Official KAG Servers

This is getting offtopic so this'll be my last post on the matter, but:

You're pretty close to being on the ball here.

The use of slurs in that way is - as we were talking about in the other thread - mainly harmful for the perpetuation of ideas which denigrate and exclude marginalised groups of the population. In your faggot example, it's not actually a "natural response" so much as a societally conditioned response, and each time you do it it reinforces that idea that gay men are worse than straight men. It also effectively puts that forward as your opinion to everyone who sees you doing it - noone can read your mind, so we tend to operate purely off what we've seen people doing or saying.

This is why the "that word doesn't mean that any more" argument doesn't stack up so well, for those playing along at home. If you've gotten to the point where "faggot", "nigger", and "baddie" are all in the same basket, you might want to take stock of what that says to onlookers about your values.

So, similarly to your angrily calling someone a faggot in-game, I wouldn't really put "hi niggers" in the basket of pushing the discourse forward - any work towards enacting change is being done by the reader there, not by his use of the word. As such, I'm happy for him to keep getting muted if that's how he joins the game.

That's just like, my opinion though, dude.

(Of course, the short version is "it's complicated".)

 

This is the next-level critical thinking that we keep you around for.

You have the option to engage your brain, think about how people other than yourself might feel, and go read up about punching down, privilege, power, history, and all that good stuff that informs why "nigger" and "faggot" have vastly different connotations to "cracker". You can do this easily and cheaply on the internet or any sociology textbook.

Or, the path I've got a sinking feeling you'll take, you can continue being a smug troll and wasting my time and the time of the volunteers who keep the peace on the servers we pay good money to keep running, and creep ever closer to earning a place outside of our community.

Or, I guess you could find some middle ground and just try to be a little less of a dickweasel. Your call.

 

Muting you still takes their time, reading your posts still takes time, following up on people reporting you takes time, and "you don't have to respond" followed by direct allegations of abuse of power and character attacks is just more baiting.

This isn't about "winning" anything. I'm dismissive towards you because you've consistently been badly behaved both on forums and in-game, and your posts here haven't shown any kind of remorse or will to change that. You're not a troll because we disagree - you're a troll because you consistently deliberately try to get a reaction by acting up both on the forums (13 warnings don't come about by accident) and in game (previously banned, see logs above). You don't get to suddenly take the high ground.

You suddenly understand and get outraged about power imbalances and deliberate exclusion when it affects you personally, yet it's a mystery why cracker and nigger don't mean the same thing. The irony would be funny if it wasn't so tragic.
Same goes for punk's "thought experiment".

 

Let's hope you never break an actual law then, because that's pretty much the opposite of a sane response.

Geti's comment on power imbalances was more directed at Malt's problem with being dealt with in kind of a dismissive way.

And honestly, sure, it does seem a little silly to only mute for some racial slurs, but there's such a broad range of hurtfulness when it comes to racial slurs. It isn't a "not as bad" fallacy if the fact (that they aren't on the same level) actually matters. Basically, it's not just that one slur isn't as bad as another, it's that one is bad enough to be muted for and one is so much less likely to heat up the chat that it's not worth punishing.

Like, for example, I'm not gonna be muting people for calling aussies kangaroos, because I am not aware of that being an incredibly hurtful slur with a history. But if you legit get upset by any racial slur, let me know, and if I believe you're not just fuckin with me, I'll gladly dicsourage that in game however I need to. The reason I'm not gonna do that for cracker is because my perception of that slur is that nobody really takes it seriously. That perception may be wrong! Like I said, let me know.

edit: a word

 

E: ninja'd, +1 for what Potatobird says.

Punk that's not a strawman. A strawman is where you refute an argument that was not made by the other party. The "not as bad as" point comes directly from

Spoiler: this

Cracker is not a "slur" that carries any weight, and it doesn't come from historical widespread societal oppression.

My thoughts about your "thought experiment" are that you ignore all that history, as well as all the ongoing discourse around race and racism when you do a 5 minute troll experiment in a game and then use that to draw conclusions. It's very precarious to make any inferences from that. At the very least it's bad science (tiny sample size, no control, not building on previous work), at worst its highly reductive about a very complex topic. "The same goes" because Malt made similar inferences from his "cracker" experiment.

My comments about outrage about power imbalances was directed at Malt. It was particularly about being up in arms about the admins abusing their power, while speaking in the same context as him being allowed to say nigger and faggot cause what's the harm? The analogy being made is that he doesn't experience any harm from the stigmas he's perpetuating by using those words in an inflammatory context - which is an abuse of the power imbalance he has as part of his privilege over those particular groups of people.

 

Well, I somehow got you to apologize, so I think I'm doing my job ok.
:^)

You're right about this thread being a little out of hand. I believe this kind of "drama" is exactly what you were seeking to create, so trolls win this round I guess, but I don't think it has been me starting/continuing/escalating things around here.

Yeah, I'll be going after both of those slurs.

All we're trying to do is provide an atmosphere in which you can just enjoy the game. That involves trying to keep arguments from blowing up in the chat, because it's hard to enjoy the game when half the server is standing around arguing about racism. That's one reason we ban certain slurs. It's also hard to enjoy the game when people are saying things that kinda hurt, so we don't want that to happen. This is the other reason we ban certain slurs. There's a million ways to be hurtful without those slurs, which is why you're not allowed to flame people in general on the servers. But I think you're right, even just commonplace use of the word "faggot" (and other slurs) can be pretty hurtful even if it's not being used to flame someone. So we'll ban that one too.

So of course cracker isn't exactly ok, but we're talking about it in the context of how we deal with it in admin. Already, it's barely even relevant, because as far as I've heard "cracker" has been used in game exactly once, by a troll who was only saying it so he could fuel a drama outside of the server. Almost nobody says it, but if you want to get hypothetical, I'll indulge: I don't think "cracker" can either start heated arguments or be hurtful to someone if they hear it in passing, so I'm not gonna go after it unless someone's using it to flame. Another thing that can really harm the game atmosphere I mentioned is overaggressive administration; we don't want it to feel too restrictive, which is why we allow mild trash talk. I wish people would be nice, but if we muted things that are as hurtful as cracker, that would pretty much suck. Half the server would be muted and the other half would be rightfully in outcry about obnoxious bullshit admin.

I hope that explanation of why cracker isn't ok but also isn't worth muting satisfies you. I have no interest in contributing to the intense and very political discussion about general race and racial slur climate, and while I can appreciate the importance of that discussion, I'm not really sure that it belongs in this thread.

This is probably the last long-winded reply I'm going to give this topic

 

This is the apology I was talking about

I don't really care if you apologize to me, if that's what you meant, you haven't really upset me at all.

 

You know, if it really starts to get out of hand, we could always just enable the chat filter on official servers

 

I can see the ridiculous leetspeak cuss words filling the chat already