lancehoch wrote:pi, but would the following statements also make people upset? There is a way to say things correctly and a way to not.
I have a friend John who is homosexual
"Yeah, that's my friend John. He's a f****t."
I have a friend Matt who is African American
"Yeah, that's my friend Matt. He's black."
I think the word sensors in the forum should be extended to include other terms. The word that everyone is all riled up about in this thread for one, the one I posted above for another. Maybe Andy should make a list together and send it to lack.
Cards on the table, I hate the idea of a word filter. And when i use the word 'f
uck, for example, i make special effort to rid my eyes of the censorship. That may sound odd coming from me, with my
Gamechat filter thread, but that was satire to illustrate a flaw and a fallacy... lost on most. The fallacy being that flamewars closure was merely a spiteful singling out of an easy target, and anything meaningful was never actually going to happen as it was too difficult.
I put that to one side as this is far more important.
Now what came from the Gamechat filter thread was the premise that censoring words is pointless, as ways are always found to circumvent word filters and mostly, genuinely nasty abuse is camouflaged completely from any automated system.
What also came from that thread was that a greater degree of monitoring/culpability in gamechat for the worst excesses of abuse, and for me that pretty much only extends to bigotry, should be more seriously dealt with in forums and in games.
This thread, with Andy's injection of authority and the distant promise of genuine change, does perhaps allow a hope of that.
Now i am almost completely laissez faires when it comes to expression, perhaps one day all words will be acceptable due to the mulching of our divergent histories; all denigrations jocular as they have a universal target. That day is far from here!
In my opinion, abuse and censor-able words/behaviours only really extend to bigotry. The rest is merely an affront to sensibility and too intangible to adjudicate. Even the most heinous of one term expletive is not really offensive unless you put your defenses up so high that it is impossible for them not to get hit.
That's subjective but i believe, that in a decent world community, there are universal concepts which, though seemingly subjective, are so absolute as to become objective - Bigotry.
The shades of bigotry become more subjective of course and that is where the mods earn their kudos.
But for overt and universally accepted examples of bigotry .. not the grey areas but the black and white ones
i see that a much tougher punitive stance can be taken.
The example in the fists post : "cuntniggerjew", though very cleverly run into one word, is unavoidable in its intent. It is black and white to adjudicate upon, there can be no doubt what this is. It mixes ethnic terms with expletive to hammer them home and can not in any way be mixed up with a playful 'street' patois.
