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It's good that you came here to express your issues with use of this word. >> Literally the absence of a word upsets you to the point you start calling racial

It's good that you came here to express your issues with use of this word. >> Literally the absence of a word upsets you to the point you start calling racial slurs "magic incantations" There are people who believe intent matters. A mere arrangement of letters or phonemes cannot itself be a slur. This distinction between utterance and intent is not superficial. Not just about the absence of a single word. It's correcting a category error. Many of those same people would make similar arguments about say blasphemy.

BoorishBears 6y ago
Ah yes, of course the stupid savage just doesn't understand simple intent... This is the most overused bullshit response by your ilk, sticking me with the most radical take possible where none was implied then tearing it down. This guy didn't lose his job just because he said the N-word without negative intent. By his own estimation he brashly lived on the edge of what was ok but never went to far. All of this "I can be an asshole". Turns out people tend to have charitable views of themselves. Judging by how much exposition he needs to wrap it up in and how someone was willing to call him "the end of the asshole era" something tells me the "few" times he was an asshole stuck with people. - You're free to toe the line of what's ok, but yeah this is exactly what happens eventually: A messy situation shows up and instead of others defaulting to treating him charitably they defaulted to treating him as a liability. He signed his own firing papers with that asinine cryptic "Don't believe everything you read", but you know, even in such a serious situation he couldn't resist one more bit of snark. I mean, serious laughing my ass off, imagine trying to "flippantly" convey anything in that middle of that shitstorm. He lived by the sword and he died by the sword, pity.
- lovemenot 6y ago
  I wasn't defending the OP's actions. I had read his defence but none of the accusations against him. I cannot evaluate whether he has been fairly treated. Your justification of his accusers' actions makes some sense to me. Your first couple of paragraphs were unnecessarily aggressive and inflammatory. You are just flat out wrong to imply that was how I was thinking of you. If it was your intention to demonstrate the OP was treated fairly, these two paragraphs should have the opposite effect. From my point of view, if you could be so wrong about me, perhaps those accusers might have been wrong about him. This is weak reasoning, but you can imagine how I could swing in the counter direction after what you wrote. For the sake of clearing up a previous misunderstanding, I never thought you incapable of understanding intent. I was pointing out that in that particular sentence that I highlighted, lies the root of a contention. People are using phrases like "magic incantation" because for such people a word taken in isolation can never hold power. Words must always be taken in context to reveal intent. Elsewhere in this thread there are comparisons to the word "Jehova", which seems apt. Mere utterance of this word was, at some point, considered to be invocation of the deity. Many people now consider such a taboo to be based on ignorance. I guess I will find out, since I just wrote it down;) Yet there is another word on which taboo is still near universal. There is no context in which I feel it may be used safely here. That this is the case is a bad thing. Not because of the absence of one word, which has historically been used in a very mean spirit and would not be missed. Rather because of the category error that brought us to this point. And because of the risks of allowing this type of error. I invite your reply, but I implore you to try to be charitable. I have not made nor implied any disrespect to you.

BoorishBears 6y ago

Ah yes, of course the stupid savage just doesn't understand simple intent... This is the most overused bullshit response by your ilk, sticking me with the most radical take possible where none was implied then tearing it down. This guy didn't lose his job just because he said the N-word without negative intent. By his own estimation he brashly lived on the edge of what was ok but never went to far. All of this "I can be an asshole". Turns out people tend to have charitable views of themselves. Judging by how much exposition he needs to wrap it up in and how someone was willing to call him "the end of the asshole era" something tells me the "few" times he was an asshole stuck with people. - You're free to toe the line of what's ok, but yeah this is exactly what happens eventually: A messy situation shows up and instead of others defaulting to treating him charitably they defaulted to treating him as a liability. He signed his own firing papers with that asinine cryptic "Don't believe everything you read", but you know, even in such a serious situation he couldn't resist one more bit of snark. I mean, serious laughing my ass off, imagine trying to "flippantly" convey anything in that middle of that shitstorm. He lived by the sword and he died by the sword, pity.

lovemenot 6y ago
I wasn't defending the OP's actions. I had read his defence but none of the accusations against him. I cannot evaluate whether he has been fairly treated. Your justification of his accusers' actions makes some sense to me. Your first couple of paragraphs were unnecessarily aggressive and inflammatory. You are just flat out wrong to imply that was how I was thinking of you. If it was your intention to demonstrate the OP was treated fairly, these two paragraphs should have the opposite effect. From my point of view, if you could be so wrong about me, perhaps those accusers might have been wrong about him. This is weak reasoning, but you can imagine how I could swing in the counter direction after what you wrote. For the sake of clearing up a previous misunderstanding, I never thought you incapable of understanding intent. I was pointing out that in that particular sentence that I highlighted, lies the root of a contention. People are using phrases like "magic incantation" because for such people a word taken in isolation can never hold power. Words must always be taken in context to reveal intent. Elsewhere in this thread there are comparisons to the word "Jehova", which seems apt. Mere utterance of this word was, at some point, considered to be invocation of the deity. Many people now consider such a taboo to be based on ignorance. I guess I will find out, since I just wrote it down;) Yet there is another word on which taboo is still near universal. There is no context in which I feel it may be used safely here. That this is the case is a bad thing. Not because of the absence of one word, which has historically been used in a very mean spirit and would not be missed. Rather because of the category error that brought us to this point. And because of the risks of allowing this type of error. I invite your reply, but I implore you to try to be charitable. I have not made nor implied any disrespect to you.