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Is this worse than an IT manager that types on a keyboard like it is some type machine from the 60's ? Picture this : typing with only 2 fingers, 90% of the time he is typing a word, deleting one letter at the time, types the same word again. Deleting the whole sentence (again, one letter at the time)
and he starts all over again... -
I don't get this bitching about pronouns, you literally used the neutral them in this post. It's so natural that even when you're deliberately trying to use something else it slips in. All you have to do is to continue using neutral like you instinctively do before you learn someone's gender. To use neutral plural is to not reference gender.
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I actually can't write automatically. It's supposed to be a fun exercise for writers or even a form of therapy but I'm just completely unable to do it. The way I naturally think about my writing is as a presentation aimed at an audience. I think to write in a flow like that requires the author to completely focus on just their own thoughts and not how those thoughts might be perceived.
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@lorentz I’m sorry but people who want us to use funny pronouns are annoying in almost all aspects of their personality.
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@Tounai Neopronouns are a different question, I don't like them because they signal "you should remember this extra info about me or else I'll be insulted". The neutral them actually allows me to remember LESS information about a person.
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@Tounai I just don't see why any reasonable person would be upset when someone prefers not to discuss a topic that's completely irrelevant such as gender. Making a big deal out of it and insisting on the gender you inferred based on their name or appearance is troll behaviour.
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@lorentz So what is next ? Instead of saying Hello we should all ask first after his/her pronouns ?
If you look like a woman, you are a 'she', when in doubt, Just using 'you' should be fine until other clues are coming. (voice, name, ...) -
@Grumm You missed my point. You don't ask, you just use "them" unless you know the gender. It's literally easier than trying to infer one, and it's FAR easier and more mature than inferring one and then insisting that your guess is right and the person you're guessing about is wrong.
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@Grumm You can also call conservative cis men and women "them", I regularly do, they don't notice because it's normal correct English and it doesn't assume anything about them that would be incorrect and catch their eye. It only becomes an issue when the conversation is political and they're paying attention.
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@lorentz I am not making a big deal out of this, I just don’t speak to those people. All I ask in return is that they don’t speak to me neither.
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@lorentz Sorry, English is not my primary language. I would just use 'you'. But 'they' is also possible I agree with you.
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@lorentz Did you miss the bit about how they strongly advertise their pronouns?
Their profile pic at work — despite being required to use a photo of themselves — is a multicolor “Oh me oh my I’m not a girl nor a guy!” We had a repeated pronoun training session by HR when this person joined (plus several reminders over the following weeks) underscoring how different and special their preference is. They also don’t go by their name anywhere, but an acronym (which isn’t their initials) — kind of a tangent.
But yes, using “they” etc. is actually pretty natural as it’s a normal language construct in English. Though there are still cases where it sounds odd, and these always irk me.
Anyway, the point of the rant wasn’t the pronouns, but the steady “stream of consciousness” that the security bulletins and IT support bits are written in, and how difficult that is to read. -
I won't participate in this pronoun bullshit.
Power, is “power over human beings” , but “above all over the mind” The party controls external reality through the control of the mind, and it controls the mind, through the control of language.
Fucking thought police trying to destroy the language to gain power. I also refuse to participate in people playing pretend with their mental illnesses. The more they push, the more extreme my responses become.
This they/them shit sounds like biblical legion shit. -
@Demolishun this person has transcended pronouns to the point where they're no longer using them at all, and you're still whining. smh
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@spoiledgoods correct. I will continue to participate in my own mental illnesses. Your participation is not required.
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@lorentz other people may not default to neutral but think in male and female tho
i've always just thought of everything as amorphous entities and then put tags on them
but I think people view others with categories in mind like gender. while reflexively one may write in neutral sometimes in their head it's still gendered
it's kind of creepy and inappropriate to police the thoughts of others I think. like that's what all the pronouns nonsense is about. it's to violate the boundaries of your thoughts being inappropriate for others to determine. they want you to allow them access to your internal representations. no fucking thanks. not everybody internally represents information like everybody else and it shouldn't be the case that we all represent information the same way. diversity of thoughts have you heard of it motherfucker
anyway
wokism is creepy rapey shit and no thanks -
@jestdotty I hate the Canada is supporting this shit too. I think its called "compelled speech". Which is against freedom of speech. Practically every government is trying to quell the freedom of speech right now through multiple avenues.
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@jestdotty The purpose of a spoken pronoun is not to operate your own internal model though, it's a signal to a third party. By insisting on neutral pronouns they aren't telling you not to think of them as a girl, they're telling you not to tell others that they're a girl. I think spreading information about a person that is unverified and rejected by them is rude at best.
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@Demolishun yeah Canada is into compelled speech
I actually haven't ran into anyone asking pronouns of me or anything of compelled speech but I do fear the day cuz I'd probably get in trouble
I'd just try to avoid the situation cuz I'd find it hard to lie. like I'd be disgusted with myself if Iied because I feared some kind of consequences. so it's just fundamentally incompatible with me. I'm not like trying to be rude and I don't hate or dislike people but I just can't bring myself to do that so 🤷, take it or leave it I guess. I mean I'm hoping I can still run into sane people in the future that get it. if that ceases to be the case or I get arrested (which isn't a joke, misgendering you get arrested for here, it's been put in the law) then well I guess I'm fucked. what can ya do 😩 -
@jestdotty I don't see how that changes anything though. The demands are still not placed against your thoughts but against your actions. Your actions are your own responsibility on the exact same principle that your thoughts are free.
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@lorentz While I agree that converging information about a person that they reject is rude, and you should strive to avoid doing such, this breaks down once people begin to use xir/xem, etc. where this conveys less useful information and is difficult to remember, and further: where you can get into trouble for not using their (and I use this phrase to the full extent of the meaning) personal pronouns. This effectively allows the individual in question to punish you, and in some cases quite severely, for forgetting or refusing.
It’s also a facet of forcing changes in the language, and therefore changes the thinking of those who use it. Doubleplusungood, comrade. -
@Tounai Agreed.
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@Root conveying*
Yuck @ 5 min edit window. -
@Root Your first paragraph is exactly why I don't like neopronouns, I completely agree.
I'm not convinced that changes to language are universally bad, because as you imply language affects the way its users think, and I don't think the existing and historical way of thinking is universally good. -
@lorentz Totally fair :)
But we just pick our future carefully, and this neopronoun one is not very promising! -
@Root By the way, one of the key lessons from 1984 is that thought policing is ultimately futile by and large. When Winston gets lost in the slums, it describes the poor engaging in all sorts of strictly forbidden pastimes. Evidently, while changes in language can be forced, the changes in thinking are only advised by the change of language.
The Hungarian language went though a lot of deliberate reform under socialist rule, but it also contains for example a feminine form of comrade as a hilarious, universal fuck you to the core tenets of socialism. -
@Demolishun what does the government have to do with any of this lol?
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@spoiledgoods in Canada it is a crime to misgender. The US governments is actively coercing social media sites to censor speech. In the UK you can be jailed for a meme. France just jailed the head of Telegram (not sure if still in jail). These are the ones I know about. I am sure there is more.
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Obligatory: if you actually went outside and interacted with people, you'd see that nobody actually gives a shit about any of this - at least not to the extreme extent that you do - and that the cultural shifts and "oppression" supposedly brought onto you by "the left" or "the elites" is actually just a big, dumb game of telephone you're playing that feeds you with bad information (your misinterpretation of that Canadian law is a great example. or should I say your handlers' misinterpretation lol) that shifts your worldview to the point where you're comparing reality to a dystopian sci-fi novel (written by a card-carrying socialist but idk if we're ready for that yet) where people aren't allowed to think and are quite literally scared of misgendering somebody that doesn't even exist
Like damn, you live like this? How can you live with that fear all the time? Don't you ever wonder why? -
@jestdotty I honestly can't imagine a system, legal or ethical, where speech isn't an action. Is wire fraud just legal then? Or on a more sensible basis, is slander completely normal? Are the organizers or inciters of a violent attack completely innocent as long as they didn't themselves get violent?
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@jestdotty In an technical sense, of course speech is an action, it affects other people by delivering information. It has an impact, and people relate in some way to that impact.
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@jestdotty
1. A thought experiment is clearly marked as such. A statement about a real person is not a thought experiment. I also completely disagree that everything has to be said. Communication is a need, the topic is a choice.
2. I'm not policing anyone, but I get to observe your communication, anticipate future actions (like communication) and their effect on me and people and communities I care about, and act accordingly. I still don't get why this is a hard concept. Everything that has consequences, including communication, has an associated responsibility. Whether you're responsible because it's your views or because it's your choice to communicate them doesn't have the slightest significance. -
@jestdotty I don't get your argument about the misdeeds I mentioned. You agree that they're bad, or am I misunderstanding something? Is the basis that people get away with them at large scale? How does that affect anything?
Wire fraud needed to be defined in a new law when the telephone was invented precisely because initially it was argued that perpetrators did nothing illegal, just talked to a person who cooperated on their own free will. -
@Demolishun is it really a crime in Canada to misgender though?
Hate speech, as far as I know, is, but it's difficult to prosecute because of how arbitrary it is and how inefficient the legal system is. Hell, the federal government cannot even properly prosecute criminals and terrorists which are no-way in a legal grey zone. -
@PepeTheFrog from what I can tell if you are a big enough dick it could elevate to hate speech. So there is a path to legal consequences. I looked at how canada handles hate speech. It is weird. They do not legally define what "hate" means. So there are legal consequences to hate speech, but the judges get to decide if what you said is hate speech. Which seems kind of bass ackwards. It seems like you could get arrested or made to come to court of "hate speech" and you get the wrong judge you could get consequences. But right now it seems like you would have to be a really big douche an defy court orders to get jail time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The reason pronouns could be an issue is because of C-16:
https://cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/features/...
Then there is this:
https://them.us/story/...
So it is not cut a dry either way.
!dev
There’s this person at $work who never uses punctuation of any kind. She has mental issues and insists on neutral pronouns (and strongly advertises these) so I’ll use the indefinite to pretend to be respectful. It has multiple thoughts while typing a message and just keeps typing through all of them without stopping. It pauses not to collect its thoughts, to edit for clarity or to fix mistakes, to separate anything (including disjoint topics), to summarize, etc. (Though calling these “thoughts” is a huge stretch, given its lack of propensity for that particular subject.) It’s as if it has zero distinction between writing and speaking, and simply lets the mental diarrhea flow while their fingers do their best to keep pace. Reading these trainwrecks of thought — and gleaning any useful information from them — is always difficult and a little bit painful.
It is also in charge of IT security, which is more than a bit worrying. (But I hate the company with a passion, so it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as it otherwise would.)
rant
root reads a security bulletin