What is too politically toxic?

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Nioreh
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by Nioreh »

toggle switch wrote: Mon Dec 02, 2019 7:15 pm i love how you think it's totally cool to compare somebody to literal mass murderers, and reserve your harshest judgement for the very gentle pushback received in response to that.

totally okay to call somebody a fascist, but out of line for me to reply that i disagree with his concept of political toxicity. :roll:
Nobody in the thread has compared anyone to a mass murderer.

Nobody has called anyone a fascist either. One person described the idea of imposing ones ideas on others as a fascist approach, which is correct by some definitions of the word. For example the orwellian definition, where fascist is basically another word for "bully".

Anyway, my two cents on the topic; I get enough of all this shit through Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. I agree with many here that anything remotely political/societal/religious should be discussed elsewhere. We don't need yet another forum turned into a cesspool of toxicity. Keep it related to retro dev stuff.
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toggle switch
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by toggle switch »

One person described the idea of imposing ones ideas on others as a fascist approach, which is correct by some definitions of the word.
i'm really sick of pointing this out, but NOBODY IN THIS THREAD ATTEMPTED TO IMPOSE IDEAS ON OTHERS. NOBODY.

if you actually read the quote that got called fascist, it EXPLICITLY states that you can use whatever language you like. please explain how that is "imposing ones ideas" because i'd really like to know.
Nobody has called anyone a fascist either
they can barely make a comment without comparing people to 1984, fascism, authoritarians, etc. if i was to dismiss your comment out of hand by comparing you to a nazi, i'm sure you wouldn't like that. it's pretty simple. if you want respect, you treat people with respect.
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Nioreh
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by Nioreh »

toggle switch wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 8:49 am i'm really sick of pointing this out, but NOBODY IN THIS THREAD ATTEMPTED TO IMPOSE IDEAS ON OTHERS. NOBODY.
And where did I say anyone did? Nowhere
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toggle switch
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by toggle switch »

LOL, omg... okay, i guess.

you realize that when bregalad was using the word 'fascist' it was in direct response to something somebody else said right? he even quoted the person first and proclaimed it was
EXACTLY what I find absolutely horrendeous and politically toxic.
it is bregalad who accused people here of attempting to oppose ideas on others.

for example, when he said
If your gramar is reminicient of some political view or utopia, anybody, even not interested in politics nor your utopia, is forced to be constantly reminded about it just by the sight of the politically loaded newlanguage. The parallel with the 1984 book is here obvious. And yes, doing politics by changing the language is a fachist approach. I never called anybody in particular fachist, but a concept. "you" in this post refers to generic "you" not anybody in particular.
in his mind, using any language that he doesn't like is a 'fascist approach' that is attempting to force ideas on others.

anyway if you truly don't want to discuss this i suggest you stop wasting your time and mine....
nocash
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by nocash »

I guess fascist could also mean "don't you see that you are wrong?" I didn't take it as offending. Although just "wrong" can be confusing if it refers to something that is "harmless/normal" to someone else. It can be also unclear which part of a sentence "wrong" was referring to (not to mention possible mis-understanding of the intended meaning of the sentence)... It's just difficult to understand what was disagreed... or what was talked about at all.

If I didn't miss some important posts, nobody has been giving examples about what is disliked about which of pronouns. There is the issue of preserving or changing language/grammar, another issue is that gender pronouns may imply associations with sex-practices. My current assumption is that male/female genders are widely accepted, and that it's only the gender neutral form being objected to by some people. Or is that already a wrong assumption on other peoples views?

Leaving gender-associated sex-practices aside: The raw language as such is allowing to say "she is a woman", and also to use who/whose as gender neutral form "someone who told me...", that neutral form is used even if the gender is known, "a man who told me...". Does anybody have objections to that kind of gendering & gender neutrality?
More controversial: "somebody emailed me (without gender info), and he/she told me about his/her..." that is a case where additional gender neutral forms could be potentially useful (probably without violating anyones religious beliefs - please correct me if I am wrong). What I can understand (and even agree with myself) is that xe and xis could sound unfamilar/queer/hurt someones ears, they and their would sound more familar and easier to adopt to, the drawback would be blurring singular and plural. I don't favor either one, but I like the general idea of having a gender neutral form, And I have some troubles to see that as controversial or toxic topic... Well, unless...
  • Manipulating the language could be seen as slow brain-washing directed at eroding political views. That is one concern here, right?
  • A too polite language can feel like having to lick everyones feet. Is that a concern, too?
  • Gender neutral pronouns would allow queer people to promote yet untold sex-practises (probably untrue because even queer people have their gender preferences when it comes to sex).
  • Is there a possible compromise, like "okay, let them use their silly pronouns, but only if I may also say this-and-that"?
If it comes to forum members, usernames and pronouns may lead to potentionally disturbing assumptions on normal/weird/platonic sex-practices. Whether or not thinking about sex, I could imagine forum members doing this:
  • User "Albert" uses pronoun "he"
  • User "Anna" uses pronoun "she"
  • User "Laura" uses Donald Duck as avatar, with pronoun "she"
  • User "Larissa" uses Dagobert Duck as avatar, with pronoun "he"
  • User "Lisa" uses pronoun "she" and is known to be a prominent transgender woman
  • User "JustMe" uses pronoun "xe"
  • User "RockyHorrorGuyFatale" uses pronoun "xe" and likes to behave a bit queer
  • User "JustSomebody" prefers pronoun "them" instead of "xe"
  • User "FingerCloud" didn't specify any pronoun
  • User "BestCoder8bits" uses pronoun "genius"
Maybe obviously, some people (me included) would be uncomfortable with using some of those pronouns. Workarounds would be...
  • Avoid sentences that require pronouns when talking about those people.
  • Don't talk to those people if, for example, you think that someone who is identifying as "genius" must be an idiot.
  • Don't allow people with offending gender identities to join this forum (that would be my definition of fascism).
  • Insist on your right to use different gender pronouns for some - or all - of those people (my opinion: that's not very polite)
  • Don't force other people to use pronouns in their sentences (I am curious: Are they really doing anything like that in sweden?)
Well, that's my best attempt to be open tolerant, not to force my opinion on other people, and to understand what other people are thinking.
I hope that I haven't offended anybody when suggesting that someone like "RockyHorrorGuyFatale" could even exist.
Bregalad wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 2:45 am(This is my last post in this thread, I'm outta there)
Oh, no! I would have been really interested in understanding your views... and if we did really disagree on everything, or only a few details here or there.
toggle switch wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 8:59 amLOL, omg... using the word 'fascist' it was in direct response
Yeah, well, but that has been meanwhile clarified to refer to a rhetorical "you" in general. Not a personal "you" in neither singular not plural form.
Maybe we need to invent more pronouns for that in future ; )
Uhm, and LOL can also sound a bit like "Boah, you are really a dumbass-idiot (fascist)" which is perhaps not the best way to defuse a situation.

PS. regardless of all that talk, I do also like unisex forums without gender info. Ie.unlike places like gbatemp, where they have large gender symbols as default avatars, and with an optional question mark for undeclared genders, although... that's working surprisingly well there.
Last edited by nocash on Wed Dec 04, 2019 3:25 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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nocash
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by nocash »

Background info on german language: German is very gendered, articles like "the" exist in male/female/neuter forms. Objects are also gendered with "house/door/table" all having different genders. Same goes for animals like "cat/dog/horse" (with generic gendering regardless of their actual sex). Words with undeclared gender are also gendered, for example "somebody" (male), or "a person" (female), in that context it's grammatically correct to say "he is pregnant, and she is male". I guess that can lead to germans taking gender issues very serious... or not so serious.

The often overlooked german gender neutral form is neutering everything and everyone by simply appending (at your choice) one of the suffixes -chen, -lein, or -le to all names and nouns. With that advice it is getting much easier to learn the language. For example, you could simply say "The angry manchen is holding its sharp knifechen at my throatchen, and the angry womanchen is aiming its large shotgunchen at my facechen."
What happens next depends on whether they think that you are totally mad, or if they think that you want to provoke drastic reactions.
In theory, using those suffixes (with similar meaning as english "-ie", like in "cutie") could relax many critical situations... maybe.
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Pokun
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by Pokun »

I see, that sounds similar to the route that Swedish and Danish took while Norwegian stayed the same as German. Started using the neuter gender for things that are not persons but still gramatically masculine or feminine. Only problem that the fourth gender uter is also doing that (but for genderless words only), and now both neuter and uter includes both animate and inanimate things. So when learning the language you are forced to memorize what nouns are neuter and what nouns are uter to know how to inflect them.

nocash wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 12:56 pm My current assumption is that male/female genders are widely accepted, and that it's only the gender neutral form being objected to by some people.
Yes promoting an artificial change of a language like this is disliked. Especially not one that intrudes on a characteristic of the language that is very culturally significant.

Background for people that didn't read the locked thread:
Grammatical gender is a characteristic of Indo-European and Semitic languages. This means that gender information (grammatical and biological) is part of the language (in the forms of inflections and pronouns) even when it's not really needed for the discussion. It is similar to grammatical number (singular and plural etc) which carries information of the number of something in the language whether its needed or not. Languages like Chinese and Japanese for example do not have grammatical number nor grammatical gender, and Chinese also doesn't have tense, so neither of those are clearly required for communication to work.

xe and xis could sound unfamilar/queer/hurt someones ears
Yeah with first-hand experience of the phenomenon I can say that the Swedish counterpart feels very forced and is kind of awkward to read or hear. It's probably mostly because we are not used to it, and because people tend to use it very inconsistently and in situations where it has no benefit. This all relates to the fact that it's an attempt to forcefully alter the language without taking the structure of the language into account.

Don't force other people to use pronouns in their sentences (I am curious: Are they really doing anything like that in sweden?)
It was a hot debate a few years ago and people on both sides gets crazy on this. Yes, it's very infected and people use all kinds of tactics, dirty tricks and hypocrisy.
I've been away from Sweden for a long time, but now it seems to have calmed down a lot. Some people still use the new word in newspapers and stuff though I think.
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Re: What is too politically toxic?

Post by tepples »

Swahili has eighteen noun classes: two numbers times nine genders.
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