I'm surprised a bit because the mainstream music is filled with the word nigga but also the n word. Isn't it workings against the idea of not using these words?
E.g., as a mild example, terms like "nerd" and "geek" were pejoratives that were adopted and reworked. E.g., Geek Pride: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Pride_Day
As with most of these slurs, positive in-group use is ok, but negative out-group use is still generally seen as abusive. I might talk about my geeky ways or refer to my fellow geeks. But I'd still bristle at non-geeks using the term in its original pejorative sense.
The N word is of course much more extreme given America's ugly, unresolved history around race, but it's the same rough deal.
I think this is quite dubious. "Nerd" and "geek" or even "freak" were never pejoratives in the way that the other word was. You could sympathetically say of someone, even as an outsider "He's a bit of a nerd/geek". But it would make no sense for one who was sympathetic to say something like "he's a bit of a "-- well, you get the idea. (This is also why I don't even claim or pretend that I'll ever understand this whole "reclamation" deal. I do accept that free speech is a thing and that a social ingroup can do whatever they want amongst themselves, but I still find it somewhat in poor taste, and counterproductive to its goal.)
The first step to understanding the reclamation is understanding just how offensive the n word was and is today. And the culture that surrounded it.
For non-Americans this topic is a difficult issue to get into because it involves unpacking and understanding so much history and culture.
Yes, which supports what I said, contra what GP said. You can't just take such a vile word with such vile connotations attached and "rework" it harmlessly like you could with "geek"-- that's just not how human psychology works, and an IAT or such would easily bear this out. You'd have to wait for the whole semantic field of the original word to become basically forgotten, then you could freely reclaim it.
(There is such a thing as dysphemism shift, but it tends to happen randomly or to be driven by language-internal forces. "Yankee" used to be a (mildly) derogatory term, but it became popular and neutral because there was no sympathetic term for "a U.S. person" in the lexicon - so "Yankee" moved into that space. But even this is a rare phenomenon; you can't just "make this happen".)
Nerd started to be "reclaimed" in the 80s and 90s, and there was a time period were it was still used pejoratively by non-nerds while being used positively by nerds.
"Yankee" by the way still has very strong negative connotations in the south particularly among older people. It's a very good example of a word that is still used by outsiders derogatorily, but insiders don't find it offensive at all.
Your belief that you know way better than marginalized people what their experience is and what is good for them? That has a name.
No, it was the same way, not just the same degree. E.g., a geek was originally the sideshow circus freak who bit heads of chickens and ate live insects. That comparison was not favorable, especially in the 50s and 60s, when conformity was strongly enforced.
I'm guessing you are young enough that you have only experienced the rise of tech. For some flavor of the early days, try Levy's "Hackers": https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003PDMKIY
With an "er" on the end, it's almost always a racist term.
Either way you spell it, it's pretty much only acceptable for black Americans to say it.
Etymologically they may be unrelated but come on. Every single time you say one of those words we all know what word people are going to think of instead, as they're way too close in spelling and pronunciation. It doesn't help those words are not commonly used at all either.
So although they technically may not be bad words, I wouldn't say them. Languages do not follow rules or technicalities. Those words just got the short end of the stick, unfortunately.
But surely this must hold all the more strongly for the "a" word? Even if you're hearing it in a music video as a reference to a social ingroup, it basically amounts to propping up one of the vilest racial slurs around, which just seems self-defeating.
Isn't it somewhat racist?
If you're saying that it's racist because only one race is allowed to say the word:
No, I don't think so. It's not really a racial thing, it's a race and a culture. Not all black Americans say it, not all black Americans agree with it, and not all black Americans can get away with saying it. It's a kinship thing. My wife's female friends can say "you're such a bitch" but no one else would be able to say that to her. My coworkers and friends call me a nerd, but if someone I didn't know called me a nerd I would take it as an insult. They haven't earned that right. It's an offensive word unless there is a kinship developed where I know you're not saying it in a hurtful way.
If you're saying it's deemed racist for non-black Americans to say the word, then yes. Saying it with an "a" would be deemed less racist and more of a very rude faux pax by many. Others may see it as very racist. Also depends on the context it's being said in.
Also the fact people keep writing "the n word", "the word but with an a" feels like communicating with children. Just write nigger or nigga and be done. The sky won't fall. You can't analyze or criticize something you can't name. Especially when forbidden words change every 10 to 15 years because people will just start using other common ones as insults. A simple example would be how "despite", "kings" and "queens" were used to mock black people (not just north-american one) on r/cringeanarchy (which ban must be why this was reposted).
All I was trying to do was to explain to a non-American how Americans view the word. The wrong person saying it to the right person could easily get that speaker killed, that's the power the word has in some communities. You can say it online all you want and you can argue that it doesn't have power, but there are many neighborhoods in America where saying it with an "a" or with an "r" will result in a murder that no witnesses will corroborate.
I disagree...people of all ethnicities can say any word they like whenever they want...there might be social consequences, but there isn't anything inherently wrong with saying a word
If the net effect is that certain people left Reddit for a platform inviting the worst of Reddit, and then didn't stay there either, that seems like a win.
It just died off since then, since 1. nobody really quits reddit, and 2. the aforementioned events made voat culture, well, not great.
Do you think the group of people you called cesspool will just accept that ? In their perspective by banning them, they are the one being oppressed. Of course they are going to fight back and try to create/move to alternative platform.
> Gas the kikes Race War Now is not an illegal threat. The supreme court has ruled that a threat needs a place and a time to be considered actionable or illegal. example: We're gassing the kikes at the Freemont Synagogue on 5th avenue, Tuesday.
This is the most upvoted comment. We can say things like "it's a matter of perspective", but sometimes things are simply objectively shit.
edit, to those of you who think I'm exaggerating, here is one comment in that thread out of many:
"Fucking faggots...meanwhile Antifa gets run of every liberal city in the country while the nigs murder us daily...and we aren't even allowed to talk about clownworld."
Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash. Theoretically they should be fine but in practice they just always attract assholes and people who want to say very edgy things. Someone should coin it, "the law of internet free speech zones" or something.
It has nothing to do with agreeing or disagreeing. Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here". You can always go ahead and host such a place if you want, but I'll stick to HN, Tildes, and Reddit instead so I can have reasonable discussion.
> Pretty much any place on the internet that promotes itself solely on being a "free speech zone/place" is trash.
Twitter is equally trash and has plenty of Anti-White, Anti-Jew (mostly in Arabic but nobody talks about it) and Anti-Men rhetoric, Violent threats towards Children and people get a free pass because they have a blue checkmark by their name and the "right" politics.
Also the term Hate speech is an ill defined term, which is used when convenient if someone has the wrong politics (e.g. centre-right, libertarian, conservative or religious). The terms is soo badly defined in law that people in the UK are going to prison for posting offensive rap lyrics on facebook.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921
> Proper places of discussion don't have comments like "gas the kikes isn't technically hate speech so we should be allowed to say it here".
Absolute garbage. This is snobbery and nothing more. I would argue that by just siloing people on the internet it is actually making discussion in general more problematic. In the past, we used IRC, AOL chat room and other things with no moderation. If someone was just being rude all the time, people just ended up ignoring them and they left ... I miss the old internet.
There are subjective things and there are objective things. What you're doing at this moment (trying to justify both sides) is intellectually dishonest.
> To them you are the assholes for calling it trash or wanting to get rid of it.
A child might call their parents stupid for not letting them eat candy all day. Objectively the parents are not stupid, the child has a mistaken perspective.
From the perspective of a hypergiant star, the sun is not that big. This does not change the objective truth that the sun is a large object.
I hope you realize you are justifying horrible, vile speech by trying to "see both sides".
> There are subjective things and there are objective things. What you're doing at this moment (trying to justify both sides) is intellectually dishonest.
Well you didn't really justify anything or understand what I said and then accused me of acting in bad faith. Lovely.
> A child might call their parents stupid for not letting them eat candy all day. Objectively the parents are not stupid, the child has a mistaken perspective.
Also the nanny state that you are promoting will have the opposite effect of what you want. Most of the places that have draconian rules are normally the places where most of the vice occurs ... it just happens out of sight of the authorities.
> I hope you realize you are justifying horrible, vile speech by trying to "see both sides".
I believe in freedom of speech. If people cannot say vile things they cannot be corrected by the rest of society, by silencing them you will just force it underground where it will fester. Well done you are making the problem worse.
In the prespective of the child, the parent might be stupid. Even in the perspective of other parent, some parent might not consider it stupid.
This just show "large" is relative.
I'm not justifying horrible, vile speech because I disagree that the speech is horrible or vile.
I'd feel better if we lived in a society where we wouldn't have to lead this discussion in the first place but since that's just not the case education and limiting propaganda seems like a good way to go.
Its boil down to whoever win on the battle.
The winning side get to decide the meaning of free speech, the meaning of radicals, right or wrong or where the line is.
Yes, society as a whole has a collective opinion that forms the mainstream and defines a) what's outside of that and b) what to do with those outside of it. Do you see a problem in excluding these opinions from mainstream platforms like Facebook and reddit? Even with a pretty open stance towards free speech I see excluding people posting racist death threats from a platform I use to look at cat pictures as a positive.
It's almost a Poe's Law of moral relativism in general, but there's the additional step of "and therefore, I will not have opinions on right and wrong and will let others do as they please, because who am I to have moral opinions about others"—but that in itself is a moral opinion about others.
The Overton window (which is what you are referring to) changes over time. What is considered acceptable is transient (I've seen the term for ethinic minority change 5 times in my life time so far and the older terms are now considered racist). Homosexuality for example would have been outside of the Overton window in the past and would have been deemed outside of polite discussion.
People have lost their jobs or banned for comments on Facebook / Twitter etc that are literally years old. Most of these comments were made made over a decade ago.
There are many groups of people that conduct a witch hunter using "outrage archaeology". They will go through someone's tweets for something that is now considered inappropriate and they will demand an apology for things that were said decades before and the person probably doesn't even remember why they made that comment at the time. Bernie Sanders (who is considered from my understanding to be somewhat of a progressive candidate) had something he wrote in 1980 dredged up in an attempt to smear him.
I've was temporarily suspended on twitter because I posted a Death Threat to my friend as a Joke between us and some other friends that were following each other. My friend and I regularly trade racist remarks about each others race on whatsapp because it is a long standing joke. Should we be censored because of an inside joke between friends?
I see moderating who can participate in a group as part of the opinion that this thread seems to try and uphold. If reddit (as the more or less democratic whole, not the company or technical system) prefers not to give terrorists, white supremacists or whatever fringe group that is based on hatred a platform you're free to see that as a problem, it's just not one the mainstream agrees with.
Likewise, the "extremist" too have their viewpoint, to them you are the danger, and they too will fight for it.
If you don't allow them to be part of the world you end up alienating them forever and they can never redeem themselves and change.
Society has forgotten how to forgive.
Easily: what is right improves the human condition and reduces suffering. What is wrong does the opposite.
Let me short-circuit your next question, which is surely "how do you measure what improves the human condition, and what is suffering?" We have to use our judgment, which we are graced with by virtue of being moral agents. This is subjective, like anything worth doing, which means we sometimes get it wrong. And that's fine. The fact that we sometimes imprison innocent people doesn't invalidate wholesale the concept of a system of justice.
Before you judge something as morally right or wrong, you have to have a standard that you're judging it by. Otherwise you'll just end up making ad-hoc decisions that depend on your emotions at the moment with no particular meaning or direction. Your morals will wander aimlessly in the space of possible morals, pushed this way and that by peer pressure and the media. They'll also develop internal inconsistencies. What's the use of an aimless moral? You might as well just pick them randomly.
The owners posted last week a message telling some of their users to stop inciting violence as the Feds were in contact. Given that Voat is ultra-toxic now it's not going to be possible to moderate every piece of content ever posted.
Just read that thread and it's crazy how much it has festered since then. Everyone there just seems so angry all the time, there are zero positive posts on the front page. How do people live their lives so angry all the time?
The groups are:
1. Groups that were kicked off Reddit for hate or questionable sex, went to voat, and got shut down there, too, or are still there but get very little activity.
An example of one that got shut down would be /v/jailbait.
An example of one that just gets very little activity would be /v/coontown. It goes months between posts.
2. Questionable sex groups that are somewhat active. /v/loli is an example.
3. Groups on neutral topics that get regular posts, like /v/technology or /v/funny or /v/science.
4. Hate groups with regular posts. (I assume these exist. I've never actually seen one, because I only go to voat when some disucssion elsewhere points to it, and that has never taken me to an active hate group).
The two kinds of people are:
1. People who came there for the hate groups.
2. People who came there for the sex groups.
The people who came there for the hate groups also post in the neutral groups, so the comments in /v/technology or /v/funny are full of hate stuff. The hate people seem to stay out of the sex groups.
I can't tell if the sex people also post in the neutral groups. My guess is that they probably do not.
The Voat groups for things like science and technology have nothing that sets them apart from the corresponding Reddit groups except the hate comments.
Sex is much easier to compartmentalize than hate. If you like something that most would find unacceptable sexually, there is no reason for that to come up when you participate in, say, a technology or science discussion. You can go to Voat for those sex groups that aren't allowed on Reddit, but stay on Reddit for everything else.
Hate group people, on the other hand, are more likely to let it leak out, and so get banned from neutral topic Reddit groups, and so have to go somewhere like Voat for those topics.
Voat is very small luckily, that may be the reason why you're hearing so few of it. If you visit the frontpage, it's full of jewish conspiracies and "gas the jews", as expected.
What does this say about the validity of the questionable study linked here that applauds "deplatforming" and only examines a few short-time consequences? Great success, sending more people from reddit to their own hate platform that will grow and exploit synergies among groups of particularly toxic people.
If Joe Bloke suddenly starts tunneling a lot of crap to 8chan... might be time for the constable to drop by for tea and persuasion.
Isnt that just a more powerful soft censorship tool?
Fox News seems like a rather good analogue of this. Despite promulgating information and opinions considered false and unacceptable by many, they are quite successful both financially and at exerting political influence. Shaming and shunning them and their viewers only hardens their viewership's belief in the truth of what they say.
By shunting the "basket of deplorables" off to Voat/Gab, we might be inadvertently creating the next Fox News.
The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Subreddits like these can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.
It also sounds reasonable to me. At small scales, especially with novices, it's good to let people experiment, find their voices, build the right audience. But once something's of a certain size, it's unlikely to change its character much.
That's not how subreddits work, though, since they require a a name and almost always have mods that shape the content. /r/waterniggas at 300 people is basically the same at 20,000 people. So if the rule is subreddits should not have "nigga" in the title, then all subreddits with that name should be quarantined (or not allow the names to contain that word).
Subreddits don't tend to change topics or "voices" but they can and do worsen in quality. Instead of posts with original concept C being upvoted, posts with content similar to C but not really get upvoted by the more general audience that comes with larger subscribers. I think /r/bonehurtingjuice is a pretty good example. At first it was excellent but now basically any anti-joke (which is different than bone hurting juice jokes) gets upvoted there.
Luckily, we're collectively beginning to grow past the naïve belief that free speech is a virtue in itself, an ends, and understand it properly as a means, a tool, which we're all obliged to use ethically and responsibly to make our society better.
In the US, most people have always had an understanding that speech should be used responsibly. The early Internet was overstocked with utopian idealists, me included, who thought this new age of instant communication meant that good ideas would quickly triumph over bad. That led to a lot of naive policies.
In practice, that didn't work. We hoped for a great age of dialog and understanding. Instead, we got an era of "don't read the comments", because it turns out the small number awful people are perfectly willing to spew awful talk all day long driving out the reasonable people who have better things to do. Now anybody running a significant platform knows they need to deal with abusers and monsters or they'll end up a cesspool.
The same utopian thinking has often gone with new technologies. Standage's "The Victorian Internet" makes clear that the telegraph was seen with the same rose-colored glasses. It was going to end war! To knit humanity together into a great brotherhood! Spoiler alert: it didn't.
Free speech is a tool, like democracy and discussion and rhetoric and liberty and communalism and a thousand other things besides, which we should judiciously and precisely in order to make our society better.
Free speech is an amoral tool, which can be used to improve or degrade the human condition, when wielded appropriately. It's our job to decide when and how to use it, and not act naïvely and pretend it's a virtue in itself.
Soviet censorship vectors were able to wrap dissenting viewpoints as "counter-revolutionary" or "bourgeois" without regard for the consistency of content to the wrapper.
Or do you mean to say that isn't censorship?
You are free to not use reddit, or create your own reddit.
There's plenty of material in the philosophical world about freedom of speech in regards to censorship by private parties and other people.
I think most people's idea of free speech doesn't align with what you are saying.
Obviously you should be allowed to boot people from your house for being an asshole. And many businesses should probably also have the same right.
But there's also the ambiguities that mean it should be as simple as 'private property overrides everything else'. Some companies are utilities, and can't dictate whether someone can use their service based on personal views (electricity companies, water companies, telephone networks, etc). Sometimes someone's role means they can't be that selective about what they hear, like how a judge found it was unconstitutional for Trump to block people on Twitter. And there are issues about either public vs private property (like for company towns) or instances where a company is so large and has such a huge share of the market (like a monopoly) that you could argue whether they should be able to pick and choose what they like.
There is no real argument that a company like Reddit must adhere to free speech. No one forces you to use facebook, reddit, or any other website.
It does not mean "I can say what I want and you have to leave me do it".
Reddit today: effectively bans (quarantines) /r/waterniggas simply because of the subreddit's title. It was quite literally a joke subreddit about being hydrated. Doesn't ban subreddits like /r/hapas.
Edit: The problem with reddit is that it's wildly inconsistent about banning subreddits. Insane subreddits can exist for years, but only will get banned once they start to become popular enough that they start to get noticed.
A fair amount amount of people went from reddit to voat because at the time voat was new, had signups open, and advertised itself on free speech. Note that I DO NOT support the likes of voat- I am describing the event that happened.
edit; changed substantial to fair amount