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Comment by mariusor | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this kind of statement requires a little more details to back it up.

And, to use a hot take here, I believe that the "left to right" political axis can be simplified using a "I believe I am better than X" statement, where X is a set of people(s), that grows ever wider the further right you go.

Therefore a person on the "far left" of the axis would complete the sentence as "I believe I am better than nobody" and thus it's not really plausible that they would need slurs to talk about others.

I realize that this sounds a little of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, but people saying they are something, does not make them that something unless backed up by actions/beliefs. Using slurs is antithetic to being any kind of left, not just "far", so I suspect you might have met someone confused about things.

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Yes all far left people are saints and would never do this. Ridiculous.

I guess you missed every time they called Tim Scott and Judge Thomas uncle toms.

Yeah you're right. Far left people use slurs like "capitalist" and "billionaire" and have calls to violence like "eat the rich", I forgot. I'm not sure if they're really as offensive as the ones that we initially talked about though. (Also, I have no idea who those two(three?) people are.)

You are forgetting all the ways you can act as if you are superior to others other than by using nasty words. You are also forgetting a lot of commonly used insults from the far left: fascist, nazi, racist, sexist, bigot, bootlicker, tech bro, and so on and so forth.

Some on the hard left put a large focus on controlling the use of language. They are the arbiters of what is offensive, etc. Those "guides to inclusive language" that made the rounds a few years ago were perfect examples. You can't say blacklist or totem pole or "no can do". You can't say kowtow or gyp or "master branch". What is insisting you control the language of others except acting as it you are morally superior to them? Generally speaking, wokeness/political correctness is exactly that: acting as if you are better than others and your moral pronouncements (no pun intended) should take precedence over theirs, because of your superior moral authority.

I feel like those are less insults and slurs and more statements of perception. The only problem is when they get dispatched indiscriminately against everyone, when you're completely right. They've been so overused that they lose meaning.

However, I have to say it again, being called a boot-liker and a tech-bro does not bear the weight of a couple of centuries of slavery behind it. Maybe "nazi" would have a similarly charged undertone, but again, if someone tells me that I'm a nazi, I check my behaviour for what might have made them say that and then just stop being a nazi. It's not subtle being a nazi, or a fascist, or a sexist or a bigot.

Racist slurs can not be corrected for, you can not sit down reflect on your life and stop being Black, Hispanic, Asian or Middle-Eastern. But you can if you're a nazi.

Being called a "bootlicker" or a "techbro" is rude. No slurs have "centuries" of anything "behind" them. They are just rude, often very rude.

If someone tells me I am a Nazi, I don't need to "check" if I am one. I know already that I am not. The same is true of the rest of those terms. Yet I have been called a "neofascist" on HN quite recently. These terms are bandied about indiscriminately to mean "person I disagree with". They are just used as slurs. Even if the meaning of these terms shifted by usage over time to refer to something I did or thought, that wouldn't make the behaviour or view bad. They are labels, and they are insults because they label bad behaviour and views. But if they shifted by usage to start labelling good or neutral behaviour or views they would need to become good or neutral terms, as difficult as that would be, because otherwise you give people the power to determine what you do and think by shifting the meaning of words to which cultural weight is attached.

Easier is to steadfastly refuse to allow their meanings to shift. No, you are not a fascist for thinking police forces are necessary. You are not sexist for believing that men and women are different. You are not racist for wanting immigration law to be enforced. etc.

> You are not sexist for believing that men and women are different. You are not racist for wanting immigration law to be enforced.

You are a misogynist if you think that those differences between men and women need to be underscored through societal and politic measures against women. You are racist if you think that kicking immigrants out of your country means only the brown people (which sadly seems to be a trap you eagerly walked yourself into). So please.

I haven't walked into any traps. People get insulted as racist all the time when they haven't said anything about race.

People called GitHub racist for having a contract with ICE.

People call you racist if you say "immigration law should be enforced".

That is my entire point and your immediate assumption that I have fallen into a "trap" and must be a secret cryptoracist is exactly the behaviour I am talking about.

As for the differences being "underscored through measures against women", that is just stupid. There are differences and there are as a result social and legal distinctions drawn between men and women. Women are much more vulnerable to violence from men than the reverse. Single-sex spaces are a requirement as a result. This is a very basic example. The accommodations that employment law and social expectations need to make for women because of pregnancy is another example: you can't just say "we treat men and women the same: you are expected to lift heavy things at work" when you have a pregnant employee.

Literally my whole point is that some on the left eagerly take any opportunity they can get to assume bad faith and apply these insults to as many people as they can. You have then immediately done exactly that. So please. Your pathetic argument that this is just "descriptive" is ridiculous. You choose to interpret things in the worst possible light and to invent things I never said so that you can call me a racist misogynist. Don't pretend that you don't or that you are some neutral observer of people.

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