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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Okay, but what if you don’t want them to leave?

Take the slur-spammer example. I don’t care if he’s within his natural rights—I would rather talk to a person with “common decency” rather than talk around a flood of slurs. The community can demand that he stop in the interests of the larger group.

Ousting for being insensitive is what purity spiralers do, and it’s also what functional communities do. It’s setting the boundary at the right place (and enforcing it fairly) that is contentious.

Okay, but what if you don’t want them to leave?

Choose. You can either accommodate them to the detriment of everyone else, or fail to accommodate them and they leave. There is often an implicit and sometimes explicit assumption that such accommodation is a moral requirement; I say it is not.

I would rather talk to a person with “common decency” rather than talk around a flood of slurs.

I would rather talk to someone with a potty mouth than someone who is going to "correct" my speech every three words, or demand some authority do the same. Yes, there is some theoretical medium, but in practice attempting to accommodate the "sensitive" ends up in a spiral... which is why we're no longer on Reddit.

Yes, there is some theoretical medium, but in practice attempting to accommodate the "sensitive" ends up in a spiral... which is why we're no longer on Reddit.

It is a very "don't negotiate with terrorists" situation. Once you show that you're willing to fold once, you'll be inundated with requests, and every one will cite your previous accommodation as precedent.

Unlike terrorism, there is no cost to you when they try and you refuse/ignore.

Except the cost of a twitter hate campaign, possibly losing your account, hosting, network connectivity, payment processing, or whatever else it is you need to communicate.

If you already face all that when you refuse immediately, I'm not convinced that it's somehow worse if you refuse only on the second iteration.

With all due respect, that sounds like a shithole.

It is perfectly reasonable to make following certain rules a condition of participation. Rules on speech norms are fair game. Like all rules, they ought to be enforced transparently and fairly, which is the real reason we’re off reddit. And the mods are still banning spammers and trolls, “correcting” their transgressions most dramatically. As they should be.

This is accommodating the the “sensitives,” and it’s also benefiting the community.

The choice is a shithole with offensive speech or a shithole run for the benefit of the sensitive. The center is unstable. Which may be why this group keeps having to move.

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