Stack Exchange Apologizes, Offers 'Possible Reinstatement' To Moderator Removed Over Pronouns Policy (stackexchange.com) 277
In October the Register reported that 20 Stack Exchange moderators had distanced themselves from the geeky Q&A site to protest policy changes and the removal of moderator Monica Cellio "over alleged violations of as-yet unpublished Code of Conduct changes."
Cellio just posted an update to the GoFundMe page where she'd raised $25,314 for legal action -- a new announcement from Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow and Monica Cellio have come to an agreement. We believe that Ms. Cellio was not acting with malicious intent. We believe she did not understand all of the nuances and full intent and meaning of our Code of Conduct and was confused about what actions it required and forbade.
We acknowledge our responses to her requests for clarification were not satisfactory. The verbiage in our Code of Conduct could have been more explicitly detailed about what was expected. We always valued Ms. Cellio's contributions to the community and respect her intelligence, integrity, and professional writing skills.
While our initial statement did not address her specifically, we regret that we used her name when responding to a reporter's follow-up. We regret any damage to Ms. Cellio's reputation and any other damage she may have suffered.
We have since updated some of our policies and processes to help ensure we are more careful in our public communications, and that there is a clearer process anytime a moderator's status is revoked as well as a process for reinstatement.
We respect Ms. Cellio and believe she is a good person with much to offer and contribute. We sincerely hope she remains an active member of our community. In recognition of the mistakes that led us here, we invited Ms. Cellio to apply for possible reinstatement on all six sites following our new reinstatement process. Ms. Cellio expressed concerns about the new process and has not applied."
That announcement was also published at Meta.StackExchange.com -- where it's been downvoted 886 times.
At GoFundMe, Cellio posted only that "No further donations are needed. Thank you everybody for your support!" And she plans to honor earlier pledges to donate all funds raised in excess of costs to The Trevor Project, "an organization providing crisis-intervention services to LGBTQ+ youth and related resources to everyone."
Cellio just posted an update to the GoFundMe page where she'd raised $25,314 for legal action -- a new announcement from Stack Overflow: Stack Overflow and Monica Cellio have come to an agreement. We believe that Ms. Cellio was not acting with malicious intent. We believe she did not understand all of the nuances and full intent and meaning of our Code of Conduct and was confused about what actions it required and forbade.
We acknowledge our responses to her requests for clarification were not satisfactory. The verbiage in our Code of Conduct could have been more explicitly detailed about what was expected. We always valued Ms. Cellio's contributions to the community and respect her intelligence, integrity, and professional writing skills.
While our initial statement did not address her specifically, we regret that we used her name when responding to a reporter's follow-up. We regret any damage to Ms. Cellio's reputation and any other damage she may have suffered.
We have since updated some of our policies and processes to help ensure we are more careful in our public communications, and that there is a clearer process anytime a moderator's status is revoked as well as a process for reinstatement.
We respect Ms. Cellio and believe she is a good person with much to offer and contribute. We sincerely hope she remains an active member of our community. In recognition of the mistakes that led us here, we invited Ms. Cellio to apply for possible reinstatement on all six sites following our new reinstatement process. Ms. Cellio expressed concerns about the new process and has not applied."
That announcement was also published at Meta.StackExchange.com -- where it's been downvoted 886 times.
At GoFundMe, Cellio posted only that "No further donations are needed. Thank you everybody for your support!" And she plans to honor earlier pledges to donate all funds raised in excess of costs to The Trevor Project, "an organization providing crisis-intervention services to LGBTQ+ youth and related resources to everyone."
Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Funny)
Did he/she/it/we-need-to-invent-new-pronouns accept the apology?
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't really sound like it. And it doesn't sound like she should either. If you are ending up apologising to a person then asking them to follow some arcane procedure with an uncertain outcome doesn't sound appropriate. Even if you can't just re-instate her without community approval for some reason, at least make the request to the community on your behalf for an exception and then make her a clear offer or not depending on the result.
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I'm pretty sure the reason they can't just reinstate her is her legal action against them. They are now going to stick exactly to the rules and procedures because any deviation will be used as evidence of unfair, different treatment in a court of law.
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a whole generation of young people who've been convinced by these delusional people into supporting them for whatever reason. This younger generation are getting into positions of power. Now, they're trying to force these delusions on the rest of society. Luckily, most companies don't have these policies because younger people haven't yet gained control of most positions of power. Expect more arguments and legal cases revolving around these issues in the future.
Finally, there's the bulk of society who don't understand the fuss, don't see any "problem," and don't agree with the conclusions of the younger generation. They don't agree that everyone else needs to adjust for that tiny population of delusional people. No, they're not "phobic." They're not afraid of the transsexual community. They may not have any real problem with the trans community at all outside of this one issue. They just don't want to be ordered by delusional people trying to tell them what to think and say, particularly when it goes against the truth. Dudes aren't ze/zie/zir or whatever bullshit is getting promoted today.
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Insightful)
I feel like you didn't read the article, you just saw the word "pronoun" and got super triggered.
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I feel like you didn't read the article, you just saw the word "pronoun" and got super triggered.
And we have a winner, I think summarizing this whole discussion. Note that actual researched comments get ignored whilst rants [slashdot.org] that are completely and absolutely wrong [slashdot.org] get modded insightful to the sky. Both sides of this argument are belly-feeling [wikipedia.org] the truth today.
Re: Pronouns policy? (Score:2)
Even from within the school of intersectionality, there are reasona to oppose such things, and dismissing such concerns outright as you do: https://medium.com/@emjaymurph... [medium.com]
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Yea -- I don't give a crap what pronoun someone wants me to use. If it is a dude, it is dude, him, he, bro. If it is a chick, it is chick, her, babydoll, sweetheart, honey, doll. If I can't tell the difference / don't know the difference, then they get called what they want to be called.
Bruce Jenner will always be Bruce to me -- a DUDE. Bradley Manning will always be Bradley -- a DUDE. The fact that they didn't get the mental help that they needed and decided to cut their dicks off is irrelevant to me. If I
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Bruce Jenner will always be Bruce to me -- a DUDE.
Out of interest, are you a dick to everyone who changes their name, or only people who do it for reasons you don't approve of?
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Bruce Jenner will always be Bruce to me -- a DUDE.
Out of interest, are you a dick to everyone who changes their name, or only people who do it for reasons you don't approve of?
You can call me a dick if you want -- but yea.
My cousin grew up with the name Delane, but a few years ago she decided to change it to Sharon. This was strictly for the fact that -- well -- Delane is a lame name. When we have family get togethers, I still call her Delane. I am not going to just start calling someone another name because they decided they didn't like the one they were born with -- and went by for years.
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You can call me a dick if you want
Ok. You're a dick.
I am not going to just start calling someone another name because they decided they didn't like the one they were born with -- and went by for years.
Addressing someone with the name they have asked you to use is just basic politeness and civilized decency.
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For example, the words "gender" and "sex" used to be synonymous and used interchangeably.
Well, not quite. Gender used to be a grammatical thing; chairs and tables in many languages have gender but no sex.
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Not in English. The topic is how the English word "gender" was traditionally used w.r.t. human beings.
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English is still evolving.
Ships are often given a female gender.
"Duck" and "goose" used to mean female, while "drake" and "gander" were used for males, but this distinction has nearly disappeared, so we have names like "Donald Duck" that would have sounded silly a few centuries ago.
The same thing is happening now with "cow". Since English has no singular form for "cattle", "cow" is often used ungendered. But it still sounds weird to me.
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And yet, when using the singular form, I know of no situation where it is considered "correct" to refer to a cow as a bull.
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> The same thing is happening now with "cow".Since English has no singular form for "cattle",
I believe you will find that this is because most cattle are cows. The males, while larger and prized for breeding and their strength, but only a few are needed for breeding. The cows are much more commonly born, and this serves the cattle ranches well.
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Thank you for the correction. I thought they actually had a different birth ratio, but according to ScienceDirect at https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] you are correct. Double checking, the recommendation for _cattle on a farm_ is roughly one bull to 25 or so cows. That means a lot of slaughter, which of course is what the cattle are raised for.
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chairs and tables in many languages have gender but no sex.
No? Then where do those small chairs keep coming from?
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:4, Funny)
Asexual budding.
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Unfortunately, biology is not the simple binary makes things easy for you. Sex is not simply XX or XY. Or XXX, or XXY, or X, or other rarer variants, or chimeric combinations thereof. Sex is not chromosomes at all; they just "usually" set off an initialization cascade - said cascade being neither the start or end of cellula
Why do you care so much? (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple fact is it doesn't mean a thing to me, but it means a lot to them. Really...no one is asking you to agree...no one is asking you to adjust your gender or date transgendered people...just calling them what they want to be called.
I think it is simple respect to call people what they want to be called. Why is it such an imposition to you? Does it bother you as well to have to call black people African American in polite company instead of the N-word? I wasn't around back then, but I have been told that it wasn't a slur long ago...but it inflicts pain today. So some dude named Bruce decides he wants to be called Caitlyn..who cares? Just call her a she and move on.
I think it's silly, but really, as a libertarian, I just don't care. It doesn't impact me. It's easy enough to say 'she' and it makes 'her' feel a lot better. So...just call people by their preferred name...life is easier that way.
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Re:Why do you care so much? (Score:5, Interesting)
Gender dysphoria is often not cured by sex change. It's a psychological problem, and very, very real. Extreme cases may need permanent medication, but more often, counselling, and being ill at ease in their bodies is a state of being. The correct course of action is to make the small amount of sufferers as at ease as possible without making their problems everyone's problems. If someone looks like a man, they'll usually be called a man, because that's how we get by day to day in practicalities. When you turn round and say "But I want to be a woman, you must refer to me as she", it sets up cognitive dissonance in most of the people around, so you've magnified the problem by orders of magnitude.
Yes, it may mean a lot to them. But being called "overlord" or various other things because they have neurological conditions that make them believe they're supreme in some way shape or form (when they're not) is also vitally important to them. And a horde of other things are vitally important to people, like they need to keep away from cognitive dissonance, as it causes them to progress into mentally very unhealthy territories (so you're actually saying that the wellbeing of the vast minority is more important than the wellbeing of the majority). In the social groups they tend to form, the close friends will accept, and be mentally ok with that dissonance. That's as it should be. Forcing people who aren't, and will not be in that friendship group is tyranny.
African Americans in polite company often refer to themselves by the N-word. However, anyone without a particular skin colour in that same conversation using that same word is then often violently rebuked. That is not equality, that is tyranny. As far as I'm aware, it's always been a derogatory term, but people used to just take it in their stride, as there were more important things to focus on in life. Nowadays, victimhood has been weaponised and retaliation is generally not balanced.
So, some dude wants to be called Caitlyn, then they change their name to Caitlyn. Not a problem there (same as men have been called Jane and Alice in history; it's always caused a bit of hilarity, but people just got on with it). Now if that same person makes no other change, has a beard and male genitalia and bearing, but insists on being called "She" and "Her", that's where the dissonance begins. Similar to someone insisting that you call a car a fish, and a house an aeroplane. Some people will find it whimsical, some will be ok with it, and some will outright say "That's idiocy and lunacy". If left to their own devices, you'll find that the people will discover small friendly groups that will just get on with life alongside them and play to their strengths while covering or ignoring their idiosyncracies. That's how life is supposed to work. Except now we have a very vocal group who will attack you for daring to say you won't call a car by any name someone doesn't want it called, but they won't tell you who these people are, what items you need to address or anything. Just that you MUST NEVER get it wrong, otherwise you're fair game to be attacked. This is tyrannical in the extreme, which is why it's considered "ultra left ideology".
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Regarding the n word argument, because this comes up a lot.
History is what it is. Usually when white people use it they are trying to be offensive. You can say it in the right context, white people do all the time, but history being what it is the default assumption people make is that it's intended to denigrate black people.
Nothing to do with equality it freedom, it's just the fact that there really aren't many non-offensive reasons for white people to use it that you need to be more careful to provide one
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So some dude named Bruce decides he wants to be called Caitlyn..who cares? Just call her a she and move on.
Agree completely. It's like if you meet someone who tells your their name is Robert, but you call them Fred all the time because you think they look more like a Fred. That would be douchey.
I can't imagine how conflicted these people must be with folks named Kim, Stacy, Robin, Chris, etc. Probably need to go find a safe space.
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My mother calls me by my uncle and my nephew's name all the time. Should she be expelled from the family for this?
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My mother sometimes calls me by my late brother's name. I know it's not intentional, she has dementia.
I consider that a fair excuse, and if others want to use it there is no harm in ostensibly humoring them either.
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It matters when the reaction for getting it "wrong" is to have someone fired or have their life ruined for noncompliance.
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Does it matter? We have a tiny percentage of people who are delusional about their sex. It's not enough for this tiny population that they dress up and pretend to be the opposite sex. This tiny group wants everyone else to participate in their collective delusion. For example, the words "gender" and "sex" used to be synonymous and used interchangeably. Now, they want us to see these words as completely different and separate. And surprise! Not everyone wants to be forced to go along with this nonsense. .
I agree with most of what you said but you got this backward dude. Gender was long a linguistic thing until the activists started mandating it as a replacement for the word 'sex'. The definition is identical except that gender has a weird addendum that you can flip to whichever gender you want. That way when you question the activists about the biology they can rightfully state that (technically) by definition gender is fluid. Its basically the old biological definition with a 'magic clause'. They sure love
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That way when you question the activists about the biology they can rightfully state that (technically) by definition gender is fluid. Its basically the old biological definition with a 'magic clause'. They sure love muddling things. For a hoot look up the guy that kicked off this who gender craze and see all the wonderful things he got up to. They don't teach you this in Gender Theory 101.
I'm guessing you never took Bio 100 or 101.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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How many 'transgenders' are truly intersexual? You might as well design all gloves for six fingered people.
I have no idea. However many it is it is enough evidence for me to know it is not as simple as everyone has five fingers.
I'd like to think we have reached a degree of civilization we can make gloves for people with any number of fingers, while you would apparently consider anything but five freaks.
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People demanding you to accept their wacky new genders are not trans, they're just authoritarian post-modernist twats that found a new way to "victimize" themselves.
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Your personal opinion of gender dysphoria doesn't matter. What matters is how you treat people.
Let's say I think you are a bitch. I insist on calling you "good girl" and only refuse to serve you human food, at my restaurant you have to lap water up from a bowl on the floor. I insist your owner picks up your shit in a bag.
Is it okay to treat you that way? Or should I treat you how you prefer to be identified regardless of what I think you are?
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:4, Insightful)
For how long? It would seem to me that they have never been distinct until this issue has insisted they be so.
If your photo ID has a gender category, that is NOT "syntactical", it's a reference the "biological" differentiation of your physical characteristics. It's not a category of how you feel, it's a category of how you look so that you may be physically identified.
If a connector, say an electrical connector, is "gendered", it is categorized by it's physical characteristics with regard to how it mates with a matching connector. Gender refers to physical parts" and always has...until now.
Sorry, but as hostile as the OP was on this issue, he is still correct and you are not.
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For how long? .
Probably since before the written record and so there's no real way to tell exactly, but since at least proto-indo-european which our current best theories would place aound 5000 years ago. When exactly the word gender arose I can't precisely tell you but it seems that it goes back to Pythagoras in ancient greece [wikipedia.org]. The entire concept of using "gender" to mean something like "sex as I feel it" is modern. Taking a 1926 quote directly from Wikipedia:
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Wikipedia is one of the areas where the promoters of these changes live and not agreeing there gets you banned.
The terms sex and gender are the same thing, in biology at least, they are interchangeable - you used gender instead of sex where you wanted to make clear you were talking about the property and not the act or if you were talking about the grammar of a word (eg. In most Latin languages, you have gendered words).
Open any dictionary of ~20 years ago and you’ll see there is no difference besides
Re: Pronouns policy? (Score:3)
Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but the grandparent certainly contributed more to the conversation than your rant with zero information or facts.
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Everybody is entitled to their own opinion,
Or to put it another way, "opinions are like assholes, everyone has one".
Agree that the grandparent was most insightful, just wish I had mod points.
Re:Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be misunderstanding this; try again. There are three concepts here.
The one I am talking about is grammatical gender [wikipedia.org]. "la poubelle" - the (feminine) bin - "le chien" - the (masculine) dog. Grammatical gender exists in all indo-european languages (French / German / English / Danish etc.) and a number of other languages but not Hungarian or Finnish, for example.
In most languages with grammatical gender every single object has a gender which can be quite arbitrary. The categories can be "masculine" / "feminine" (French / Italian), "masculine" / "feminine" / "neuter" (German / old English). Sometimes the gender can be wierd and opposite to biological sex. None of the speakers of those languages will worry about this.
When gender studies style gender was introduced in the 1960s this was hijacking an older word which had a different meaning but there was no time when gender should match with biological sex. As my earlier quote from the 1920s shows, using gender to mean sex used to be considered a mistake.
Re: Pronouns policy? (Score:2)
"If your photo ID has a gender category, that is NOT "syntactical", it's a reference the "biological" differentiation of your physical characteristics. It's not a category of how you feel, it's a category of how you look so that you may be physically identified."
Some dudes look like ladies and some ladies look like dudes, that isn't changing, and it does often come down to how they feel, if they change the way they look. So if you want to use that box to identify a person, it's kind of up to that individua
Re: Pronouns policy? (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s not an issue of sex versus gender. If it was, you could just ask for and put sex on a personâ(TM)s ID instead of gender and avoid the whole issue. When we ask about someoneâ(TM)s sex/gender what they are really asking is what sex organs a person has not how masculine/feminine a person looks/feels. On a lower level, itâ(TM)s whether or not they have a Y chromosome and large amounts of testosterone. It has nothing to do with how well a person meets some arbitrary definition of
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The reason we put sex/gender on identification is indeed for the matter of identification and prevent abuse. It’s also helpful in medical and emergency situations, you don’t want to take someone’s pants down just to sort people out.
Men and women are different, those differences are large enough that we have sorted society accordingly. We try not to let male cops search females and vice versa, we shouldn’t put females in a male prison, females have different needs in healthcare.
If you
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The biology isn't clear. Everything has been tried to come up with a biological definition of sex. Chromosomes, genitalia, hormone levels, none of it is clear cut in every case.
That's not the real problem though. The problem is people caring so much about it.
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Bullshit. Here is a link to dictionary [princeton.edu], that calls the two words synonyms:
It is not from 200 years ago — it is recent enough to be online.
Curiously, the whole WordNet-project [princeton.edu] seems to have stalled — with the last release over 10 years ago — otherwise, surely, some SJW wou
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Bullshit. Here is a link to dictionary [princeton.edu], that calls the two words synonyms:
And yet, when we have a link to a proper dictionary with actual historical use of the term [oed.com] we find that grammatical gender entries begin in the 13 hundreds
whilst the first sociology reference comes from the 20th century:
Re: Pronouns policy? (Score:5, Insightful)
But why should someone in a free society not live as who they want?
I agree everybody should live as they want; but, by the same token, others should also be allowed to live how *they* want, and not be asked - or forced, via CoCs, or, as in this case, firings - to change their behavior to accommodate them. You want to be a woman, fine. You want everybody to stop using "him" or "her" and switch to "zir" instead - not fine anymore.
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But what if you don't want to be a woman or a man?
You are trying to eat everyone should be free to do as they please but in practice you want to limit their choices to ones you are comfortable with.
There is no solution to this where everyone gets to do what they like. There will have to be compromise.
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Utilitarianism; intersex (Score:2)
XX and XY chromosomes
And XO, and XXY...
you HAVE NO RIGHT to force others to buy into your bullshit
Let's try a utilitarian angle: Allowing trans people to consistently roleplay as their gender identity produces better mental health outcomes than forcing them into a gender expression inconsistent with their personality.
Science is science, DNA has been known for over half a century now
Differences of sex development, also called intersex disorders, have also been known for decades. Roughly 1 percent of people are intersex, which is also about how many people are transgender. The overlap isn't entire, which is where you get trans people who aren't otherwi
Oh get off it. (Score:3)
He's 'transphobic' only if you redefine 'phobia' to include 'dislike' and 'disagreement' on top of the actual definition of 'irrational fear.'
That points to a big problem these days. The hard left keeps redefining words to ensure their innocence and every one else's guilt. When you're talking to someone who is 'woke' you can't be sure there's agreement on the meaning of words, let alone anything else, so piercing their newspeak becomes damn near impossible.
Three fears that underlie transantagonism (Score:2)
Some writers prefer the term "transantagonism" to describe this sort of bigotry. But I've identified three fears that may underlie bigotry against trans people:
1. Fear that the government will take money away from programs that benefit you to fund transition-related health care for transgender citizens, such as real life experience counseling, hormones, and top and bottom surgery.
2. Fear that a man will pretend to be a trans woman in order to gain access to the women's shelter where your daughter is staying
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They are delusional and the latest DSM still agrees with that. It’s not phobic (irrational fear) because nobody is afraid, most people are moved with compassion when they see someone with such mental disorder and they should get the help they need. The first step of recovery is often to accept that you have a disorder by having your environment point it out as a problem and not blindly accepting you ‘as you are’.
You don’t cure alcoholism by saying “you’re not an alcoholic
Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are psychopaths who don't realize they hurt people with how they treat them.
Doesn't mean it is a good idea to protect oneself from them.
If somebody is so mentally unstable that one is triggered and flipping out because of ... pronouns ... one is unfit for work a danger to one's surroundings, and needs therapy. No matter how good one's intentions inside one's twisted model of reality are.
It is not about harming such a twisted person, but about not being harmed BY that person.
Re:Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean the people who attack everybody by enforcing a pronoun policy, enabling people with subjective assessment to censor everybody around with an objective assessment?
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This has actually been tested on Stack Exchange. Someone suspected the same tyranny that you did.
There have been a few posts from users stating their pronouns to be things like "master" or "chopper", and they have all been deleted for trolling. Turns out that you can't pick arbitrary pronouns.
Correction: ... isn't a good idea to NOT protect o (Score:2, Insightful)
I meant to write: Doesn't mean it is a good idea to NOT protect oneself from such a person!
Goddammit, this completely flips the meaning on ity head.
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Natural language is a bugger to convey explicit meaning. :)
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Hopefully no one takes this as legal advice, because "malice" pretty much completely requires intent to actually be "malice."
Otherwise it's just negligence.
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"Malice" literally means [lmgtfy.com] "the INTENTion or desire to do evil; ill will".
Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, malice is the intent to do harm. Without intent, there is no malice, only harm.
Re:Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:4, Insightful)
Malice is BY DEFINITION *intent*:
So, someone using a pronoun you don't like does not imply malice. It *does* imply that you are an senstitive flower who assumes that everything you take offense to is intended to cause you harm. Sorry - despite what mommy told you, you are NOT that damn important and no one gives you a second thought, much less go out of their way to harm you
Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:3)
Nobody goes out of their way to harm you?
Have you seen the Internet? In your life?
Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:2)
Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why though? Why are there the ones that need to toughen up, not the people who go out of their way to use non preferred pronouns when it has been made clear? I keep hearing about how people should toughen up but itâ(TM)s not clear why you think the one standing up for themselves in the face of people who have nothing at all to gain but being pricks is the one being weak and that it would be stronger of them to not stand up for themselves?
Half the comments talk about a proliferation of gender pronouns
Because that is how some people are (Score:3)
Why are there the ones that need to toughen up, not the people who go out of their way to use non preferred pronouns when it has been made clear?
Because you can actually toughen up, whereas you cannot wish away people who mean to do harm.
Announced personal pronouns are like crafting a sword specifically built to wound you deeply, and hanging it outside your house with a little note saying "if you want to fuck with me, grab this and try a few swings". They are a stupid idea and people who use them are setti
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Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they are asking 99% of the population to cater to them. Because they are attempting to exert personal control over *your* speech. Because they've diluted the terms hate, oppression and bigot to the point of meaningless by this.
Re: Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:2)
Wait, how is this different from the way everyone wants to be treated? I would prefer that you refer to me as "he" in the third person and my name if you're speaking to me. I might refuse to talk to you if you don't, and certainly I would make a complaint if I thought you were doing it out of some sort of ill intent and we worked together. I'm a cisgendered male, so this probably doesn't impose much of a burden on you.
Trans people just want you to use the pronouns that they ask you to, even if those aren't
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The problem goes far beyond "opinions I don't agree with trigger me", though. Trans activism is more than just pushing a pronoun policy, it's about pushing the concept of gender "identity" as a fundamental, orthogonal characteristic of who we are and a scorched earth war against anything that impedes that agenda. Look at what Trans activists have to say about Blanchard's Typology to gain an appreciation...
Trans people cannot accept Blanchard's Typology because it fails to support how they wish to see them
Re:Malice does not need intent to be malice. (Score:4, Insightful)
If the sexes are equal, using the wrong pronoun should be no more offensive than describing someone as having blue eyes instead of brown.
If being referred to as male/female is so shocking offensive to you, why do you hate men/women so much?
Re: (Score:2)
Untrue, because you are ignoring intention.
Deliberately getting certain information wrong is intentional disrespect. Regarding gender, deliberately misgendering someone is generally an insult, regardless of the actual gender of the person.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
How many genders do you think there are? Just two?
If you're born with two X chromosomes like a female but with a penis, are you a male or a female?
Re: (Score:2)
That position is not defensible nor is there enough information to make any claim. Having two X chromosomes doesn't preclude also having a Y, and having a penis doesn't preclude having a vagina.
Also note the the OP didn't say what he meant by "male" and "female" so it is not clear what the question is.
Choosing chromosomal makeup as a determining factor to an ill-defined question when it regards a personal with developmental abnormalities is worthless. Depends on what you mean.
What the deal is (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the summary was utterly vague, the deal here is that Monica was worried the revised code of conduct would punish people for not using proclaimed personal pronouns for others (treat it as a violation).
So for that she was banned and had moderation changes taken away...
Really puts a damper on my like of StackExchange, not because of the policy itself (though I find it questionable) but because people should not be punished for discussion about possible changes to things like code of conduct. That is indeed, ThoughtCrime.
More harm than good (Score:5, Insightful)
In the good old pre-CoC days, when somebody was a problem you'd just, you know, deal with them individually. Like talk to them and stuff.
The codes of conduct seem like a huge distraction and/or nothing more than virtue signaling. But even more than that, they seem completely ineffective. Consider what happens in these 3 scenarios when you don't have a CoC:
1) Person XYZ is nice --> no action needed
2) Person XYZ does something jerky --> you take them aside and say, "hey, don't do that" and they stop doing it --> no further action needed
3) Person XYZ does something jerky and even after talking to them they refuse to be nice and usually act worse --> they get banned
The addition of a CoC results in the same outcome in each scenario. There's not a lot of overlap between the group of people that are jerks online and the group of people that will read and take to heart a CoC.
You can't enumerate all of the ways people can be mean or inappropriate, so you instead wind up with a list of vague no-no's that are completely subjective (one person will find something mildly annoying, another person will experience the same thing and be convinced that they have suffered literal harm).
It's even worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
The addition of a CoC results in the same outcome in each scenario.
I'm not sure it does though, because having a ton of rules means people can now argue they didn't violate the rules, whereas without a COC you could have simply, as you said, just said they were being a jerk and they would have nothing to say about it except they disagreed.
The more rules you make, the more unreasonable and immoral people will take advantage of those rules to hurt others and escape punishment. You are Gamifying harassment.
Re:It's even worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
I naively thought that because everything was happening in a computer, the rules would be ironclad and airtight with no way to bypass them, so it would be perfect. The problems began to show up in play testing. A good example was the firewall spell. If you were a PKer, you could use the firewall spell to kill an innocent. OTOH, you could cast it to kill a monster (or crimina), and an innocent could run into your firewall, thus flagging you as a criminal, and would lose reputation if you defended yourself when they attacked you. The same action, but two opposite results depending on the intent of the parties involved.
After reasoning through enough of these scenarios, I came to the realization that you cannot always determine guilt or innocence based solely on actions. There are situations where guilt or innocence can only be distinguished by ascertaining the intent of the actor. Unfortunately, to truly determine intent you need to be a mind reader, which is (currently) impossible. That's why we have courts, judges, and juries. They listen to what occurred, weigh the evidence, and try their best to determine the intent of the accused.
In the same way, a CoC (a fixed set of rules governing behavior) won't solve your problems. There will always be loopholes, ways a malicious actor can exploit the CoC to harm innocents. The system needs to have a person(s) acting as judges - evaluating people's actions to determine guilt or innocence, not a mere CoC. This is also the same problem with political correctness. It determines guilt based solely on actions, not on whether the person intended the action to be harmful. That's why you have someone fired [washingtonpost.com] based solely on what he said, not based on whether he actually intended to say it. Political correctness is inherently unstable. The more successful it becomes, the more people who won't know that a word is a slur (I didn't know 'coon' was considered a racial slur until the newscaster incident). And as knowledge of that word being a slur passes out of general knowledge, more innocent people will be punished by the PC crowd for violating a rule which they didn't even know exists.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, people who had no ill intent will find themselves technically in violation of one of the rules and since there are no exceptions offered, out they go.
It's in the name... (Score:3)
Oh, it does make sense, just not the sort you might think. It's there to let them signal which political side they're on. In fact, the less sense these actions make, the better, because the signal will be stronger. No one else will do something nonsensical by accident, at least for the most part.
The words "virtue signal" get thrown around a lot, some use it to point out that the actions are not necessarily sincere or sensible, but the primary function thereof is simply to declare what side one is on publ
"We believe she did not understand..." (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"We believe she did not understand..." (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
We always valued Ms. Cellio's contributions to the community
Re:"We believe she did not understand..." (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, it's not false. I'm guessing they are "reaching out" with two possible motives:
1. They really need her back so she can continue to work for them for free.
2. They really need her back so they have someone to humiliate for what was, in the end, their own mistake.
I applaud her common sense in not applying for volunteer work where humiliation will inevitably be her part.
Re: "We believe she did not understand..." (Score:2)
It's amazing how quickly rash decisions are (Score:3)
reversed, as soon as someone accrues $25K to pay legal fees...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except in this case it didn't get reversed. They invited the wronged individual to fill out paperwork to ask for it to be partly reversed.
Fuck it (Score:2)
Re:Fuck it (Score:4, Funny)
I was going to go with the ever universal "asshole", or possibly "dickhead" as everyone's pronouns. The beauty of this system is that one way or another it applies to everyone.
Re: Fuck it (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Good Person (Score:2)
This will soon be capitalised as Good Person. If you are deemed to be not a Good Person enough times, you shall be an Unperson.
The real issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem was that shortly afterward, the Register ran a story about the issue, and Stack Exchange offered a comment where they said, paraphrasing, "we stand behind firing Ms Cellio, because she was intolerant towards transgenders."
This was a lie, and was republished in the Register. That's what prompted the lawsuit. The worst behavior Monica exhibited was saying that she didn't like using 'they' as a singular pronoun, and preferred phrasing comments in a gender-neutral way to avoid using a pronoun that could imply the wrong gender.
That Register article could haunt Monica for years. Being publicly accused of bigotry by a corporation, being fired, and having those accusations printed in a major news site? It doesn't matter that you could do a little research and find out they were without merit. This is what defamation lawsuits are _for_.
At least, now, she can point to their official apology... and hopefully, the various news sources covering their apology.
A good person equals...? (Score:3, Insightful)
We respect Ms. Cellio and believe she is a good person...
So if someone doesn't agree with you or share your beliefs, they aren't a "good person"? Not to mention, the idea of a "good person" is irrational to the point of childishness. Are these supposed to be adults?
What apology? (Score:2)
They didn't apologize for anything.
Articles contain no facts (Score:2)
Following through the various listed articles, they have no pointer to or detail of the alleged offense, or whether Monica Cellio did anything at all inappropriate to anyone. I'm afraid this is common to various gender politics today. Facts are ignored in favor of the personal emotions about the situation, with little reference to facts or behavior. Fortunately, there are other articles, like this article from The Register: https://www.theregister.co.uk/... [theregister.co.uk] I've been impressed by The Register's ability to r
Tolerance (Score:2)
I'm not sure how forcing others to use language not of their choosing under threat of cancel culture is supposed to be embracing tolerance. I could care less what choices someone else wants to make (a 20+ year good friend of mine is trans and has been since long before it was politically acceptable) for themselves. I've also had a trans roommate I welcomed into my home when her own mother kicked her out after she came out of the closet. I rented a room out to a Hispanic lesbian for a number of years who was
Once a CoC is in place (Score:3, Interesting)