Quote Originally Posted by Taosaur View Post
To clear one thing up, I did not call tommo an asshole. I characterized his actions and how they were likely to be perceived. If I had called him an asshole, that would be a punishable offense under forum rules. I did, however, take an unnecessarily patronizing tone and take things in that direction, which is why tommo didn't get an infraction for outright calling me an asshole in his response. Sorry for the forum policy tangent--the rest of this discussion does seem relevant to the thread.
Even as a tangent it's still very relevant to the topic of free speech and hate speech. This is just another example of why I think that all speech should be allowed and unpublishable(other than in certain nebulous contexts like yelling "BOMB!" on an airplane or something; in this case you should be punished for causing havoc, not for use of words).

Your right, you didn't call him that, I missed the words "likely to come off as" in your second post. My apologies for misrepresenting you. But if he was offending you by his choice of words then you could have called him an asshole, or at least this is what I would have done(only with harsher words). What is wrong with calling someone an asshole when they are acting like one? You probably shouldn't have, buts that's just because you're a mod and that would look bad for the site and make it hard for people to take you seriously as a mod.

And is calling someone an asshole seriously a punishable offense? Jesus H. fucking Chirst. This is the internet, not 3rd grade. I can understand mods not using words like that(mods really shouldn't be offending people), but if someone is being an asshole you should be able to call them an asshole.

Quote Originally Posted by Taosaur View Post
And I feel the need to speak up when someone is using a "hate speech" discussion as an excuse to get a tingle by using a taboo racial epithet, one that is taboo for good reason. Let's imagine tommo saying his post out loud in some other public settings: a classroom; a subway platform; a busy restaurant; the evening news. What kind of response do you think he would get? If you were standing next to him, would you back him up as adamantly as you did here? Would he even think about saying it in the first place? I doubt either you or tommo would have made that statement without 1) the anonymity and distance of the internet or 2) a 100% white audience.
This is because it is taboo, not because of the word itself. I agree that he could have worded it better. And I'll admit it, I am only so adamant in my backing because I secretly want to be a lawyer for the ACLU. Do you have any evidence that he was doing this to get a tingle? While his wording may have been poor, it seems much more likely that he was using the word(a form of hate speech) because he is in a discussion about hate speech.

Any discussion of hate speech is going to be edgy in some respect unless it is weak and watered down by political correctness and other forms of fear. If I found myself in a discussion of hate speech in a classroom I would have no problem saying the word nigger, though I wouldn't have used as he did the second time, that does sound like he is using the word to refer to someone, which is offensive.
Quote Originally Posted by Taosaur View Post
You can throw around allegations of "political correctness" all you want, but every community has standards.
Why should standards ever be a complete prohibition of things or actions? This has been tried in communities since the beginning of time and has always been a total failure. We prohibit drugs yet people do them anyway. We prohibit murder yet people do it anyway. This is not to say that we shouldn't have rules or regulations of any kind, but rather to say that our methods of morality are old fashioned and out dated. They are still based in Thou Shalt mentality, which doesn't work. Time for a software upgrade in the Universal Computer.

Things are never harmful in and of themselves. A gun sitting 5 feet away, or even one in someones hand, is not in and of itself harmful. It is the way we use things that creates harm.

I think that it is an obvious and unspoken standard that a man should not offend another man. Why do we need to put stipulations and limitations on the strings of letters we can put together? Had you told tommo "watch it, you sound like a racist," I might have let it go. It is this idea that you are in some position of authority to tell someone what words they can and cannot use that I am rambling on about. This is a free country God Damn it. This is supposed to be a country of free men, of free thinkers. This country* was founded on a reaction, a revolution against this kind of Thou Shalt Not moralizing. People came here to escape this kind of bullshit and it seems to have followed them.

As a mod you certainly need to control the context, that is your job, to keep things from getting out of hand. But by eliminating content (or threatening to) you are not controlling the context, you are warping it. In order to control the context you must remain rational and not be moved by politics(which is all second circuit emotional energy). Your tone was offensive in my opinion. You seemed to be in this kind of Holier than Thou mindset that politically correct folk often have.

Sorry for this being so absurdly long, I am very passionate about free speech, it is the cornerstone of liberty.

*I should note that when I say country, I am not referring to the state. I am referring to the groups of communities that were started here in the 1500s by European settlers.