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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I totally agree, it seems that intent means absolutely nothing when using words. Talking about a word is exactly the same as using it against someone in a derogatory way. This same thing happened to the Papa Johns pizza guy. He was talking about how we've made a lot of progress when it comes to racist speech and when talking about it, used the n-word to talk about the n-word, and was canceled as a result.

Honestly I don't get it, I'd love if someone would spell that out for me why someone using the word with extremely obvious lack of malicious intent is vehemently shouted down with the same intensity that actual white supremacists receive.

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This is a form of animism. The strange belief that some words have magical powers. Superstition.

To be fair, that word is rather unique in being a hateful slur which is also inherently bound to the utter dehumanization of a large group of people. If you take the 'use-mention distinction' seriously, this doesn't mean you can't mention the word as part of talking about something else altogether, with zero intention to dehumanize blacks. But many people subscribe to a kind of magical thinking where "bad" words are imbued with some kind of mana or occult power. To that sort of mindset, you of course would never ever dare to say the word out loud unless you were fully intending to bring us all back to that dismal time of oppression.

It's not an overtly stated narrative and doesn't have to make rational sense, only be emotionally appealing. But it's quite self-consistent in its own terms, and it's ultimately what justifies this kind of outrage.

The same intensity? No, more intensity.

Actual white supremacists don’t pose any threat to the prevailing system of thought, so mostly get ignored as marginal wackos.

On the other hand, mainstream people who dissent, even in a minor way, pose a serious threat. They challenge orthodoxy in a way that crazy racists don’t. The real danger? People might start listening to them!

That’s why they get shut down harder. It’s about silencing credible dissent.

Actual harm prevention is a distant secondary concern.

It's really easy to detect whether the word was used. It's orders of magnitude harder to determine intent. I think it's just a case of optimization. The anti-worders view that they have so many people to correct that it's just not feasible to figure out intent. Better to just slam everyone and move on to the next target.

It's definitely not a just strategy, but it might actually be a fairly effective one.

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