I think we would all do well to stop accosting other people, unless they are new users who are here in obvious bad faith.
Are we here to fight and have barroom brawls – and consider the kind of gladiatorial crowd that attracts, too – or are we here listen and talk and exchange ideas in turn?
Sorry I don’t want to hear bigoted, racist, sexist, and transphobic things.
No, see, it’s okay, cause I’m mean and shitting all over free speech by supporting the article, which asks for human beings to be treated as human beings. It’s ME that’s being offensive by expecting bigots to look at themselves and maybe not be so bigoted.
WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE BIGOTS!!!
Let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m in favor of just being nice to people and treating them the way I would like to be treated without worrying about who they are. That makes me a bigot. Roger that.
I’ve tried to argue that screaming and shouting at people is not the way to convince them of anything. That makes me a bigot. Because if we didn’t learn anything else from Martin Luther King, we learned that angry belligerence is the best way to win people to your side. Shout at them until they submit.
I said to you previously that you do not have a right to live in a world that never offends you. You do, however, have the right to walk away from that which you find offensive.
This is me, walking away.
Which is hilarious for you to say, because you came into this thread and acted all offended due to the article’s existence, and threw around all sorts of insults and rudeness. You acted rude, and then got angry when people were rude back - you expected people to treat you better than you treated others.
I didn’t call you a bigot. I called people who refuse to listen to others and take how they feel into account bigots. There is nothing wrong with being nice, but to say that “just be nice” will fix bigots is at best myopic, at worst meant to allow people to continue to be bigoted.
MLK was great, but at the time, he was not welcomed and beloved by many white Americans. His strategy was indeed to love thy enemy, but it was also to be respectable, normal, middle class people, to outclass the people holding you down. An understandable strategy, but it also meant that it was less “respectable” members of the black community that didn’t get as loud a voice. The only thing that made him seem acceptable to many whites was the Malcolm X alternative looming in the background (something Malcolm well understood).
if I don’t have the right to live in an inoffensive world, neither do you. You’re just going to have to deal with people having a voice and a public forum to express their views on how they’d like to be understood.
No, see… free speech.
Accepting what people say or walking away strikes me as merely two poles of ignorance. The real value I think is in debate. This is ideally the practice of confronting each other to test our ideas. As we help each other to find the flaws in our own ideas, and the ideas of others, we come away from the process with more refined thinking. And this is what IMO people tend to be afraid of, they’d prefer to persuade and judge, taking the easier approach of simply categorizing and reacting to others without the possibility of teaching or learning anything. Confrontation does not need to equal “belligerence”, this would be emptily going through the motions of debate while missing the point.
I have a question about gender indentification and health.
A couple of months ago I read an article (I wish that I could find it again) about a gender-indentified / transgender (but not transsexual) man that had to go to hospital with severe pain in his vaginal & lower abdominal area and was upset that the doctors and nurses wrote ‘female’ on his charts and wrist bracelet.
Since he had not had a surgical transition and had ‘female’ organs which could possibly be the cause of the pain, how should have the hospital handled this?
On one hand it’s a kind of discrimination but on the other it’s up the the doctors and nurses to treat what is physically presented, i.e. if he had a yeast infection, ovarian or uteural problem.
(Note: I hope that I correctly used s/he pronouns. I mean no disrespect to anyone. Also wasn’t sure how to describe the ‘groin’ area).
I’d have said “We’re putting “female” on the chart because of the female organs, so we know which doc you need to see, and to give them a heads-up on what kind of problems they should be looking for. Maybe someday our system will be able to deftly handle this, but our focus now is to get you proper and quick medical treatment.”
I don’t care if you are on the “right” side of the issue or not, being a jerk to people is never an effective strategy. And playing the “who can escalate to be more offended first” game is an exercise in futility.
Tone actually matters, because apparently “don’t tone police me” is now code for “I get to treat other people like a raging asshole because reasons”. It is one thing to disregard the substance of someone’s arguments because you do declare, their frightful words give you the vapors – it is another entirely to give yourself blanket immunity so you can say hateful things to other human beings along the way to making your point.
Make all the points you want, just be as respectful of others as you would want them to be of you along the way.
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