I fully agree. I was just countering the flank.
The insight is that this is a trainwreck, with people spasmodically typing any old thin legged insight popping into their upset mind.
Good olâ debate is great, rancour and annoyance wonderful, creativity and advancement fantastic. But bickering fills up these previously wonderful comments sections and pisses me off.
Argument, rhetoric, persuasion all have their ways. But these comment sections nowadays are being filled with angry rants, dressed up in bow ties or not, with all the value of candyfloss.
Normally I would agree with you, but there is the persistent problem of misogyny that hasnât been addressed in the scientific community. From the point of view of Scientific American I can see that it would be very embarrassing to have two third parties, each who happen to be contracted by them, to be having a public argument. Nonetheless, Scientific American is responsible for the behavior of its third party contractors, the good and the bad. And since one of those contractors became abusive in a way that is important for the scientific community to discuss, I think they should have seized the opportunity to bring this up and investigate it in a honest way. Leave the blog post and use it as an example to say how the magazine wonât tolerate sexism or bigotry.
Donât confuse free speech with the 1st Amendment. They are not the same thing. The 1st Amendment only applies to the laws that the Legislative Branch of the government can create. Courts can issue gag orders. The Executive Branch can regulate security clearances. And corporations can censor content. None of these have anything to do with the 1st Amendment. And this discussion between private individuals and corporations has absolutely nothing to do with the 1st Amendment.
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Well, that makes me feel better about all that effort I put into not letting myself be angered and remaining impassive. 
As a Southerner Iâve never heard the word âurbanâ used to refer to raceâŚmaybe itâs cause we have other culturally insensitive words here who knows.
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Are you blessed with a cognitive development that leads to you being unable to read complete sentences? I did not say that it was unwise to discuss the meaning of love, I said that it was unwise in a particular circumstance, which you seem to have missed the significance of. If logic is more important than the emotional well-being of your SO to you, then by all means cleave to logic in your disagreements, and see how long your SO remains S.
The point youâre missing about your digression into the meaning of the word âurbanâ â or rather, its paucity of meaning to you â is that it is completely orthogonal to the original post. The heart of the matter is an emotional one; even now you seem more emotionally invested in being right in your ignorance of a particular use of a word than in discussing the rights and wrongs of the issue. What do logic and the rules of debate â as interpreted by you in your favour â have to do with sexism and racism? Especially when you seem to be deploying them in the same manner as many have, to downplay the emotional side of these issues into insignificance, thereby diffusing sexism and racism into mere wordplay.
Finally, this is not a court of law, but if it were then hearsay evidence would still be evidence. Several witnesses testifying that they understand that the word âurbanâ can be used to mean âblackâ would be sufficient proof that the word can be understood that way. If your argument is based on no-one knowing the interior states of Lee and Ofek, then nothing anyone can say â possibly including statements from Lee and Ofek themselves â will do anything to make you doubt the relevance of your doubt.
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Mods are asleep? Post ponies?
-head scratch-
Wow, is there some vigorous mansplaining, and the use of logic to bully people in here. FFS, people, offensive terms are a slippery slope, and some words and phrases that are completely innocent by themselves, in some contexts, are wildly offensive. Watermelon, bananas, monkeys, porches, all are completely innocent by themselves, but when said to or about a back person in the right phrases or situations, it become offensive. Take it from a person living in the South - Iâm twitchy even using those words around a black person because of the racist connotations they can have.
Applying the rigor of formal logic and scientific critique to a discussion of something as fuzzy and non-logical as the English language is wildly inappropriate. We are dealing with emotions, informed by history and culture. Understanding the offense requires a fair bit of historical knowledge. There is no way you can apply the full rigor of logic to the interpretations of history that inform modern attitudes - emotions play a huge part of our reaction to historical events in our daily lives. Everything from V-Day in WWII, to the JFK assassination, to 9/11 have huge emotional impacts on the people who lived through them, and it will color the attitudes and opinions of them and their descendants in ways that are not particularly logical.
And finally, just because one person does not find a statement offensive, it does not follow that all people do not find the statement offensive. And sometimes, when you see such horrible behavior, that violates the boundaries of decency, you call people on it. Because thatâs what decent people do. Feminists have been doing this for a long time - calling people on male privilege. And itâs the responsibility of those of us of European descent to call others of the same melanin production range on things that can be construed as racist.
Seriously sick and tired of people trying to justify racist jokes.
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Bollocks. Then the same would be true of any word. If several people testifying that the word âphonoâ was a derogatory slur it wouldnât become so in the eyes of the court.
Everybody out. Court closed.
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If youâre becoming afraid of using words then youâll eventually scare yourself into silence.
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No one is justifying a racist joke. People are merely stating that what was presented as certain fact is actually indeterminate uncertainty.
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Not asleep at all. Have been reading closely. Not one post has been deleted in this thread.
I was simply being facetious, but glad to know weâre being monitored.
Hopefully youâll be unneeded. Iâd like to believe in this communityâs capacity to overcome negative emotional responses and to set aside personal anger or frustration in the face of disagreements.
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Itâs not indeterminate. You want evidence of someone using âurbanâ as a reference to black folks? Blazing Saddles. Used in the movie to refer to the lead character.
Sorry, but I can speak on this with a little more authority than most - as a white person, who was a union steward in a shop where 75% of the people I worked with, and represented, were not white. In a city that is majority black. Iâve had to navigate this for a long, long time, and I have literally seen that phrase used by a neo-Nazi in a death threat sent to a friend of mine. So, no, itâs not âindeterminate uncertaintyâ. It may be for you in your nice, safe ivory tower, but for those of us who live in the blood and muck of real life, itâs a real, offensive term.
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Dragon eyes are watching you.
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Nobody here is trying to justify racist jokes. There was no joke, just an insult. Everybody agrees on that.
What some are questioning is if it was the right thing to bring racism into the discussion, since neither Dr. Lee nor the troll that offended her, have clearly made any remarks about race. The race thing was brought up by the author of the BoingBoing article, and some people are asking why.
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If I wanted to insult someone by calling them âblackâ I would do so, not cloak it in a deniable euphemism. Humpty-dumpty had it wrong: words mean different things to different people, and the onus is on the user of the word to be clear â and in this case, to own that a word they used may have been even more offensive than it may appear to those ignorant of modern slang.
No-one chooses to be offended, any more than one chooses to feel pain; one is either offended or not. One may choose to offend, which Ofek undoubtably did; and one may choose to apologise, which Ofek hasnât.
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Just took a look at the movie script
It says;
âWhatâs a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic settling
like this?â
Quite plainly not referring to race, being used in conjunction with ârusticâ.
Couldnât find any more references to âurbanâ in the script.
I just pulled up a partial script to Blazing Saddles (sadly Google seems to have difficulty finding me a full one), and in searching it via text editor I cannot find a single instance of the word âurbanâ within it, and certainly not in reference to black people.
What I assume youâre misremembering, and what my searching suggests is the case, is a single usage of the word âurbaniteâ, which - while it is being applied to the character of Bart - the usage is clearly refering to his urban upbringing, with the meaning being that he is a âcity slickerâ. Neither âurbaniteâ nor âcity slickerâ has any racial motivation connected to it that I am aware of.
Of course, if I am wrong and you can cite an exact line, please do so. As much as I would enjoy watching Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder for a full 93 minutes and hope to catch any potential usages of âurbanâ, Iâd prefer to be able to seek out a specific timestamp for the sake of simplicity.
As regards your personal anecdote, Iâve already explained that I do not and will not accept undocumented hearsay as a basis for argumentation.
You have come this far in this discussion thread, and still did not realize that the discussion is not about the right of Dr. Lee to be offended! Sad.
The question is, was it right for the author of the BoingBoing article to bring race into discussion, to ASSUME that Dr. Lee was hurt by this and not that? And the people posing the question just want some evidence that there is a racism issue with that statement. Nobody is saying that it is not a racist statement, we just want to understand why.
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