If you find a way to communicate with people who throw around terms like “snowflake” and “libtard,” let me know.
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I don’t know either and that’s the problem. How do you work with someone who literally refuses to see you as an equal? How much vocal dehumanization should people be forced to endure? Why is it OUR job to remind people that they shouldn’t act like grade school bullies?
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I would think Natural Ice is preferred.
broflake is easier to pronounce than hegemony.
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I think the problem is that we’re trying to communicate with the wrong people. It’s not the bullies we need to talk to—it’s the people they’re effecting. They need to know that this isn’t us. “You belong” is a much more powerful message than “Fuck Trump.” We can’t talk the alt-right into not being dicks, but we can find ways to support and defend one another.
It’s just like a video game. You don’t try to reason with the NPCs—you support your team.
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I offer four different answers of various levels of seriousness:
First, the flippant: And calling them ‘broflake’ is communication, is it?
Second, the pragmatic: There are people to whom hurting the outgroup is its own reward and with such there can never really be any communication, particularly if you happen to be the outgroup. However, on the internet you rarely speak just to the person that is ostensibly the target of your words: there is also the great silent audience to every Twitter exchange whose participation is likely as not silent and may be far into the future. If these people are the undecideds in this current culture war (and the young, by definition, are undecided to begin with) how you say things will serve as emblematic of your whole position. Whether you want to or not, on the internet you are always an ambassador of whichever group you visibly affiliate with. Needless to say, the words ‘libtard’ and ‘broflake’ both are great markers of identification. I don’t know if you’ve ever really paid the attention to the other side, but if you do you’ll see that there’s a simple and seductive technique to their growth. A huge part of it is to find someone on the other side whose demeanor is particularly uncharitable, unkind, and cruel. Then they contrast their own smiling face, and gentle demeanor with this other, terrible, person and invite their susceptible viewer in. When their entire online circle (and for so many online is their primary way of interacting with people) is made up of members of the tribe, no cruelty done in the name of the tribe will seem to excessive because, well, the other side started it, didn’t it?
Third, the personal: It’s not for the benefit of people using ‘libtard’ that I am complaining, it is for yours. Think of it like this: empathy toward the Other is hard enough without making it more difficult by using deliberately dehumanizing language. It’s why slurs are so bad—not because they hurt those they are directed at, but because they hurt the people using the slur (who then, in the fullness of time, hurt the people the slur was meant for) by making them less capable of empathy and, thus, fundamentally less human. Think about it like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Those who end up doing it often feel cheated because the tasks they do seem so trivial and everyday but it works more than any equivalent therapy. By seeking out newer, more hurtful words to use against the other, you are doing your own bit of CBT, whose effect is to make you a worse person—with empathy and cognition that little bit more compromised as you find it easier and easier to dismiss the pain and words both of people with the wrong tribal markers. I’d avoid this if at all possible. When I was younger I was very much a fan of cutting remarks until I realized that honing that particular edge made nothing better and me worse. I say this not to claim moral superiority, but to say that I know it feels nice to have something to throw right back at people calling you names and acting in ways you find appalling. I am by no means immune to it or even particularly good at avoiding it.
Fourth, the simplistic: But being nice is nice! And being mean isn’t!
None. None at all.
Some people you simply cannot reason with or make common cause with. The best hope is to turn the rest of society to your side and the side of community and niceness and so on, and to isolate the dangerous antisocial sorts from power and wait them out.
It is a cruel world. I don’t see much point in breeding better and better forms of cruelty, do you?
And if you like to communicate in quotes, here’s one: Almost no one is evil, almost everything is broken.
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Do you really think those described by “broflake” feel hurt if they hear someone use that word to describe them? Seriously?
Anyway, for me, the point of such terms from this side of the table isn’t to hurt them. It’s to describe them accurately.
Regarding empathy, it’s pretty hard to empathize with someone who’s relentlessly harassing and threatening you. But even so, what sort of pain do you think “broflakes” are going through that the women they harass should try to understand? And what makes you think those they harass don’t already understand it?
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You beat me to it.
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It is very difficult, totally agree.
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For his faults, his bit on white privilege is pretty great. I wish more white comedians would have such commentary on race like that. What was it that Stokely Carmichael asked the white members of SNCC when he made it a black only organization? That they should go back to their communities and do the work needed there? It’s too bad that many of the white allies instead took it as some sort of mortal insult.
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Louis CK ain’t perfect by any means; but when he’s on point, he’s razor sharp with it.
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Totally true.
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Forgive me, but ‘broflake’ doesn’t smack of clinical accuracy. It looks uncannily like a slur, possibly, because it is closely modeled on something that the other side of the table enthusiastically uses as a slur.
If it is used to describe harassers as the second half of your posts seems to suggest, what is wrong with ‘harasser.’ What nuance is achieved by the use of ‘broflake?’ Again, apologies, but it seems a word designed to insult, nothing more.
And whether someone is hurt by the use of broflake—almost certainly. I’m always hurt when I’m the target of a word designed to dismiss and dehumanize me. ‘Broflake’ is not the worst I can imagine, by far. The worst I personally was called is ‘collateral damage’— I’m sure you can furnish your own examples of worse things. But not being literally the worst is not a particularly good argument for something. Now, I’m not seriously hurt, no, but it is unpleasant. I imagine people I disagree with are, at least in part, the same way.
Indeed.
Well understanding whatever it is that damaged them sufficiently that they derive some sort of pleasure from the suffering of others would be a handy thing, wouldn’t it? I mean, maybe we could make it stop? Make it better?
It’s a long shot, certainly, but it’s surely better than the odds of insulting them into being better people. I’ve not seen that one work once.
I can’t be certain that they don’t, but the use of ‘broflake’ and the evolution of parallels to ‘libtard’ and the like makes me suspect. It’s not how I think about people I understand, generally.
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American whites are so immune to having their feelings hurt that they are the demographic second most at risk for suicide, only after Native American men in this tragic distinction.
When I see a group whose members, despite undeniable advantages, keep killing themselves I don’t think it’s because they are so damn happy and immune to emotional hurt. Quite the opposite.
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Are you aware that we live in a patriarchy?
(I ask because I’m gagging on your false equivalencies.)
Please stop recommending that both sides treat each other the same. Given the context, it’s useless advice, and it makes you come across as totally out of touch with the particulars of the problems at hand.
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