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I would like to mention that you assume I do not show respect for other people's beliefs, which I never alluded to in any way.
No, I didn't assume that you don't show respect for other people's beliefs. I told you that you must have some goddamn respect for your craft and other people's craft. By your craft, I mean your practice. The magic you engage in, or hope to engage in. If you're committed to a solid, meaningful, adaptive practice then why would you want to discuss it in an environment festooned with swastikas and jokes about gays? Why would you insist that other people should do so?
You also mention A collective investment in interrogating one's practice and one's beliefs about that practice through peer discussion, yet you seem to not want to examine your own beliefs on this subject, besides sticking to your solid, 'hard won' experiences.
Excuse me, but that interrogation is happening right here and now. And it has happened over and over again. For as long as I have been posting here there's been a continual stream of people parading through here telling us all how we're oversensitive for banning this Holocaust denier, that serial woman harrasser, or the other racist whackjob. They offer precicely the same easily demolished non-arguments you have. None of them have ever come up with a good enough reason to ditch my opposition to hatespeech and commitment to an ongoing investigation of what might constitute hatespeech.
Why do I stick to my experiences? Because that's what I learn from. I've learned that when I sit by and quietly put up with homophobic slurs rather than rock the boat, I allow my queer collegues to be oppressed and they leave the space. When I sit by and quietly put up with racist slurs, I allow my non-white* collegues to be oppressed and driven off. When I put up with antisemitism and Holocaust denial, I allow my Jewish collegues to be ejected from the space. When I sit by and quietly put up with slurs against women, I betray all my female collegues and they go somewhere else. And pretty soon all my "tolerance" has bought me is the right to be part of a space full of nothing but great steaming tiers of unspeakable bloody turbodouches who I can't have a dialogue with anyway because, well, turbodouches.
No-one has yet been able to convince me that this is in any sense a good idea.
I should also note that the people arguing for our oversensitivity are overwhelmingly straight, white and male. Nothing wrong with being straight, or white, or male, but this does make one sli-i-i-ghtly unlikely to have the same viceral, carnal relationship with and response to hatespeech directed at groups who are not straight, white and male.
*Incidentally: I've been using non-white a lot lately and it's kind of making my eyes bleed cuz I'm distinguishing people in a negative... "coloured" sounds horrible though, like a 70s landlord would write it on his small ads with "NO..." in front of it and an s afterwards. Can someone give me a better term? How about people of colour, is that less ick? |
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