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from the keep-your-friends-close-and-your-enemies-closer? dept.
An article at vice.com reports The Number of U.S. Hate Groups Keeps Surging, Largely Thanks to Young, White men:
The number of hate groups nationwide reached a record high in 2018, driven partly by the persistent growth of white nationalist groups catering to young, college-aged men.
There are currently 1,020 active hate groups in America — up from 954 in 2017, and 917 the previous year, according to an annual tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The new, young face of hate emerged from the shadows during the 2016 election and organized through a shared language of memes and under the banner of the “alt-right.” Many hailed then-candidate Donald Trump, with his hard-line views on immigration, as a hero. In celebration of his election, the alt-right’s one-time de facto leader Richard Spencer led a room full of young men in suits to give Nazi salutes.
Since then, Spencer and other prominent actors, entangled in costly lawsuits and tired of being heckled by anti-fascist protesters, have faded into relative obscurity.
At the same time, groups like Identity Evropa — whose khaki-clad members were a formidable presence at the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017— have proliferated and expanded their reach by setting up new chapters across the country. Patriot Front also grew significantly in 2018 after splintering from Vanguard America, the group linked to the 19-year-old neo-Nazi who rammed his car into a crowd of protesters during the Charlottesville rally and killed Heather Heyer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:34AM
So by regressive people, generally speaking, is that what you're saying?
"Also not all men, but definitely most. "
So you're saying the majority of men are regressive?
"There are many things we do that seem perfectly normal because that is how we grew up. Like gamers who grew up using "faggot" as a generic insult"
If I'm understanding this part correctly, you think it's a homophobic insult, and this makes it verboten, a word no right-thinking person would use (though you just did, apparently you allow an exception for use in abstract rather than earnest?) And then you refer to others who understand it differently, as a generic rather than specifically homophobic insult, and therefore think it's ok to use.
Well let me blow your mind for a moment. To me, it's not even an insult. It's a word I've many times used to refer to myself and my friends. My generation of gamer reclaimed it and adopted it as our own. It's a great word, actually, if you grok the actual meaning and history of it. It goes back to the british empire with its system of boarding schools. It originally meant lowerclassman, or in less formal language you might say 'noob.' Upperclassmen were assigned roles of noob-master and expected to haze the noobs to break them down psychologically somewhat like what is done today to slightly older young men in basic training. So it referred to someone that was regarded by the system as a raw recruit, unusable in current form, that needed to be torn down and recreated into an appropriate tool of the Queen.
By my time it had morphed a bit and it was more the word the beautiful ones used pretty indiscriminately against any out-group males. Since the beautiful people tended to be obsessive homophobes I can see the interpretation of it as homophobic but that's putting the cart before the horse. We aren't *all* gay. We're just the people that the herd considers defective. Moo.
And here we go, a few years later, afraid to even use my own favorite word for myself in public because some hate mob might interpret it as a homophobic insult. It's not just 1984, it's been rewritten as black comedy.
"That last one I was guilty of recently, I downplayed an old white lady who said "speakee eeenglish" to a brown skinned kid who was wearing a south-american style sweatshirt. Even if he wasn't US born and raised it is still an offensive way to address a customer."
Her age, not her skin color, might well explain that. What is 'offensive' is so subjective and so mercurial it's sometimes hard for young people to keep up. It's even harder as you get older, and you're also even more likely to come to the understanding that you can't live your life on eggshells worrying that someone might be offended. Life's too short and it's a waste of time.
Look, taboos are silly. Taboos on words are one of the silliest sorts of taboo. These things have gone in and out of fashion throughout the history of language and they never did any sort of objective good for us. They don't change behaviour, they don't change thought. they only complicate language. The polynesian languages, for instance, split more quickly into unintelligible branches because, among other reasons, they practiced a lot of word taboos. Every time one word became taboo, another way of saying the same thing was always devised, of course. Either a circumlocution or flat-out borrowing a word from a neighboring language or whatever. After so many generations a lot of common words look totally different.
Just in my lifetime, the words you're *supposed* to use to refer to different groups of people in order to avoid 'giving offense' have changed multiple times. What point did that serve, other than to make it easier for someone to unintentionally 'give offense?'
"Some PC stuff is ridiculous and people need to be a little more understanding of mistakes when no offense was intended, but on the flip side the anti-PC brigade (so many of the posters here) needs to realize that it isn't OK to be offensive."
Unfortunately the second clause is a poison pill of a postulate. We need to be more worried about whether or not something is *true* than whether or not it offends us, first off. If it is true, and it offends us, then perhaps /we needed to be offended./ Offense, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Language is meant for communication, and taboos on language only inhibit communication.
And once you admit the principle that you can be penalized just because someone else claims to be offended by something you said, no one is safe. Public dialogue, public conversation, the 'lifeblood of democracy' as it's so often been called - well that breaks right down, it becomes impossible.
So no, sorry, it IS ok to be offensive. That's the entire point of the first amendment. You think we needed a constitutional amendment to protect speech that everyone agreed was ok? Speech that offended no one?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?