imagine it’s you. imagine you have to hear it all the time. imagine it’s your loved one, or nearly everyone you work with professionally, and you have to deal with it. then imagine that for decades. are you exhausted yet? it gets very old and when the traction finally kicks in and people start going ‘‘OK let’s move away from this’’ and you pop up going ‘why can’t we just KEEP being awful! It doesn’t hurt MY feelings!!! So who cares!’’
I don’t have to imagine, I heard it all the time. Among a litany of all other sorts of insults. “slow”, “dumb”, “moron”, “idiot”, “dipshit”, “special”, “widowlicker”, etc, etc, etc…
Policing ONE word isn’t do jack shit to solve the bullying problem. It’s giving lazy people an easy cause to crusade for that ultimately does nothing. Less then nothing, because once you’ve convinced yourself that “this word” is the “nono word”, you’ll let all the others slide. As long as they don’t say the “nono word” it’s okay…
And actually does more harm than any tangible good. Because the most common misuse of policing the word isn’t to protect people… it’s to purity check others. Its a diversionary wedge issue that creates artificial divisions. Instead of stopping bullies, we’re stopping eachother… “oh you called RFK Jr a nono word??? you’re a nazi too!!”
so you want people to use the slur? because people recognizing saying it is awful is bad…? it’s not a crusade, people get it’s bad and don’t want to hear it. and yeah one word isn’t the issue, as an adult, when you start getting corrected on the one word, you kind of have to be smart enough to see the actual problem and stop with all the other words as well. I don’t think it’s a coordinated attempt to destroy all decency if we allow people to be upset about a slur.
imagine it’s you. imagine you have to hear it all the time. imagine it’s your loved one, or nearly everyone you work with professionally, and you have to deal with it. then imagine that for decades. are you exhausted yet? it gets very old and when the traction finally kicks in and people start going ‘‘OK let’s move away from this’’ and you pop up going ‘why can’t we just KEEP being awful! It doesn’t hurt MY feelings!!! So who cares!’’
I don’t have to imagine, I heard it all the time. Among a litany of all other sorts of insults. “slow”, “dumb”, “moron”, “idiot”, “dipshit”, “special”, “widowlicker”, etc, etc, etc…
Policing ONE word isn’t do jack shit to solve the bullying problem. It’s giving lazy people an easy cause to crusade for that ultimately does nothing. Less then nothing, because once you’ve convinced yourself that “this word” is the “nono word”, you’ll let all the others slide. As long as they don’t say the “nono word” it’s okay…
And actually does more harm than any tangible good. Because the most common misuse of policing the word isn’t to protect people… it’s to purity check others. Its a diversionary wedge issue that creates artificial divisions. Instead of stopping bullies, we’re stopping eachother… “oh you called RFK Jr a nono word??? you’re a nazi too!!”
so you want people to use the slur? because people recognizing saying it is awful is bad…? it’s not a crusade, people get it’s bad and don’t want to hear it. and yeah one word isn’t the issue, as an adult, when you start getting corrected on the one word, you kind of have to be smart enough to see the actual problem and stop with all the other words as well. I don’t think it’s a coordinated attempt to destroy all decency if we allow people to be upset about a slur.