It’s like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky feminazi SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these “anti-woke” crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
But they don’t. Ultimately they’re just words on a screen. Even 4chan allows people to hide posts/threads, filter by username, words and so on. People are bothered by those things because they grew up in “very tightly moderated” spaces both online and in real life, where others removed “bad words” so they never had to learn how to control their emotions or develop “thick skin” in response to them. I’m not defending the usage of slurs, but over-moderation creates another extreme where the mere sight of a word makes people emotionally distressed. People love to fantasize about revolution and “seizing power”, but you think those who oppose us are going to use only nice words and be polite?
This is pinging ‘false equivalence’ for me. The revolution is going to be a harrowing meat-grinder of an event of which few of us will survive it and will be expected to give everything we have for it. Nerd spaces are not that deep; and do you really think I’m going to just be cool with a dozen crackers in a Halo lobby popping off every settler-crafted slur in the book? I don’t get ‘distressed’ when some cracker piece of shit hard-r’s me; I get furious. I don’t play games, I don’t watch movies, I don’t do anything entertainment/leisure-coded with the intent for fury. So of course I’m going to cut myself off from the average cracker Gamer™ to try and forge a space of my own. “Ultimately just words on a screen” is so Very much not the take. A racist online is going to be a racist IRL, and a racist IRL is a threat IRL.
But that’s what they are. Because the only power those words have is the power you allow them to have.
They’re not an (immediate) threat to you, by virtue of being very far away and not knowing where you live. They could be a threat to someone else, someone they share a physical space with, sure, but removing them from an online space doesn’t make that person disappear or make them less racist, if anything it’ll make them hide their racism better. Isn’t that more dangerous?
“Being racist” is not an immutable characteristic people have. The best (non-violent) way to get rid of racists is to expose them to the people/cultures/ethnicities they are racist against. Otherwise they will forge their own insular, racist communities where they will reinforce each others’ racism and push each other to extremes.
That’s a tactic. You can call them slurs too, “cumskin” is a good one. If you let them get to you, then they will know their tactic works. So next time they are losing or want to get their opponent angry (if we’re talking about gaming) then they will just repeat what they did knowing it is successful. Showing them their words have no power might make them rethink their strategy.
I’m saying you shouldn’t let them kick you out with words. If you’re all gamers in a Halo lobby (to use your example) they have no way of actually removing you from a public lobby, other than getting you angry with their words. But fuck that, make them leave if they don’t like it. After a while of screaming racial slurs they might be the ones who get angry enough to ragequit. Isn’t it preferable that they be the ones who leave and not you?
Bigots are cowards at heart, and largely they will act on their feelings only to the extent that they believe they have social license to do so. Scared bigots are less dangerous than emboldened bigots.
You think online moderation makes bigots scared? Come on… They hide it cause they don’t want to be banned from platforms. This also makes them able to “infiltrate” spaces if they so wish.
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