Euphemism treadmill is driven by people who believe in a fairly strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that the thoughts we have are bounded by the words we have. They think that the negative connotations of fatness are at least in part derived from the word "fat" itself and could therefore be at least partially erased by getting rid of that word and replacing it with another.
But even if we erased every single word for fatness from the minds of everybody in existence all in an instant, new words for fatness would be invented the very next instant when people around the world see fatness, can't find a word for it, and invent a new one. Words are tools for conveying understanding. Humans are tool-creating apes; when we need a tool, we make a tool. Remove a slur from people's vocabulary and people will invent a new one.
When I was young, my school had a program for retarded kids, the kids with profound mental disabilities. We also called each other retarded as a mild insult to impugn our friends' intelligence. The teachers and parents hated this, they banned the word retarded and renamed the class for the retarded kids to "Special Education". Anybody caught saying "retarded" would be scolded very severely and denied recess/etc. So what did we do? We started using "special", "special education" and "sped" as insults equivalent to retarded. You can't erase concepts by erasing words, least of all concepts that are so readily observable and self-evidently negative as the state of being mentally retarded or fat. Need a tool, make a tool.
Who said anything about the government? In the article, Spielberg laments his own decision to censor the guns in ET. It was his decision to alter his own movie, not government-imposed. The article isn't about government-imposed censorship specifically, it's Spielberg lamenting censorship generally.
inb4 "it's not real censorship unless the government does it"
I think the word censorship really has to relate to government action - if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.
Anyway, you're wrong and I think you know it because you said "government-mandated censorship." The first two words clarify the third. This wouldn't be necessary if the third truly implied the first two.
Have you ever heard of the Hays Code? It's quite infamous, you probably have; it was a system of self-imposed censorship from Hollywood to ban scandalous content from movies, such as people kissing or husbands and wives only having a single bed in their bedroom (oh the implications!) But the point is this censorship was self-imposed, there was no act of congress requiring it. The claim that true censorship must come from the government is simply wrong.
> if it's extended to an author reworking their own output, it really loses all sense of meaning.
It doesn't lose all meaning. It loses only the very narrow meaning you wish to impose (probably because it's an ugly word and you don't want to think yourself capable of censoring.)
The Hays Code and the Comic Code were both arguably an industry self-censoring "somewhat" (for whatever value of that you want) so as to side-step government legislation.
I don't use many content recommendation systems, so maybe this isn't typical, but youtube's is very good at what it does. It knows I like videos about trains and ships, and suggests virtually nothing else to me. It doesn't need to guess at my motivation for liking trains, all it needs to do is give me train videos.
I think these systems are what you make out of them. If you click trashy content, it'll give you trashy content. If you click politically edgy content, you'll get more of that. If you only click on trains, you'll only get trains. Maybe people who complain about these systems have a totally different experience than me, or maybe they don't like what they see when a content recommendation engine holds up a mirror.
As for their perverse incentives and profit motive... if they're bad at anything, it's getting ad views from me.
I was fascinated by the concept promoted by Pandora: "digital DNA" of musical works. It was an exhaustive list of properties applied to each song they played, and it fed into their recommendation engine so that songs could be typed and matched with more stuff we wanna hear.
It failed me miserably.
Digital DNA, or at least its implementation on Pandora, was woefully inadequate in determining my motivation and reasons for selecting songs in a list. I created a Lenten playlist of penitential hymns, and the cardinal rule was: "NO ALLELUIA" which is not vocalized at all during the Lenten season. Well my recommendations were liberally sprinkled with joyous Easter shouts of the A-word, and my experience was ruined.
I may select songs based on particular lyric themes, seasonal considerations, bands based on their particular location or affiliation; things like that. Recommendation engines just have this kind of sledgehammer that goes "Oh! You like <Heavy Metal>! Here's some more <Heavy Metal> for ya!" when my use case doesn't even care about genre, but I was looking for lyrical themes or topics.
Also unlike Pandora, YouTube has one big firehose of recommendations. It is unable to segregate them within a playlist or a particular session for some purpose. The only way to isolate recommendations is by account or incognito, and that is one reason I have 3 separate personal accounts for different purposes, so that my main account's activity does not pollute the interests and recs of the special-purpose accounts.
Ah right, I see what you mean. Supposing I tried to make youtube only show me videos of red trains, it would probably fail. It has a limited number of content bins and probably doesn't/can't synthesize new bins on the fly for individual users.
I too find YouTube pretty good. But like you say I avoid clickbait and am careful with my likes. If it suggests too much I don't want, I'll tell it I don't want those.
There is a weekly game my friends play wherein one of them crafts a playlist, and then the rest of them attempt to guess the theme that holds it together. It's really fun!
My only contribution was a playlist of inappropriately-named bands, such as the Sisters of Mercy, the Cocteau/Thompson Twins, Concrete Blonde, etc. It stumped them.
Have you ever noticed that native cultures are commonly praised for not wasting any part of the animal, yet the modern meat industry is vilified for not wasting any part of the animal ("pink slime", sausage, leather industry, etc)?
I think this sort of contradiction is evidence of emotionally compromised reasoning.
You're right, but I think you're conflating arguments.
Meat eaters should be proud to wear leather, eat byproduct, etc. Anything else would be waste, and it's shameful to act as you describe.
But vegans want all of it to stop. There's nothing to waste to the animal isn't killed. Well, until it does naturally. There's nothing to waste if the animal isn't born though. And it wouldn't be born if we didn't have a culture of harvesting their bodies.
Then it should be safe for me to say that I've noticed transmen are less assertive and aggressive than transwomen, and that this tracks with all the research, including crime statistics, showing that human males are more aggressive than human females.
Seems unlikely to me that you’ve personally spent enough time with transgender people and with a large enough sample to justify having an opinion that generalizes across them if you’re so eager to share this opinion.
You have posed this as a question. My answer is yes. But perhaps you don't really mean it as a question, and instead mean it to solicit others to flag my comment to silence my point of view. Is that the case? If so, then logicalmonster was right.
I have spent the past 15 years working in tech in an American west coast city, I have personally known several transgender people in professional and social contexts, and encountered many more. I have also known or encountered innumerable cisgendered men and women. From these experiences, I have concluded that cisgender men are more dangerous than cisgender women, more quick to anger, more prone to aggressive posturing and certainly more prone to physical assault. Do you doubt these observations as well? Will you allow me the ability to conclude anything from my personal experiences, or do you demand that I perform rigorous scientific studies to conclude anything of this sort? I am telling you, in good faith, that it has been my personal observation that I should be wary of cisgendered men and transwomen. Because although both are usually not violent, both exhibit a predilection for aggression that significantly exceeds what I have come to expect from cisgendered women and transmen.
I’m asking if it’s good faith because it feels like it cannot possibly be.
You can have any opinion you like, but it’s kind of pointless to think that your small experiences are sufficient to generalize. on top of that, I feel like you’re probably just making up your anecdata or exaggerating the size of it to justify your desire to state an opinion you know other people will not like.
I don’t really care what your opinion is either way. But your experiences are about as valuable as my grandparents’ experience with “the Blacks”.
No, you don’t need to conduct a study to state your opinions. But at the same time, your opinion is meaningless, and it’s not “silencing conversation” to acknowledge that and end the discussion there.
But let’s have it anyway.
I don’t have any opinion on whether transwomen are more aggressive than cisgendered women. If I had to guess, yeah, they probably are? Why does that matter?
The reason I mentioned my opinion is because it's an example of opinions which are suppressed. You have demonstrated this, by insisting that nobody could possibly have and express my opinion in good faith (despite your insistence, I earnestly do believe what I've said, in good faith.) Such proclamation of bad faith are an attempt to suppress the expression of opinions like my own, you have tacitly declared my comment to be a violation of the forum rules and therefore deserving of suppression.
Your reaction to my statement has proved logicalmonster's point: "Most comments on HN on this topic that veer outside of a narrow range of acceptable thoughts, even from those people that generally support this topic, are flagged and killed."
You haven't succeeded in getting my comments flagged, but you called for it. I knew you would, and that's why I made that comment. To give you an opportunity to demonstrate your censorious inclinations.
Also Chris2048 is right:
> No, you don’t need to conduct a study to state your opinions. But at the same time, your opinion is meaningless
This is double-speak. You don't require me to have opinions based on scientific studies, but at the same time my opinions are worthless. That's double-speak.
> Such proclamation of bad faith are an attempt to suppress the expression of opinions like my own, you have tacitly declared my comment to be a violation of the forum rules and therefore deserving of suppression.
No, it's much broader than that. It's a claim that your statement is outside the bounds of what a human could honestly think, and therefore that it's invalid anywhere, not just here.
"If you're being honest, you agree with me. If you disagree, you are being dishonest." That's either very narrowminded, or a very cheap rhetorical gambit.
> Given they claimed, at least, to have personal xp on the matter then why is it meaningless?
Because personal experience is highly unlikely to amount to enough evidence to make a claim that anyone should feel comfortable generalizing to a population of humans. Positive or negative.
> Maybe have a conversation and find out?
My dude, I literally said “let’s have [a discussion]” and posed the exact question you are quoting to invite a conversation.
> highly unlikely to amount to enough evidence to make a claim that anyone should feel comfortable generalizing to a population of humans
Then what is the solution? quoting a study after all?
You also didn't explain why you mention all the things you "feel" about the poster, given you have such high standards of evidence - e.g. that they are making stuff up - what is that based on if not xp?
> My dude, I literally said
Saying "sure, let's do this" after making it very clear that their opinion didn't matter, and you think they were making stuff up? I don't think it was inviting a discussion in good faith, whether you said it or not.
Agreed, and one can observe exactly the same dynamic in trans-only spaces. Indeed, it would be very unexpected if males donning feminine attire had any correlation with them acting less aggressively, compared to females.
Veganism can act as cover for disordered eating; perhaps that is what you have observed.
Related, I know many “vegetarians” who are what I call effective vegans, meaning they eat vegan ~90% of the time, recognizing purity as a pointless pursuit.
Anecdotally, vegetarian seem to eat a lot of eggs, fish, etc. Yes I know fish is technically not vegetarian, but.. they call themselves vegetarian and certainly avoid other meats.
Just saying, my experience with vegans is very limited. For all you know, the vegans you know are, in fact, cancer patients. Cancer patients are much less rare than vegans after all. Not everyone tells the people around them.
> permaculture setups that integrates animals and a food forest into their operation.
This is a premise from a bygone era. Replace modern farming with integrated permaculture and billions will starve. Such farming techniques only persist in developed countries today as niche activities to amuse yuppies who want to buy some connection to nature at the grocery store.
Food instability will lead to mass starvation, which in turn will lead to wars. Wars will trash this planet more surely than modern mechanized farming.
I think you missed the part where modern mechanized farming is going to destroy fertility to the point that we have food instability anyhow, which was my original point. The answer is to rethink how we feed our populations, but by all means keep kicking the doomsday can down the line without a plan.
Exactly, when it comes to essential matters like food, stability is much more important than efficiency. I don't want the food supply chain optimized for efficiency, nobody should. Optimize it for reliable output.
But even if we erased every single word for fatness from the minds of everybody in existence all in an instant, new words for fatness would be invented the very next instant when people around the world see fatness, can't find a word for it, and invent a new one. Words are tools for conveying understanding. Humans are tool-creating apes; when we need a tool, we make a tool. Remove a slur from people's vocabulary and people will invent a new one.
When I was young, my school had a program for retarded kids, the kids with profound mental disabilities. We also called each other retarded as a mild insult to impugn our friends' intelligence. The teachers and parents hated this, they banned the word retarded and renamed the class for the retarded kids to "Special Education". Anybody caught saying "retarded" would be scolded very severely and denied recess/etc. So what did we do? We started using "special", "special education" and "sped" as insults equivalent to retarded. You can't erase concepts by erasing words, least of all concepts that are so readily observable and self-evidently negative as the state of being mentally retarded or fat. Need a tool, make a tool.