> I'm as left as they come and I'm tired of pretending that banning words solve anything. Who's offended? Why?
I'm with you on this, also speaking as a strong leftist.
I do think that "banning" , or at least strongly condemning, the use of words when the specific group being slurred are clear that they consider it a slur and want it to stop is reasonable. But not when it's social justice warriors getting offended on behalf of other people.
However, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that even when discussing the banning of these words, we're not allowed to use them directly. We are supposed to say "n-word", "r-word" even when discussing in an academic sense. Utter nonsense, it's as if saying these words out loud would conjure a demon.
The point of these meaningless dictionary changes isn't to solve anything. It's to give plausible deniability to asshole behaviour through virtue signalling.
Crazy assholes will argue along the lines that it is an insignificant inconvenience and hence anyone who uses the old language must use it maliciously and on purpose, because they are ableist, racist or whatever.
This then gives assholes the justification to behave like a biggot towards the allegedly ableist person. The goal is to dress up your own abusive bullying as virtuous, even though deep down you don't actually care about disabled people.
This is an interesting take, and I think it's not unreasonable to label the worst of the social justice warriors as assholes.
However, most of them are well meaning. They're misguided rather than assholes. They really do want to take action for social improvement. It's just that real change is too hard and requires messy things like protesting on the street or getting involved in politics and law. So, they fall back on things like policing words, or calling out perceived bad actors, which they can do from the comfort of their homes via the internet.
To be fair, some genuinely bad people have been "cancelled". The "me too" movement didn't happen without reason. It's just that it went too far, and started ignoring pesky things like evidence, or innocent until proven otherwise.
I'm with you on this, also speaking as a strong leftist.
I do think that "banning" , or at least strongly condemning, the use of words when the specific group being slurred are clear that they consider it a slur and want it to stop is reasonable. But not when it's social justice warriors getting offended on behalf of other people.
However, I think it's absolutely ridiculous that even when discussing the banning of these words, we're not allowed to use them directly. We are supposed to say "n-word", "r-word" even when discussing in an academic sense. Utter nonsense, it's as if saying these words out loud would conjure a demon.