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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28224 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Language can only be abused so much, and only for relatively short term gains. And often at the expense of long-term progress.

I think this is the reason "white supremacy" became such a common descriptor in the 2010s: activists recognised that there was no alpha left in "racist" as a term of abuse, the word having become as inflated as a Zimbabwean dollar.

The problem for them now is that accusing someone of being a "white supremacist" is heading the same way (doubly so now that it's become so obvious that even being Indian offers no protection against the accusation), and woke people are fast running out of words with which to tar their political opponents that inspire the same level of outrage. "Racist", "Nazi", "fascist", "white supremacist" - are there any such descriptors left which haven't been rendered meaningless through overuse?

I think it was more an issue of conceding to right-wing complaints about 'individual bias' and 'systemic inequity' both being refereed to with the same word ('racism'), and trying to actually separate the two by calling individual beliefs that one race is superior or individual efforts to intentionally favor one race 'supremacy' instead of 'racism'.

Which of course didn't work at all to mollify conservatives who claimed to hate how the same word was being used to refer to different things. What they actually hated was just being smeared in general; the fact that the terms used to do so were being used confusingly was never more than a 'gotcha'.

No, I don't think that's remotely true. When have woke people ever made "concessions" to conservatives of any kind?

I didn't say 'woke people', and I don't know precisely who you would or would not include under that classification.

I'm talking about major media outlets and politicians and the like who were using 'white supremacy' for a while. They make concessions to conservatives all the time

Thanks for clarifying.

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