This was my experience up until about 10 years ago, but the natives seem restless on this issue (I couldn’t help myself).
Seriously though I think the internet has greatly increased the reach of this nonsense outside academia.
Uh, it's "people of Indianity" now.
I would swear when I first saw this comment there was a link included, but there is not now - has it gone it was I dreaming? Is there another similar comment with a link I missed?
I don't know, but here's the article if you were looking for it: https://www.slowboring.com/p/who-is-included-by-inclusive-language
It's signalling all the way down.
> (if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
The terms "the rich" and "the poor" are kind of a special case because they separate people from the rest of society, when those people would probably prefer to not be separated (you're not supposed to be proud of being rich or being poor, it's not polite to talk about it or point it out, etc). Japanese/French/Southerners probably see that category as part of their identity and they don't care if you talk about it (assuming that you don't use a slur).
The occasional efforts by the COJCO LDS to deprecate the term “Mormon” in this way seem relevant to this topic.
Sorry Mormons, you're not oppressed enough to have any power.
I had a paper held up in peer review for using that term. Reviewer (who is Mormon) demanded we use their approved term to get his approval for publication. So we changed the paper to talk about the unwieldy LDS. Granted, not a lot of Mormons in science, so this doesn't happen often, but it does happen at least once.
In the context of an academic paper I think that's fair enough, "Mormons" is a slang term rather than being an official term.
What is an official term? It's the normal term for this group of people used by just about everyone. The only people who object are themselves and maybe a few people who are offended on others' behalf.
For a UK example, "Paki", short form of "Pakistani". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paki_(slur)
In Denmark, "neger" (negro) became unusable recent due to American influence about their "negro" word, so the reach of Stokely Carmichael is surely great. Obviously, these words come from the same Latin root, so really it was all pointless.
It’s a little off topic, but now that we have a simple word for it...
If Prediction Markets become trusted sources, how can we best protect them from manipulitive hyperstitious cascades?
By those caught up in the cascade going bankrupt, hopefully. This effect was/is pretty noticeable with any betting market having anything to do with Trump, presumably due to their inconvenience/low market caps, with odds skewed by pro-Trumpers being happy to lose money over unrealistic propositions.
I'm constantly irritated by a version of this. The word 'polak' is the word in the Polish language for a Polish person. I should know, I'm Polish. It has never been considered a slur by Polish people. Ever. Yet multiple times in my life I had to sit though a condescending lecture from an American telling me I'm saying a slur **in my own language**. You can see this same thing right now on the English Wikipedia page talk page. Multiple Polish people are writing to inform that this word is a literal endonym and has never been a slur, and every time a sanctimonious American tells them they are wrong.
Imagine going to Poland and finding out "American" is considered a slur and Polish people telling you the correct reaction is to be offended and you are wrong for trying to correct them.
Slavoj Zizek once said that Yugoslavs have no aspirations of dreams, there is no room for it. Others are too busy dreaming for us for us to be allowed ourselves. Having Americans 'correct' me in this regard is literally the only time I've ever felt discriminated against. Certainly not when I'm being called the Polish word for a Polish person.
This is a pretty interesting example. Polish immigration to the USA was high in the 1920s, then dropped like a stone during the 1930s and stayed low for decades. Very few second-generation Americans speak Polish; the two cultures were largely separate during the Cold War.
The word “polack” went through a hyperstition cascade in one culture but not the other.
When I waa a child in the 80's, "polaks" were the proverbial butts of ethnic jokes, i.e., the term was equivalent to "stupid person". As I was growing up I remember coming to notice that every actual Polish person that I met or even heard of was quite smart, and realizing how unjust those jokes were. "Polak" in American English has had a different connotation than in Polish, and Polish people are not the authorities on that connotation, even though the word originates in Polish.
This usage seems to be going extinct. I have not heard an American tell a "dumb Polak" joke in this century, though I heard them occasionally in the 90s.
Me neither.
Yeah, it's not a slur. My grandpa was a proud polak and he wouldn't have stood for being called anything else.
Hmm, I wonder how much of this is directly downstream of A Streetcar Named Desire. If you're not familiar with the play, the Polish-American Stanley Kowalski takes offense over being called a "Polack" and insists on "Pole." Of course, he's the villain, but I think that part was intended to be taken sympathetically.
I'm reading a biography of Alan Burns, one of the last generation of British civil servants in the colonial service. It was interesting that in the first part of the twentieth century most thoughtful people in the service *and* in the colonies understood their job to be preparing their colonies for self-government, toward which some colonies progressed faster than others. It all got derailed when demagogues and Soviets and the UN saw colonialism as a club to beat The West with, which is why lots of former colonies are in the fix they are in today.
Anyway, part of the process of preparing the colonies was building and staffing a school system. I was startled by this tidbit from the early *fifties*:
> Alan found solace in dry humor. One session was held up when the Iraqi delegate insisted that the term "teacher training" was archaic and should be replaced in all UN documents with the swanky new term "teacher preparation". Training, the Iraqi theorist declared, was for horses. "I spent many years being trained as a civil servant," Alan insisted, "and I most emphatically deny that I am a horse."
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Would one rather be trained (like a horse) or prepared (like a meal)? Thanks for this tidbit.
Yeah I have gotten that “training” one in federal government contexts over the past decade or two.
“Don’t say training to describe the trainings, it’s offensive”. Never sticks though.
> But once the media successfully convinced everyone that it was a racist attempt to erase black lives in particular
(re 'All Lives Matter')
You probably know this but that's a pretty uncharitable / confused reading of what happened (it was used by actual people to express that their contempt for the "black lives matter" people; the media had nothing to do with it). I can't imagine any reason to be uncharitable about this unless you're bitter about it or something.
By the way, what is your denominator?
70% of which subset of people?
English-speakers around the world?
American citizens?
Your ingroup?
You must be very VERY careful not only to define your denominator, but also not to be misled by the extremely large and pestiferous crowd whose professional or self-appointed personal mission involves making the majority think they are actually the minority about some opinion, what I like to call “intellectual stolen bases”.
You may find, in fact I would wager that you WILL find, that many of the new norms of language that you have adopted are in fact approved of by fewer than 70%, or even fewer than 50%, of American, and certainly by fewer than 50% of English-speakers around the world, which I would argue is the better reference class.
Also, in what context? Formal/workplace, colloquial, everything? Companies and other organizations can very quickly force people to go quite a way through the cascade in workplace speech, and some people may pick some of it up in colloquial speech as well, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will become ubiquitous in informal speech.
Company-policed speech may even make up 70+% of all speech in some contexts, such as programming. Avoiding terminology like blacklist/whitelist may well become ubiquitous in corporate projects and not in hobby projects. (Another form of signalling that became widespread since the late 2010s is adding SJWesque codes of conduct to open source projects, but I mostly see it in corporate-sponsored projects, and not in independent, hobbyist-driven projects.)
---
Even generally, I think 70% is too low. If 30% or even 10-20% of people still use a term in a neutral sense in a given context (e.g. work, or colloquial), then
- it's unlikely to be risky to use
- it's unlikely to be genuinely offensive.
>(if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
FWIW, the AP does in fact bite this bullet. They've since deleted the screen-shotted tweet and put out a new version which replaces "the French" with "the wealthy".
That's genuinely surprising.
I feel like it would be more reasonable to have different thresholds in different contexts.
For instance, maybe I'm willing to give up using a once-inoffensive slang term for some group (that I never come into contact with anyway) when we reach 50%, because it's no skin off my nose to stop using "tranny" or "pickaninny".
On the other hand, I would hope that the threshold for actually stopping mentioning true and relevant facts might be a lot higher.
I feel like Scott has often become sloppy in this kind of "anti-woke" post, like he detests his opponents so much he can't give the solid argument he does on other topics. For example, is it really true that "society demands that politicians resign if they use" the word "Negro"? The link goes to the chairman of the RNC calling on Reid to resign to follow the standard of Trent Lott. In other words, it's a kind of trollish hypocrisy claim by Reid's political opponents, not a serious argument that using the word is egregious. Did "society" demand Reid resign? Not really, and he stayed majority/minority leader until he retired. Also, people were offended by Reid's comments for reasons other than the word "Negro." This kind of thing (or other weak examples like the confederate flag/all lives matter) doesn't destroy the whole argument but it does make me think I cannot trust Scott not to exaggerate the evidence to make his opponents seem more ridiculous than they are.
Yeah, I think he's about 20% down the Scott Adams "contrarian public commentator to punchline" pipeline at this point.
My personal bellwether is to track how many of the HBD/"I'm just seeing where the data goes" commentators shed their cocoons and join the out-and-out "black people are genetically inferior and must be expurgated" crowd. And how likely you are to get banned by calling them racist idiots.
agreed, the 'All Lives Matter' example seemed either just misunderstood or very poorly argued to me, and in general this post did not seem as sensitively or well argued as I've come to expect from Scott. I agree with many of his examples but the post as a whole decreased my opinion of him a bit.
Not sure about the US, but after the anti-vaxx trucker convoy in Canada displaying a bona fide Canadian Flag, the Maple Leaf, became a sign of being anti-left. That is not the Union Jack, or some other niche thing, but openly displaying the official flag is now viewed with suspicion, "Are you one of THOSE?"
There have been times when wearing or displaying the US flag has been right-coded to some extent along with other overt displays of patriotism. It probably hit its high point somewhere between Vietnam and 9/11, which last kicked bipartisan flag displays and pins into high gear for a while.
In the UK, flying the English flag is now considered by the government/leftists as an act of 'far-right extremism'.
Which is crazy because the current Canadian flag was brought in by the Liberal party they hate to replace the far superior Red Ensign which should be our flag.
There was an attempt to hyperstitious campaign the Red Ensign into something racist, but I think that's largely failed due to the strength of the "We literally fought the Nazis under this flag" argument.
Surely, some of this is regional. Maybe in SF Bay Chick-fil-A is taboo, but in many parts of the country, it's one of the most popular fast food joints.
Likewise, all lives matter might be taboo in places where people put out black lives matter signs, but it's far from a universal taboo.
The AP tweet commentary mostly focused on "the French," which is obviously silly. But I haven't heard nearly enough commentary about why the AP would have said it is "dehumanizing" to refer to "the college-educated."
Huh? Since when do college-educated folk object to being mentioned?
> This is a compromise between principle and self-preservation, but I don’t know a better way to do it.
If the people who started it are contemptible, and the early adopters are pathetic, then the whole thing is a bad idea no matter how many join in on it. In situations like this, I find the wisest words are those of C. S. Lewis:
“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
The better way to do it is not to simply "stand on principle" and not join in the cascade, but to do what you're doing here and explain the process behind what's going on. "Stop doing this, you're being manipulated by contemptible people. We should turn around and go back to where we were." The better way is more than just not giving in, it's pushing back.
BIPOC and Latinx seem to be attempts at hyperstition cascades that are on their way to failure. Is this an actual turning point or are there other examples of failed hyperstitions from the past?
The one I really wish we could turn back is “person first language”. Just such a ridiculously circumlocutious way of talking, and I can’t imagine any homeless person feels better about their plight now that the do-gooders insist on calling them a “person experiencing homelessness”.
If BIPOC is going to fail, it will be for entirely different reasons than for Latinx. I've never seen any "BIPOC" person express offense over the term, whereas Latnix is widely hated.
I think that what a lot of people overlook is that "Latinx" was never about raising the status of Latinos. It was about raising the status of feminists and/or gender diverse people. Latinos don't like it in large part because it wasn't for them, and because it was specifically designed to promote an ideology most of them don't buy into.
BIPOC, on the other hand, was coined to raise the status of black and indigenous people.
Have you talked to Asians and Hispanics? POC was an umbrella term for minorities. But with BIPOC we have blacks moved to the top of intersectional primacy with Asians and Latinos just lumped into the unimportant "other".
I listened to an episode of Code Switch in which a number of Black people discussed their feelings about the term. Opinions were mixed. Some liked its creation of a sense of unity across different groups, while others felt it erased or minimized the unique Black experience and Black culture by lumping Black people in with other groups.
I always thought that it ironically entrenched the very “white is the default” attitude that anti-racists would usually quite vehemently oppose.
If I’m understanding the ASX theory of hyperstition, the term itself should have some organic origin before it gets politicized, polarized, and gnawed-over. BIPOC and Latinx were delivered fresh from PMC/academia regimes. For contrast, Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, and MLK all casually debated the term “Negro.”
What about “LGBT….” and the numerous letters getting added onto it? That one seems to be an inorganic, but successful (at least up to “Q”) hyperstition.
I’ve been seeing additions and alterations to “LBGT...uhhh...” since the late 90s/early 2000s. I think clearly it signifies disparate groups under a political umbrella that is assumed to provide protection (both serious, life-preserving protection, and rhetorical cover). There is no Machiavellian council deciding which letters in the acronym get put where.
I’m not saying there’s a “Machiavellian council” just that the mechanism you posit is something I would call “inorganic” / intentional.
If you mean relating to this SSX post, I don’t think group-affiliate acronyms are the same as “hyperstitious slurs” or whatever.
The group affiliate acronym would be replacing the new “slur” as the preferred polite term, so it represents one side of the hyperstition cascade.
“BIPOC” for example seems to have grown out of “POC”, itself a semi-successful attempt to make “minority” or just “black” considered mildly offensive.
The one where Scott inadvertently turned "Asian" into a slur.
This is PRECISELY what happened to the term "quantum supremacy." I'm still using it, even though it's already at or past 70%.
While I think most of this is basically right, this comes to mind:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely
The constant shifting of acceptable language can be confusing and stressful for people, and I agree that it often happens for insubstantive reasons. But it's a pretty minor issue that causes more inconvenience than harm, and lamenting it in an article that *leads* with the example of 'Jap' burns respectability with very little to gain.
AFAIK Scott is financially independent now. He's self-employed and makes money off both his self-owned private psych practice and ACX. Why fear the self-appointed woke censors when they can't meaningfully harm you?
If this burns "respectability", then respectability can go to hell.
Scott clearly didn’t lead with “Jap” because it’s the term he most wants to go back to using (I mean he specifically says he has no intention of making it part of his lexicon). I think he picked that one because the etymology is so obviously benign compared to how negatively the term is now viewed.
> I think he picked that one because the etymology is so obviously benign
You never know how the Japanese might feel about us referring to them by the name they're called in China.
“This story shows that slurs are hyperstitions.“
I think it’s worthwhile to note that not all slurs are hyperstitions—some words are intended as slurs from the very beginning.
“A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true.”
Similarly, it seems like the correct (or at least uncontroversially correct) version of this line is “A hyperstition is a belief that becomes TRUER if people believe it’s true”. I think a lot of people would claim that hanging a confederate flag was always racist, by virtue of signaling support for the confederacy. But it’s pretty undeniable that it’s become a much stronger signal for racism over time.
(Similarly, it’s unclear if “hyperstitions are bad” is endorsing the take “People shouldn’t have promoted the claim that the Confederate flag is racist.”)
Not a big distinction for me, but some people I’ve linked this too have definitely been put off because of this, and that’s sad because I think this article makes a lot of great points!
The adoption of the confederate flag as a bumper sticker/home decoration/logo is 100% enmeshed in the history of Southern racism and the Jim Crow legal regime. Most of the statues and cultural signifiers (like street names, school names, etc.) that have been cultural flashpoints of late (as in Charlottesville) were not built or instituted as war memorials in the sense that most people understand that process. It probably wouldn’t surprise most folks to know that building war memorials is not an activity usually undertaken by recently subjugated populations. As they say, the victors write history. The high point for the proliferation of Confederate war memorials was just post-1900, and concentrated around post-WWI, when black veterans were returning to Southern towns and asserting what they thought were their rights. The flag iconography rose in tandem with this.
That is all true. But there really was a segment in the south in the 70s-90s that largely was oblivious of the connotational baggage and used the flag as a symbol of regional pride, even while others used it more deliberately. The symbols lost their salience over time as hate-symbols for at least sub-segments of the white population.
Sure, once it got watered down into a shorthand for liking Lynyrd Skynyrd. But I don’t think that’s the claim our friend above is defending. (source: I grew up around the remnants of Lost Cause ideology in the South, which was by my time Boomer dads saying “it’s just about Southern Heritage. I have black friends at work!” who mysteriously never came over to our barbecues... )
It would also appear that our interlocutor “Cody Manning” deleted their originating post. ‘Nuff said.
What does "racist" mean?
Agreed, this also put me off this article.
By London soccer team is an interesting case. Tottenham Hotpur FC ("Spurs") is a north London team that had a long history of support among the Jewish community (which eventually moved out of Tottenham of course). Opposing teams took a lot of pleasure in baiting the Yids.
Tottenham fans eventually adopted Yids as their own nickname for their fans (Yid Army), and proudly shouted "Yiddo' at players doing will - including black players amongst others.
Various Jewish groups have tried to stop this: they argue that using Yid is inherently antisemitic, and hurtful (it's ironic that the most active group is led by a Chelsea fan - their fans were for a long time know to be horrifically racist and antisemitic).
The club itself commissioned a survey which inevitably generated split results (only a relatively small minority of fans in the ground are now jewish btw). The club has rather awkwardly tried to ask fans not to us "Yid" or "Yidddo," but this appears to have had zero impact.
For myself, I'm a yes: I like the idea of reclaiming a slur. In a way it's even better that non-Jewish fans use the former slur approvingly....
You have this with a lot of normal words, like "master and slave", the image of hanging and nooses; using "he" as a baseline pronoun; etc. It happened really quickly, it's extremely bothersome at how quickly these campaigns to turn something into a bad word become real. I understand how someone ends up being the old fogey who's worked in the office for 50 years and still stubbornly uses outdated terminology that is viewed as a faux pas. It's because this sort of transformation in the language keeps happening, but now it happens at ridiculous speed. And somethings don't take, maybe because they're too ridiculous. But some things do, and you find yourself conforming because you don't want to be offensive and you're good at picking up on these cues, but it's really not a good thing.
This reminds me of a passage from "Flowers for Algernon." The protagonist is mentally handicapped at the start of the book, but undergoes a medical procedure that makes him exceptionally intelligent. When that happens, he reflects:
"Am I a genius? I don't think so. Not yet anyway. As Burt would put it, mocking the euphemisms of educational jargon, I'm exceptional-a democratic term used to avoid the damning labels of gifted and deprived (which used to mean bright and retarded) and as soon as exceptional begins to mean anything to anyone they'll change it. The idea seems to be: use an expression only as long as it doesn't mean anything to anybody."
When I read the book I thought that if nobody had ever used the word "retarded" with derision, it probably would be a fine word to this day. If anything, it's a hopeful label - this person will progress in their learning, but their progress will be retarded. I hadn't considered the notion that a word could start its path to becoming a slur by someone trying too hard to be nice, like your USC example.
This is called the euphemism treadmill. A word starts out as a euphemism, but because it describes something that people look down on, people start using the euphemism ironically, and before long it's a slur.
Japanese has several second-person pronouns like omae, kisama, and temae that, based on their etymology, seem like they should be the kind of very polite words reserved for addressing nobility. And they were, centuries ago. But then people started using them ironically, and now they're basically fighting words.
"Mormon" is another one. I have some Mormon coworkers all the way out here on the east coast. One day the topic came up and in response to me saying the word "Mormon" one of them when he responded very emphatically said "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" with the unspoken but obvious subtext that "Mormon" is something I must not say. No, I'm not going to say that mouthful. If I'm trying to be conflict averse I might compromise at "LDS" (which according to the new church doctrine is a forbidden term too) but I will not under any circumstances say that mouthful.
The position of the Mormon church, btw, is that if we must insist on a short term for Mormons, we are to call them "Saints". Lol ok, not happening.
This might not have been true 20 years ago, but I feel like these days the determination of how established in society the norm of a word being unacceptable is is totally warped by the fact that the most vocal and scolding people are the ones pushing it. If the norm isn't established organically, how do we know if it really is X percent who are buying into it?
Not only are we not supposed to mention 13/50 / 13/52, it's now listed as a "hate symbol" by the likes of the ADL. They even have the audacity to say "In this numeric shorthand, the number 13 refers to the purported percentage of the U.S. population that is African American. The number 52 refers to the alleged percentage of all murders committed in the U.S. that are committed by African Americans. Some white supremacists use the number 50 instead of 52."
"Alleged". Bold move.
(source: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1352-1390)
I assume that the "allegedly" is in there because the actual number has been a bit higher recently.
Worth noting that this is usually claimed to be the percentage of violent crime or even total crime committed by black people, which is not true. It's really only homicide and robbery that are majority-black. If the ADL wanted to say that this is false, they could have gone with one of the weakman versions that actually are false. Instead they went after the version that's approximately true.
> deliberately thumbing your nose at the prevailing signaling equilibrium - which is itself a statement about race.
It isn't, though. Once hyperstition is locked in, meaning is effectively gone. One can say that a statement is unacceptable, but not why it's unacceptable, because any meaningful difference of beliefs is just as possible among the acceptable-signalers as it is between the acceptable-signalers and the hold-outs.
By this point the whole thing is on simulacrum level 3-- "I belong with the acceptable people". Or think of Havel's greengrocer: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." And the reverse signal-- "I don't belong with the acceptable people"-- could equally be a dissent from *any* consensus; the notional meaning of the symbol is drowned out just by the act of dissent. This explains the behavior of Trump-style populists who seem actively eager to be rejected by the Overton Window consensus, but just for the sake of the rejection; they're careful to maintain plausible deniability about holding any *actually* unacceptable views. They're signaling opposition to the In Crowd in general, not making a statement about anything in particular.
Yep.
Scott has made several points that are only true from a center-left perspective.
In downtown Helena, Montana about 80% of the businesses have either a rainbow flag sticker or some related virtue signal about being "safe" or how "all are welcome" or whatever.
This is not San Francisco. Its 99% white cowboy Montana!
It already makes me nervous that I don't have such a sticker in my window (I am a business owner) and I have done nothing wrong. According to Scott's logic, resistance to the trend is a statement about sexuality whether I want it to be or not. No matter how I personally feel about the issue.
Putting one up now is giving in to the Satlinesque social scape we are rapidly building. Smile and repeat the lie or lose your livelihood.
It's not just "silly" or "stupid"
It's actually frightening especially if you escaped from a place like that (or in my case had a parent who told you stories about it).
"You can't say wops no more, the dagos don't like it." Archie Bunker on national-network prime time television, 1972.
(R.I.P. and a salute to the great Norman Lear)
I'm a little afraid to jinx it, but unless something has changed very recently, Norman Lear is still alive at age 100.
Oh my, well good for him!
A newspaper comic I used to casually enjoy, was cancelled by the Los Angeles Times and I believe other papers because, *in a flashback set in Literal World War Two*, an allied military officer was shown referring to the presumed pilot of a fighter plane with big red meatball insignia as a "Jap". And with a tone of curiosity, not contempt.
I want to "make them work for it" a whole lot more than you do, even in the case of morally neutral shorthand terms like "Jap". I don't want to annoy them; I want to infuriate them. And for the simple plain-language statements of unquestionably morally virtuous things like "all lives matter" and "it's OK to be white", I think a Rorschachian unwillingness to compromise is called for, because the enemy won't stop at just one or two ways to express that sentiment.
Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you.
*ahem*
From the horse's mouth (by proxy):
'After the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, activist Alicia Garza woke up crying in the middle of the night and decided to write about her emotions in a Facebook post. In the post, Garza stated that she was surprised "at how little Black lives matter". The post would inspire Garza's friend Patrisse Cullors to create the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on July 15, 2013.'
"All lives matter" is and should be a perfectly fine thing to say. As a retort to the "Black Lives Matter" slogan, it's witless.
The problem with that is that "black lives matter" has become a shibboleth for defunding the police, bailing out killers, and general hatred of whites as well as those who have worked hard and achieved things. Black lives matter, yes, of course. But that doesn't mean I will sign on to the slogan that has become a signifier of hateful political psychosis.
I don't have a simple reply to whether I support "Black Lives Matter". The phrase? The slogan? The organization? The movement? The social organism? But that doesn't preclude an honest assessment of the slogan on its own terms.
The slogan is bullshit. One No lives matter.
Two it is a slogan of hatred and racism and most of the people fond of it are actively racist. Absolutely the most racist group of people in society by far are the far-left racial activists.
Fuck them I hope they all get raptured into some other dimension they can slowly turn into hell.
Say what you want about the tenets of Performative Wokeness, at least it's an ethos.
Pronoun-sharing ("he/him/his") occurs to me as the case that is at like 40% right now.
One interesting point to the 70% rule.... such a cascade can still occur even if almost all people use a fairly high threshold like 70%. The Schelling segregation model provides an illustration of how this happens: https://youtu.be/dnffIS2EJ30. Residential segregation can result even when people only move out of a neighborhood when heavily outnumbered by people of other races/ethnicities--much like the 70% rule. Replace "neighbors of a different ethnicity" with "people you read or talk to who share their pronouns" (or whatever) and the model shows that even a fairly strict rule may not prevent such cascades.
(The analogy is not perfect because in the Schelling model people move and are replaced, rather than actually changing their ethnicity)
Seems like the NYT style guide writers are the only individuals with much power here.
You also have local cascades. There are communities, organizations, and regions where 70% might be reached before the broader country or anglophone world. I think introducing pronouns has problem crossed that line in certain groups
I was at a company once for a summer internship (tech company full of woke yuppies in downtown Chicago) where when I started out a few people had pronouns next to their names on Slack. Maybe 10-20%. By the end of the summer it was over 80%. I still refused to comply. This was four years ago. I will never comply with forced pronoun sharing. I am a man. That is immediately obvious by looking at me. If you don't know how to refer to me, that's a you problem, not a me problem.
I've had the misfortune of encountering a few people who adamantly insist on referring to everyone as "they" until explicitly being told pronouns. Extremely grating. Kill it with fire!
For most hyperstitious cascades there's a point around 80-85 percent where I give up and resign myself to it. But the pronoun thing is so obnoxious and grating that I just will not comply. I refuse to debase myself like that. If I am ever forced to, they'll have to fire me if it comes to that. I'll find a job somewhere else.
I was in a meeting where 4 separate times I was asked to provide pronouns and each time just met them with a stony glare. Luckily I am highly coveted in my small area, so I knew there would be no consequences I couldn’t handle.
If I am ever asked then I will tell people that they are free to use whatever pronouns they think are most appropriate.
Alternatively I'll buy a title on one of those sketchy Scottish websites and insist that my pronouns are "His Lordship/His Lordship/His Lordship's".
Agree
Thanks for making a top level comment about this 20 minutes before I could. I couldn't help but notice the omission of this from the post.
Latinx was an attempted one that people pushed back on. The fact that these cascades are a ratchet explains why the pushback is so strong
I feel like pronoun-sharing is one of those attempts that is going to stall and fail and then everyone will go back to pretending like it never happened.
The current form, wherein people include both the direct object and indirect object (and occasionally possessive) version of their preferred pronoun is a weird carryover from that brief period when people were seriously trying to use things like "xim/xir" and "yot/yir". The bizarre nonstandard pronouns seems to have receded but we're left with "he/him".
Like a lot of good articles from Scott, this one had me thinking about something I kinda knew but hadn't identified.
I think this hyperstitious concept goes a long way to explaining my move from a more libertarian mindset to conservative. I realized that "live and let live" wasn't going to work out, because 51% of people (or a very vocal 10%) was going to take my hobbies, my lifestyle, my flag and my statues and decide, in a reverse respectability cascade, that they were really emblems for all that was ill in this world. If I wanted to do my own thing, I'd have to find a large community to make sure random things I loved didn't become universal signs for hatred.
As much as I'd like to unite with the fellow Libertarian minded, there just aren't enough of us.
Yes. A few years ago I was fine with statues of Confederates being taken down. Didn't care much and didn't see how it affected me. Now I want Monument Avenue in Richmond restored to its former, resplendent glory. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Don't get greedy.
The left really did a great job of losing centrists ok that issue. We went from “oh just because we want to rename this lake doesn’t mean we will be tearing down statues of Lincoln”, to actual requests to tear down statues of Lincoln and rename schools named after him in like 5 years.
It was amazing how fast that slippery slope was actualized.
There should never be a public statute of any person for more than 20 years.
After 20 years sell it and commission something new. It might be the same person or it might not.
Hagiography is for saints. But the secular society has no way making that determination because it is out of their realm of competence in a pluralistic democracy.
Full employment for sculptors and no secular hagiography.
Mt. Rushmore...?
A impressive piece of artwork but should not have been publically funded (Coolidge). Hard to take that down.
I suppose always an exception that proves the rule. No public forever hagiography.
I disagree about "live and let live" not working. I think the phenomenon is very much downstream from government action, namely hostile workplace environment (aka harassment) laws, and guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws. Notice how corporations tend to be among the earliest and most effective enforcers of speech policing, and how the most discussed risk of speaking up is getting fired. It's partly because not policing speech would itself be a lawsuit risk; and partly because all the executives are either SJWs or keep quiet, because hiring an outspoken opponent of them would be a lawsuit risk. And notice how ubiquitous this is at major companies (while on a free market one would expect that if one company chooses to cater to progressives, then a competitor would fill the opening and cater to right-wingers).
It's not that all of wokeness is mandated by law. But I think the laws are essential components of the feedback loop. Repeal harassment laws and anti-discrimination laws (laws that violate the libertarian principle of freedom to choose who you do business with), and the edifice collapses. Or, to stay closer to the Overton window, keep anti-discrimination laws, but make it very clear that proof of discriminatory intent is required, and hostile workplace environment or statistical disparities can't be used as evidence.
Yep, like Hanania said, wokeness is just civil rights.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/woke-institutions-is-just-civil-rights
Hanania is wrong about that.
David Bernstein's recent book ( https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Classified/David-E-Bernstein/9781637581735 ) has a good discussion of the efforts of Polish activists to get the same protections that blacks were given. The law is very clear in making nationality parallel to race, but judges and federal departments refused to protect Poles, or to establish data collection to track whether or not Poles should receive any protection, because -- in their eyes -- the point of the law was to protect blacks!
This is a case where the law says one thing and it doesn't matter because everyone involved in enforcing the law chooses to enforce something different. The immediate implication is that, if you try to change the law, it won't matter because the people who interpret what you meant are still the same people.
Note that two things are historically true:
1. After the civil rights act passed, government actors specifically tried to protect blacks, because that was what they had already wanted to do. They weren't trying to implement a new law, they were appealing to the new law to implement their preexisting agenda. This contradicts the theory that the agenda is caused by the law.
2. When activists appealed to the actual text of the law, the same government actors ignored them. This contradicts the idea that the law has an agenda-setting power independent of what the enforcers wanted before it was passed.
Courts and executive agencies will twist the law and enforce it differently for different groups, but that doesn't mean that the law has no effect whatsoever. After all, there's a reason they made a law in the first place, instead of just enforcing what they wanted without any law to back it up.
Also, more broadly my point is that wokeness is a result of government actions, of all three branches combined. Which means that it wouldn't have power under a live-and-let-live (i.e. libertarian) governance; and that getting rid of these laws and/or their enforcement is a necessary (and probably sufficient) condition for eliminating the power of wokeness.
that's how it could be ended, but how would one get the support for those legal changes, without conservative support? Libertarians won't get it changed on their own; we're too few.
Conservatives+libertarians together need the numbers. That's not a reason to be a conservative over a libertarian: it doesn't change the sum.
I do support allying with conservatives, voting alongside them, and even illibertarian tactics to get there (such as cracking down on companies pushing politics in a progressive direction).
---
Btw the lowest hanging fruit for an American libertarian or conservative political organization (or rich person) with a few million dollars would be to offer to pay the legal costs (and in case of a loss, the award) of a company that makes a First Amendment challenge against verbal harassment law. I'm unaware of any SCOTUS decision upholding it, and it doesn't fall under any of the established exceptions to the First Amendment; it's not a content-neutral time/place/manner restriction. The difficulty in challenging it is that the employees don't have standing when fired under lawsuit risk, only the employer does when actually sued. It's censorship by proxy.
I like this post but think it goes too far in stretching the word "slur" to include things that are more like "categories of un-person" such as cops or drone pilots or whatever.
I also think it's EXTREMELY important to remember that there is not just one culture and quite often things can be slurs (or whatever) to 50 percent of people without actually being part of any kind of cascade, and I think there can be hateful equilibriums that hold for decades. Republicans think badly of democrats and vice versa and neither side is coming close to turning the other word into an unspeakable slur or an un-person category of people in general, even if being a republican makes you an un-person to a lot of dems.
It's interesting that you use Asian as an example of a term that could become a hyperstitious slur without mentioning that this already happened--my mom, who lived in Asia for many years and certainly has the opposite of animus for people from that continent whatever they might be called, is still mad that she's apparently not allowed to call them Orientals anymore.
That’s another of those weird ones where both the preferred and deprecated term mean literally the same thing (e.g. “negro” and “black”) - Asia and the Orient both mean basically “the East”. Eurocentric to be sure but not obvious why one would be more offensive than the other.
The words are not offensive. The people are offended -- or at least they are claiming to be offended. And they are choosing to be offended by one word and not the other. The great push-back which is needed is to re-orient the world to a default position where everybody is presumed responsible for their own feelings. This is unlikely to happen because for the USC authors, this is not about feelings, but about power. This is a society-level hazing operation.
Thank you. I wish this point of view were less rare.
Based on wikipedia, Asia's etymology is not East, it originally referred to a part of Anatolia.
“The eastern shore” of the Aegean, and there’s a more direct possible etymology to “East”, either as “the direction the sun rises” (Semitic root asu)
The connection to asu is speculation.
We can outright rule out the idea that it refers to "the eastern shore" of the Aegean, since the term appears to come from Hittite, and they were located to the east of there.
That might not be an example - during the Nixon administration, a couple of Indian pressure groups successfully campaigned to get out of the "white" category and into the legally-preferred "Asian" one.
In the modern day, this has really hurt them in college admissions, but it continues to have monetary value post-college when dealing with the government.
Anyway, that would have necessitated a shift away from "Oriental", since Indians are obviously not Orientals.
As someone who has been called 'Oriental' once or twice, I've never been offended by it, but I would probably think your mother was strange in the "probably doesn't get out much/hasn't consumed any media in the past fifty years" sense - no real judgment implied, but that's the sentiment it gives off. As a side note, it's a lot more common in Europe ("Oriental barber shops") which is a little funny to me to see because it seems to mean 'Turkish' here more than 'East Asian'.
What you keep referring to as a "stable equilibrium," I call "totalitarian."
In the future, what will happen to businesses that DO NOT put up a rainbow flag on their window?
I'm always amused how people on the right wilfully confuse rainbow washing with poor corporations being enforced to comply with totalitarian culture or else.
Do you know that a lot of the pride participating corporations actlively lobby anti-lgbt politicians?
I am always amused that everyone, left, right and middle believes that moral progress is inevitable and that all progress bends in a leftward arc. But, I have to live here in this bizarro world.
Corporations can do whatever they want, because they are rich and they are corporations. But the difference between legal ramifications (like Obegfeld for example) and what the left likes to call "consequences" of canceling for the little guy when you have mouths to feed is a distinction without a difference. Its cynical, coy sophistry.
Oh no, of course moral progress isn't inevitable. It requires a lot of effort. Thankfully humanity is doing this effort. As for the direction - it actually just goes forward but for historical reasons right wing people are to a significant degree conservatives and reactionaries, so of course it would seem to bend leftward if we judge it with such dychotomy.
Yeah, cancel culture is a problem and civilized society will have to figure out a way to deal with this edge case of freedom of speech. Please tell me, a person living in Russia all my life and currently executing moderate effort to hide from the government in order not to be sent to die in imperialistic war, more how being expected to support lgbt is totally like totalitarianism. It's another things that totally amuses me.
Being disinvited from polite company and not being able to work means your kids don't eat. It's pretty important.
Comparing who's life is more difficult is a futile exercise. My children do that to each other. Is exhausting to listen to.
Also, its not clear what "support lgbt" means.
It's funny that you complain about "racism loosing all meaning" in the different thread while keeping insisting that people being fired from jobs is literally totalitarianism.
Yes, it's bad when your kids can't eat. No, it doesn't make it totalitarisnism. Easy as that.
I'm not sure I am tracking what is so funny about it. Totalitarians seek to control not only your behavior, but the thoughts and words you use to express those thoughts. (Hence the prefix "total"). They don't need gas chambers and gulags to accomplish those goals.
PC and woke movements come from this totalitarian instinct, which is very strong on the left I am afraid.
The mere idea that someone like me exists, with my little heteronormative nuclear intact family living our Christian life and actually believing what we pray around the table while being allowed to earn a living is deeply troubling to these people.
Also, I have deployed to two wars I didn't particularly agree with, so cry me a river.
Totalitarian is not a synonym for “bad thing that becomes socially dominant.”
And likewise “stable equilibrium” is not, as this Scott seems to imply by our host Scott does not, a synonym for “right and good”.
It is funny to watch a series of nice or euphemistic terms go through the process of becoming slurs because the thing they're trying to describe isn't good and people develop the superstitions belief that some it's the word's fault, and if we just change the word we use, the badness will go away. Sort of like the old idea that the word "bear" isn't really the name of the animal, it's what we say INSTEAD of its name because if you say its name, it will hear you and attack.
I think that "ephemism" angle should have been mentioned here. Otherwise we are getting a pretty one sided picture where stupid sjw keep making things slurs for nearly no reason other than to signal their wokeness and conformism, while in reality it's a memetic battle between forces in a culture war.
Some things are both wrong and forbidden to say like "Black people are inherently inferrior to white people". Some people want to say them but not to loose all their social capital. So they create an ephemism, say "Black people commit more crimes than white people", which is both technically true and not forbidden to say and keep using it in the context of Black people inferriority. They now have plausible deniability of "just saying facts" and trying to appear clueless normies which is improved when the ephemism become popular enough that actual clueless normies start using it. As a result there is no more neutral way to talk about "Black people commiting more crimes", because just saying it out of context can very well be an ephemism for racist views. So people on the left talk about systemic racism, consequenses of slavery, adjustments for poverty and all other things that put the phrase in the context that explains it without defaulting to racism. And yeah, also the fact that black people commiting more crimes is partly a hyperstition as well.
There is also a matter of virtue of accuracy that people will inevitably confuse with hyperstition cascades. Saying "gender assigned at birth" is strictly more accurate than just "gender" or "sex" when talking about whatever was written in your birth certificate. Noone reallychecked your gender identity, chromosomes or hormones. There was just made a reasonable guess based on your genitals. That's not how people actually define sex or gender.
Also there is a matter of, not sure how to call that, linguistic truth? I've never heard that "the X" is potentially dehumanising before. But now when you brought it to my attention - indeed it seem to be ruder form than saying "X people". Try rephrasing "Eat The Rich" to "Eat Rich People" - it immediately becomes less snappy and more awkward. And yeah, to answer the question, obviously "the rich" is just as dehumanising as "the poor". The difference is in the fact that being rich is more high status than being poor and being attributed to a faceless high status mass is better than to a faceless low status mass. Also rich people can handle a little dehumanisation much better due to having much more resources. So I think I'm joining the cascade early on the grounds of basic niceness and will make some effort to say "X people" instead of "the X".
And of course there is also the revese process of "reclaiming a slur", which happens occasionally without any intervention of the King of Language. It just have to be an initiative from the group that the slur is against. "Queer", I think, is the very good example here. So yeah, if a lot of Japaneese people coordinate and proclaim that "Jap" isn an acceptable short form to talk about them - soon it won't be a slur anymore.
Part of the problem is the notion is that if people say (certain) wrong things, even in veiled forms, they need to loose all their "social capital" (in practice we're talking about suffering material penalties like not being able to get a job), and this is even more important than letting people say true things.
Why? One of the common justifications is that black people shouldn't have to work side-by-side with openly racist people and tolerate them; that's a hostile environment, unfair and illegal. But notice that this doesn't even mean black people don't have racists around them! It just means they are not allowed to know who they are: to the extent the system is effective, they don't know that any particular co-worker is racist, but they also can't know that any particular co-worker isn't racist, because everyone is forced to pretend not to be racist.
Or maybe it's to prevent racists from spreading particular racist ideas? But the whole point is that they are prohibited from signalling racism in any way, even by saying things a non-racist may say too (or might if they didn't signal racism).
Or maybe to prevent racists from making it common knowledge that there are many other racists, and feel emboldened by that? But then why do the anti-racists themselves spare no effort convincing people that society is full of racists?
In practice, it's because every company wants to fend off racial harassment/discrimination lawsuits by convincing courts that "there are no racists here, everyone here is an enthusiastic anti-racist, all the racists must be employed somewhere else", and this works relatively well even if everyone is actually just forced to pretend that they're enthusiastic anti-racists.
I think I agree with you on net, but to steelman the other side with an example: if you believe racism toward black people is common enough to be a threat to individual black people (this doesn't have to be very common), black people would benefit from having at-least-slightly-costly signals of non-racism. By using hyperstition cascades, you can keep the goalposts moving, which keeps people working to perform non-racism. "colored" signals likely racism, "African American" signals being out of touch so not fully trustworthy, "black" signals being likely trustworthy, and "person of color" signals paying active attention (that one has probably mostly lost its value by now, but still). I suspect that does pay genuine dividends to individual black people, even if it's annoying and looks a bit silly and costs society some.
In the Japanese example, when anti-japanese sentiment was common, having flags for trying-to-be-decent was probably really valuable?
I guess overall, being in the first 1% means you're a dick, but being 5-15th% probably signals trustworthiness?
The problem is, the goal of creating trustworthy signals of non-racism inherently conflicts with the parallel goal (of the same people) of making it impossible to signal racism and get away with it.
Either let people say what they want—then racists will say racist things; but if someone doesn't say racist things, you can easily trust that he isn't racist. Or punish people for behaving in any way that suggests that they might be racist, but then you have no way to trust that anyone is definitely not racist. Choose one.
(Similarly, let racist whites segregate themselves from black people, and then black people can surround themselves with people who are definitely not racist against them. Or do your best to make it impossible for racist whites to segregate themselves, and black people have no way to avoid being around racist whites, as long as there are any. At that point, you can choose whether to let them know which whites around them are racist and which ones aren't.)
EDIT: Why does the signal of non-racism have to be costly? I guess because even racists are pressured to signal non-racism. But again, do you want black people to know who's not racist? If yes, then don't incentivize racists to dishonestly signal non-racism, and then no racist will dishonestly signal it even if it's cheap. If no, don't create signals (costly or otherwise) that allow non-racists to signal their non-racism.
Humans are ridiculously social animals. Some even think primarily in terms of what's socially acceptable, and secondarily in terms of what's true. (See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ regarding food preferences.) So for some people, seeing other people signal being racist will convince them that it's ok to be racist, and increase the total amount of racism.
This article is good But you chose two poor examples.
The Confederate flag is a bad example.
It was added to bunch of state flags in the 1890s. It was part of enacting Jim crow.
It was added to Georgia's in 1956 as part of defending Jim Crow.
So yes there was some "innocent" use I guess, but the "first 5-10-25%" of making it a racist hate symbol was done by the actual Confederacy (We kind of had a war over it.) and then Southern legislatures using it as a sticker to brand the reassertion of a racist caste system.
Similarly, you live in California.
You probably have been to some Japanese internment memorials. You've probably seen some of the surprisingly racist dr. Seuss cartoons. The use of Jap was not innocent after 1941.
The Confederate flag is a superb example. Most people flying that flag are not (or at least were not until the last 10–20 years) "racists" in the old meaning of that term; they are expressing their Southern pride/rebellious spirit. It is (or was) primarily an anti-*Yankee* symbol, not an anti-*black* symbol. You can argue that its history and connotations make it inherently racist, but that's just exactly the process being described.
Again, look when it was put into the state flags. It wasn't put up during the war or right after. It was put up as part of Jim Crow and as a way to say fuck you to civil rights in the 1950's.
The KKK also used a ton of Confederate flags.
Like this branding goes back a long way.
While I agree those uses existed, the uses that Calion describes also definitely existed as the primary “meaning” of the flag over some period that ended recently (let’s call it the “Dukes of Hazzard” era). The DOHE lasted until at least the mid 90s - I distinctly remember the WalMart in my (very Northern!) hometown having merchandise with Rebel Flags (and that’s always what it was called) printed on it. Around the schoolyard it was absolutely understood that this was a cool symbol you’d use to signal “rebelliousness” and “anti-authority” and “yay Lynyrd Skynyrd” not “I hate black people”. Punk perhaps, but not racist.
So there absolutely was a “hyperstition cascade” centered on the flag that occurred over the last 2+ decades. And the centering of discussion on the flag’s “anti-civil rights” meanings rather than on “them Duke boys” is one of the mechanisms of the hyperstition.
The “truth” about how offensive / racist the flag “should” be is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion of the hyperstition phenomenon. The people who insisted “black” should be used instead of “negro” were very sincere believers that the latter had always been racist in its origins.
Just this, though I highly question the last sentence.
This is bs. The confederate flag has always been an FU to blacks, northerners and pluralists.
If celebration of Southern culture was point the flag would have okra, banjo and a nascar on it.
How old are you? Honest question, not a gotcha. I feel like there is a fairly hard generational split in what people grew up thinking about it. I’m an “old millennial” and as a (northern) kid it was definitely “cool anti-authority, disdain for ‘fancy’ culture, ‘redneck’ pride” (I recognize it’s viewed differently now, and maybe rightly so, but I’m not going to retroactively pretend it was being used that way back then). But every Zoomer I encounter is sure it’s super racist and always has been. There may be other shifts farther back.
I'm in 60s, so a boomer. I personally have known people who marched with King.
The Confederate Flag has always been racist, anti-urban, and anti-multicultural competency. To not acknowledge that it has always been that way is nonsense.
The "it's just a southern thing" is a covering up of the real truth. It might even be self-deception that parents and grandparents weren't racists. But the truth is the truth. I think it should also also be called the "Traitor flag". Just like the fiction that the Civil War was not about slavery - of course, it was. Parrhesia!
Right. But I’m not talking about hiding grandma being racist, I’m talking about a nontrivial number of my actual early 90s peers adopting it for reasons orthogonal to racism or slavery (not me personally, so I don’t have a totally inside view into their hearts I guess). I get that I’m asking you to take my word for it, but that’s also “the truth”.
I wasn’t in the south to be fair so maybe it lost that context when it migrated north.
So maybe boomers -> it’s racist, Gen X / old millenial -> loses some of its racist connotation, late millenial / zoomer -> it’s totally racist again.
“The Civil War was about slavery” is true (with caveats and complexities, but sure, that’s your one sentence root cause). But “the Civil War was fought between abolitionists and slave owners / people who personally supported slavery”, which seems to be how that gets spun these days, is misleading.
It is racist. Period. It always was.
That people pretended it wasn't and maybe fooled themselves, I don't what to say.
That zoomers don't really know how bad it actually was is a whole different question.
Maybe by the 90s, grandchildren of immigrants from the 20s started imagining that they were whites and WASPs and so took on the racist Southern WASP culture especially after Reagan recession/depression of 80s broke people economically without really understanding it.
Maybe Clinton, Gore and Gingrich made it seem like there was a new South and the meaning of symbols was muddled.
The southern traitor states attempted to violently cede specifically and directly to preserve the institution of slavery. And then continued the oppression by different means Jim Crow and traiter flag and confederate monuments. Like also gnostic movements secret unspoken but known symbols of the "cause" - WASP supremacy.
>The Confederate Flag has always been racist, anti-urban, and anti-multicultural competency.
Could you define “racist” in this context?
What in okra, banjo, and a nascar represents a spirit of rebellion to centralized authority?
Is "rebellion" "culture"?
symbols, language, food, arts, music, customs.
The traitor flag can never be a symbol of "the South" because it is an FU to a at least 30-40% of the southern population (blacks descended from enslaved).
As to the non-black population of South how possibly could traitor flag be a symbol of foreign immigrants who overwhelmingly came after civil war or northern transplants who overwhelmingly came South recently as rust Bowl dislocations and as Atlanta and NC (medical research) became cosmopolitan.
To assert that the flag is in any way benign is really a crypto-racist and crypto-no nothing tell.
No, you’re right, a spirit of rebellion cannot be part of a culture, which is why the culture of the United States is not based in large part on its rebellion against the British..
Even that is a mythology.
But American culture is certainly bound up not in "rebellion" but in the use of violence to reject laws.
Probably one of the most important motivator of revolution in south was avoidance of somerset v stewart, in north it was avoidance of laws against smuggling (basically tax scofflaws).
In 1772, King's Bench, ruled in the case of Somerset v Stewart that it was unlawful for Charles Steuart (or Stewart) to transport James Somerset, an enslaved African he had purchased in Virginia, forcibly out of England.
So a long with okra, banjo and nascar add a gun.
America America mend thy every flaw.
Also: Man, those black crypto-racists are something, aren’t they? https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/06/black_veteran_a_son_of_the_sou.html
You're always going to be able to find the odd ball. Maybe he thinks he can be a as vanguard appropriate it and flip it. But we should not discount the amount of self-loathing and attention seeking behavior involved in that process.
>>It is (or was) primarily an anti-*Yankee* symbol, not an anti-*black* symbol.
This falls apart when one interrogates why the South had an "anti-Yankee symbol" to begin with. If the Yanks had been cool with slavery, no symbol. Same if they'd later been cool with Jim Crow. So yeah, it's anti-Yankee, but only to the extent those damned Yanks insist on abolishing slavery, desegregating schools, etc.
Yeah…that is ridiculously simplistic. To think the only reason Southerners don’t like Yankees—or the only reason for the Civil War—was that the South hated blacks and wanted slavery and the North did not hate blacks and wanted to abolish slavery is not only oversimplified, it’s flatly false.
Also, your generous overuse of the word "racist" is telling.
It is a perfect example of why this policy you have prescribed doesn't work. "Racist" now no longer contains any useful rational meaning for the majority. Same with "misogyny" and all the rest of it.
90% of people who display confederate flags are signaling their "racism" to you? Yikes. What a drag it must be to have to deploy such an obtuse screening measure against your fellow Americans.
There is a giant spectrum of positions on race and the role it should play in society and almost none of it is hostile toward any particular race. But we are no longer allowed to explore those options because of the stable equilibrium of which you write.
That is indeed how it's widely seen. I'm not sure I see your point here.
I think his point is the way it is widely seen is often wrong. Large swaths of people written off as “irredeemably racist”, are not particularly “racist” in the traditional sense at all. They just have some beliefs about racial matters that don’t correspond to the current HR orthodoxy. That isn’t the same thing.
“I don’t want to live next to black people because I hate darkies” is racist. “I don’t want to live next to black people because it is a good sign that a neighborhood has high crime and low social functioning/compliance”, is not.
Yeah it is annoying it is hard to tell the two types of people apart, but life was never guaranteed to be easy, and lumping them together creates more problems than it solves since you create more actual racists by branding non-racists racists (once they are already called racists injustly, the social cost of going the rest of the way becomes nil).
Not only that, but “I don’t want to live next to black people because it is a good sign that a neighborhood has high crime and low social functioning/compliance”, when spelled out that way, points to actual problems that can and should be addressed and whose solution would benefit black people as well. Making it taboo to mention the problem prevents any attempt to even think about a solution.
Omg.
You are very confused.
Enlighten me, then...
Non-substantive posts like this are strongly discouraged here (as I discovered when I received a 1% ban for doing so). Please spell out your claims if you have them.
Who the heck are you?
My post was very specific.
"A friend's black neighbor flies a confederate flag to celebrate south" implicitly suggesting that its not racist. This is dubious on many accounts and not credible to me.
Yes, absolutely. Because you can make that point about black neighborhoods and be honestly curious about the causes of it without hate or condescension.
Seeing how NOT making that point has probably cost the lives of thousands of black people over the last two-and-a-half years, maybe a little less preemptive mindreading and a little more attention to facts would be worth a try?
Nobody is "irredeemably racist"!
Repent and sin no more;
metanoia is always possibility.
Even George Wallace repented.
Truth and reconciliation is always possible and guaranteed when loving one's neighbor as yourself is embraced. Solidarity is possible and the true human condition.
Sure, but is that somehow Scott’s fault?
100% percent are Traitor Flag flyers are signally racism!
Who the heck fly that flag without intending to make such a statement or without understanding it could and will be taken that way.
If you don't understand that then you should be ashamed.
https://www.al.com/opinion/2015/06/black_veteran_a_son_of_the_sou.html
It's mildly amusing that “negro” became unacceptable explicitly because of its ~european etymology, to be replaced by another term “black”, also has a ~european etymology.
True. Of course, if you wanted to choose a word of African etymology, there are probably hundreds of languages to choose from, and choosing one would exclude the others.
Would someone please explain how "Oriental" got added to this train? It just means "Eastern" for Chrissakes! How in the world is that offensive? <oldmanyellsatcloud.jpg>
Likely because not many people use the word. The only major examples I can think of involve quite racist British 'Orientalists'. If you've grown up in a group where most people use the word, then it won't be a useful signal to you, but if you're from Asia then likely the only times you've heard this word is in reference to these Orientalists, and people who agree with their views.
Not many people use it because it is considered offensive. ~Thirty years ago, it was used many places where “Asian” is used now.
I think it was an occident.
LOL +1
It's Eurocentrist. Calling China, Japan, Korea, etc. "the East" implies a "central location" (i.e., Europe) for them to be East of.
I personally am mad about replacing BC/AD with BCE/CE. It's worse in every way.
Except we call *ourselves* “the West,” implying…what? That Afghanistan is the center of the world?
Also, “Asia” originally just meant part of what is now Turkey, so………
Is the following statement inaccurate / off?
Hyperstition ⊂ Self-Fulfilling Prophecies, i.e. hyperstitions are a subset of self-fulfilling prophecies but pertaining only beliefs (quote: "...a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true.")
I didn't see any reference to self-fulfilling prophecies mentioned (please forgive me if this question / observation was already commented). Wikipedia, Self-fulfilling prophecy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
This is a really good essay, thanks!
Just two points: first, to understand the motivation behind the drive to replace old terms by new ones, the concept of "shibboleth" (and the biblical story behind it - http://web.mit.edu/jywang/www/cef/Bible/NIV/NIV_Bible/JUDG+12.html ) is really helpful.
Second: with words for which an easy substitute can be found, 70% sounds reasonable (although 90% would probably be better)... but for important facts, can we please please agree to set the threshold at 99.999%? We're getting close to where pointing out that there are exactly two biological sexes in animals gets you labeled as a transphobe, and that way madness lies.
This is why I push back on the penis havers and XY chromosome types getting to call themselves women. Sorry that word is taken!
Well, if “Jap” is to be re-admitted to polite discourse, there are some other candidates that have been used for other peoples in similarly derogatory ways. In no particular order: spic, mick, coolie, wetback, nip, bohunk, jock, sambo, Canuck, kraut, greaser, frog, slope, Uncle Tom, wop, Dago, guinea , spade, Papist, babu, wog, chink, fritz, gook, hymie, whitie, tonto, jungle bunny, dinks, redskin, injun, polack , portugee, ruski, banana, oreo, mulatto, half breed, mongrel, beaner, Buddha head, rag head, Charlie, goombah, honky, beastly hun, white trash, trailer trash, zoot suit. As Whizzer White said of pornography, I can know a slur when I hear one. Only when a target group adopts a term, like Chicano, and uses it outside the group should we think about rehab for slurs.
Jap is a contradiction of a longer word. Different category.
Usage, not grammatical categorization, is the source of the character of a word as a slur.
Polak isn't a slur. My grandpa'd have told you off if you tried to tell him he wasn't a polak.
Maybe in general, people who don't consider a word a slur should be more willing to state their case. Angry people are always going to be the more vocal ones otherwise.
The people who started the screaming about the redskins team name weren’t native Americans. Offense is largely performance to show you are the good people and to demand that others also perform to demonstrate membership on the correct side.
Speaking as a non-american, I actually had no idea "Jap" was considered offensive.
Some light googling seems to hint at this being a really terrible slur in the US, whereas in most other places it's considered at worst slightly offensive? Kind of interesting that such language siloing can still exist in these internet days.
And now I'm not sure if I should stop using it out of kindness towards japanese-americans, or continue using it out of principled resistance to US cultural hegemony and trying to stop/reverse the cascade outside of the US. When talking to an actual person it's easy to choose of course, but when broadcasting to the entire internet?
To Englishmen of my generation - I was born in ‘57 - ‘Brit’ certainly is a slur. It was introduced by the IRA. I hate the way it is used casually today.
I also thought this was a funny suggestion for a counter-example, since 'Brit' is in fact a slur.
Someone needs to tell the “BritBox” UK content streaming service I subscribed to recently. Or rather, keep the apparent respectability cascade going and don’t tell them.
'Practicum' sounds more worthy than 'field' yet ‘Practicum’ is derived from late Latin, neuter of practicus ‘practical’. Since the Romans were slave owners, colonisers by conquest, despoilers of colonial resources, cultural appropriators, and global polluters through their smelting of lead, the use of ‘practicum’ seems even more inappropriate.
Hush! Don't give them ideas! Next up, all words of Latin origin will be up for cancellation!
My gosh, "social dominance" would be a breath of fresh air. That would mean you can still survive in this society if you openly hold an alternative viewpoint.
Tell all the people who have lost businesses, been canceled, etc that what they are facing is just "social dominance."
Very common to hear “jap” in Singapore, eg “Let’s go to a jap restaurant.” If you told the locals that’s offensive, they’d just chuckle over Americans and they’re missionary zeal.
It’s a holdover from WWII. I doubt any American would give a rats ass nowadays because not enough virtue signal points.
I just commented to a friend via text message that some people think a period at the end of sentence in a text message is somehow viewed as strict or offensive, and that for now on I'll start using more periods when I text.
Text chatting usually consists of messages no longer than a single full sentence, so capitalization and periods are omitted. Using both of them definitely sends a formal/hostile vibe, and using periods only would be just weird/silly.
Definitely? If I never thought it was hostile or silly, should I start thinking it looks that way now? If you get offended whenever you see a period in a text message, and that feeling you have was not at all the intention of the writer, where does that hostility come from?
Do you have a source for this claim:
"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, it successfully avoids the hyperstitious slur and lets you mention the fact in that one special-purpose case."
I didn't know that that was false (which I realize is the obvious consequence of people that I usually consider to be in good standing saying exactly that). And while I assume you wouldn't make a statement like that without some strong evidence, it's still difficult for me to believe it. Also linking to that evidence could act as a lightning rod for undue viral "look at this covertly racist blog" attention.
It comes out clearly in Chetty's massive data set. The disparity in criminality actually _increases_ with parents' income. Steve Sailer has written about it many times, but you can also see it in NYT https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html (search for "Share of the men incarcerated").
Here's my non-paywalled version of the amazing Chetty Chart of imprisonment rate to parents' income as an adolescent:
https://www.takimag.com/article/americas-black-male-problem/
In addition to Chetty, this classic RCA post looks into homicide specifically:
https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differences-in-homicide-rates-are-poorly-explained-by-economics/
I was with you until your passage about the AP style guide regarding "the poor" etc. Even though I had never heard of this issue before, it was quite easy to see what they meant. It *is* dehumanizing to refer to "the rich". Whatever sentence that phrase occurs in is likely to make some generalization about the group, rather than treating them as individuals, making wealth the defining characteristic of its members; and the generalization is likely truly only a tendency (not a tautology). That it seems obvious to you that this is not a problem is because being rich has been seen positively by most people in the US for most of its history, or at least more so than in some other times and places. Referring to a Lavoisier as a "person with wealth" rather than simply a member of "the rich" might lead marginally enough people to consider his other personal characteristics, to allow him to keep his head. You posed what you seem to think is a rhetorical question, but it doesn't seem to me that you thought it through.
This example aside, I do find your exposition of affective connotation as a dynamical system insightful and illuminating. And I admire the phrase "hyperstitious slur" that you came up with to summarize the phenomenon, it's delightfully apt.
Is this satire? I can’t tell. “might lead marginally enough people to consider his other personal characteristics” um, no.
I doubt it is, because I also had this thought - saying 'the rich' makes it easy to make broad generalisations than e.g. 'rich people'. It's just how language works - 'the rich' conjures up an image of a faceless mass. 'The rich' is less likely to be considered insulting, but no less 'dehumanising' in a literal sense.
Consider two slogans - 'eat the rich!' and 'eat rich people!'. The second sounds ridiculous.
Sorry but both sound rather equivalent to me.
I think on some level slurs and taboos taken too far by a society are equivalent to religious and superstitious thinking: think of how in islamic culture it’s taboo to mention the name “Mohammed”, in certain southern African cultures women must never say the names of female in-laws, and even in Harry Potter, saying “Voldemort” is taboo!
Surely it's not taboo to mention the name Mohammed in a place where every fourth man is named Mohammed?
Two minor nit-picks:
1) does any group EXCEPT the Brits get abbreviated in a non-offensive way? And I'm not that sure about "Brit".
2) "Poor people" rather than "the poor". "Rich people" rather than "the rich". The distinction is slight, but consider how "eat the rich!" sounds compared to "eat rich people," and then decide if the former language is dehumanizing or not.
The fins? The Swedes? Not quite sure if those count as abbreviations, but they seems to Finnish/ Swedish as Brits does to British
1) The Aussies. Maybe the Canucks?
2) "Kill the Poor" implies we should kill all poor people, "Kill poor people" implies we should kill some.
Kiwis?
Canucks i thought was potentially offensive. I remember something with Muskie's campaign.
Never forget Monty Python. "Jehova, Jehova"
Self-fulling prophecy?
The thing that annoys me most is when the "slur" gets replaced by something functionally identical, or arguably MORE offensive, and pointing this out causes people to bite your head off.
"Coloured people" was seen as an offensive term for non-white people for decades, to the point that even woke actors like Benedict Cumberbatch have caught flak for using it casually. In woke circles, the preferred term for this group of people is "people of colour", which is just the same words in a different order. And this distinction doesn't apply to any of the subsets of "people of colour": no one demands that you refer to Asian people as "people of Asian" or black people as "people of black", though maybe they will now that I've put the idea in their heads.
10 years ago, a common point in geek feminist circles was admonishing men not to refer to women as "females", as it's subtly objectifying to reduce someone to their sex. Fair enough, point taken. But the modern trans-inclusive variety of feminism wants us to refer to female people as "breastfeeders", "people who menstruate" or "vagina-havers". If someone can explain to me why calling a woman a "female" is objectifying or dehumanizing, but calling her a "menstruator" isn't, I'll buy them dinner. I believe noting this absurdity was one of the first things that landed JK Rowling in hot water.
> If someone can explain to me why calling a woman a "female" is objectifying or dehumanizing, but calling her a "menstruator" isn't, I'll buy them dinner.
Let me try.
Using "menstruator" as a direct substitute for a "woman" would indeed be offensive. That's where the offensivness of female is comming from, as you already understand.
But the thing is, such words as "menstruator" or "brestfeeder" are not supposed to be used like that. They are only supposed to be used in the specific relevant context where they are unoffensive. For instance, if we are specifically talking about breastfeeding, a word "brestfeeder" is relevant and actually more accurate than "woman", because not all women brestfeed and not all brestfeeders are women. Likewise, when we are specifically talking about menstruation, or gynecology etc. This is just using a more accurate term and there is nothing offensive about it.
Only a biological woman can actually breastfeed. Anything else is performative and I refuse to play along. If this is offensive, so be it. Words do not change biology but they can confuse. I’d like to be around when some new generation rediscovers what humans have observed for thousands of years. Surgery and drugs, much less a dress, cannot turn anyone into a biological female.
And some of these "biological females" are not women, yet they can still breastfeed whether you "play along" or not.
Notice that "breastfeeder" is still a more accurate term than "biological female", when we are talking specifically about breastfeeding. Because not all females breastfeed.
This sounds like word salad to me.
Sure, well, kind of. But plenty of biological women *can't* breastfeed, so saying it is still more specific and intentional than including a wide swathe of non-breastfeeding people.
>This is just using a more accurate term and there is nothing offensive about it.
Well, again, that's your assertion. Some people (JK Rowling, for instance) are very offended by this creepily clinical language and preferred the old way of doing things. Perhaps you think the offense they're taking is unwarranted - if that's what you say, come out and say so. Present to me a convincing argument why the offense taken by (a minority of) trans people is legitimate and worthy of accommodation, and the offense taken by TERFs is illegitimate and silly.
I could equally counter that there's "nothing offensive" about using the word "women" as synonymous with "adult human females", and if a tiny minority of extremely online, extremely neurotic trans people (not trans people as a whole, most of whom, in my experience, are nowhere NEAR as thin-skinned as this) get bent out of shape about it, that's their problem.
I see you disagree with me on "there is nothing offensive about it" part. I'll address it, but firstly, do we agree on "more accurate" part?
Also, your initial question was "why menstruator isn't offensive for the same reasons that female is offensive" The answer is that menstruator isn't used in the same context female is (as a substitute for woman) thus the situations are different. Do you understand this?
I find it important to clear this points first, before we can talk about other reasons why people can be offended and their validity.
Before trans activism became a mainstream, highly influential phenomenon, mainstream media outlets could publish an article aimed at women with advice about breastfeeding. Perhaps cis women who didn't (personal choice, or unable to have kids) or couldn't (had previously undergone a double mastecomy) breastfeed were insulted by this, because "not ALL women breastfeed", but I'm not aware of it.
Nowadays, a tiny minority of the people who breastfeed don't identify as women (only a tiny minority of female people identify as trans men; of whom only a tiny minority have children [many of them are unable to because medical transition has rendered them infertile]; of whom only a subset breastfeed their children [personal choice, or having undergone a double mastectomy as part of medical transition]). A minority of extremely online trans activists (to reiterate, I personally know several trans people, only one of whom was offended by the term "pregnant women" as opposed to "pregnant people") have complained that talking about "breastfeeding women" is trans-exclusionary because of the aforesaid group,. They request that the people in question be referred to as "breastfeeders" or "chestfeeders" instead.
I accept that, in the narrow sense, this terminology is more precise than referring to "women", because not every woman breastfeeds and not everyone who breastfeeds identifies as a woman. But we're not just talking about accuracy and precision here; we're also talking about tone. The term "chestfeeders" is CREEPY. Referring to body parts as distinct from the person they belong to is clinical, mechanistic and off-putting. To many people (myself included) it's unnervingly reminiscent of the kind of intentionally distancing and dehumanizing language used in dystopian science fiction.
Maybe the subset of trans men who breastfeed their children, as a whole, prefer this language to the previous arrangement, and don't find it creepy or off-putting. Fair enough, everyone is entitled to their preferences. But I reject the claim that, because the terms "breastfeeders" or "chestfeeders" are ACCURATE, they are therefore INOFFENSIVE. I think finding this language creepy and off-putting is a perfectly understandable human reaction, which can't be simply dismissed on the grounds that it's "accurate" or "inclusive". Trans people don't simply get to declare by fiat that THEIR emotional reactions to language are valid and legitimate, and other people's aren't.
Disability rights advocates talk a lot about "reasonable accommodations". Completely restructuring the way the English language discusses sex and gender so that 1% of the population feels more "included" or "centred" is an accommodation, to be sure, but I don't think it's a reasonable one.
Okay I'm glad that we are in agreement about the accuracy part.
I also agree with your point that just the fact that something is preceise, doesn't mean that it's inoffencive, in the sense that noone will ever be offended. Probably nothing is inoffensive in this sense.
But here is the thesis that I'm making: word accuracy actually correlates with their inoffensiveness. The more preciese are the words the less possibilities for misinterpretations there are. When we say that women breastfeed, we exclude actual people, invalidating their identities. This is a perpetual reason for offense, that isn't going anywhere untill we fix the language. When we say that brestfeeders brestfeed we do not commit similar mistake.
We can still creep out people who dislike the term brestfeeder. But it's a very different class of offense, one that will naturally dissapear just by people being exposured to the language and accepting it. New generation wouldn't mind. Thus more accurate language is inherently less offensive, even though there may be some dissatisfied preferences in the transition period.
And it's not just about accomodating the 1% minority of trans people. It's also about people who care very much about trans people, people who care very much about the accuracy of the language or making language less offensive in general and other groups of people invested in the issue. And the reason we see that the situation gets traction is that there are a lot of such people so the accomodation is pretty reasonable.
>word accuracy actually correlates with their inoffensiveness
This just strikes me as wishful thinking. It would be more "accurate" and "precise" to tell someone "you smell really bad and it's making me feel ill", but doing so would be far more rude and offensive than politely hinting that someone take a shower or apply deodorant. It would be more "accurate" and "precise" to tell someone "I don't find you sexually attractive because you are ugly and overweight", but doing so would be far more rude and offensive than telling them "I think we'd be better off as friends". In fact, I would go so far to say that cases in which bluntly and accurately stating the factual state of affairs is LESS offensive than couching it in a veiled euphemism are the exception rather than the rule.
>And it's not just about accomodating the 1% minority of trans people.
No, it's not about accommodating the 1% of minority of trans people. It's about accommodating <the subset of the 1% minority of trans people> who are offended by phrases like "pregnant women" or "women who breastfeed", which is vastly smaller than trans people as a whole, most of whom are unbothered by this phrasing. I also care about trans people, which does not mean that I believe that every demand made by every single trans person should be instantly acceded to without question, no matter how unreasonable.
Again, I simply do not understand why we must default to accommodating the most neurotic, thin-skinned and easily offended members of our society. Why does the offense experienced by an unusually neurotic trans person by the phrase "pregnant women" automatically supersede the offense experienced by the average cis person by the phrase "chestfeeders"? At what point am I allowed to say "sorry, but if you're offended by this that's a you problem"?
TLDR biological males who have had surgery and hormones insist that everyone believe they are actually women biologically.
Excuse you, ape, the correct term is "chestfeeder". "Breast" is unnecessarily gendered and may be provocative of dysphoria in people who do not have positive associations in the matter of possessing these secondary sexual organs.
https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/having-a-baby-if-you-are-lgbt-plus/chestfeeding-if-youre-trans-or-non-binary/
https://www.laleche.org.uk/support-transgender-non-binary-parents/
"Transgender dad Trevor MacDonald writes that, “It is equally important to note that some trans people experience severe gender dysphoria when breast or chestfeeding, and that they may decide not to nurse their babies for mental health reasons. Trans parents choosing to breast or chestfeed and those choosing to suppress lactation and bottlefeed may require the support of breastfeeding counsellors or lactation professionals.”
My native language doesn't have a distinction between between "chest" and "breast". But I can see why people whose language does, may feel uncomfortable.
I think it's completely reasonable if people who are more comfortable with the term "chestfeeding" used it regarding themselves.
[EDIT: this was meant as a half sarcastic, half "intellectual Turing test" description of the thought process behind attempts to restructure the language so that there isn’t a convenient way to refer to biological men and women anymore. It is not what I actually believe.]
Trans-inclusive feminists don't want you to refer to female people as "vagina-havers". In fact, ideally, you shouldn't have a convenient way to refer to "female people" as a distinct group at all. If all the available words for that group are awkward, offensive, inappropriately clinical, or all of those at the same time, and not something you could use in casual conversation, that's a feature, not a bug!
There's just women, with or without a vagina, and men, also with or without a vagina. In the ideal world, there wouldn't be a separate word for "biological females" any more than there's a short succinct commonly-used term for "people whose belly-button is an outtie". Why would you need to have a word for that?
>Trans-inclusive feminists don't want you to refer to female people as "vagina-havers".
Yes they do, I've seen this exact phrasing in writing dozens of times. I've personally witnessed people being admonished that the phrase "pregnant women" is transphobic, for instance. Here's an article (in that famous hive of scum and TERFery The Guardian) debating the merits of trans-inclusive language in a medical context https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/06/inclusive-language-on-maternity-care-risks-excluding-many-women. Stop telling me that something I've personally seen happening isn't happening.
>In the ideal world, there wouldn't be a separate word for "biological females" any more than there's a short succinct commonly-used term for "people whose belly-button is an outtie". Why would you need to have a word for that?
If "people whose belly-button is an outtie" were able to experience a vast range of medical conditions and illnesses (including, but not limited to, pregnancy, menstruation, ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, cervical cancer, endometriosis) that "people whose belly-button is an innie" are incapable of ever experiencing, we absolutely WOULD need a specific term for "people whose belly-button is an outie". People whose belly-button is an outtie is almost always a clinically irrelevant fact; sex is not, ever. This might amaze you to hear, but a person's sex is actually an extremely important fact about them in a medical context, probably more important than any other single fact about their body. You can build the most trans-inclusive society imaginable, your "ideal world", and it won't have the slightest bit of bearing on the fact that uterine cancer only affects one half of the population (the half that actually HAS A UTERUS), regardless of how the members of that half might identify. It boggles my mind that you seem to think that biological sex is some kind of trivial point about someone's body, like eye or hair colour. PLEASE tell me that's not what you ACTUALLY believe and I'm just misinterpreting you.
Thank you. Now we’ve come to the crux of the thing. Some people actually believe that using different words to describe reality changes the underlying reality. Shakespeare had a neat phrase about this.
> PLEASE tell me that's not what you ACTUALLY believe and I'm just misinterpreting you.
It's not; I was trying to sarcastically summarise what I believe to be the underlying reasoning behind such language policing.
I fully agree with everything you wrote about how, as long as humans procreate primarily via sex and pregnancy, reproductive biology is going to be a lot more relevant to ordinary people's daily lives than belly-button shape. But this does appear to be the idea behind e.g. people complaining about "pregnant women": they want to posit a world in which self-identified gender is the only thing that matters 99% of the time, and biological sex is just some unimportant technicality which may be relevant in some highly specific medical contexts but should not come up in 99% of regular conversations.
Oh thank Christ. Poe's law strikes again! Mea culpa, sorry for misinterpreting you.
No problem, I could certainly have made my sarcasm more obvious! In fact I guess I was kinda going for an "intellectual turing test" style attempt at describing their views in words which they would actually agree with and consider a fair a description.
If you honestly cannot see the difference between "person who possesses this set of biological organs" and "person who possesses a different set of biological organs", I don't know what to say.
Why do we have different terms for different countries, in that case? Why do we make distinctions between species of animals? Heck, why do we need a special word for "animals that live in the sea"?
EDIT: I see below you were in fact being sarcastic. Thank you. Though the problem is there are some people who express attitudes not a million miles away from "there's no need for separate words", and you never can be 100% in the know about who is really meaning what they say and who is only spoofing.
Poe's law strikes again!
> the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible
They want power and they get it if the cascade takes off. I can't do better than to quote MM in the argument at Scott Aaronson about some scientists ('scientists'?) who ran a campaign trying to make 'quantum supremacy' a slur: (how did that one end, I wonder?)
---
There is another perspective on this debate. The other perspective says that whatever you think you are doing, what you are actually doing is: bullying computer scientists. Whoever you think you are doing it for, bullying computer scientists does not affect those people at all. It does affect the computer scientists. And it does affect you. It makes you feel strong and proud and important. So does cocaine. Your career might even profit from it — you can certainly profit from cocaine.
There is really very little that we human beings enjoy more than telling other people what to do. Once we have a socially accepted rationalization for exercising dominance — like the idea that bullying computer scientists can protect the underprivileged from the vast anti-underprivileged conspiracy — anything in the hominin clade will be on it like a piranha on a meatball.
Maybe you could call it the Karen cascade. Wow, did I just use a slur there? Why yes I did. But it’s much less important what the actual word is than that some will object to its coinage. We could all be talking about the annoying Beckys who want to police you. Words like this are handy shorthand. I believe this re-naming fever is less about bossing people and more about virtue signaling. Saying the correct word makes you a better person. As if. But it does signal that you have the correct ideas and belong to the correct “good people” group.
"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."
Forty years ago was only twenty-eight years after Emmet Till's lynching, and a time when a majority of Americans did not support interracial marriage, so I warrant that a lot of people displaying the Confederate flag then were out and out white supremacists. The idea that the Confederate flag has ever been an uncontentious symbol, free of any racist connotations, is extremely bizarre, to say the least.
Yes bizarre.
Confederate flag ALWAYS a southern white fu to blacks, northerners, and multicultural pluralists.
It is absolute dishonesty to suggest otherwise. Both in intent and known effect.
"It is absolute dishonesty to suggest otherwise. Both in intent and known effect."
Better tell these Canadian researchers they don't know their business, so:
https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/4985/4985.html
"Supporters of the Confederate battle flag often argue that their support is driven by pride in the South, not negative racial attitudes. Opponents of the Confederate battle flag often argue that the flag represents racism, and that support for the flag is an expression of racism and an attempt to maintain oppression of Blacks in the Southern United States. We evaluate these two competing views in explaining attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag in the Southern United States through a survey of 526 Southerners. In the aggregate, our latent variable model suggests that White support for the flag is driven by Southern pride, political conservatism, and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks. Using cluster-analysis we were able to distinguish four distinct sub-groups of White Southerners: Cosmopolitans, New Southerners, Traditionalists, and Supremacists. The greatest support for the Confederate battle flag is seen among Traditionalists and Supremacists; however, Traditionalists do not display blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks, while Supremacists do. Traditionalists make up the majority of Confederate battle flag supporters in our sample, weakening the claim that supporters of the flag are generally being driven by negative racial attitudes toward Blacks.
...The bulk of our findings relate to White Southerners, who have been the focus of popular discussions and most of the empirical work surrounding support for the Confederate battle flag and Confederate symbols. In general, we found support for three theoretical perspectives. In line with the Southern heritage perspective, Southern pride was strongly associated with support for the Confederate battle flag even while controlling for blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks. While this accounted for the largest association, both political conservatism (principled-conservatism perspective) and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks (racial ideology perspective) were also both associated with positive attitudes toward the flag. However, there is a complex interweaving of political ideology, Southern pride, and racial attitudes revealed by the cluster analysis.
Our cluster analysis revealed four distinct groups of White Southerners who hold distinct attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag and have these attitudes linked to distinct make-ups of political ideology, Southern pride, and negative racial attitudes. The most positive support for the Confederate battle flag came from two groups: the Supremacists and the Traditionalists. Both groups reflected a non-statistically significant difference between their Confederate battle flag support and yet their strong support was linked to different profiles. For Supremacists, it was a combination of strong conservatism, pride in the South, and blatant negative racial attitudes toward Blacks; however, for Traditionalists it was only a combination of strong conservatism and pride in the South, without blatant negative attitudes toward Blacks. Traditionalists held similar positive attitudes toward Blacks as did Cosmopolitans and New Southerners. Of the Supremacists and Traditionalists, who tend to favor maintaining the Confederate battle flag on government premises and as part of official state flags in the South, Supremacists make up the minority in our sample. The majority of supporters in our sample show positive racial attitudes toward Blacks."
And to refer back to our exchange around Emma_M's anecdote, while there is overwhelming majority of black opposition to the Confederate flag, there *are* a tiny minority of black people who do have positive attitudes, so maybe her friend's neighbour really does exist and is a black Southerner flying the flag more as "fuck you and your pissy attitudes looking down your noses at the South, I'm from the South and proud of it":
"Black Support for the Confederate Battle Flag
As previous work has indicated (Agiesta, 2015; Webster & Leib, 2001), Blacks are in overwhelming opposition to the Confederate battle flag. Our results also confirm this. Our results generally demonstrate an antagonism toward the Confederate battle flag among Black respondents and no factors examined were significant predictors of Black support for the flag. This may be due to a lack of heterogeneity in flag support among the Black respondents. Only 7.3% of the Black sample scored above the midpoint for positive attitudes toward the flag and 60.6% scored the lowest possible value.
Despite the significant bivariate and partial (controlling for all factors) correlations between Southern pride and attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag among Blacks, this association disappeared in our structural equation model, which reduces the influence of measurement error. While this is the first quantitative study we are aware of that evaluates factors possibly impacting attitudes toward the Confederate battle flag among Black Southerners, we are unable to provide any strong conclusions as to the motivations of the minority of Black supporters. However, we can suggest that anti-White racism does not seem to be involved in Black opposition to the Confederate battle flag, as is sometimes portrayed within the Southern heritage view (Woliver et al., 2001). Qualitative research on Black Southerners who support the flag may help identify more useful variables to analyze in the future."
Anecdotally, as someone who grew up in the South in the '80s (not the deep south, but still a southern state with strong connection to the Confederacy), I didn't associate the flag with racism. It was the cool flag from the General Lee. This was an area with a very homogeneous population, so displaying the flag wouldn't have even made sense as an overt FU to anyone.
It's possible I was naïve. Realistically I think some people at that time used it as a racist symbol, others as a symbol of southern pride, and others because of the Dukes of Hazzard.
> Now if you still have a Confederate flag bumper sticker on your car, you’re either making a statement about race, or deliberately thumbing your nose at the prevailing signaling equilibrium - which is itself a statement about race.
The distinction between these two should be emphasized (and even more so in cases that are less far along the cascade). One is "I hate black people and want to offend them". The other is "I oppose hyperstitious slur cascades". Part of the tactic of pushing the cascade along is pretending that only the former exists.
I think the elephant in the room in this post is how important the euphemism cascade is for signalling where people are on causes dear to one’s heart.
For example, I think 20 years ago if you found a nurse wearing a rainbow pride lanyard, you would expect them to be almost certainly gay, and definitely a strong sympathiser with gay rights, well educated and engaged with the cause. Now you’re probably going to think that their employer got a big box of lanyards and handed them out for pride month. Signalling and language change over time, as things become mainstream (which is what campaigners want, and is success!) you need a new signal on the top for ‘I still care more than averagely about this issue.’
The _benefit_ of having a euphemism cascade is to allow huge nuance in that sort of signalling in language. You can avoid the people who use words at the 99-1 point as almost certainly actively prejudiced against you. You can assume that people using the standard middle of the road acceptable language of the day mostly don’t care too much and want to not hurt you if it’s not too annoying or inconvenient for them. And the people who are early adopters at the 5-95 point are almost certainly not just keeping up with new euphemisms but isolated from the rest of the debate - you can expect them to be on side with any other contentious issues of the day as well.
I think the whole point is that it _has_ to be an exhausting ever-changing thing to try and stay on top of, when the practical positions underneath the language are also changing. To take your civil servant example, pedagogy changes at a very surprising pace (well, I think it’s surprising, given we’ve been teaching people things for thousands of years, in the UK there are still big changes in things like how to teach reading and maths every decade or so.) Making the word for ‘teaching’ be a clear signifier of what you think teaching is like is handy. Making your word for people in group X be a clear signifier of what rights you think people in group X should have is also handy. And that means in any politically active space some sort of euphemism cascade will happen.
The signalling doesn't need to be ever-changing in order to allow nuance. It's only ever-changing because signalling anywhere near bottom sympathy is punished, and so people are continuously forced to adopt stronger signals that were previously only used by stronger sympathizers. This, of course, hurts the ability to discern with nuance how much any given person sympathizes with a group.
Why do much more people wear rainbow lanyards than 20 years ago? Maybe because much more people sympathize strongly with gay rights, or those who do are more willing to show it. If so, you don't need a much stronger signal. Or maybe because their employer handed them out and they feel pressured to wear it even if they don't actually sympathize with gay rights: well, then if you want gay people to be able to tell who sympathizes with them, then don't pressure people to pretend to sympathize with them even if they don't. (Granted, maybe they wear the lanyard voluntarily, but it now only signals weak sympathy. But then you just need signals for each level of sympathy, you don't need them to constantly change. Indeed, if you let people signal different levels of sympathy, you don't even need complex signals, you can just let people say what they think.)
(I don't fully understand your last paragraph. What pedagogy example?)
The rainbow thing is kind of an example of this phenomenon for a positive, non-slur symbol -- I once bought a car from an old guy with a rainbow sticker in the window, which looked to have been applied sometime in the seventies. I'm pretty sure he wasn't gay, he just liked rainbows in the seventies.
By the nineties (when I bought the car) this was enough for people to make gay jokes about my car; now it would be a signal that I was pro-LGBTQ2+ or whatnot.
In Scotland (years ago) it was common practice to refer to a corner shop run by Pakistanis as ‘the Paki’ as in I’m just nipping down the Paki do you want something? I moved to England and used the phrase and was very firmly corrected.
As well you should have been.
Many decades ago, I was writing against someone who had advocated management style that might be a caricature of the dumb athletic type "leader" reving people with slogans and team emotion.
In America, we might use term jocks derived from jockstrap.
I said that "jock management" was useless. Not knowing the original advocate was Scottish and that jock might be a slur against Scots. He was very upset about my "dishonoring" of him and his people. He did not know the American term.
Good thing you didn't invite him to a Pogues show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEIKO4m9WE8
("We'll sing a song of liberty, for Paks and Blacks and Jocks..." -- also I promise I'm not stalking you, these comments just jumped out as I scrolled the thread)
I don't think the term 'jock' has ever been a slur against Scots. At least whenever I have heard it it has been affectionate. But the thing about the term Paki is that in Scotland it was completely neutral whereas in England it was definitely used as a slur. 'There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so' seems to apply. So I was of course happy to not use the term once I realised how it was used in England.
Well this Scotsman really took offense.
I can easily imagine a timeline in which "jap" never became a racial slur.
It's much harder to imagine a timeline in which displaying the confederate flag didn't end up generally seen as a sign of racism. That was baked in from the flag's origin. So I don't think it's a good hyperstition example.
I disagree. Jap became a slur because we were fighting them during WWII.
And after Bataan it became clear they were major assholes. It's why we nuked them, and ever since they have been far more civilized.
I'm not sure if this is quite equivalent, but consider the standard peace sign. It originated as a combination of the semaphore signs for N and D, as a symbol of the movement for unilateral nuclear disarmament. I don't think many people today believe we would be better off if the U.S. and its allies had scrapped all their nuclear weapons in 1958, when the symbol originated. And yet, instead of being seen as a symbol of policies that would have led to a Soviet conquest of Europe, it's seen as a feel good symbol of being against war.
Some interesting thoughts about labeling, but using examples that are in some cases very unfortunate. A couple of examples that troubled me:
“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.” I don’t know what evidence this is based on, but it is very much contrary to my experience of 40 years ago that the Confederate flag was actually a very strong indicator of racism. OK, maybe there's some study somewhere to contradict that, but you don't reference it and I would think it would have caused a big brouhaha. The Confederate flag has been deeply associated with racism since it was created and always evoked a society where racist slavery was a very big part of its culture and economy. So why use this example to make a point about how labels shift, unless there were some strong evidentiary foundation that the statement is actually evidence supported?
And this one: “True facts can be hyperstitious slurs. “Black people commit more crime”’ Now it’s certainly true that in the USA and many other countries, Black people are arrested and convicted at much higher rates than White people, and sentenced longer — though at least for a time, laws limiting judicial discretion in sentencing actually dramatically reduced the disparity. (indicating that race indeed is a factor when judges are given discretion.) But, how can one say with any confidence that “Black people commit more crime” when most crimes go unsolved? You have to assume that race plays an insignificant role in selection of who gets arrested and convicted. Again perhaps there’s some study I don’t know of that supports the assertion that “Black people commit more crime” doesn’t depend on arrest and conviction rates, and therefore isn’t confounded with biases in our criminal justice system, although methodological issues would be daunting. Lacking that, I think this assertion would be a good example how “commonly held but unsupported beliefs” can be hyperstitious slurs. (To me, an interesting angle on what you’re saying would be, to look at how false or unsupported statements can move in the opposite direction, from being recognized widely as wrongheaded to becoming acceptable.)
I really like what this piece says about hyperstitions and how we use labels, and agree with your main point, but I do think that sometimes changes in how labels are responded to isn’t just a matter of which labels are ideologically acceptable but also can be a result of understanding the content of the label better.
"But, how can one say with any confidence that “Black people commit more crime” when most crimes go unsolved?"
- when the discrepancies are large enough, even if a large number of crimes go unsolved, the ones that don't are enough to make the case.
- for some crimes (like homicides), the rate of unsolved crimes isn't that high, and it's not plausible that a large number of them don't get reported, or are swept under the rug.
- in many cases, even though the actual culprit isn't caught, people still have an idea what he looks like.
- related to that - most crimes are committed within communities, and the distribution of victims gives you a pretty good idea of the distribution of perpetrators. And if there were an epidemic of white criminals sneaking into black neighboorhoods to rob black people at gunpoint, someone would notice.
Do read some of Steve Sailer's articles to get a feel for the numbers. We're not talking about a few percent more or less here.
>- for some crimes (like homicides), the rate of unsolved crimes isn't that high, and it's not plausible that a large number of them don't get reported, or are swept under the rug.
Nit - the rate of unsolved homicides, while probably lower than other crimes, is actually quite high at around 49% (and rising) as of 2021: https://projectcoldcase.org/cold-case-homicide-stats/
Well, I don't know where you get your statistics, but according to a report from Pew Research (“Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. go unsolved””, 2017) less than half of violent crimes get solved / cleared. Then there's the problem if there's bias in the selection of the crimes that do get solved, how would you unconfound it from factors other than race, without an unbiased sample to work from.
Note we're only talking about violent crime here. Scott's assertion was Blacks commit more crime generally, which I don't take literally, because I don't think that's what he means. If you include financial crimes such as frauds, securities law violations, tax evasion and wage theft for example, environmental crimes, drug usage, and other non-violent crime categories, I think it would substantially weaken any claim that there's actually a racial disparity in criminal behavior overall.
To your point, as I understand it, that the subset of crimes that are solved and the higher rate of Black offenders in this subset are large enough that the unsolved crime subset couldn't overcome this racial discrepancy in crime rates, in might be true if these numbers came from an unbiased selection of cases. But if there are large biases in the sample, they will create large discrepancies.
With less than half of violent crimes being reported, and overall less than half solved, we're working a sample I'd described as filtered, with bias in the law enforcement system potentially skewing the results quite a bit. But I concede this is very hard to measure given the limits on available data. You could assume there's little or no racial bias in our criminal justice system, but then your conclusion that Blacks commit more crimes would be based on that assumption. I'm not saying it's impossible that would turn out to be correct, though personally I doubt it, but I am saying, the assertion that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites is based on an assumption that isn't supported by actual evidence.
To your point about homicide, according to the 2017 Pew Research study, the rate of murder cases solved is higher than other violent crimes. (I'm not sure whether or not the statistic is actually referring to homicides or murder, which is legally speaking a smaller subset of homicide), but there is data that conflicts with that. According to the Murder Accountability Project report ("The quest for America's missing murders, 2022) (which apparently is using "homicide" and "murder" interchangeably), "Local law enforcement agencies reported only 14,715 homicides while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so far have counted 25,988 murders. This means police reported only 56.6 percent of the nation's homicides in 2021, the worst reporting rate on record." Which would mean solved cases are far lower percentage than law enforcement reports indicate. And beyond that, no study I've seen accounts for cases in which homicides are classified incorrectly, for example, as accidental deaths, or cases where no crime is reported to the police (for example, someone who isn't missed and no identifiable body is found). But nevertheless, Scott didn't say, Blacks commit more murders than whites. He said, Blacks commit more crimes than whites.
As to reports of race of perpetrator where he or she isn't caught, if you have any solid data supporting that, I'd certainly like to know where I can see that. Also, this kind of eyewitness report can be quite unreliable.
To your point about most crimes committed within communities, again, I've seen no actual evidence supporting this, though it seems like a fairly plausible suggestion when talking about crimes of personal violence, though certainly not when it comes to other sorts of crimes such as economic or environmental crimes, for example . And, a recent Department of Justice report referenced in a more recent Pew Research study, ("What the data says (and doesn’t say) about crime in the United States", 2020) suggests that there is only a very small difference in rates which Black and White people are victims of violent crime. In any event,a plausible hypothesis is very different from evidence based truth, which is how Scott described the proposition that Black people commit more crimes.
But like I said earlier, from what I know of the actual evidence about this issue, there just isn't solid information on race of perpetrators except perhaps for crimes charged and convictions, and even with that reporting seems to be somewhat uneven between different jurisdictions. There's weaker evidence about crimes reported, and virtually nothing about crimes that aren't reported. But if you do have some actual evidence I haven't seen, please point me to it.
Where do the stats come from? Here's a good starting point: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/table-43 . I'm sure Steve Sailer can point you to lots more.
As for your points: I can almost feel the cognitive dissonance oozing from your writing. So you want to include white-collar crime as well, because you hope that would dilute the statement that you disagree with... and the table I cited shows that blacks are overrepresented in fraud, embezzlement and forgery as well.
Okay, so not all crimes are reported, and not all crimes are solved. Go ahead, paint me the picture where in an apparently peaceful, wealthy suburbia a vast number of crimes go unreported, unsolved or unprosecuted... whereas inner-city areas that appear to be riddled with high unemployment, regular outbursts of violence, a culture of "snitches get stitches" and an under-funded, under-trained police force (increasingly so after a "defund the police" campaign") are actually the victims of a vast conspiracy of the criminal justice system to frame black men for crimes they didn't commit, and to make sure that every one of them is counted in the statistics. And all of this in a political climate where everyone who says anything negative about black people is immediately targeted by a storm of outrage. Then, maybe!, you could explain away the discrepancies in the statistics.
Sorry, but saying "the assertion that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites is based on an assumption that isn't supported by actual evidence" when every statistic you care to pull up paints the same picture that can only be cast into doubt with advanced mental gymnastics (that are themselves not based on any evidence that you cite), reeks of motivated reasoning.
> indicating that race indeed is a factor when judges are given discretion
Or whatever they make discretionary decisions based on correlates with race, even after controlling for the factors non-discretionary sentencing is based on.
Regarding the Confederate flag - the Dukes of Hazzard tv show ran on CBS as a quite popular prime time show until 1985. The main protagonists drove a car with a confederate flag on the roof. While I’m sure some folks contemporaneously thought this was racist, it was not broadly perceived as racist. Another anecdote, I grew up near Gettysburg. As the site of a major civil war battlefield, it was full of historic sites and tourist shops. Driving through the town in the 80s - you would see hundreds of confederate flags displayed around the town and little desktop confederate flags for sale in every shop. The flag WAS used by racists for racist purposes but it was also used for a lot of other cultural markers too. As an 80’s kid, my experience is that Scott is correct on this one. Also, to be clear, I am not denying that racism was more prevalent and tolerated in the 80s and that surely had something to do with a causal acceptance of the confederate flag being displayed for reasons not rooted in racism.
Nice counter examples to my point. Yes, there was more winking at racist symbols in the 80's, in particular the Confederate flag which would tend to weaken my point.
Nevertheless, I still think that the Confedeerate flag is a poor example of the hyperstitious slur phenomenon that Scott is examining. This is a symbol that as you recognize was widely recognized in the 80's as a racist symbol, but also tolerated more widely than it is today, as your examples illustrate. Hardly comparable to the much better example Scott offers of the word "Negro" which went from a generally acceptable term with very little or no racist undertone to a hyperstitious slur in only a few years. With the Confederate flag, you're talking about a symbol whose racist roots went from being winked at to being winked at less. Different in that way from examples when due to social pressure a neutral term was turned into a socially unacceptable symbol by forces of political correctness. That's why I objected to Scott's asseertion that the Confederate flag was basically a neutral symbol in the 1980's and called it out as a poor example of hyperstitious slur.
On another level, it's a question of political balance. Most of the examples Scott uses are of leftist crowdthink pressuring to turn previously acceptable words into tools for pushing their ideology onto the public discourse. Confederate flags are surely no better example of this than drag shows, which only a few years ago were considered harmless play common in the collegiate Greek world and network TV comedy, for example. Suddenly right wingers (including several with their own personal history of playful drag episodes) in an upsurge of political correctness have suddenly demonized drag and even passed laws declaring it to be illegal. In my view a much more apt example of a hyperstitious slur than an increased tendency for people to object to the racist roots of the Confederate flag being winked at. Going to show that this sort of poisoned politics isn't the province of one particular side of the political spectrum.
But it's also true, even liberal CBS seemed to have no compunctions about using the Confederate flag in the 1980's as a prop in a popular lightweight situation comedy. That aslo goes to show, hyperstitious slur is the kiind of concept which might apply or not, depending to no small degree on the point of view of the person making the evaluation.
Related, the "Thomas-theorem" in sociology:
"If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."
...formulated in 1928 by the US sociologists William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas.
Another example is that apparently some American academics have decided that you can't say "slaves" anymore, not even in a context where it's clear that you agree slavery is bad. You have to say "enslaved people" or "enslaved persons". Well OK, I can actually kinda see the point of that one, tbh.
But when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. So recently some Dutch media have started to do the same thing. Except that Dutch doesn't have an adjective meaning "enslaved". So they went with the incredibly clunky and unwieldy "tot slaaf gemaakten" -- which, translated back to English, means something like "those who were made into slaves".
Which is not only very grating and cumbersome when used in a sentence, but also totally pointless as a euphemism because it still contains the word "slave" as a noun! If the idea of the original English coinage was to emphasise that the person is still a unique individual with hopes and dreams of their own, and the enslavement does not erase the individual, then the Dutch translation totally fails to achieve that. In fact it pretty much does the opposite: it seems to go out of its way to *emphasise* that whatever the person may have been before, they have now been transformed into, first and foremost, a slave.
That's what happens when a culture becomes so dominant that it can force its shibboleths not only on its own members, but even on people from different cultures where those shibboleths make no sense. It's quite annoying.
It's not *solely* a result of the American phrase, but that and that, apparently, the Netherlands, too, has the idea that racism is the absolute evil, and if there is ever a more anti-racist and a less anti-racist choice, one must choose the more anti-racist choice (even if it doesn't make sense), else one is racist and evil. Though you quite possibly got this from America too.
Regarding "the rich" and "the poor", I think there is a sense where it is inherently dehumanizing in certain contexts.
Consider, by analogy someone wanted to claim that tall people are more likely to be professional basketball players. But they choose to phrase this by saying
"The Talls are more likely to be in the NBA"
That would be weird. It would be more normal to say "Tall people are more likely to be in the NBA" or "Tall people are more likely to be NBA players"
the 2 descriptors here "being tall" and "being an NBA player" could either be phrased as predicates/adjectives ("tall (modifying people)", "in the NBA") or as identities ("NBA players", "Talls")
For one of the descriptors (NBA player) either is normal but for the Tall descriptor only the predicate usage is normal, not the identity.
I think this is partially because being in the NBA is perceived as an identity .For people in the NBA, the fact that they are in the NBA forms societies' entire perception of who they are as a person. And it possibly also forms their own perception of themself. And this is true for most full time jobs. For someone who is a plumber, their plumberhood is a significant enough part of their identity that they probably think "I am a plumber" and not "I am a person who works in plumbing"
When you say "the poor" and not "poor people" you are centering the poorness as being part of their identity. In this light the point about "the French" is interesting. If French people are proud of their French identity and centralize their this aspect of their identity then it's fine to say "the French". But if you are referring, not to French people who live in France but rather to people who maybe have French grandparents but who themselves don't live in France anymore and don't attach any significance to their ethnicity then you are centering a part of them that they don't consider part of their own identity.
I think I get your point - like, if there's something akin to a membership card for being a Something, it's fine to use "the Somethings", and if it's more incidental, it's not. Sounds plausible.
But two aspects about this rub me the wrong way. First off, it's apparently fine to reduce people to only one aspect of their existence in other contexts - like, has anyone complained about news articles speaking about "consumers" or "voters" or "employees", instead of "people who make consumer decisions" or "people who vote" or "people who are employed"? No, because in that context, you are only interested in that aspect of their lives, and that's okay. The absence of the group-forming (and therefore "dehumanizing") word "the" is only due to a grammatical quirk that requires it when you're using a naked adjective to describe a set of people, and doesn't when you're using a noun.
Second - aren't the people who push for these language changes largely the same people who insist that identity labels are super-important and in fact trump any attempt at being an individual who makes their own choices, regardless of their being "white" or "black" or "gay" or whatever it is?
I accept your point and admit that I was probably wrong in my comment and you are probably right.
If I were to try to defend my original position I would say that since very few people think being a consumer is fundamental to someone's identity either usage is fine. But being poor is something where people are more afraid that their poorness will be used to identify them on a more fundamental level and therefore more care must be taken to avoid that impression. But I'm not sure if I believe that that's what's actually going on here or not.
That's actually a great point - being a consumer, or an employee, is morally neutral. Being poor isn't, at least in the eyes of many people (whether being poor is a sign of moral virtue or failure depends on your political position, but in the US it's mostly considered bad), so people worry about the possible moral implications of that one property bleeding unnecessarily into a categorization of the whole person (poor = bad -> member of "the poor" = bad person).
But I don't think that recasting the language helps remove the associations in the long term. The taint just carries over to the new terms (poor = bad -> "poor person" = "bad person" - not a long stretch).
It doesn't remove the association completely but it makes it harder to claim the association is true by calling attention to the generality of the claim.
Consider the following statements:
1) "Poor people are more likely to be evil than non poor people"
2) "All poor people are evil"
3) "poor people are evil"
4) "The poor are evil"
(2) is obviously false and also very damaging if believed seriously.
(1) is (very slightly) less obviously false and also less damaging if believed seriously.
(3) and (4) are both ambiguous if they mean (1) or (2). Therefore statements of the form (3) or (4) are great motte-bailees for people who want to discriminate against poor people since they can claim they mean (1) when asked to provide evidence but (2) when they want to justify discrimination.
However with (3) the ambiguity of the sentence is more obvious. Since you are saying "poor people" you are calling attention to the fact that there are multiple "poors", multiple people and in associating the predicate of "evil" to them you are asserting a generality.
In this context, that might not be true anymore since "the poor" as gone out of fashion and therefore sounds weird.
But consider "Millennials are tech savvy" VS
"people born in between 1981 and 1996 are tech savvy"
where the first phrase sounds like something someone might say seriously whereas the second sounds weird without some qualification about "do we mean all people born then? Most of them? some of them?"
So committing not to using certain words as "identity descriptors" makes certain types of ambiguous motte/bailey statements about them harder to make.
On the other hand, I doubt if the APS balloted the entire population of La Belle France on their preferred way of being referred to by les rosbifs when gabbling their inferior language 😁
Love that post. And as I have no social standing to lose - hell, even my wife is younger than me -, I will go on doing the Tymofiy Mykolayovych Shadura*-thing and insist that WORDS HAVE MEANINGS, and thus ALL LIVES MATTER is a hill I am willing to literally die on. As an extra: indeed if you are "in doubt" whether "it is ok to be white" , yes, I do consider you a full racist already and your existence on the same planet as me triggers fear in me. Really. Could you please stop to dehumanize me just because I am from Northern-Europe? - And that is true even if you get polled by a not-so-excellent poll-firm. Am I in the slightest doubt that IT IS OK to be black/PoC/gay/trans/vegan/"person of Asian descent"? (for whatever that means - could s.o. do some field-work to check it triggered Bengali oder Cantonese, ever)
No. Never ever. (btw: Dilbert is great, his creator is sometimes less so. Still.)
*(PoW, shot, famous last words: Slava Ukraina - btw: I prefer PTN PNX. That war sickens me too much to say "glory".)
Sure they do, Machine Interface. ;) Bitch is a female dog, by the way. (Or fox/wolf/otter). Never used it for humans, no matter menstruating or not.
No and Yes have connotations, too, or so I heard. So, you disagree with "No means No"? Interesting. ALL. LIVES. MATTER. Better?
Ok, so let us stop this silly condescending each other. Obviously words and even phrases have meaning and also obviously and including their connotations.
Even 2+2=4 (connotation: 1984)
ALL LIVES MATTER.
ALL as in all. No exception.
LIVES Dumb, smart, no matter what continent you great-grandparents were born or what passport you hold. Even evil or good. Even Putin. Even animals, plants and mushrooms. E. coli.
For me as for most humans: humans matter most. And really all matter.
MATTER as in "make a difference". A human life is not nothing. Even a fetus, btw.. Does the life of a rapist/school shooter matter more or his victim's - well, I expect the police to decide "no" and shoot him - if no better option available. But even his life matters. A lot.
That is the MEANING of the statement. And if XY say: "No. The meaning of this sentence is: Black lives do not matter." - then I will insist that it does not mean that. And I will continue to say it. NO FUCKING MATTER WHAT. KILL ME. But I will not say that ALL LIVES MATTER is wrong. It is right and it is true. And it is a better thing to die for than most stuff suggested in the last 10 k years.
And IT IS OK TO BE (insert whatever-you-call-your-type-of-skin-when-dermatologically-fine). And if someone says: "I am not sure it is ok to be black" - then that someone is doing a racist statement. And probably is racist. And if it is about "white"/or-whatever: same. And do I wish to live near people who are outspoken racists? Not really. Do you? Do I feel SAFE near racists who consider people of my heritage/appearance to be "not ok"/"his life does not matter"? HELL, NO. And by historical experience: Near those people one usually is not safe.
"Moral: Run, don't walk to the nearest desert island."
The reason it would cause offense is that one of the meanings of "bitch" is "a woman who behaves badly," with the meaning of "behaves badly" depending on context and society. So "woman" and "bitch" don't have the same real world referent — in the context you are considering, one refers to a subset of the group the other refers to.
My understanding is that the ranking of offensiveness in using terms for female animals to refer to female humans was: cow - bitch - mare. Seeing as how "bitch" is the word used most often in swearing or aggressive language, that always intrigued me: I don't think I've heard anyone referred to as a "mare" in recent times. I heard of the TV drama "Mare of Easttown" but they seem to be forcing a pun on "Mare (short for Marianne)/Mayor" there, rather than "female horse as term for female human".
Btw I think the term Brit is a slur when used by Irish people. The British don’t really hear it as a slur however!
Historically (only a few decades ago) it was a slur when used by some Irish as you say.
However, it was reclaimed by the British and rebranded successfully and was used in the title of the "Brit Awards" (for music) by the late 80s and early 90s.
The odd thing is I don't think it has been reclaimed exactly. I don't think mainland British people even realised it was a slur.
As a mainland British person I knew it as a slur in the 70s, although I was well up on politics even as a child. The newspapers of the time had black and white pictures of "Brits Out" painted on walls.
I still don't particularly like the term which wasn't heard on the mainland until the media picked up on it in the 90s probably related to the whole "Cool Britannica" thing. I doubt many British people use it to describe themselves or use it regularly.
"Britisher" was an American English term which seems to have picked up popularity in the mid 19th century and peaked around the time of the Second World War. I know it always grated on my ear when I read it in fiction because it sounded much clunkier than British, and I'm not British myself.
Whether "Brit" is better or not, I couldn't say.
Interesting, didn't know "Britisher" was originally an Americanism. Indians almost exclusively use the term "Britisher" nowadays. Both in negative and neutral context. Brits are almost never referred to in a positive context so not applicable.
But why was it imported into British English? I recall seeing what I believe was an authentic UK military recruitment poster (from one of the World Wars) that included "Calling All Britishers." Why would anyone use that when "Briton" is so much better?
It seems to have been also an older English/British term, that fell out of favour in the UK but was retained by the Americans. and Canadians It also seems to have been used widely in India during the Raj.
It does sound clumsier than "Britons" but maybe it was intended to appeal to Englishmen living overseas, or those who might identify as "Britishers"? According to Collins online dictionary, it was also used for "any British subject", so for overseas recruiting drives?
EDIT: God bless Google, I think I found the poster you mean! And it does seem aimed at overseas recruitment - it has a soldier in France shaking hands with a civilian in the USA:
https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.40987/
By contrast, the one for the Great Britain had "Britons" as in "Britons, Lord Kitchener wants you to join the army today":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Kitchener_Wants_You
Isn't "Brits" also away to present a unifying symbol/mythology of the unity of Great Britain in face of Scottish and Welsh desires for autonomy and even independence.
Irish using "Brits" as a slur has no impact. Its like blacks calling whites, "cracker". Again zero impact. You just can't take it seriously. In return all the Brit has to do is call the Irishman, a potato or something. Or for a white person, the "n-word". Now those words have an impact!
A couple things, none of them disagreements:
1) to clear up some confusion in the comments: obviously not all slurs are hyperstitious. Some words start nasty, and I think we should treat them differently than words that begin neutral.
2) these thoughts are admittedly quite nascent, but might there be some upside to hyperstitious slurs? I'm thinking particularly in a society in which bigoted ideas are held proudly by large chunks of the population. In this context, a slur becoming hyperstitious might represent genuine progress.
3) you talked a bit about how hyperstitious slurs make life worse for just about everyone, but I think they harm some groups more than others. Hyperstitious slurs, along with the related euphemism treadmill, penalize anyone lacking the knowledge networks, social intelligence, or mental acuity to learn and effectively navigate these sociolinguistic rules. Among those most disadvantaged are groups the rules purport to protect: the neurodivergent, low formal education, low SES, etc.
Words are only nasty as the result of an agreement that they are. There is a word in wide usage that is only a slur when certain people use it, but not others.
And money are only valuable as a result of an agreement that they are. Social constructed reality is still pretty real.
Sort of related: I was examining the word "with" across languages. You well see pretty clearly how "with" is in some languages related to "against", eg con. Initial that this was a switch, like calling something bad many it was good. There are these opposite flips.
But a little closer thought probably spurred by "avec", I came to understand that when something is lean against a tree or house it is with the tree or house.
Sometimes it Is difficult to tease out whether there is a flip to an opposite or if there never was a flip but the illusion of flip.
Like "jap" in English pre Japan meant to splash and might have some urinary associations. Not enough time to fully explore.
The n-gram viewer shows a spike in usage of jap around 1700 which might have nothing to do with Japan at all. So while it looks like jap is just short version of Japan it might have already included this urinary splash meaning. (So it wasn't offensive just a shortening might just be a "cover story". History is often politics projected into the past.
I'm not sure about this at all, but this whole phenomenon might be an American invention. In the cultures I live in (Turkish and Dutch), we have labels and stuff but not this thing where normal words become slurs. It's only people who do what the Americans do emulate it sometimes, but that's it and they don't have much traction.
Why would you do this to everybody? Just keep using the words like they're intended to be used. Sometimes I use being a foreigner and having English as a second language to my advantage and say whatever and feign ignorance. It's the least I can do to pushback and help.
It’s virtue signaling all the way down. Where are all the slaves who will be offended by the wrong circumlocution? Too busy being enslaved to care.
I have already spent far too much time here, slaughtering pixels in what is likely to no avail.
But in this forum, like most others in the West, it is acceptable to use symbols associated with the USSR, the CCP and of Communism in general. These tokens of murderous illiberal brutality are not seen as hate symbols.
The difference between this tolerance (and even endorsement) and the intolerance of the South using the rebel flag is outgroup vs ingroup.
We should all ask ourselves what we think we know, that just isn't so, and why.
Because victims and their descendants of those regimes aren't right there being an uncomfortable eyesore to respectable Western societies, to state the obvious.
I think one possible solution (or part of a solution) to this is for everyone to have enough personal autonomy that you could give no shits about something being or not being a slur. (Bar the obvious "fossilized" slurs.)
I couldn't tell if this had been said already, but I didn't find it before Substack and my phone fell out again:
Your strategy as stated is a recipe for defeat. You are telegraphing to the Enemy (whoever yours may be) that all they have to do is choose some meaningful bit of your culture, organise a hyperstition cascade, rinse and repeat. Either it works or it doesn't- if it doesn't, it's costless to try again; if it does, they have in perpetuity (or as good as) denied you some ground.
Unless some effort is made to reclaim lost ground, Cthulhu only swims left.
Right now any contempt we feel for those who start the cascade is directed nowhere. If instead, there was a widespread reaction/influential celebrity who said, "Banning 'field work' is ridiculous. Everyone start using the word 'Negro' again to show you're not one of these clowns," then the Enemy risks actually losing ground and might start thinking more carefully before initiating the campaign.
But as stated, your 70% heuristic might as well be a big Kick Me sign.
There is an important difference between "Kick Me" sign and "Kick Me Only If Absolute Majority Of People Agree That I Have To Be Kicked" sign.
No there isn't, and certainly not when deciding how to sway majorities of people is part of the game you're playing.
Well, when you've already decided which side is right once and for all, adopted 100% soldier mindset and is now only interested in getting more points against the enemy, then maybe the only difference is time.
But, thankfully most of the people are not this much mindkilled by politics.
My comment to Scott was explicitly pointing out how his approach is a bad idea when dealing with actors waging a culture war against you.
I wasn't sure what your first reply was going for, as it didn't seem to follow on from what I wrote. Your second response didn't develop from your first, and doesn't seem to be doing much else either. At best it's making an unrelated claim about tribal mindsets, at worst it's just an excuse to throw insults at me.
All in all I'm not sure what value you're bringing to this discussion.
As a poster above noted “continued oppression requires a constant flow of new rules.” armchair warriors look to be offended to have an excuse for condemning the designated baddies
Non-whites going forward to be punished for not using the term "Northern European Americans".
The alternative hypothesis is the euphemism treadmill, namely:
1. Group is viewed negatively
2. Group's name acquires negative connotations due to association with group
3. People use name of group as insult
4. Group invents new name for themselves
5. New name acquires negative connotations due to association with group
6. People use name of group as insult
7. Group invents new name for themselves
This clearly applies to all the terms associated with learning difficulties over the years; your playground taunt was your parents' respectable term. "Jap" is probably unusual as a one-off change (although cf. "Nip"), but that's because the popularity of the Japanese went from "unacceptably foreign, but basically exotic and mysterious" to "subhuman goblin-like monsters" to "our allies, the bastion of freedom in Asia" at break-neck speed. Similarly, the sodomite/invert/homosexual/gay treadmill stopped when being gay stopped being viewed negatively.
So far as social spread is concerned, that's partly sympathy (not wanting to define people as part of the negatively-affected category they're in), partly signalling ("I'm one of the nice people who says Native American") and partly social pressure in the later stages, which is where the cascade effect would start to come in. I don't think a cascade could start from 51/49 and move purely on its own steam though; I think it has to get to something more like 66/33 before it can move on its own momentum.
Enjoyed this! I’ve noticed the euphemism treadmill at work with so many things and now i have a name for it.
"The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended."
That may be one possible excuse but I am not sure it explains the process very well.
1. When we are moving something from 100:0 to 99:1, like it was done with the N-word or might be done with "field work"', there is a period of 80:20 and 60:40 when the word is already considered offensive by many but still has not been purged from the pages /re-educated from mouths. During this period, the amount of offense is likely higher than it was during 100:0. So this process is pretty counter-productive way to reduce offense and yet there are now many people whose full time job is to find such words!
2. If the aim is to reduce offense, why would anyone take the name of a racial group, then invent a new concept with strong negative connotations based on this name, but not to try to change the name of the racial group afterwards? This seems to be pretty counterproductive as far as reducing offense goes, and yet this is what was done with "whiteness".
A more plausible explanation for both is that the aim is not to reduce offense/raise the status of one group but to lower the status (aka oppress) another group. With this explanation, it makes sense that the rules are constantly changing: as people get used to old rules and internalize them, these rules become less oppressive and continued oppression requires a constant flow of new rules.
This explanation is also consistent with a non-uniform enforcement of the rules, with some groups retaining the privilege of using the N-word.
It's pretty easy to ignore all this nonsense. I still hear words like Oriental, Redskin, and even Jap, used by people who don't mean offence. Actually it is particularly often that I hear "Jap", because I hang out with a lot of Anime/Manga artists, and they can't be bothered to say "Japanese" when the Japanese artists they interact with don't care or lack the context to care. They invariably mean Japanese in Japan anyway, so you get the situation where an American of Japanese Descent uses this.
Or take another example. I got a friend who's next door neighbour has a confederate flag waving in his yard. This neighbour is black. To him, the flag just means "yay southern United States". Because the only people who really got the memo about the flag being racist are people who watch the news or follow politics, which is honestly almost nobody.
Their social credit is issued at a different bank, you could say.
In the end, I say give up never, because that social credit line you're trying to take out is from bad people, and the percentage of people with that line of credit is almost never actually 70% or higher. Exceptions may be made based on context, IE, formal settings require formal language.
I'm going to call BS on this: "I got a friend who's next door neighbour has a confederate flag waving in his yard. This neighbour is black."
Nope. Provide City, state, neighborhood.
Maybe you've made it up. Maybe your friend made it up.
But the chances of a black American flying a confederate flag to celebrate "southerness" is so unlikely as to be essential zero.
Y'know, this is what annoys people. The "lived experience" types who are all about "you must prioritise person B, their lived experience of prejudice over-rides whatever you say or write, don't question their narrative, if they say it, then it's true and that does not have to mean factually true" suddenly become all "name, rank, serial number" when it comes to this kind of contradiction.
Someone relates an experience that does not fit with their stereotypes. "You're lying. You made that up. I know you did because I know it can't be true".
Isn't it more stereotypical to think you know all about the opinions of every single black person born and reared and living in the South, so you know what they would or would not say, think or do in every instance?
Maybe it is a made-up story, but you can't jump to that conclusion on the bare bones of "it can't be true because my mental model of all persons of D type doesn't include such outliers".
If it was her neighbor, then I wouldn't have called BS.
But it is presented the way falsity happens. A friend of a friend. But then you push on the friend, well it was actually their cousin who told the story. And you push on the cousin and well they heard it at a party.
I'm a litigator, there are very good reasons for the hearsay rule!! And I have a very good crap detector.
So Emma_M can tell me the City, state and neighborhood.
We do not have to take everybody at "their word". Especially when it is presented as and hearsay that also has a pretty high degree of incredibility and which is being used to shield offensive stuff.
Parrhesia some has to do it.
On here we generally do take people at their word, because this is not a court of law. If everyone here is presumed from the start to be liars and fabulators (everyone is a dog on the Internet), then what good is this place?
How do I know that you are, in fact, a litigator? Why couldn't *you* be inventing that fact to make your story seem more convincing? Are *you* going to produce your law licence to prove that you are who you say you are? I'm not asking for you to do that, I think the anonymity afforded here is valuable and I don't want people feeling like they have to doxx themselves in order to be taken seriously.
But you see my point? You don't believe Emma_M because. I can equally disbelieve you because. At the moment, Emma_M's previous contributions on here have not marked her (him/them) out as a liar or troll. So I extend to her/him/them/the five racoons in a raincoat the benefit of the doubt.
"A random black person flying the Confederate flag as a celebration of the South." No. Not a credible story.
Could it happen sure? It might have even been on TV. Like an undocumented complaining about undocumented. There is also all kinds of weird stuff.
If she made the claim that it was her black neighbor who did this. Then, I would not have challenged. I would not have believed it but I would not have challenged. But once it gets asserted in the hearsay kind of way with plausible deniability, then it is suspect.
State, City, Neighborhood request is not doxxing her. It is about the "friend" who ostensibly has a black neighbor who ostensibly flies Traitor Flag as way to celebrate the South. And it is sufficiently vague to not be doxxing anyone.
I don't find Emma_B's story incredible. I don't live in the South, but I have family who do, and it's a complex place.
On the other hand, your incredulity would seem to partake of a cartoonish stereotyping of the South that is so commonplace among coastal and Northeastern soi-disant sophisticates that one is put in mind of the saying about how much fish notice water.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/elections/presidential/caucus/2015/10/24/black-man-carson-event-defends-confederate-flag/74550918/
(There's actually a few more if you Google "black man with confederate flag", but the articles are paywalled and I'm not dealing with that)
Clearly it's a "man bites dog" kind of story, but the fact that papers don't seem to struggle to find men biting dogs makes me think that the probability of Emma's friend's neighbour flying the flag is way more than zero.
How much more than 0%?
0.1%?
America is still segregated not as much as before but still. So what percent of non-black people in South have a a black next door neighbor. Not just on the block or in the neighborhood, next door. What percent of blacks fly a traitor flag to celebrate south?
The is the man bites dog story. And then some says oh they were there and saw it. Really? This is how "urban myth" spreads. And as it spreads well it starts down the path where a man biting dog really is ostensibly not that unusual.
Then we have alleged stranger danger and putative rampant satanic cult, and pretty soon pedo pizzagate.
So you are calling Emma a liar? Seems uncouth, given that the possibility of having a Black neighbour in the US is naively ~2/10. (I didn't notice Emma specifying the race of her friend)
Nobody is saying that there are a shitload of black people out there flying the confederate flag, just that it's not out of the question -- from which it follows that there are definitely other reasons for that behaviour than (anti-black, I guess) racism.
Just to give a few details, without Doxxing anybody.
My friend is Native American/Caucasian mixed race. He lives in what could be uncharitably described as a "white trash" neighbourhood, the kind of place where everybody has about an acre of land, everybody lives in trailers, and everybody's yards are piled with various objects that look like detritus but which get used for various purposes, like rusty go-karts, cinder blocks, lawn chairs, grills, and cars that don't work.
Why is the black neighbour waving this flag? I actually don't know, my friend and I speculated years ago it was because "yay south" but for all I know it could be he's a fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Maybe it's ironic flag waving, but nobody gets it because this is exactly the kind of neighbourhood to display that flag. Maybe the guy has a wife who's white, or he's half black? I've never spoken to this man, I just see the flag, and the man.
This story is not meant to be an "ahah! Gotcha!" account. It's a real thing I've seen that illustrates my intended point, that conforming to the culture you are in is more important and easier to do, than conforming to what are ultimately top-down declarations from outside cultures that probably have bad motivations.
On a previous contract, I had a coworker who was a gearhead (car hobbyist, for those who haven't heard the term). Middle class (we're all software developers). One of his favorite shows growing up was the Dukes of Hazzard. By pure coincidence, we noticed several cars with very custom paint jobs regularly parked in the garage near our office. One of them was a modern Dodge Charger, done like the General Lee, right down to the lettering and the flag. It was his favorite car. He's black. I never had an opportunity to ask him explicitly, but he clearly wasn't bothered in the slightest by its history.
The consequences of "I know it can't be true, so anyone who says it is is a liar and can be ignored" can also get pretty grim.
We know you are doing that, hence that your beliefs are not a reliable guide to truth. We don't know if Emma's are.
"People use words but don't mean offense"
Intention surely is a thing,
But if you know that someone is hurt by the word and persist then it's implicit intent.
Or maybe you are saying they are too stupid to know? But how stupid must one be to give them they're a dummy pass.
Several people have commented that "eat the rich" feels snappier than "eat rich people": are you sure that's not just because "eat the rich" is an idiom, and if "eat rich people" were the known idiom, it would feel the same way?
But regardless, for every case people try to turn a phrase into a slur, there's a story why it's bad, or worse than the alternative. The point isn't that there isn't one. It's that just because one phrase has marginally different connotations than another doesn't mean it's reasonable to demand everyone to only use one, and treat the other as wrong. Just because one phrase is a micrometer less humanizing than another, that doesn't mean it's dehumanizing and should be suppressed. Just because one phrase is a micrometer less anti-racist than another, that doesn't mean it's racist and should be suppressed.
I think the point is that many “slurs” aren’t, in any meaningful sense, slurs at all. Negro is actually a good example. It pisses me off because all the good people who used it before it was “bad” - and who are dead now - have absolutely no defense. I guess the NAACP can hide behind their initials but what about all the quotes that become obsolete from “negroes” themselves? Frederick Douglass is rolling in his grave. Any honest educator should have to explain how we later decided to change our minds. This essay is a valuable service.
They have perfect defence: in their time it wasn't a problematic word. No one is cancelling MLK. Chill.
"They have perfect defence: in their time it wasn't a problematic word."
Not good enough, chronological distance is no defence. Haven't you heard about editing Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming? While there is much more of a case for cutting the racist etc. references out of Fleming's Bond books, the Dahl ones are less defensible.
We mustn't say "fat" so the replacement term is "enormous".
Evil child-eating witches can't be said to work as supermarket cashiers, that is the glass ceiling! Now they must be scientists. Because the offence there is them being limited as women to low-status jobs, not that they are - you know - evil, child-eating witches?
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/roald-dahl-edits-books-censored-witches-b2288252.html
Absolutely, offensive terms like "Negroes" can and should be removed from works written in the past; if it's offensive at any time, it is offensive at all times, and just because the author has been dead for a hundred years is no excuse to go easy on them.
Negro was not an offensive term.
And I disagree vehemently. Even offensive terms should stay where they are. You’re such a baby you can’t handle historical reality, go suck your thumb instead. Leave the books alone.
Yet. He wasn’t a perfect man, and soon some bored, self righteous lefty will start a purity cascade on him. Because who’s going to be left to go after?
Thank you for making your public prediction.
> are you sure that's not just because "eat the rich" is an idiom, and if "eat rich people" were the known idiom, it would feel the same way?
Yeah, I feel pretty confident about it. I'd say that the reason why "eat the rich" became an idiom instead of "eat rich people" in the first place, is because the former is more snappier and less awkward then the latter. Not vice versa.
>Just because one phrase is a micrometer less humanizing than another, that doesn't mean it's dehumanizing and should be suppressed.
Well, there is a difference between supression and prefering to use something else. I agree that we can use more tolerance regarding the terms people use and be generally nicer about it. I'm not going to shame people for saying "the X" instead of "X people" but I myself will try to be a better person in this regard even if a tiny bit more.
"Eat the rich" is a succinct distillation of a political principle: opposition to the notion of a class such as "the rich" in the first place, the idea of wealth being unequally distributed, a call for the little streets to rise up against the great.
"Eat rich people" is much foggier. Which rich people? All rich people, or just some rich people? What counts as a rich person? Are we eating them because they're rich, or because they're people? If the latter case, what other people can/should we eat?
The same way that "eat your greens" is more actionable and a snappier slogan than "eat healthily". Eat greens, got it, I know what green vegetables are, I can do that. Eat healthily requires a lot more effort to figure out and is cloudier: is meat healthy? wine? what size portions? should I eat fruit or avoid it because of sugar?
I feel like this is that old propaganda saw "jumping on the bandwagon", and since your average person wants to be part of the group more than spending time engaging in critical thought on issues that aren't personally relevant, onto the bandwagon everyone goes. It's survivalist instinct pure and simple and makes sense from that perspective. Sad too though. Somehow, mankind can do all the things we've done to create a world today where it's better than it has ever been before, and yet, we've found no anecdote for demagogues using propaganda to advance their own interests made possible by most people's sheer/intrinsic desire to support said nonsense because they want to be validated by groupthink.
In the Russian language, there is a presposition "v" which means "in" and is usually used with relation to countries (e.g. in Poland, in Argentina), but with an exception for Ukraine, where preposition "na" is used instead (something like "on Ukraine"). It is caused by the fact that the word Ukraine etmologycally means "boundary", "frontier", "perifery", and was used with respective preposition (on the boundary, on the frontier). There was a long and protracted discussion if it was offensive, with the same hyperstition dynamics. But the start of the war a year ago gave a huge boost the the divisevness of the hyperstition (that was the point when I gave in).
Is this related to the former use of "the Ukraine" in English?
There is a weird assumption that if you “give in” that life will be unbearable. But language already is filled with stuff where people “gave in” and we are all fine. It’s annoying how language changes. But this post reads like someone saying “I don’t like how language changes and I’m going to be the friction that tries to stop it”. But you can’t stop it. And it’s already changed so much already. And the endpoint isn’t horribleness, it’s where we are now. These fights have already happened a million times over. They have literally been happening my entire life. Trying to fight this stuff is like trying to fight the weather. Go ahead and try. Or try to be a dick to people that are on the vanguard of the change. But all you are doing is being a dick to people and accomplishing nothing. The best approach is probably to be generally ignorant of the fight rather than hyperfocused on it so when it comes to your attention, you change because you know by that time it’s the preferred position in society. Or you can be a dick and fight the weather. Do whatever you want.
Change is inevitable, but so is resistance to change. You can't stop it, but you can slow it down. And I'd say resistance to change is more important than change. If people didn't have any preference to keep language mostly as they are used to, it would change so fast that parents wouldn't understand their children, and grandchildren wouldn't understand their grandparents. If people didn't change language at all except to give names to new concepts, nothing bad would happen.
As far as people getting offended (feeling like others are "dicks to" them), those responsible are first and foremost those who start propagating the idea that this-and-this term is offensive. Most "offensive" words are only offensive to the extent listeners think the speaker means to offend, hates them, or similar. If well-meaning people keep using a word, listeners don't think it indicates hatred, so they don't get offended.
Right. See right in there is the “fear”. “If we allow this to happen then language will change so fast overnight that no one will be able to understand each other”. No. It will be just like it is currently. You think your doing something. But your taking a teaspoon out of the ocean. This post and others efforts will have no affect. And again, there have already been millions like you in the past who bemoaned “political correctness” and the move to “flight attendant”. If you want to pretend you are defending something or someone by being a dick, go ahead. But it’s doubtful anyone will thank you for the friction you cause and more likely you will just come off as a dick. Some stuff you can fight. How language changes isn’t really a fight anyone can win.
The same applies in the reverse: what's the point of complaining about Scott's post? After all, in the grand scheme of things, any one person, or even Scott and this entire commentariat, doesn't change things by more than an infinitesimal amount: why bother?
Indeed, do you ever vote? Should no one? Your vote is a teaspoon out of the ocean; the chance that it affects anything is negligible.
Nobody says life will be unbearable, this is just your strawman. What somebody does say is that we should not let pathetic nobodies control how we talk, which is a categorically different thing from linguistic change, which 99% of people who invoke it to justify their ingroup's demands don't understand nor care about.
> you can be a dick and fight the weather.
This is what 4chan calls a "Cope", a delusion that you make up so reality is more bearable and you appear stronger to your outgroup than you really are. In actual reality, none of the pathetic "vanguard of change" is as secure or as stable (let alone as cute) as my 4 years old nephew, they are extremly fragile and contemptible creatures held together by insincere praise and meaningless buzzwords, and the slightest opposition or pushback, on the scale of 1 among hundreds of thousands, sends them crumbling to the soil like dust. They can literally be demolished by words, like the monsters of myths.
If fighting weather was as easy as this, Climate Change would be a walk in the garden.
What makes it unbearable is the rapidity of change, for what seems no good reason.
"Don't say X, that is offensive, you should say Y". Ordinary person agrees and goes along using Y, until someone else gasps in horror about "You said Y? Don't you know how offensive that is? Why aren't you using Z, the term everyone knows is the only acceptable way to speak?"
However, Z just came into being ten minutes ago and nobody outside of a circle of particular highly-wrought purists even know it exists. That doesn't stop them from condemning everyone who doesn't use Z of malice, rather than ignorance or error.
I would say that it becomes more important to struggle against a cascade the more annoying the new word is. There are a variety of factors that contribute to how annoying a new word is, but here are five of them:
1) Is the new word longer? (Because we want to waste less time)
2) Is it easier to pronounce/type? (Because we care about easy of use)
3) Is it less descriptive? (Because we care about people quickly grasping the concept)
4) Is it dissimilar to the old word? (Because we want to minimize transaction costs)
5) Is it likely to cause another cascade? (Because we dislike cascades)
If tomorrow people say that "black people" is bad but "black peoples" is good, I would jump on board at 55% because it scores well in all aspects (except 5). If however people want to replace it with "abcedifoguhajekilomun" that's worse in all aspects (except 5) so I would strongly push against it (maybe 98%).
Conversely if people want to *reclaim* a word and start a *respectability* cascade I would jump on board rather quickly (I like having the freedom to use a lot of words), but I would jump on board even more quickly the better it scores in those different aspects.
For example, I'm on board with trying to reclaim "queer" because lgbt is longer and more annoying to say, requires an explanation for a new user, and quickly causes another cascade (what about intersex? Okay we'll say lgbti. What about asexuals? Okay we'll say lgbtia etc).
Queer on the other hand scores well on all aspects (even transaction cost since we still have a lot of books lying around about "queer theory" etc).
I don't think we should be trying to put a number on this (e.g. I add 10% to my 70% for every negative aspect it has) because a lot of it depends on social context. With rarely used jargon I value descriptiveness over brevity, with words I use in everyday life it's the opposite. Let's all agree we jump onboard a disrespectability cascade at more than 50% and onboard a respectability cascade at less than 50%. How much more or less we'll change depending on a lot of hard to quantify social factors.
EDIT: This is just a heuristic and moral reasoning obviously takes priority. Queer people wanting to make "queer" a respectable synonym of "lgbt" is fine. But if the nazi-party wants to start a respectability cascade to make "holocaust" a respectable synonym of "morality" you should probably resist jumping on board even once the majority of the population has.
The discussion about “the poor” and “the rich” seems to me to be clearly about privilege. One could be considered unintentional punching down (the poor) while the other is punching up.
How much of this resistance to accepting slurs as slurs is straight up privilege?
Great post.
A couple of typographical errors:
• Missing closing quote mark in the following sentence: Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’ every time someone refers to them.
• Repeated word in the sentence "This is just a bad time time on all sides."
If you're going to seriously think about this maybe you should have started with n-gram viewer of "jap", "japs", etc. (Put time frame to 1700 and compare American English to English data sets.)
I recall Spiro Agnew's usage.
Mcwhorter's and Randall Smith's and others' before thinking about how words are slurs or become slurs might have been useful. (ie the literature review is important.) It's not like nobody has been thinking about this stuff for decades!
To mildly equivocate brits with japs as a set up is kind of lame. How long has the word Brits been used?
Again where is a literature and historic review. I remembered Safire writing about it and it wasn't hard to find.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/27/magazine/on-language-brits-tommies-poms-limeys-kippers.html#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20Brit%20%2C%20capitalized,end%20of%20the%2013th%20century.
The lack of the long or serious view is disheartening.
And then there is the logarrhea. You're not getting paid by the word. Edit yourself. Distill. You aspire to be an essayist but seem unwilling to hone your craft.
Rewrite and resubmit.
"Okay, but this process is bad, right?"
...is it? You've basically described the process of language evolving based on past events. How is that bad?
"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."
'For some reason' is doing a tremendous amount of work here. Either there's a good reason, and this is fine, or there isn't a good reason and this doesn't actually happen. Or you can admit that people do irrational things and adjust all your beliefs (including the belief in efficient markets, etc, which your writing indicates you're very attached to) accordingly.
"This seems bad for everybody."
This is the same 'everybody' that agreed to go along with this one sentence ago?
Good points.
It's indeed easy to imagine scary scenarios like "what if everybody spontaneously coordinate to do something terrible" But the assumption that people successfully coordinated around something already contradicts most of the terrible scenarios. Not all of them, though.
The whole point is that it's not everybody spontaneously coordinating. It's a small number of people coordinating initially, then some more people joining in because they are ideologically motivated to always choose the most anti-racist etc. option available, no matter how silly it is, then more people joining in because they are pressured to conform, then more people because they start to worry that the old terms may actually be offensive to some people, then more people because (after many of the least racist people already avoid the old term) a few people of the race referred to actually start to get offended by it, and so on.
A positive feedback loop, where there's a gradually increasing number of people avoiding the old term, along with an increasingly good reason to avoid it, even though originally there was no reason to change terminology at all, or nowhere near a sufficiently good reason to go through the process.
I doubt the "no matter how silly it is" part. After all field work, isn't cancelled and I don't think there is any controversy around quantum supremacy anymore. There indeed is a mechanism that leads to changes but it doesn't seem to be capable to create absolutely any change.
There are definitely people who join in no matter how silly it is, though it sometimes fizzles out at the next stage or the one after that.
But, more importantly, the reason it sometimes fizzles out is that *enough people behave like Scott suggests* and don't join in just because someone tells them some term is offensive. That's not an argument *against* Scott's post.
I guess an argument against Scott's post could be that it's enough for people to just judge if the request is silly, and if they judge it silly, it will fizzle out. But when people request you to change some terminology, and you say "this is silly", they'll often say "it costs you nothing to do it, and someone might get hurt if you don't, so why don't you do it?" That's when you can link to Scott's post to defend yourself.
The argument against Scott's post is that while he kind of presents the mechanism as all powerful and unrestricted thing that can make any change in the language which isn't the case as there is hidden machinery inside, which is responsible for which changes get adopted and which not, which Scott didn't include in his model.
The other argument is that the changes that actually happen, contrary to potential scares and failed attempts, are often good and we should take it into the account.
But yes, the fact that someone have to stand ground occasionally to prevent outright stupid changes is true.
What hidden machinery do you refer to?
Can you give examples where the change was good?
"A positive feedback loop, where there's a gradually increasing number of people avoiding the old term, along with an increasingly good reason to avoid it"
Okay. Seems fine.
"even though originally there was no reason to change terminology at all"
That was then, whenever "originally" was. People respond to changes in their environment. This is normal and healthy and good.
"or nowhere near a sufficiently good reason to go through the process."
The people who went along with the process probably disagree. That's why they did it.
> That was then, whenever "originally" was. People respond to changes in their environment.
But quite possibly it would be better if the process didn't start at all, and their environment didn't change at all (in this manner).
> The people who went along with the process probably disagree. That's why they did it.
Wrong. Many of the same people who went along at a time the original term became somewhat widely regarded as offensive may well have preferred if the whole process hadn't started at all. That's why they only joined in later. Only a small minority necessarily wanted it when compared to not having the process started at all (or having it fizzle out early on).
Also, some people are forced/pressured to join in by employer policies, social pressure and so on, and these still contribute to the continuing feedback loop. (Here I'm not even opining on whether said policies, pressure are right at the time they happen. My point is that they should be counted as opposing the process, not supporting it.)
> But quite possibly it would be better if the process didn't start at all, and their environment didn't change at all (in this manner).
"Quite possibly" isn't exactly a slam dunk argument.
> Wrong. Many of the same people who went along at a time the original term became somewhat widely regarded as offensive may well have preferred if the whole process hadn't started at all. That's why they only joined in later. Only a small minority necessarily wanted it when compared to not having the process started at all (or having it fizzle out early on).
So their preferences changed as the situation around them changes. This is normal and healthy and good.
> Also, some people are forced/pressured to join in by employer policies, social pressure and so on, and these still contribute to the continuing feedback look. (Here I'm not even opining on whether said policies, pressure are right at the time they happen. My point is that they should be counted as opposing the process, not supporting it.)
When it's a thing you like, it's "responding to incentives". When it's a thing you don't like, it's "pressure".
> So their preferences changed as the situation around them changes.
Their preference changed as to whether people should continue using the word. It didn't (necessarily) change as to whether it would have been better if most people had kept using the old term, and had not started to treat it as offensive.
The problem is, in these cases it only takes a small number of people to float the idea that something is a slur (or otherwise offensive) for any silly reason, and that's enough to start the cascade if everyone else tries to behave maximally non-offensively. That at least a small number of people behave irrationally (or more specifically, are radicals blinded by ideology) is hardly news. (More generally, it's never been my impression that Scott thought most people behaved rationally when it came to politics(-adjacent things).)
"The problem is, in these cases it only takes a small number of people to float the idea that something is a slur (or otherwise offensive) for any silly reason, and that's enough to start the cascade if everyone else tries to behave maximally non-offensively."
And this is...bad? Because...???
"(More generally, it's never been my impression that Scott thought most people behaved rationally when it came to politics(-adjacent things).)"
He has an entire day of the week set aside for prediction markets, pretty much every one of which includes some market on politics(adjacent things). Either people behave rationally or those markets are useless. You can't just switch between the two whenever it's convenient for the thing you're arguing for. It's almost like a thing, with a castle and some farmland.
“And this is...bad? Because...???”
Because a small minority of ultra committed status hungry people will be able to constantly impose their will on a complacent majority
As opposed to all of human history up until now, where nobody was status hungry and the complacent majority instead imposed their (lack of?) will on those ultra committed?
What are you actually arguing in favor of?
I guess its the subject matter if the imposition. Here unlike imposition of a normal religious value or prohibition on criminal act, there is no conceivable utility in these constant linguistic landmines, other than for those who start these trends, who get to catch others in landmines, creating new opportunities for posturing and inflicting social ostracism on others. ie: the contemptibility of those who start these cascades
...unlike "normal religious value", like what kind of milk you boil goats in, where you have incredible utility. Really?
"You're arguing about a particular manifestation of a problem, but that problem is actually much older and general than this particular instance, so you shouldn't do anything about this instance."
Not a good argument. Yeah, committed power-hungry minorities often try to impose their will on majorities, and it's natural that we try to fight back against them when we disagree with their will.
EDIT:
> What are you actually arguing in favor of?
If someone tries to pressure you to change some terminology to avoid allegedly offending some group, resist the pressure if it's unlikely to actually offend people. And perhaps keep using the old terminology if you think there was originally no good reason to change it, even if at this point it does offend some especially easily offended people, but not once it's universally regarded as offensive.
> "You're arguing about a particular manifestation of a problem, but that problem is actually much older and general than this particular instance, so you shouldn't do anything about this instance."
I'm saying the problem is being misidentified. If the problem is "humans are status hungry and the majority is complacent", then saying more slurs doesn't actually solve anything.
> Not a good argument. Yeah, committed power-hungry minorities often try to impose their will on majorities, and it's natural that we try to fight back against them when we disagree with their will.
Are you sure that you aren't the committed minority here? You're arguing in favor of using more slurs.
People who put money on prediction markets have strong incentives to do their best to be right, and to bet specifically on markets about which they are likely to be right. People joining Twitter campaigns have... different incentives.
But anyway, is it your impression from Scott's general writing about politics (not the prediction markets stuff, more his earlier stuff on SSC) that he thinks most people behave rationally about politics? If no, and you see a contradiction between that and the prediction market posts, take that up with him, not me.
> People who put money on prediction markets have strong incentives to do their best to be right, and to bet specifically on markets about which they are likely to be right. People joining Twitter campaigns have... different incentives.
Twitter sucks, I agree, and you won't ever catch me defending it. But I think this is the first time Twitter has actually come up in this discussion.
> But anyway, is it your impression from Scott's general writing about politics (not the prediction markets stuff, more his earlier stuff on SSC) that he thinks most people behave rationally about politics?
It is my impression that Scott thinks most people behave at least rationally enough that markets work on general and that the results of a market (prediction or otherwise) can be taken as a reasonable analogue for ground truth.
> If no, and you see a contradiction between that and the prediction market posts, take that up with him, not me.
I did, when I left my original comment. You lept to his defense. I didn't know who you are before you responded and largely still don't.
> I did, when I left my original comment.
OK. To be clear, I'm working off the belief that people are in general not very rational about politics.
> Either there's a good reason,
Some morons recently decided that calling a country the "Philippines" is offensive[*], so Scott is actually being pretty mild here as far as this idiocy can go.
>This is the same 'everybody' that agreed to go along with this one sentence ago?
Yeah, in nazi germany everybody agreed to go one way, and it ended badly for every single one of them and a good part of their descendents. Herds Follow Their Stupidest Off A Cliff.
[*] http://web.archive.org/web/20221219160303/https://itcommunity.stanford.edu/ehli
>Instead of : Philippine Islands
>Consider using : Philippines or the Republic of the Philippines
>Context : The term is politically incorrect and denotes colonialism. Some people of Filipino heritage might use the term, though.
If real Asian people demanded it, it might be worth considering. But in reality, it'll be some dumb liberal white person striving for ever greater purity of consciousness who is getting offended on behalf of others and declaring the old usage is bad, we must now all say the new phrase.
"Some morons recently decided that calling a country the "Philippines" is offensive[*], so Scott is actually being pretty mild here as far as this idiocy can go."
This is missing the crucial "everybody goes along with it for some reason" step.
It's a 3 months old proposal, you think the parasites who came up with this bullshit won't spend the rest of their sad lives trying to force it on every professor and student whose miserable luck made them fall under their authority ? With a very high probability of success ?
>With a very high probability of success ?
Bet?
Sure thing, send an application to the university in question using one of the words mentioned in the naughty list, if you got accepted for an interview report back the results to me and any amount of money you want me to pay.
This offer stands for 5 years from now.
You're thinking too small. Scott describes (and I objected to) a situation where "everyone" would be forced to stop using the term "Asian". In that context, what does one university's hiring department matter? It's less than a drop in a bucket. This is the exact nature of my objection; it's not hard to find someone advocating for something dumb. You could even call it the human condition. And some of those people might even be in situations of petty authority. But what they aren't going to do is transform the culture through sheer force of will. For purposes of our bet, I graciously won't hold you to the strictness of "everyone", 1/2 or even 1/3 of "everyone" would suffice to convince me. But it's certainly going to take more than a handful of people at one university.
And then there's the outcomes we're measuring; do you honestly think a university refusing to hiring a Robert Bigdick is evidence of...anything? Do you know whether or not I am of Filipino heritage, and thus the point would be moot anyway? Could you possibly come up with a less shitty way to test your claims? Something that doesn't involve reminding you of a comment five years from now (Assuming I can track you down) to harangue you for money? Isn't Scott pushing prediction markets for exactly this kind of situation?
"Asian" is two syllables. "Person of Asian descent" is seven.
Go through this process with enough words, as is currently happening, and our language becomes less concise, less succinct, and less usable.
One of the worst offenders is how we are now expected to stop saying "Mormon" (two syllables) and say "member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" (14 syllables!).
The replacement words almost always seem to be much more of a mouthful than those which came before.
If this is the crux of your complaint, then the rationalist community is throwing stones in glass houses. Neologisms abound here. We're in the comments section for a blog post that just introduced the world to the word "Hyperstitious", for fucks sake. And you want to talk about how language is becoming less susinct and less usable?
I'm not a Rationalist nor do I claim to be one. Regardless, this is a bad comparison anyway. "Hyperstition" is a very specific thing that previously had no term. We have a perfectly good word for Asians already: Asian. I am not going to substitute that for the mouthful "person of Asian descent" which means the exact same thing.
I pick option three, "there isn't a good reason, and it does happen".
Seemingly now DEI is DEIB, where the "b" stands for "belonging", because being diverse, inclusive, and equitable was too limiting and not accepting enough. There comes a point where you look at what is being plopped down in front of you and go "this is a con job".
https://www.charthop.com/resources/blog/dei/dei-vs-deib-in-the-workplace/
"But DEI leaders are now calling for the word “belonging” to join the acronym."
Who are these leaders, why is anyone listening to them, and does this sound like anything more than a way to squeeze more money out of training, workshops, consultancy, and "you need to hire me at great expense to lecture all your staff about this new thing"?
"Who are these leaders"
No idea. This is the first I'm hearing about it. It must not actually be a big deal.
"why is anyone listening to them"
I'm not sure anyone is (except you). This news would never have reached me if it didn't have you signal boosting it, even though you are doing it for toxoplasma reasons.
"and does this sound like anything more than a way to squeeze more money out of training, workshops, consultancy, and "you need to hire me at great expense to lecture all your staff about this new thing"?"
Again, the only perspective I have on this is yours, so it sounds like whatever you describe it as. You've intentionally chosen some obscure thing that nobody else could possibly have a chance to form an independent opinion on beforehand. But I'll give it a naive and uninformed shot:
This is fine. I already use the acronym "DEI" approximately never, I project using the new acronym about as much, I think belonging is fine as an idea, and the very idea of fighting in this particular trench in the culture war fills me with a weary headache. If (again for emphasis, IF) it's all a grift, it's not a grift on the scale of, say, crypto, and the blog's stated stance on crypto is "less than maximally hostile", so the appropriate level of hostility here would be even less than that.
"even though you are doing it for toxoplasma reasons."
Is your ability to conduct telepathy via the Internet an inborn trait or a learned ability?
Come now. It's not a vastly different skill from the one you're using to detect your supposed con jobs. We're both reading text other people have written on the internet and making judgements about the writer's motivation. If you think this is wildly unfair, I'd gently suggest not making it the crux of your argument.
I'll grant that the DEIB thing is an obscure issue that may or may not become a bigger problem down the line, but there are clearly other instances of "there isn't a good reason, and it does happen" that have already been proven out.
For example, see the "blacklist" issue - the origin of the word has nothing to do with race or the colour of anyone's skin, but it's now been declared verboten by some navel gazers [1] somewhere because it might associate negative sentiments with the word "black" which makes it somehow a slight against black people.
Is that a good reason? I would argue no, it doesn't actually serve the supposed telos of solving any real issues of racial inequality, it's authoritarian language policing that only demonstrates and boosts the social power of the aforementioned navel gazers. But this triggered a cascade resulting in many companies having to spend thousands of engineering hours to strike "blacklist" and "whitelist" from all their assets to signal they're not racist. This is a form of tyranny - it gives a few dedicated social engineers the power to inflict heavy costs on society for little real world benefit except to themselves, which does not seem socially beneficial to me for all the same reasons classical tyrants are generally a bad form of government even if some turn out to be wise and good - the abuse potential and downsides are too high.
[1] - Wikipedia cites https://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/490/744 as the originator of this trend to strike the word from use. You can judge whether their reasoning is valid for yourself, but that little kafkatrap at the end tells me all I need to know.
> For example, see the "blacklist" issue - the origin of the word has nothing to do with race or the colour of anyone's skin, but it's now been declared verboten by some navel gazers [1] somewhere because it might associate negative sentiments with the word "black" which makes it somehow a slight against black people
You're misunderstanding my argument completely. Scott posits a situation where someone makes up something dumb and then (something something handwave "everybody" agrees and it takes over the world). My issue isn't with the first part, where people make up dumb stuff, that happens all the time. It's happening in these very comments as we speak. I take issue with "somehow everyone agrees for some reason and it takes over the world". That doesn't happen, and when pressed on this the only counterexamples I'm presented with are things that someone made up that _haven't_ convinced everyone and _hasn't_ taken over the world. You yourself admit that this blacklist thing is something "some navel gazers" made up. My router continues to maintain a blacklist, and I don't see any open tickets on Ubiquiti's forums to request such a change. I feel kind of silly for checking.
So no, I remain unconvinced.
>I take issue with "somehow everyone agrees for some reason and it takes over the world". That doesn't happen, and when pressed on this the only counterexamples I'm presented with are things that someone made up that _haven't_ convinced everyone and _hasn't_ taken over the world. You yourself admit that this blacklist thing is something "some navel gazers" made up. My router continues to maintain a blacklist, and I don't see any open tickets on Ubiquiti's forums to request such a change. I feel kind of silly for checking.
You may not have experienced the effects yourself, but as someone in the software industry, I have been made to participate in large scale efforts to strike "blacklist", "whitelist", "master", and "slave" from our codebase and documentation. This is not an isolated phenomenon; smaller companies like Ubiquiti might get away with not conforming to the signaling, but major players like Apple [1], Microsoft [2], and Amazon [3] have already hopped onboard.
I take your point that not all hyperstition cascades ultimately "take over the world", but regardless of whether penetration ultimately reaches 99.99%, as the cascade grows we incur a huge amount of unnecessary costs based on nothing but silly, made up things. Counterexamples here and there don't make those costs go away.
[1] - https://www.pcmag.com/news/apple-to-remove-masterslave-and-blacklist-terms-from-coding-platforms
[2] - https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/03/chromium_microsoft_offensive/
[3] - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/messaging-and-targeting/goodbye-blacklist-introducing-the-suppression-list/
> You may not have experienced the effects yourself, but as someone in the software industry, I have been made to participate in large scale efforts to strike "blacklist", "whitelist", "master", and "slave" from our codebase and documentation. This is not an isolated phenomenon; smaller companies like Ubiquiti might get away with not conforming to the signaling, but major players like Apple [1], Microsoft [2], and Amazon [3] have already hopped onboard.
I'm not sure I understand why your grievance here. Is it that, in the course of employment, you've had to do things that you personally think are "silly" and pointless? Sure, that happens. I would point to "meeting that could have been an email" as a much more regular, widespread, and costly. My wife is a software engineer and at there are entire days lost to meetings. Your concern for "unnecessary costs" strikes me as particularly hollow, given that in this particular case the "unnecessary costs" are your paycheck; you yourself are the one being paid to make these changes. You could argue that if you didn't have to make these changes, you could be spending your time on doing other more important work and changing the world for the better, but you and I both know that isn't true and that time would instead be spent on another meeting. The entire "unncessary cost" argument boils down to "This is less than 100% optimal", to which I would say "Yeah, this and literally everything else in the world". In deciding what to fix first, do you _really_ think this ranks at the top of the list? The top 10%? The top 50%?
Are you sure that Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are actually under some genuine pressure to make these changes that they couldn't resist, or that it's simply a case of large corporations doing the large corporation thing of making token goodboy gestures to distract from their constant bad actions? Any article about Apple changing its terminology is an article that isn't about labor issues in Apple's supply chain. Amazon putting this front and center on their blog suggests that this isn't begrudgingly capitulating to external pressure but a movement from within Amazon. Weak evidence in favor: Ubiquti is generally well regarded and doesn't have any need to employ any such distraction tactics. More weak evidence against: Amazon, Apple, etc have literal PR departments whose literal job it is to put out statements like this. Someone got paid to write that blog post you're linking to. Is that an "unnecessary cost"? I guess so, but now we're talking about signaling games in general. How far are you willing to take this line of argument? Are luxuries "unnecessaryt costs", and therefore as a society we should commit to only having trabants as cars? Do you get as upset at seeing a Rolex as you do at those articles you linked?
Are you, in particular, attached to the terms "blacklist", "master", slave", etc? I don't think this is the case, but in absence of anything else I have to wonder why anyone cares. Indeed, nobody can muster up any more venom than calling this phenomenon "silly". Clowns are silly. How much time in the past month have you spent thinking about clowns?
> I take your point that not all hyperstition cascades ultimately "take over the world", but regardless of whether penetration ultimately reaches 99.99%, as the cascade grows we incur a huge amount of unnecessary costs based on nothing but silly, made up things. Counterexamples here and there don't make those costs go away.
"Huge" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for your argument here. How "huge" the costs are will necessarily scale with things like how deep the penetration gets, and what the remedy is. I'll point that, for example, not saying slurs in everyday conversation is basically free.
I'll also push back on the implication that just because something is """made up""", it doesn't matter. Scott's definition of Hyperstitious is so wide that it includes all language (Words only have meaning because we agree they do) and not just slurs, and also like the concept of money and value, which is pretty necessary to your whole "huge costs" argument.
Lastly, let's take stock of just how far the goalposts have moved, from start to finish. We've gonefrom "Someone is going to say you can't say 'Asian' anymore, and then the next day it's going to become a universally agreed rule by mysterious means" and arrived at "Amazon makes some meaningless token changes to the name of some database fields to distract from how it can't stop killing warehouse workers locked in warehouses during tornados". I'm unimpressed.
A good writeup but fails to adequately stress how there are people and groups actively attempting to start a "hyperstitious cascade".
The only way to fight that is to be the 1% on something.
Enough 1% different somethings, I believe the cascades fail.
> On the other hand, the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible.
This doesn't seem very well-supported in the rest of the essay. It also seems like fundamental attribution error to me.
> if you think there is, compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
I think a significant percentage of the time we are, but no more so that when we talk about "rich people" and "poor people". Generally, when we categorize people, we end up attributing characteristics to the category that we either identify with or identify against. I believe the people who advocate for using "X people" are doing so because they want to center the fact that they are people, and not the categorical fiction that we've created in our heads. Ultimately, I think that endeavor is pretty futile.
True. Good correction.
Reminds me of the language-change index in Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage, which tracks the progess of a linguistic innovation from "clear mistake" to "perfectly acceptable usage".
Stage 1: Rejected
Stage 2: Widely Shunned
Stage 3: Widespread but . . .
Stage 4: Ubiquitous but . . .
Stage 5: Fully accepted
More detail here: https://stroppyeditor.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/bryan-garners-language-change-index/
Many forms linger in the first stage or two forever, but some make steady progress up the ladder. And then the question is when do you, as a careful writer and speaker, adopt the new usage?
This is one of the first times I have felt like a column of yours is not so well thought out. Applying statististics (where do these come from, in this case, really?) does not make much sense to me. Language is a living, breathing thing: it evolves, it lives in context (and what counts as context could take up an entire book or ten) -- and sometimes history is part of that context. I do feel much of what you express; that the language police are not just annoying but also sometimes do real damage (I saw a faculty member not just run out of her job but of her next job, by students who went online and said awful things about her, when her original "crime" was stating: "I care about the pronouns you all want, and they are still confusing to me, and I will be clumsy sometimes in what I say as I am still learning it all." She cared, and was bullied out of the situation and a job. She was an excellent teacher, beloved by many students, apparently not all.) I also think you are in one way over-thinking your own response, using stats to justify a gut reaction, and making some real assumptions or at least harsh judgements based upon very little ("the people who want to be the first person in a new cascade, like USC’s social work department, are contemptible.") Are those in USC's SW dept really contemptible? We don't know enough. Maybe they, too, are just clumsy. Weird that you say "the people" (plural) ... "want to be the first person in a new cascade...." Do you know what propeled them and if that is their main goal? No. To me, much as I dislike some of the swing, the pendulum swings esp. when new ways of life, new understandings, new things to notice, are emerging, and we can all over-react about the motivations of others. I don't think they ("motivations:) are "private" in the philosophical sense (the old idea of inner things we can never know about in principle, which is debateable and I would come down upon the side of not-privacy; its not a thing, except poetically and circumstantially, not metaphysically or ontologically...) but I do think here you haven't shown any knowledge or research into USC's motivations. And on and on. Lots of things people are observing here are annoying to me too, but we reduce and define and assume at our peril. That said, I do think inviting real discussion, as you do, and as we are all I think trying to do here, is generally good, though I don't have any stats to back up that assumption. Still, let language breathe, folks. Let people grow and struggle with the new. Just don't forbid stuff create reductive analyses too quickly.
> Weird that you say "the people" (plural) ... "want to be the first person in a new cascade...."
What's supposed to be weird about that? The notion is that more than one person hopes to be the first person in a new trend scourging their enemies. Do you think only one person at a time can hope to win any given contest?
Language is our common property, and sometimes words get busted up and abused and we have to collectively replace them, just like you need to buy a new suitcase every now and then. They just accrue bad associations and connotations, and there's a need to start again with fresh terms.
Probably most of us can agree that sometimes people force this process too early or completely unnecessarily. But a lot of the time, it's good that the processes of language change happens; terms for poorly treated classes of people really do start to feel inherently insulting for example, or old-fashioned in some other way.
I'm not sure if this conservative view of protecting every word, as if they're irreplaceable and we might not manage to find others, is coming from a thoroughly thought through mindset, and it seems to contain a worry for the poor left-behind users of outmoded language that outweighs the small amount of inconvenience they are actually enduring.
I'd probably be less opposed to this phemomenon if the replacement words weren't almost always so much more of a mouthful than those words whose places they are taking. The cold, clinical, academese feeling of most of them doesn't help either. I'm a man, not a robot or a sociology postdoc. Human language is both connotational and denotational.
This I fully agree with. We should appoint a single Shakespeare type to come up with new words every year.
> terms for poorly treated classes of people really do start to feel inherently insulting for example, or old-fashioned in some other way
Do you feel like this about some word for a poorly-treated group that's still formally neutral, in the sense that people use it whether they like the group or not? Or have you felt like this about a word at a time it was still formally neutral? Can you give example(s)? I'm trying to get at whether you might feel like this because the words in question were already at least starting to be perceived as offensive (the group starting to consider it offensive and/or people friendly to the group starting to avoid it).
Probably in my case for the most part it's only words that are already starting to be considered offensive by others. I'd say I usually get on board about 40% of the way through the so-called hyperstitious slur cascade! (Joking with the number, I couldn't quantify it)... I'm trying to think of examples where the terms are still 'formally neutral' but they feel uncomfortable for me to say. I would say 'tory' perhaps qualifies. That's a term happily used by conservatives in the UK to describe themselves, but in the mouth of a political opponent it's often said in a derogatory way. I would try not to use it because I think it can sound ranty and a bit contemptuous.
I think that makes sense, Scott. I'm probably kind-of-sort-of, in a fuzzy "I haven't thought deeply about it" way, at around the same point for the same reason.
Why are you moralizing this process? Sometimes it’s good to notice signals and amplify them. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the underlying behavior is itself significant and sometimes it isn’t. Saying that this is wrong or bad implies that teams shouldn’t choose colors because suddenly they’re creating their own hyperstitious cascades.
I think what moralizes it is the real emotional and social effect it can have on people. The author describes this in his “Asian” example (“White people have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk to an Asian... When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person is actually racist ... If they are the sort of person who is triggered by hearing slurs, they will have to be triggered several times a day as people adjust from the familiar language to the new... Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time time on all sides”).
Language has the power to accomplish this in a way that I’m not sure something as arbitrary as team colors can. And inasmuch as team colors do affect our emotional/social situation, it is with respect to something less impactful/serious (sports) than race
I think that is something specific about how we deal with race, not how the general process of people starting to associate a word with a signal of group membership and then enhancing and reifying it. Just think about all the words that people have done this with that *aren’t* racial, like “problematic” or “prior” or whatever.
Moralizing usually happens when the choice in one's personal interest may differ from the choice according to a greater good, or otherwise right for whatever reason. In this case, a particular cascade may be bad on the net, but one may be under social pressure to participate.
Scott isn't saying that all "hyperstitions" are bad; indeed, commenters have pointed out that every word is a hyperstition". "Slur cascades" are highly unusual process compared to normal changes of meaning.
Team Green wears green, Team Orange wears orange. People identify Team Green members by their green shirts, because that's what they wear; they wear green because they want to be identified as Team Green. If a Green member accidentally puts on a white or orange shirt, chances are he realizes the mistake and changes to a green shirt. Vice versa if an Orange member puts on a green shirt. This is how words normally work; approximately like stable equilibria.
Now let's say that if a Team Green member puts on a white shirt for some reason, somehow the color green is relinquished to Team Orange, all the Team Green members have to change to white, and Team Orange now mixes orange and green. This is how "slur cascades" work. (The analogy isn't complete, it doesn't explain the mechanism of the positive feedback.) This is a much less stable system. Unoffensive words on sensitive topics are like they're in unstable equilibria.
I'd guess because it's so vividly moralized by the people trying to kick off new cascades, often as a weapon - which is miserable even when it's heartfelt and not just a status battle.
There's some interaction with social class, too. I once had a college roommate who was full-blooded Japanese-American, grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Honolulu. He applied the term "Jap" to himself, and taboo terms to other ethnic groups. Apparently these were valuation-free in informal speech among his peers growing up. Vague press reports suggest this is true more generally in working-class America, and that the various hyperstitious taboos are s.significantly limited by class.
There is a strong (and strongly ignored) aspect of classism in political correctness in general. To keep up with all the taboos and their recent updates, one must spend a lot of time online, which is much easier in a white-collar job.
(The very idea that words are thing that can hurt you most already suggests that the person who believes it does not live in a ghetto nor work in construction.)
I spent five years almost full-time learning Japanese and probably 80% of learners (myself included) have no idea Jap is a slur and use it before getting corrected. It's doubly absurd because no Japanese people have any idea it is a slur either. Pretty much the only thing keeping it offensive are automated reddit/discord bots and a small number of overzealous do-gooders.
Maybe now [old, not current] Jordan Peterson's fight about pronouns makes more sense.
[I realize there are going to be people who feel the need to reply "Yes, but I still hate [old or current] Jordan Peterson". Sure. Granted. Have at it. But it's not germane.]
> Is being a Civil War re-enactor (on the Confederate side) sufficient for condemnation these days? I don’t know, but it depends on whether other people think it is.
I have heard that some groups that do historical war re-enactments assign the roles by a coinflip, to discourage potential members who would only be interested in playing a specific side.
I have a wargaming friend who is a re-enactor. He is a white libertarian gun enthusiast. I know what you're thinking, and I can guarantee, it's not what you think. Among his re-enactments (and not a simple costume; very high quality replica gear) was the Vietnam war... as a PAVN (North Vietnamese) soldier. According to him, the Vietnamese practically rolled out the red (heh) carpet for Vietnam War re-enactors of both sides (or at least American re-enactors for the 'other side'; no mention was made of any ARVN re-enactors).
When I think back on this, my initial reaction to remembering his re-enactment when it comes up is always that his re-enactment was somehow wrong, but when I try to figure out how it was wrong, my brain can't process it.
“Meanwhile, Asians now have to police everyone else’s behavior, saying “Actually, that word is offensive, we prefer ‘person of Asian descent’”
This is a feature-not a bug-for those who set off most hyperstitious cascades, which after all are mostly about clout-seeking and setting social landmines for others
Where do people think that the new interpretation of "squaw" falls right now? I had literally never heard anyone say this was offensive before the last year or so (and it is an actual indigenous word for "woman" in several languages), but it has gotten far enough that lots of place names are being changed. It seems silly and borderline bad to me, but I think I agree with the 70% rule.
I remember a Jules Feiffer cartoon from about 1970, syndicated in the newspapers. I can't find it on Google, although I did find a couple of other cartoons by Feiffer based on the same idea.
A five-frame strip. The image in each one is a black man (my reason for choosing "black" here will become clear) addressing the reader.
First frame: "At first, we were called 'black'."
Second frame: "Which was replaced by 'negro'."
Third frame: "Which was replaced by 'people of colour'."
Fourth frame: "Which was replaced by 'coloured'."
Final frame: "Which was replaced by 'black."
"Black" was at the time the ordinary, neutral word. Older readers may remember the slogans of the time, "Black Power" and "Black is Beautiful". Also the Black Panthers, and the Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympics. The cartoon was a few years later.
I remember "coloured" being the ordinary, neutral word back in the earlier 60's (in the UK -- the history may have proceeded differently in the US). One occasionally encountered the words "people of colour", but it sounded to me then as very old-fashioned, and also as if those using it were straining to be politer than they felt like being to the people that each of these expressions, at different times, neutrally referred to.
There's a treadmill of social history there. The neutral word is used by everyone. The people vocal in their hate for the group use it too. It becomes associated with the haters. A replacement is found and the cycle repeats. Nowadays we seem to be back to "people of colour" and "BIPOC", a mixture of recycling the old and inventing new ones. "POC" strikes me as potentially troublesome, though. How do you pronounce the plural? What word does that sound like? How long before the haters start spelling it with an X?
Nit: "Black people commit more crime” is too vague to be either true or false. More than... what? There is a version of that statement that is true, but that ain't it.
Virtually everyone in the US is committing a crime of some sort right now. Do you have any expired prescription medication in your house somewhere? Congratulations, you're committing a crime, and so am I. Therefore, since there are more "white" people in the US than black, white people commit more crime. Yes, black people commit proportionally more of certain types of crime, and are charged and convicted much more proportionally than that.
“and are charged and convicted much more proportionally than that.” Not sure what the intended meaning here is, but if you mean blacks are charged disproportionately, wholly untrue
Cite your source. Here is one of 26,100,000 hits I got on google:
"Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S.
population,9 and are consistently documented by the
U.S. government to use drugs at similar rates to
people of other races.10 But Black people comprise 30
percent of those arrested for drug law violations11 –
and nearly 40 percent of those incarcerated in state or
federal prison for drug law violations.12"
https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civil/DrugPolicyAlliance/DPA_Fact_Sheet_Drug_War_Mass_Incarceration_and_Race_June2015.pdf
Yes, for "certain types of crime. "
The FBI helpfully compiles annual tables with this exact information. Here's the table for 2019, the most recently available year: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43
I'll do the same when 70% of readers accept this 70% rule.
"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."
When I read this line, I thought of the 1960s, but realized, forty years ago was 1983. Time goes by too quickly :(
Quote from UCSD:
“Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."”
https://www.opb.org/article/2023/01/14/a-usc-office-removes-field-from-its-curriculum-citing-possible-racist-connotations/?outputType=amp
It's even more annoying when two camps are fighting over the correct term. Consider: "people with disabilities" vs "disabled people".
The argument for the former is that it puts the "people" term first to signal that they're people first and disabled second, which is clearly the correct order of priorities.
The argument for the latter is that the former sounds like disability is an inherent attribute of certain people but not others, whereas in the social model of disability, a disability is something that society does to people by being insufficiently inclusive, thus disabled people are people who are being disabled by not having their needs accomodated well enough, whether that's kerb cuts or captioning or something else.
I have seen both these arguments advanced in good faith by different groups of people within the general category of people who these terms could apply to. I've even heard similar arguments for autistic people vs. people with autism.
> I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”.
I presume there were a lot of Japanese-Americans with memories of forced relocation and internment, who had been called "Japs" a lot at the time.
From the outside perspective of someone with no stake in this internecine warfare, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the social model of disability. Do people actually believe it, that there's no such thing as an inherent disability? Or is it simply a fashionable luxury belief and/or a justification for certain types of advocacy?
If I ask myself "what is it true of?", I certainly come up with some good examples: someone needing a wheelchair but with no pain or mental problems, someone with a sight or hearing impairment etc.
The original "motte" claim was not that there's "no such thing as a disability", but that how much a condition (like having no legs) "disables" you is dependent on society: whether Oscar, a hypothetical person with no legs who uses a wheelchair, can walk is not a social question; whether he can shop in his local store, go to the cinema, use public transport, vote, work as a programmer at the local tech company is a question of ramps, lifts, accessible toilets and other accommodations that society can provide (or legislate) more or less of.
The social model of disability was one of the driving forces behind equality law in Europe (I'm less sure about the Americans with Disabilities Act but I suspect the model was involved there too), and in the sense of adding QALYs (or comparable positive outcomes for people of another philosophical bent) this has certainly been a huge success, even for non-disabled people as Ozy explains here for example: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/the-curb-cut-effect-or-why-it-is-basically-impossible-to-appropriate-from-disabled-people/
In the sense of "every disadvantage of a disability that society reasonably can fix, it should fix", our lawmakers certainly do believe it; a lot of corporations in Europe state that they believe in the social model of disability as part of their values statement or code of conduct.
For me, the limts of the model is that it basically only works for "nice" disabilities and not "horrible" ones. You can have no legs and still have a good quality of life in the right town; if you have complex PTSD you basically by definition have lower quality of life and society can do far less about fixing it (though legalising certain drugs might be worth a try). Chronic pain conditions, CFS/ME, anxiety disorders etc. pose the same kind of challenge for the model.
On another note, Freddie deBoer has blogged about how antipsychotic drugs have helped his condition in a way that activism and social changes have not, so unless you put the availability of such drugs in the first place on society's balance sheet, the model would seem not to apply too well here either. And there are certainly "there's no such a thing as a disability and therefore treating a supposed one with drugs is bad" kinds of activists that Freddie, and myself, have very little time for.
I bet 70% number is partially composed of personal preference but also influenced by circumstances. Scott here may be in a position where he could accidentally offend someone and not be too hurt by the ordeal; professionally and socially.
I would guess younger people with less clout and life stability may need to be more cautious. I am thinking collegiate and new workforce age, 17-23. I support this with two examples:
1) younger people are less stable in their career as they are newer and less experienced. Therefore using a slur could be much more harmful in someone's professional career when they are younger
2)Social bubbles are newer, possibly more personally impactful, and possibly more important professionally. A misstep here (i.e. using a slur) could be much more detrimental than an older person.
3) Younger people are expected to be more respectful and are reinforced to be overly polite.
With these points I would hypothesis that younger people would have a natural tendency towards lower thresholds for using a slur. I can't back this up with data.
I am less sure about the following ideas, what follows is epistemically lower than the above point.
Naturally I would argue if you are someone who is trying to convince people for a living, or even adjusting people's biases (like in rational debate), wouldn't lowering your threshold for slurs make your argument more appealing to young people. In the same way if I speak both English and Portuguese, I may write my blog posts in English so they have a larger effect size.
Would lowering your threshold for slurs- so it has a larger effect size, be worth the tradeoff here? Especially through the lense of my pet theory above "younger people have a lower slur threshold" should I adjust my threshold downward to be more inclusive as I get older?
One of the risks here is that sometimes there is a pre-existing reason for something to be genuinely offensive, and people can have different views on this. To take one example, I think it wouldn't be surprising for someone to take offense at "All lives matter" even in the first week of its existence, given that the phrase is a retort to "Black lives matter" and carries the implication that BLM is incorrect in prioritizing black lives. I agree that I dislike people who join a cascade simply out of fear or conformity, but what if the person believes that there is a real reason to take offense?
In a sense all language is a hyperstition. Does “dog” refer to the canine animal? It does if people agree it does. Does “heavy” mean serious? Not in 1955, but it did in 1985, and now it doesn’t. Did “fetch” happen? Does “literally” mean what it supposedly means, or the opposite? Does “I’m dead” refer to a serious medical problem or a funny joke? How do any of these come to mean what they mean, and change over time? Mostly the same was as with the slurs, right?
As far as I can tell, there was no group of leftist elites telling people they have to use "dog" to refer to the canine animal while everyone was using a different word, who then accused anyone who didn't go along with the diktat of being racist, sexist, and homophobic. Or if there was such a group of elites, it existed in the Old English days (<1000 AD) and is long gone by now.
I'm quite happy to grant that SJWs are moderate compared to primitive Papuans, Islamic fundamentalists, Spanish Inquisitors, or whatever other brutal primitive people come to mind. That's a really low bar. It's like being proud about knowing more science than the uncontacted tribe on Sentinelese Island, or more English than a toothless peasant from 2nd century China.
This is weird because... isn't *all* language usage a hyperstition, by definition? More generally any communication protocol is a hyperstition.
"Suppose someone decides tomorrow that 'hammer' means a weight at the end of a handle, used to hit things.
This becomes widely accepted for some reason, and now anyone referring to such a tool uses that word. Someone using a word like malleus will be met with incomprehension.
This is terrible for everybody. People have to be on tenterhooks every time they talk about construction, trying their hardest to remember the unwieldy word 'hammer', and somehow restrain themselves from saying malleus or anything else. Meanwhile, carpenters now have to police everyone's behavior, saying "Actually, that device is called a hammer". When people get annoyed by this, they have to fret that the person really doesn't care about woodworking. Meanwhile, dozens of organizations with names like the National Rock-Shaft Alliance will have to change their names. Old novels will need to include forewords explaining that a mudgara actually means a hammer. Some old people will refuse to change and get ostracized by society. This is just a bad time on all sides.
This whole thing is stupid. But it’s a stupidity we have to fight against, really hard, because if it ever gets a foothold then everyone who cares about percussion will eventually say 'hammer', it will be a stable equilibrium, and we’ll be stuck in it for all time."
> This is weird because... isn't *all* language usage a hyperstition, by definition? More generally any communication protocol is a hyperstition.
Yes, but Scott's post is specifically about hyperstitious *slur* cascades. In your hypothetical, nobody's asserting that the word "malleus" is an intrinsically insulting term, or that it's associated with offensive and dangerous subcultures. There is some other reason why the change is being enforced.
The problem with hyperstitious *slur* cascades is that they enforce periodic language changes for reasons that can, at least sometimes, be pure costs for the overwhelming majority of the population. That cost is not primarily the extra time it takes to say the longer word, as some here claim. The cost is the social disharmony that the phenomenon creates as people negotiate fundamentally pointless language shifts, or as people weaponize these language shifts to criticize, ostracize, and intimidate.
Other hyperstitious cascades are pretty much fine. I have no objection to using the word "raspberry" to refer to raspberries, for example. In other cases, we have good reasons for enforcing suboptimal lock-ins. For example, referring to electrons as "-" and drawing current backwards from the flow of electrons is universally understood to be an unfortunate historical accident, but it still makes sense to teach this as the normal convention because there would be huge costs to creating confusion in the work of professional electrical workers.
Personally, I don't use the word "Negro," so I don't mind not using it at all. By contrast, I feel that choosing between the words "Latino" and "Latinx," or "Black" and "black," or navigating conversations on the topic of disability where I'm at risk of being called out for saying "disabled people" rather than "people with disabilities," create real costs in my life and don't obviously produce social benefits of any kind. So it's not the specific result of the hyperstitious lock-in that's the problem, but the churn of unnecessary hyperstition. "Hammer" and "malleus" are both fine, but let's pick one and stick to it as much as we possibly can. In the case of, say, "Black" vs. "black,"
I'd love it if we had a culture capable of engineering the final properly respectable form of these terms, and then permanently enforcing that term as "respectable by fiat," in the same way that we enforce dollars being a form of currency. The design of the dollar is a largely arbitrary shape (certain security features aside), but it is good and useful that we not only respect earlier denominations as just as good, but that design alterations to the dollar are declared as just as good as the old ones. We can imagine a culture that declares that black, Black, Negro, and so on are all equally acceptable terms, and that only a racist would ever think it was somehow insulting to write "black" or say "Negro." That culture could still enforce the various universally agreed upon slurs, or regulate them in other ways. But the point is that this culture would be creating and enforcing long-term standards rather than a constant churn. We don't live in that culture, and I would prefer it to the one we do have now.
I'm very, very tempted to post a comment that consists of nothing but the prohibited non-slur "slurs", purely for the "fuck you" value.
See also: euphemism treadmill (hat tip to Steven Pinker)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly
this is an interesting example, I think we are now past the tipping point where one can safely assume that someone using the word niggardly is intentionally 'making a point' rather than just taking it as a synonym for parsimonious or miserly, but apparently this was not the case as recently as 1995:
"In 1995, London-based magazine The Economist used the word "niggardly" in an article about the impact of computers and productivity: "During the 1980s, when service industries consumed about 85% of the $1 trillion invested in I.T. in the United States, productivity growth averaged a niggardly 0.8% a year." The Economist later pointed out with amusement that it received a letter from a reader in Boston who thought the word "niggardly" was inappropriate. "Why do we get such letters only from America?" the British magazine commented.[19]"
or 1999 when they wrote this leader about the David Howard incident. which also includes a detour into comedy AAVE:
"The dictionary assures us that it has nothing to do with the Latin niger, black, meaning only “miserly” in Old Norse; but as a former head of the National Bar Association asked the New York Times, “Do we really know where the Norwegians got the word?” Good point. They'd already discovered America, hadn't they? Straight off the longship on to the Bronx Expressway, and who knows what they heard through those horns on their helmets. “But it turns up in Middle English, too,” you protest, “as nig and nog, meaning miser.” Right: so racism was alive and well in the era of Sir Gawain. Who do you imagine was actually sent to lif' dat Grail?"
https://www.economist.com/leaders/1999/02/04/down-with-the-n-word
another article from 2020 has a noticeably different tone:
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2020/10/03/the-battle-against-racist-language-is-too-important-to-trivialise
What if you have it backwards? What if the society is wrong or racist and eventually that comes to light over several generations and these terms that first appeared so innocent/ innocuous begin to be seen in their true light? I'm thinking of George Lakeoff's work with framing and metaphor as he says that language is never neutral because it is constructed/ shaped through whatever frames the culture is using to shape its reality.
There's no such thing as "true light". It's blinkered to insist that we have finally reached the end-all and be-all of human existence, given how many people thought we had found "truth" in the past and turned out not to have. Study history.
I think "do the people in question like or dislike the word?" is a better rule of thumb than "70% of the way through the respectability cascade". Like, I guess at some point you need to switch over purely for self-preservation reasons, but the thing that actually matters here is whether you are bothering the group you're referring to imo. If everyone is saying "Native American" then I don't think it matters that it's at 90% if the actual people indigenous to America prefer being called "American Indians." And if the people hate a term, maybe you should start pushing it down the cascade even if it's at 0%.
I remember seeing this argument on twitter a while back about the Albanian term for "black people" and whether it was a slur or not: https://twitter.com/asticky1still/status/1254577484475043840
Some people arguing it's not a slur because it's apparently just the literal Albanian translation of "black people", others arguing that it is a slur because it's often used in a derogatory way, others arguing that it's not a slur because most references to black people in Albania are derogatory regardless of what terminology is used because Albania is pretty racist etc. Lots of black Americans arguing that the Albanians claiming the term isn't racist aren't really qualified to do so because they aren't black (which is a fair point), and lots of Albanians arguing that the black Americans claiming the term is racist aren't really qualified to do so because they don't speak Albanian (also a fair point). Just stuck in my mind as an example of a pointless, unproductive twitter argument.
Every term for black people in every non-African language is often used in a derogatory way. That's going to continue to be true until their behavioral profile changes dramatically.
True. It seems ridiculous that every so often some zany idealist gets the idea that you can improve people's lives by changing how other people treat them socially, which must be possible to be done by making this or that word taboo. Asians and Jews have been called lots of different names in this country, but surprise, surprise, those words had no effect on the cultural wealth of valuing family, education, civic stability, et cetera-- nor on the compounding or dividend-paying of their actual wealth. Those words are taboo many places nowadays, it's true, but their wealth-building happened beginning long, long before that.
I mean, I think that's because of racism more than black people being objectively worse than every other group on earth, particularly somewhere like Albania where less than 0.1% of the population is black
Show me the country where the blacks are outperforming the locals.
> USC was just annoying and everyone else was gullible and conformist!
No, USC was gullible and conformist. When challenged on the extreme stupidity of their policy, they defended themselves on the grounds that other schools were doing the same thing. You heard about USC because it has a higher profile.
> compare to eg “the rich”. Are we dehumanizing the rich every time we call them that?
My sense is that "the rich" actually is mostly used as a slur. I would suggest that the balance of slur use vs non-slur use makes no difference to whether something is seen as a slur; your focus on "Jap" developing more slur use than non-slur use is beside the point.
> hyperstition
Finally, I should point out that if you want to shift "superstition" into Greek, the word you're looking for is "hyperstasis". 😜
> Actions can be hyperstitious slurs; consider eating at Chick-Fil-A. If enough people who care about gay rights boycott them, then eating there actively signals that you’re defecting from the boycott and must not care about gay rights very much.
But suppose enough people who do not care about gay rights started to boycott them too. Wouldn't it stop the cascade? Your theory of signalling says that no correlation means no cascade. Isn't it?
I'm asking, because I'm in a doubt really. I think it will work in any case. I think it might, but some other ingredient is needed.
I know one of the families that was instrumental in changing the name of “Jap Road” near Beaumont, Texas. The power to change the name belonged to the local (county, basically) not state authorities. It was multi-year saga, ultimately involving several out-of-state advocacy groups, including the Anti-Defamation League. After the local authorities agreed to change the name of the road, there was a vote on what the new name should be. The descendants of the original Japanese farmer for whom the road was named and other people of Japanese and Japanese-American origin wanted the road name changed to the farmer’s family name, although several other more “acceptable” references to the farmer (including “Japanese”(!)) were offered as options. The locals overwhelmingly voted for “Boondocks,” the name of a popular but by then defunct restaurant that had been on the road. Boomdocks, of course, had nothing to do with the farmer or Japan. The supporters of changing the name from “Jap Road” considered the “Boondocks” vote to be strong evidence that the arguments of the locals that “Jap” was meant to be a tribute and an honor were insincere. The locals argued that they were annoyed by the whole process and exercising their right not to be bossed around by outsiders who might never drive on that road again. In any case, “Boondocks” was deemed not offensive, so that’s now the name of the road.
The most hilariously dumb hyperstition is "people of colour": good, vs "coloured people": bad.
BTW Jap is still used as an abbreviation for non-personal (things not people) media headlines where space is at a premium. "Jap economy doing well" or "Jab sub deal sunk" would be uncontroversial, but "Customs arrest Jap smuggler" or "Jap tourists staying away" would not be used.
Interesting and well written. Another slightly irritating situation is when things that are slurs in one culture (perhaps for good reason) then infiltrate other countries where they have historically never been slurs and start to take over. The N-word (!) is treated as a magical incantation with more care than the name of God. Some journalists won't even say it to Samuel L Jackson when he demands they do.
Where all the argument starts to fall down a little is just how angry people are about having their words changed a bit. This may reflect my relatively enbubbled life, but these social changes where I keep up with them have not been particularly onerous for me, and when I get it wrong, I'm normally corrected gently. To my experience at least there's really no cause for the level of animosity, anger and backlash.
We probably should have been fine to keep 'master' in git, but I don't really have a problem with 'main' either. It was always somewhat arbitrary, things change, in this case, if anything, the accuracy of language is perhaps improved with no cost to awkwardness.
The left is quite right that words matter. By demanding that you change the language you grew up speaking, they are asserting their power over you, your culture, and your mode of self-expression. By complying, you are demonstrating submission. Most free adults quite rightly believe that submitting to one's enemies is humiliating and debasing, and that the animosity, anger, and backlash that comes with forced submission is more than justified.
Just try asking anyone on the woke left to stop using the word "socialism", because it's associated with the deaths of tens of millions of people. Or to stop using the word "white privilege", because it demeans the suffering of unprivileged whites. Will they listen to you? Of course not. They will use language specifically designed to offend conservatives, while demanding that conservatives stop using words that nobody in their right mind thought was offensive just a few years ago.
I guess you've never seen Bernie Sanders or his supporters. Which is possible if you don't live in an insanely left-wing environment, but I do. Also, 36% of Americans view the term "socialism" positively, so it's not like support for socialism is that rare even among the more mainstream left: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2022/09/19/modest-declines-in-positive-views-of-socialism-and-capitalism-in-u-s/
As for communism vs. socialism, Stalin's state didn't call itself the Union of Soviet Communist Republics.
This is exactly the point I'm making. It's very difficult for me to imagine the kind of headspace where you see a request to change a word from 'master' to 'main' as humiliating, and debasing and the people who ask you to do it as enemies. Now I appreciate that we all have different experiences and that it might be possible to have such negative experiences with people that this seems like a reasonable stance, but from my bubble, this is such a weirdly negative way of looking at the world with a level of hostility and emotion that seems completely excessive.
Think about people you consider enemies. They ask you to stop using the word "negative", and replace it with "upsetting", for a reason that's completely spurious. They say that if you don't do it, you're a bad person. Do you do it? Let's say you do. The next day, they ask you to replace the word "bubble". Then the word "excessive". At what point do you say that enough is enough, that you're not a slave to the whims of people who hate you and won't dance to their tune? At what point do you stop being played like a fiddle?
As for my level of hostility or emotion, I'm talking about people who explicitly say they want fewer people of my race and gender in the workplace, and want to rid it completely of people with my political opinions. They're not my enemies because I want to make them enemies; they're my enemies because they see me as an enemy.
Also, what part of wokism is *not* hostile and emotional?
> I'm talking about people who explicitly say they want fewer people of my race and gender in the workplace
There are always extreme weirdos you can find, but surely this is an astonishingly tiny number of people? Too few to even be worth worrying about? I can imagine there being a lot of people (including myself) who would like to see the workplace more evenly representative when it comes to race and gender, but none of the people I am aware of would want to reduce the number of white males in the workforce, they'd want a larger workforce overall with people from more backgrounds in it.
> what part of wokism is *not* hostile and emotional?
My part I guess? When people start throwing around terms like 'wokism' or 'the right' or 'the left', it generally becomes very difficult to work out who exactly they're talking about, and I often wonder if they're talking about me.
"There are always extreme weirdos you can find, but surely this is an astonishingly tiny number of people? Too few to even be worth worrying about?"
They include Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi, widely recognized as leaders in the movement, by adherents to that movement. That's just OTTOMH; if I looked longer, I'm sure I could turn up more. I think it'd be hard to categorize them and their followers as both an "astonishingly tiny number" and leading voices simultaneously.
As for your part of the movement not being hostile and emotional - maybe I can take you at your word, but you would probably benefit from understanding how hard that is for someone on the other side to believe. Imagine for example some outgroup of yours, and then someone claiming to belong to it and also claiming they're actually pretty easygoing and reasonable. The best face I could put on this is that you are indeed easygoing and reasonable as advertised, but also consequently pretty quiet - which means the facet of your group non-members are most likely to see are the loud ones - who tend to be hostile and emotional.
I see that as a fairly universal problem to political movements, regardless of party, class, gender, etc. Everyone outside the bus only hears the squeakiest wheels. But while understandable, it's a problem nevertheless.
> they'd want a larger workforce overall with people from more backgrounds in it
Social justice people often demand equal representation of all demographic groups in all kinds of (especially prestigious) jobs (at least implicitly by treating underrepresentation as proof that there is a problem). I don't think it's feasible to expand employment in all prestigious jobs until all groups are equally represented: there's just not enough need for that much more people in those jobs than there are today, or else more people would be employed in those jobs even today. And I don't think most people who support affirmative action think it should be accompanied by a major realignment of employment structure either. They support policies that reduce the number of white men in prestigious jobs, even if they wouldn't put it that way.
Another way to think of dionysus' point is that woke people are asking other people to { do something for them }. The fact that it's a tiny thing (use this word in place of that one) helps, but it's still something the non-work people have to do. It's like if your sibling deliberately pokes you gently while you're riding in the car. It doesn't have to be a hard poke; just a touch, just enough that you have to notice it. And they keep doing it. And those pokes are considered acceptable in only that direction.
Some would call it microaggression.
I think you are demonstrating how much you live in a bubble, Scott. No one says "All Lives Matter", it's true, but that's because there's no longer any particular need to; BLM has largely faded from prominence. (Perhaps discovering how wealthy the founder was had something to do with it.) But you live in an area rife with members of the far Cultural Left. It might be socially unacceptable to say something like that in one of the areas of greatest hegemony of the Woke Cult, but that's like saying that in the 1600s the world was 99:1 against heresy based on what was said in public in 17th century Spain. In most places in the world today you would at best be looked at askance for saying "Black Lives Matter" or having one of those signs up. You'd be looked at askance for saying "All Lives Matter" too, but that's because it would be a truism without context.
Gotta agree with you RWP, but then we all live in bubbles and at least Scott isn't cowed by popular dissent, so that's a big plus in my book because we get to hash this stuff out thanks to his honesty.