7 ms·

I'm hardly a SJW but it's 2022, can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less. I'm sure I'

by g5095 5y ago

I'm hardly a SJW but it's 2022, can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less. I'm sure I'm gonna get slammed for this but whatever.

throwaway37388 5y ago
This is 2022, this term is very diluted now.
Mizza 5y ago
This is textbook usage of an alternate dictionary definition of the word, not just usage for hyperbolic shock factor. Though obviously, it is a word which carries a lot of weight.
mixedCase 5y ago
I got the impression that was the point, to exaggerate. But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?
- tokai 5y ago
  Too me all those words are over exaggerated. Nothing close to that has been done to Bukowski. His work is being misconstrued, and that's bad enough. Turns out rights holders are usually scum. I guess it depends on how much you like Bukowski if it feels overdone or not.
- _jal 5y ago
  Those are also over the top, but comparing text editing to violent sexual domination is well past the American taste for absurd overstatement, and just comes across like a silly, blinkered person overly absorbed in their little drama. It works against the author's apparent interest. They throw the dials to 11 as a bit of norm-setting editorializing about supposed severity of the unjust edits, but it just ends up being more bullshit clickbait, blending in to the background of every! other! desperate! headline!
  - twox2 5y ago
    I disagree. It's very fitting within the context of Bukowski's work.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      If anyone doubts this, find the phrase "like a sickle" in Bukowski's work and you'll see it's in the right general area.
- user-the-name 5y ago
  Those do not happen to a sizeable fraction of the population. Rape does.
  - dpark 5y ago
    Is that really the deciding factor? What percentage of the population it happens to? Why?
    - user-the-name 5y ago
      Because if you are under no threat of being disemboweled, then you can joke about it. If you are, however, under a constant, low-level threat of being raped, then you kind of want people to take that seriously. You don't want people to make light of it. You don't want people to devalue that. And we, who are not under that threat, can and should respect that.
      - dpark 5y ago
        I am an amputee. The idea that I as an amputee should have the right to stop others from discussing or even joking about amputation seems absurd to me. I understand the argument about being sensitive to the topic of rape. I do not think that extends so far that no one can use the word except in its literal meaning.
        user-the-name 5y ago
        Are a large fraction of the population getting amputated against their will?
        dpark 5y ago
        Do you suppose that people who live in war zones are forbidden from making jokes about bombs? I get what you’re going for and have already stated elsewhere that I think rape jokes are tasteless. But your criteria doesn’t make much sense. Good for you for wanting to be sensitive to others. But if you’re going to be sensitive to others, maybe ask why your care doesn’t extend to victims in general and somehow only applies to this one word.
golemotron 5y ago
Now do "violence."
kayodelycaon 5y ago
I happen to agree, but I feel the need to explain why “rape” is used this way. The original meaning of the word was “to take by force”. Using it to exclusively describe sexual assault is a more modern thing. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”. A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific). As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same. The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.
- tokai 5y ago
  But the 'take by force' meaning does not make sense, as nothing is being taken from anyone. While its a literary crime, Black Sparrow Press is not doing something they don't have the right to do.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    You’re taking a direct translation of the root words literally and only applying it to mean legal rights and excluding moral or ethical rights. In this case, they are taking the original work, corrupting it, and passing it off as the original. Legal, but definitely not moral or ethical. I think “rape” is a little strong, but not inaccurate.
    - tokai 5y ago
      >root words literally and only applying it to mean legal rights No I'm not.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    If this bothers you, definitely don’t read Bukowski. He uses offensive metaphors that could cause serious damage to you!
- 5y ago
aaron695 5y ago
> I'm hardly a SJW You didn't care about the quote on "castrating him" in this article, or being analytical or relating this to dirty realism so you clearly are. The article is literally about people like yourself wanting to edit these things from history (article is 2013) Read Charles Bukowski "The Fiend" and then understand why words like rape and castrating were chosen if you care at all about what's being talked about and why the article was written this way. I despise trigger warnings but surprises are also unfair on a tech forum even if we are talking Bukowski, it is about child rape - https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,41638-the_most_beautiful_woman_in_town_&_other_stories.html https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,416... (The Fiend starts half way down)
dandare 5y ago
That was my first thought as well, but then I realised there is a big difference when one just grossly exaggerates (e.g. "touching someone without consent is rape") and when the word is used with poetic licence. Rape of a ghost is clearly not meant literally.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
You don't get it, do you? This asswipe, Martin. He fucked up Bukowski's poems. With his mincing, middle-class stink. Oh, it's not a dirty poem anymore, it's a vulgar one. By the time he's done, it sounds like Bukowski went to Vassar. Now you? You're going to mince around like this too? But Michael Phillips -- he respects Bukowski. He knows how to write. He uses the right goddamn word in the right goddamn place. Like: "castrating". Because Martin took the balls from his poems. "shitty". Because he shat all over them. "unmolested". Because it's like he diddles kids. That's the same thing you're doing. You're trying to castrate Phillips. And you know what that is? Rape.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  To be honest though, while I don't like what Martin did to the poems, and while he should never have taken those liberties with them, I sort of get what he was trying to do with the example Phillips gave. By changing "ancient" to "medieval" and "dirty" to "vulgar", he's trying to invoke the switch from Church Latin to the vulgate. I mean, there's the organ music in the background, the red wine like the blood of Christ. And then he's saying, "Look at Charles Bukowski, he writes in the language of the common people". He then reinforces "no vulgarity" later. An addition about "clean[ing] up my act" is also there, to go with the "cleaning the shit stains" (now also explicitly "cleaning"). Which is about devulgarifying the poems. To go along with all this he makes the poem about why he writes "like" that, not just "why he writes". To make clear that it's about why the poems are vulgar specifically, not why the poems exist at all. And then he emphasizes that Bukowski is pleased with the result (he puts "pleased" in twice). So there's a logic to it. It's a little pedantic and a little pretentious. And it changes the meaning of the poem. And it does some of the very devulgarification it's talking about. But it's not totally dumb.
- djmips 5y ago
  Give me a break. Can't he have an opinion? I guess you're raping the OP.
- ambrozk 5y ago
  But what about all the ghosts who're reading this who might have also been victims of tragic sexual abuse?
coldtea 5y ago
It's 2022, can't we stop conflating analogies and metaphors with "morally equating"? When we "kill" a program there's no life murdered or equivalent moral issue involved either. But I don't take issue with the wording just because I've had a relative killed in a bad situation. And I don't think anybody should (or if they do, they should get over it).
- elefantastisch 5y ago
  At issue is not whether analogies and metaphors are a type of morally equating. At issue is whether it is appropriate to use a particularly severe term in a decidedly less severe manner. "Kill" is used in many less severe circumstances. We kill plants and mold and bacteria. "Kill" does not nearly universally refer a specific severe act with a real human victim. Notice we don't murder programs. Regardless of historical usage (words do not have some innate meaning which persists through all time), the current usage of the word is almost exclusively limited to a very particular crime. A better comparison would be "genocide". We should ask ourselves how we would feel about a company transitioning from cross-platform to a single OS being described as committing a genocide of other OS users. Or even better, we should ask actual survivors of genocide how they would feel. And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel. For example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-context_b_5155173 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-conte... There are terms which because of their specificity and severity (in modern usage) cannot be used metaphorically without calling to mind the non-metaphorical meaning. This is quite distinct from more standard metaphors which we barely recognize as metaphors at all (no one thinks of a sprinter when we ask them to run a program). Regardless of what decision we end up making on what terms we are comfortable using, we can recognize that not all violent terms are equal in how concretely they call to mind their violent meaning when used metaphorically and that victims of violence are speaking out about the usage of certain terms. How we should respond to that is a judgment call we all have to make.
  - eezurr 5y ago
    Personally I think people should be free to say what they want to. And people are free to react the way they want to too. But neither side should have the power to silence the other. Also since this submission hasnt been downvoted into oblivion, your personal, anecdotal reaction is not the norm (on HN)
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less sure, we can but in fact using rape as a metaphor for really bad things that one person does to another person is not used to downgrade rape but really to point a finger at why the thing being done is bad. Because rape has power as a bad thing. Sure, but I mean we must not use rape as an analogy for anything that is not rape, holocaust for anything that is not holocaust, fraud must only be used for things that are legally prosecutable as fraud and so forth. The language must be cleaned and simplified, metaphor and analogy while a seemingly necessary component of the human mind must be excised.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
user-the-name 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Since the topic is poetry, I took it as a somewhat literary allusion: eg. "The Rape of the Lock".
dokem 5y ago
You're free to use, or not use, what ever words you like. Also, why is rape such a bad word but not murder or torture or suicide?
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  There are billions of survivors of rape living and trying to cope, and it is wrong to trivialize their experience by comparing it to a misguided editor trying to make some bad poetry better. Murder and torture and suicide occur at nowhere near the same scale, and in two of those the primary victims are not around to suffer poor choice of words. For what it's worth, I also wish we didn't speak so trivially of "killing" e.g. UNIX processes. "Rape" is an easy word to avoid.
  - dokem 5y ago
    Yes I agree it's a strong word with strong connotations. It's good to have such words and make a language strong and effective. You seem to be equating use of the word rape with the act of rape. Maybe we should also not use the word war, maybe we should not speak at all because someone is trying to cope with something. It shouldn't be used in a professional environment, but out in the world or on the internet who are you to play hall monitor?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
adultSwim 5y ago
Thank you.

by g5095 5y ago

throwaway37388 5y ago

This is 2022, this term is very diluted now.

Mizza 5y ago

This is textbook usage of an alternate dictionary definition of the word, not just usage for hyperbolic shock factor. Though obviously, it is a word which carries a lot of weight.

mixedCase 5y ago

I got the impression that was the point, to exaggerate. But I can't help but wonder, would you had felt the same way had the author chosen other shockingly violent acts such as "disembowelment", "lobotomy", "castration", or "amputation"?

tokai 5y ago
Too me all those words are over exaggerated. Nothing close to that has been done to Bukowski. His work is being misconstrued, and that's bad enough. Turns out rights holders are usually scum. I guess it depends on how much you like Bukowski if it feels overdone or not.
_jal 5y ago
Those are also over the top, but comparing text editing to violent sexual domination is well past the American taste for absurd overstatement, and just comes across like a silly, blinkered person overly absorbed in their little drama. It works against the author's apparent interest. They throw the dials to 11 as a bit of norm-setting editorializing about supposed severity of the unjust edits, but it just ends up being more bullshit clickbait, blending in to the background of every! other! desperate! headline!
- twox2 5y ago
  I disagree. It's very fitting within the context of Bukowski's work.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    If anyone doubts this, find the phrase "like a sickle" in Bukowski's work and you'll see it's in the right general area.
user-the-name 5y ago
Those do not happen to a sizeable fraction of the population. Rape does.
- dpark 5y ago
  Is that really the deciding factor? What percentage of the population it happens to? Why?
  - user-the-name 5y ago
    Because if you are under no threat of being disemboweled, then you can joke about it. If you are, however, under a constant, low-level threat of being raped, then you kind of want people to take that seriously. You don't want people to make light of it. You don't want people to devalue that. And we, who are not under that threat, can and should respect that.
    - dpark 5y ago
      I am an amputee. The idea that I as an amputee should have the right to stop others from discussing or even joking about amputation seems absurd to me. I understand the argument about being sensitive to the topic of rape. I do not think that extends so far that no one can use the word except in its literal meaning.
      - user-the-name 5y ago
        Are a large fraction of the population getting amputated against their will?
        dpark 5y ago
        Do you suppose that people who live in war zones are forbidden from making jokes about bombs? I get what you’re going for and have already stated elsewhere that I think rape jokes are tasteless. But your criteria doesn’t make much sense. Good for you for wanting to be sensitive to others. But if you’re going to be sensitive to others, maybe ask why your care doesn’t extend to victims in general and somehow only applies to this one word.

golemotron 5y ago

Now do "violence."

kayodelycaon 5y ago

I happen to agree, but I feel the need to explain why “rape” is used this way. The original meaning of the word was “to take by force”. Using it to exclusively describe sexual assault is a more modern thing. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/rape This kind of double meaning in English is very common. The word murder can also be used as “to perform badly”. A way to look at it is English often has two forms of words like this. There is murder (general) and there is Murder (specific). As someone who is bipolar, the “misuse” of labels around mental health is aggravating. The misuse of “rape” is the same. The general usage of words dilutes the impact of the specific use. I’d love to bring back capital letters to English nouns. That way we could use Murder and murder to clarify what which meaning is used.

tokai 5y ago
But the 'take by force' meaning does not make sense, as nothing is being taken from anyone. While its a literary crime, Black Sparrow Press is not doing something they don't have the right to do.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  You’re taking a direct translation of the root words literally and only applying it to mean legal rights and excluding moral or ethical rights. In this case, they are taking the original work, corrupting it, and passing it off as the original. Legal, but definitely not moral or ethical. I think “rape” is a little strong, but not inaccurate.
  - tokai 5y ago
    >root words literally and only applying it to mean legal rights No I'm not.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  If this bothers you, definitely don’t read Bukowski. He uses offensive metaphors that could cause serious damage to you!
5y ago

aaron695 5y ago

> I'm hardly a SJW You didn't care about the quote on "castrating him" in this article, or being analytical or relating this to dirty realism so you clearly are. The article is literally about people like yourself wanting to edit these things from history (article is 2013) Read Charles Bukowski "The Fiend" and then understand why words like rape and castrating were chosen if you care at all about what's being talked about and why the article was written this way. I despise trigger warnings but surprises are also unfair on a tech forum even if we are talking Bukowski, it is about child rape - https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,41638-the_most_beautiful_woman_in_town_&_other_stories.html https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/charles-bukowski/page,22,416... (The Fiend starts half way down)

dandare 5y ago

That was my first thought as well, but then I realised there is a big difference when one just grossly exaggerates (e.g. "touching someone without consent is rape") and when the word is used with poetic licence. Rape of a ghost is clearly not meant literally.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

You don't get it, do you? This asswipe, Martin. He fucked up Bukowski's poems. With his mincing, middle-class stink. Oh, it's not a dirty poem anymore, it's a vulgar one. By the time he's done, it sounds like Bukowski went to Vassar. Now you? You're going to mince around like this too? But Michael Phillips -- he respects Bukowski. He knows how to write. He uses the right goddamn word in the right goddamn place. Like: "castrating". Because Martin took the balls from his poems. "shitty". Because he shat all over them. "unmolested". Because it's like he diddles kids. That's the same thing you're doing. You're trying to castrate Phillips. And you know what that is? Rape.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
To be honest though, while I don't like what Martin did to the poems, and while he should never have taken those liberties with them, I sort of get what he was trying to do with the example Phillips gave. By changing "ancient" to "medieval" and "dirty" to "vulgar", he's trying to invoke the switch from Church Latin to the vulgate. I mean, there's the organ music in the background, the red wine like the blood of Christ. And then he's saying, "Look at Charles Bukowski, he writes in the language of the common people". He then reinforces "no vulgarity" later. An addition about "clean[ing] up my act" is also there, to go with the "cleaning the shit stains" (now also explicitly "cleaning"). Which is about devulgarifying the poems. To go along with all this he makes the poem about why he writes "like" that, not just "why he writes". To make clear that it's about why the poems are vulgar specifically, not why the poems exist at all. And then he emphasizes that Bukowski is pleased with the result (he puts "pleased" in twice). So there's a logic to it. It's a little pedantic and a little pretentious. And it changes the meaning of the poem. And it does some of the very devulgarification it's talking about. But it's not totally dumb.
djmips 5y ago
Give me a break. Can't he have an opinion? I guess you're raping the OP.
ambrozk 5y ago
But what about all the ghosts who're reading this who might have also been victims of tragic sexual abuse?

coldtea 5y ago

It's 2022, can't we stop conflating analogies and metaphors with "morally equating"? When we "kill" a program there's no life murdered or equivalent moral issue involved either. But I don't take issue with the wording just because I've had a relative killed in a bad situation. And I don't think anybody should (or if they do, they should get over it).

elefantastisch 5y ago
At issue is not whether analogies and metaphors are a type of morally equating. At issue is whether it is appropriate to use a particularly severe term in a decidedly less severe manner. "Kill" is used in many less severe circumstances. We kill plants and mold and bacteria. "Kill" does not nearly universally refer a specific severe act with a real human victim. Notice we don't murder programs. Regardless of historical usage (words do not have some innate meaning which persists through all time), the current usage of the word is almost exclusively limited to a very particular crime. A better comparison would be "genocide". We should ask ourselves how we would feel about a company transitioning from cross-platform to a single OS being described as committing a genocide of other OS users. Or even better, we should ask actual survivors of genocide how they would feel. And in this case, survivors are already telling us how they feel. For example: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-context_b_5155173 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stop-saying-rape-out-of-conte... There are terms which because of their specificity and severity (in modern usage) cannot be used metaphorically without calling to mind the non-metaphorical meaning. This is quite distinct from more standard metaphors which we barely recognize as metaphors at all (no one thinks of a sprinter when we ask them to run a program). Regardless of what decision we end up making on what terms we are comfortable using, we can recognize that not all violent terms are equal in how concretely they call to mind their violent meaning when used metaphorically and that victims of violence are speaking out about the usage of certain terms. How we should respond to that is a judgment call we all have to make.
- eezurr 5y ago
  Personally I think people should be free to say what they want to. And people are free to react the way they want to too. But neither side should have the power to silence the other. Also since this submission hasnt been downvoted into oblivion, your personal, anecdotal reaction is not the norm (on HN)

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less sure, we can but in fact using rape as a metaphor for really bad things that one person does to another person is not used to downgrade rape but really to point a finger at why the thing being done is bad. Because rape has power as a bad thing. Sure, but I mean we must not use rape as an analogy for anything that is not rape, holocaust for anything that is not holocaust, fraud must only be used for things that are legally prosecutable as fraud and so forth. The language must be cleaned and simplified, metaphor and analogy while a seemingly necessary component of the human mind must be excised.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

user-the-name 5y ago

JKCalhoun 5y ago

Since the topic is poetry, I took it as a somewhat literary allusion: eg. "The Rape of the Lock".

dokem 5y ago

You're free to use, or not use, what ever words you like. Also, why is rape such a bad word but not murder or torture or suicide?

tomjakubowski 5y ago
There are billions of survivors of rape living and trying to cope, and it is wrong to trivialize their experience by comparing it to a misguided editor trying to make some bad poetry better. Murder and torture and suicide occur at nowhere near the same scale, and in two of those the primary victims are not around to suffer poor choice of words. For what it's worth, I also wish we didn't speak so trivially of "killing" e.g. UNIX processes. "Rape" is an easy word to avoid.
- dokem 5y ago
  Yes I agree it's a strong word with strong connotations. It's good to have such words and make a language strong and effective. You seem to be equating use of the word rape with the act of rape. Maybe we should also not use the word war, maybe we should not speak at all because someone is trying to cope with something. It shouldn't be used in a professional environment, but out in the world or on the internet who are you to play hall monitor?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

adultSwim 5y ago

Thank you.