There doesn’t need to be a positive use for any word.
People are people, people get mad, words mean different things to different people and they all have a different power to different people. Culturally here in the UK you can effectively use any slur because we all throw them around in such an incredibly casual way that they all hold very little meaning unless you use them in a very specific way with in very specific situations We can tell what is an attempt to cause deliberate harm and what isn’t and why they’re doing it. Everyone should be able to make this judgement.
But the fact remains, at the end of the day, people make mistakes. Sometimes someone is gonna piss you off a lot and someone is gonna call someone else a “fucking r*tard”. They meant no offence to any group outside of the person that pissed them off, they just picked the first offensive word that’s synonymous with moron and rolled with it. Those are not the people our policies should target. There are genuinely highly toxic individuals and those should be the targets of our policies.
We should avoid assigning labels to people that imply they are a lot worse than they are and consider the context and the intent of the offender.
For example if someone is getting harrassed by another marine, a lot and they lash out and call them a “r*tard” when it reaches a boiling point then they might face a higher punishment because we’ve taken such a strong stance on this issue than the person actively trying to ruin another person’s experience.
The troll could walk away with a note for being a shitter and the victim of their trolling could walk away with a 7 day ban.
A lot of people have been saying “r*tard” on this server since the day it was born and 99.99999% of them meant no offence to anyone that’s mentally handicapped and we should extend such charity to everyone. It’s easy to tell who is a bad actor and who isn’t.
Not that I could conceive it coming up in game, but worth mentioning from a lexicological perspective.
R-word is also used in aeronautics a lot. Example in Airbus aircraft it has special meaning as it is a throttle quadrant position referenced by the GPWS. Airbus being French, where the R word is the common way to say slow down - more so than what it became in English.
Specifically a GPWS of Airbus aircraft will play a warning that states “r----d… r----d…” if the crew have not correctly seated the throttle in the correct spot (marked ‘r----d’, or idle).
I’m very into aviation and the aviation discords/reddits I’m on I’m used to code-switching and nobody misses a beat with the aeronautical use of the term in context.
While in the RNZAF I was on exchange someone who was French and not good with English outside of Aeronatics. They did a real double take when they learned that the exact same word had a profoundly different acceptability outside of Aeronautics.
I do worry slightly that english-as-a-second-language people are often hit hardest by word-bans, as they might not have the proper context around words and use-cases, or other meanings. English is terrible in general in this regard and I do feel bad for people caught out there.
And it is genuinely newspeak. The entire point of newspeak in 1984 was erasing words from the language as a way of controlling people’s thoughts and expressions - If you didn’t even know a word for a feeling existed, how could you possibly express the feeling to someone else? That was the goal of the censorship and social engineering in 1984.
Newspeak took on a more sinister angle than merely preventing people from expressing bad sentiments to each other (frankly, a necessity of language); it was also used to prevent people from expressing any sentiments against the enriched ruling class or the direction their society was heading.
It just floors me that the staff here take 1984 like a joke on all their posts about this rather than understanding it as a lesson in what danger totalitarianism and censorship actually pose and where such abuses have constantly, almost unerringly, led throughout history.
Already, what started as simply moderating the most abusive speech in an attempt to keep players polite has now metastasized into bans for commonly used words that even have genuinely benign usage and for which the inherent sentiment can yet still be expressed in an infinite number of creative ways that cannot ultimately be policed with anything, not even more jackboots.
In truth the only reason such a ban ‘works’ is because the community actually plays along with it; while the staff may congratulate themselves for a job well done, not much of anything has actually been accomplished.
To me, it almost feels like the staff would love nothing more than to oust half or more of their own playerbase, not for speech, but rather for underlying ideological and cultural reasons with speech just the excusable raison d’être of it.
I think the inability by staff to recognize that this kind of behaviour on their part is dangerous and not actually good for anyone - not themselves, and not the server and community as a whole - gives me bad vibes I can’t shake for the future of this place.
There needs to be a change of heart for things to get better.
Dying societies accumulate laws like dying men accumulate remedies.
This feels like bait. I was able to ignore two messages in a row saying “you say there’s no positive use of this word, but have you considered that you could apply it to vehicles we don’t have in a way nobody has ever utilized on this server before?” (Cue “I found a message from 2019 of someone demanding a PO slows the Alamo’s descent to the LZ”), but “the authoritarian unpaid moderators of a game are trying to institute fascism by asking you to use any of the non-slur synonyms for a word” takes the cake. You hit the nail on the head by comparing the phasing-out of slurs to the inability to meaningfully criticize a government, which absolutely sounds like CM.
Again, paraphrasing Frozen: Nobody’s referring to trains, planes, automobiles, or literal Orwellian states when they sling slurs around, it’s fellow players. The same way you can become numb to any toxin as a by-product of it killing the nerves your body has to warn you about it, being negged until you no longer rightfully feel upset at someone disrespecting you isn’t a sign that others are too sensitive for not building up the same damage . . . sorry, “tolerance” to some and “thick skin” to others.
Read the books you’re quoting and try to look deeper at what they were talking about. Xeets too, I guess. Reserve the slurs for airplanes and just call your fellow players “dumbasses” or “morons” like the rest of us.
You might have missed the crux of my post, which is that I have some sympathy for those who english is a second language. This is easily solved by the proposed mechanical block of the word, rather than the auto ban.
I merely pointed out that the R-word does have technical meaning, especially for French speakers. Someone who is French who has limited English education might not always have the same contextualization around this word. Another example would be when I lived/worked in the Czech republic ten years ago, locals did not quite have the same understanding of cultural problems around some racist words.
When word bans are applied, including ones that are very valid - they can sometimes ensnare those who english is a second language. This is because those people often learn some of the “edge” side of english in various places, where they might not know the various different contexts of words.
I merely point this out to assist the conversation, especially for those who are not native speakers who may be getting much of their english practice without the benefit of context.
Again, to labour my point, I’m not suggesting the actions should not be undertaken. I’m just wanting to point out the difficulty that english provides with the “use the same word multiple ways” and those who english is a second language.
Moron, imbecile, idiot.
Also: cunt, whore, bitch, slut, etc. are also pejoratives aka “slurs” aka to be banned???
Also, you absolutely can say the R-word in good faith. “Delta went full R-word and rushed the hive with little regard to their lives”. Also, I am willing to say that most people who say the R-word never met a person with such disability in their lives. They just saw it on the Internet and started to use it too, without ever thinking of such persons. How is this bad faith?
Erm, I said twitter, not X
But yeah, this is how things go. First you ban words you don’t like, then someone else ban words you like
This seems like the same reason the n-word is out.
Someone said the r/n/f/whatever-word.
Are they of that identity?
Were they given permission by someone of that identity to use that word?
Did they mean it in an offensive manner?
Is the other person valid in their discomfort?
– Can we verify literally any of the above and is that worth the effort every time someone says it?
Again, the core of good-faith judgement on/use of these words seems to boil down to how difficult it’s being portrayed to not use these words (as even people in favor of not banning them have stated: they have a variety of synonyms and a narrow non-pejorative use case), versus how easy it is to evaluate every use of them (Staff/receiving players being expected to read intent in a mostly-toneless medium, the wide majority who have no clue who you are as a person before they hear you say something that would get a corrective action in most professional settings in the Western world).
Can you still use them in DMs? Unaffiliated Sidecords? Personal calls? Daily life with friends? Family? Out of the rolled-down window of a pick-up truck? Of course you can, that’s your space you can curate the rules of!
A wide-open community with people of all stripes where every use of one of those words needs to be held against Rule 2 on the forums or 3 in the game and Discord’s own policy of “don’t be a dick” in every use-case against every person? Probably not.
