I'm actually teaching only faculty myself (well, I do a bit of SoTL research) these days but mathfest is pretty good for the teaching side. At least it certainly was a few years ago when I was just starting out after PhD and absorbing lots of teaching ideas.

I'm on-board with your general point, but I think I disagree with this particular example. It seems to me birtherism was a giant dog-whistle from the beginning. I guess there were some sincerely uninformed questioners, but how large was that group... 1%? .1%? .01%?

Also, I am not going to mathfest this year, in case anyone was wondering.

A less-political one would be the autism-vaccine connection. There are parents out there that are honestly confused and uninformed, and they don't know who to trust. But that's not because they think there's some anti-science conspiracy out there. They're just legitimately and honestly confused by the information and don't know what to think. That might help frame things in a way that will have less political baggage.

I know it's not the best measure, but here's some polling data from 2016:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/201...estion-n627446



I'm focusing on the "Neither agree nor disagree" category. The "dog-whistle" folks are the ones that are solidly in the "Disagree" category. Those in the middle just don't know what to think.

I don't deny that there's likely an impact due to implicit racial bias, nor do I deny that there's some impact from specific forms of media exposure and consumption. But I have a hard time saying that those people who are saying that they are in the middle are hiding that they're really on one side or the other. They just don't know what to think, and they are getting mixed messages about it.

Have you ever been?

Next week will be my third. They are really good for getting a wide sample of where the math community is on teaching trends pretty quickly. So for someone who has never tried IBL or flipping a course or mastery based learning or any number of other buzz topics, you can leave with a good collection of ideas from people teaching similar courses. But that said, the average quality will be quite a bit lower than something like the lilly because any rando could be speaking on that one weird thing they did in calc. So hit and miss.

I enjoyed your post and final point and will respond because I have outlined an essay in my head on basically this same theme (taking some language and quotes from Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie), but with another term that has entered the political lexicon within the last decade. And is flung about broadly and loosely for propaganda purposes, mostly. And it deals with religion. Would make an interesting thread but I haven't the time to engage.


And this aside from "phobia" being a term that has the patina of medical science behind it and also the implication that the term(s) sticks the person being disparaged with being deranged, or having a mental disorder or aberration. Making those terms an excellent propaganda tool but hardly an objective means of debate/discussion.

We are stuck somewhat with the terms we have. In my view, homophobic is simply the word we have to mean equivalent things to racist. While it might be slightly annoying that it has this "phobia" suffix (it leads to the annoying "I'm not homophobic, I don't fear gay people" type response) it is what it is. I don't think it has the connotation of an actual psychological mental disorder, and I certainly don't use it that way.

While it is true that it CAN be used as a "propaganda tool", this hardly means it can't be an objective term in a debate or discussion. Exactly the same as racist, unless you feel that we also are incapable of having a meaningful discussion about racism?

Except that it really isn't. And the fact that people think differently and react the way that they do about this word demonstrates that it isn't. Also, you're demonstrably not stuck with the term, because anti-gay is a perfectly viable alternative that would avoid the problem.

This is not dissimilar to people who get hung up on gendered pronouns for people of unspecified gender. People who insist that it makes no difference but also insist that "he" is proper don't make it very far into the conversation. You're kind of in the same situation.

Yeah, this is probably a better example, but according to your graph, the birther example is better than I thought it was. I'm surprised at the 25%+ figure in the middle, and your thoughts on how that could happen make sense.



I'd never heard of it until yesterday. It was a joke, a la the 90 lb weakling helpfully letting the body builders know he wouldn't be in the next competition.

I didn't want to assume that you were a 90 lb weakling.

You don't think that people going around spreading negative propaganda attacking gays had any negative animus against gay people? Look how you use "animus" almost immediately afterwards:
You see little problem ascribing racial animus to "many" birthers, and calling them racist. Those in the "dogwhistle" category, in your mind, seem to be the 35 or 40% of republicans who disagree that Obama is an american. I agree, I think racial animus is a substantive factor in the preponderance of this conspiracy theory. I just don't think you are being consistent in what you think of as animus.

It isn't just the thresholds, it is also the qualifications you use. You don't talk about intentional as being necessary to call that category of birthers racist, you don't talk about whether this is their end goal or not.

Anti-gay is also just awkward. Firstly, anti-LGBT might be more inclusive. Secondly, it doesn't even conjugate right. Racism, homophobia, anti-semitism those all compare to...uh...anti-LGBTism? Thirdly, the other "isms" like racism don't have a separation into two terms. We don't commonly use "anti-black" and "racist" where the latter has a higher bar.

This is just a bad argument. People think differently and react in all kinds of good and bad ways to "racism" as well. In fact, a lot of fringe issues are highly contentious whether they should be called racism or not. I don't see why homophobia should be any different, and what major problem we face that we don't when we try and avoid the term.

Nope.

Correct.

No. All dogwhistles are in that group, but not all people in that group are dogwhistles.

Okay.

I would say that a vast majority of whites in the pre-civil rights era were racist. But I wouldn't say that the vast majority of whites in the pre-civil rights era felt animus towards blacks. There's a difference. General segregationist logic (you have your spaces and I have mine) are not inherently built around animus.

You're free to argue whatever you want here. My point stands. You say there's no alternative, but I'm telling you there is. You don't like it, but there's an alternative. Whether that's anti-gay or anti-LGBT is irrelevant.

You don't like how it conjugates. Waaaaah.

You are a homophobe. --- You are anti-LGBT.
That's homophobic --- That's anti-LGBT.
That's a form of homophobia -- That's anti-LGBT.

It's not so complicated.

All you're really saying here is that you like your word, and even though it *knowingly* miscommunicates ideas to some people, and even though there are alternative ways of communicating the same content.

The difference is that you have disputes over the *term* and not the *content* it conveys.

So you have no problem calling people racists without an "anti-black" animus, yet to be homophobic you must have an "anti-LGBT" animus. What a weird choice.

And then doubly weird, is how you seem to have a fairly low standard for what having an "animus" among republican birthers, many of whom you think have this animus and are racist. But when it is about gay people, you have a ridiculously high standard where even people spreading extremely negative propaganda around town about gays, you don't see any animus against gays. Your use of single word responses to microquotes doesn't address this basic tension in your view.


It isn't "my" word, nor did I say there is no alternative. I'm saying that there is a standard word in the English language that parallels racism or sexism or anti-semitism, and that word is homophobia. There is no need to go about finding a new word for it. You don't even seem to know what that word is. Is it anti-gay or anti-lgbt? When people say "Our society unfortunately still faces problems or racism, homophobia, and sexism", how are you planning on conjugating the replacement of the standard word. Something convoluted like "anti-gay prejudices"?

If there was some major problem you could communicate about using the word homophobia in a similar way to using racism, I'm sure you would have articulated it. Right now, you seem reduced to worrying about the "miscommunciation" of people so out of touch they think it literally means fearing gays. Heck, it's a useful tell.


People dispute what racism means all the time. Debates of "is X racist" very often devolve into the meaning of the term. Just as "is X homophobic" do. It's the nature of the beast, but there isn't some fundamental problem with homophobic that racist is totally immune to.

It's only weird to you because you want to insist that there's already a "standard" meaning that everyone should abide by, and that's the one that you have chosen. But that's not really how language works.

You don't think that there are white supremacists that are also birthers? I don't know how you deny that there's racial animus there.

Birtherism isn't *just* a racial animus thing. It started off as a political animus thing. Here's an article from 2009:

https://www.npr.org/2009/07/29/11119...hplace-persist

Do I think that this bill was ultimately created because of racism? No. I think it has a lot more to do with politics. Was race a factor? Yes. But that's clearly not the whole story.

There are some people who have passively taken in information from the early Obama presidency and never actually re-evaluated anything, and so may still hold birther beliefs. Those people are distinct from the white nationalist/white supremacist movements that kept birtherism alive and active.

Single word responses are sufficient. I don't disagree that there's tension there. But what's really happening is that you're holding tightly to your preconceived views and trying to shoehorn what I'm saying into them, rather than taking my view for what it is.

No, there isn't a "standard" word. It's just another word that you happen to have a preference for. That's like saying "he" is the standard gender-neutral term and that people who use s/he, she, and they are wrong because there's a standard that they're not following.

Nothing new is being found or invented. It's not as if anti-gay or anti-LGBT hasn't existed before.

If you want me to be technical, I'll say it's anti-LGBT. Anti-gay is more familiar to me because "gay' has a longer history in my experiences than LGBT. "LGBT" was introduced in the late 1980s in response to the sense that "gay" was not having an inclusive enough connotation (as in "gay community").

I don't know why you think it's convoluted. I would have said: "Our society unfortunately still faces problems with racism, anti-LGBT bias, and sexism." Or I might just rewrite the sentence like this: "Our society unfortunately still faces many problems due to race, sexual orientation, and gender."

I want you to realize that you're literally whining about your personal struggles with writing English sentences at this point. Have you never written something and discovered that the term that "flows naturally" isn't actually the right word to use? And then have to rewrite it in a different way? This whole "conjugation" line of reasoning is absolutely horrendous.

The problem is that you're trying to play the "dictionary definition" game with the English language, and the English language (nor languages in general) play that game.

Communication is a two-sided process. You want to pretend that your progressive thinking is what everyone should be thinking or is already thinking. But that's just not how language works.

<sigh> They aren't debating the *term*. They agree on the term that they want to use. They are debating the *content* of the term. This isn't complicated.

You just want to pretend that the debate over the term is over. It isn't. It may be in your circle, but you're not holding the controls over the English language.

Again, you should really think about the debate over the use of "he" as a gender-neutral term. If you understand the nature of that discussion, you should be able to draw an exact parallel to this one.

You can choose your own definitions, if you want to. You just made a really bad choice. What you have bizarrely chosen to do is to make "animus" a necessary component of homophobia but NOT of racism. And then it gets worse when your standard of what an "animus" is becomes really high (at least when it relates to LGBT)

And yes, standard meanings is how language works. It is simply standard for people to conceive of homophobia and racism as parallels. If you want to communicate effectively, then you shouldn't have chosen the nonstandard interpretation where you impose this extreme asymmetry between the terms.

It was your choice to articulate definitions that had such a ridiculous asymmetry in them, that gave to rise to this tension you agree exists. I'm happy to "take your view for what it is". But I'm going to point out how bad it is. Honestly, I suspect you simply didn't notice the asymmetry when you originally typed it out and are now stuck.

You began with "a level of racial animus towards obama" and are now at "white supremacist". When you were vaguely saying "many" birthers were racist, it appeared you were taking a fairly low bar on what some level of racial animus could mean. Far from deny it (lol), I explicitly agreed. I think a level of racial animus did indeed play a significant role in the propagation of this conspiracy theory. But if you are upgrading to "white supremacists" then that is back up to a really high bar again.

You are getting confused between different levels. There is a descriptive claim about what words happen to be standard and what they typically mean. There is also a normative claim about what ought to be standard. In the case of pronouns, I've articulated on this forum the normative claim that "they" is superior to the affirmative action style "she" favoured by original position, and both are far superior to "he". However, in uttering this normative claim I accept the descriptive claim that "they" is far less common than "he". In the case of the current debate, it just happens to be "homophobia" both descriptively is the common English language parallel to "racism" in a way that "anti-LGBT bias" is not, AND that I assent to the normative claim that, unlike "he", the standard usage is reasonable. You are certainly disagreeing normatively (your usage of racism and homophobia are completely asymmetric, with one requiring "animus" and the other not) but it seems also descriptively. Lol at you thinking you would win by bugging me repeatedly to address this.

I'm sorry that 30 years wasn't long enough for you.

Do you think that sentence is more standard than the version with homophobia in it?

With your ever telescoping replies, one has to be at least marginally selective in what I respond to. Don't worry, your other points were almost as terrible.

What you seem to not be grasping is that the "evolution" of the term that you cited is precisely why this is the case.

Either that, or you think that everything that is "anti-LGBT" is "homophobic" (which you do because you seem to think the two terms are equivalent). Again, you're really just shoehorning what I'm saying into your own lexicon instead of accepting it as it is.

Just.... no. You have already admitted that language evolves over time. This means that there can be no "standard meaning" but rather only a "current understanding."

No, it's not. As I've stated, the media has two different words ("anti-LGBT" and "homophobic") that is uses in two different settings. But the concepts and ideas around racism have consolidated into a single term. I've even gone as far as to argue how the consolidation of this words is problematic at certain levels.

All you're saying here is that you *want* them to be parallel.

Pay attention to the world around you and get our of your own little bubble.

You can assert whatever you want. I'll simply leave you with this challenge to prove me wrong:

Look up news articles using the phrase "anti-LGBT" and then look up news articles using the phrase "homophobic" (or some "conjugated" form of it) -- but ignore opinion pieces. I assert that tou will *consistently* find that the two words are used in two different ways to mean two different things. This is the fact that your analysis is repeatedly ignoring. There is not just one "standard" parallel that everyone must choose.

I get that you're really passionate about this sort of stuff, but you're really off in your own world here.

You completely missed the point. I'm not surprised. There is no "argument from standard."

Except you're wrong. It's not parallel. You're viewing the words as being far too flat in their meaning. "Racism" encapsulates both high and low form of behaviors. "Homophobia" (currently) only encapsulates the high forms. Again, look at how the term is used in the news media. They are NOT interchangeable.

I think you've ultimately failed to appreciate just how much consolidation of ideas has gone into the term "racist" for you to understand the implications of what you're trying to claim here.

It's "not long enough" for Reuters and many other news outlets as well. Here's Reuters on July 4, 2018:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-i...-idUSKBN1JU140

And here's something from LGBTQ Nation from just a few days ago:

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/07/...k-fil-antigay/

So waaaaah. The irony is that you're the one who is going full language-police here. I started off with a suggestion for how to make yourself more persuasive by altering your language choice, and now you're over here trying to argue about "standard English" and trying to stake out moral superiority for it.

You're just completely disconnected from reality. You seem to want to imagine that you've got control over the English language when you don't.

OMG -- THERE IS NO "STANDARD"!!

Does your entire argument simply boil down to you just trying to assert that something is standard when it isn't? Despite all of the external evidence to the contrary, this is the thing you want to hold tightly to as the way you want to understand things?

The English language does not proceed like math. We do not define the terms up front and have well-codified understandings of them. You might be right that in another 20-30 years that "homophobic" will have consolidated a lot of language and will be a closer parallel to "racist." But that is not how the term is currently and actively used right now. The evidence is literally all around you, and you just need to be more observant of reality.

Until you actually do the challenge, I think you are incapable of having a meaningful conversation on this topic, and everything is going over your head.

--

Edit: I'll add that the article I linked earlier (which I didn't ask you to read, so I don't fault you for not reading) was making the argument that it is better to "preserve" the high meaning of "homophobic" and not let it become more generic. And it's not as if this was an article written in the 1990s. There's just way more happening than you seem capable of acknowledging.

https://www.theatlantic.com/national...ophobe/282333/

I didn't want to think I was, but my daughter was taking geometry and asked me to go over her homework and after the Pythagorean Theorem I had to google everything. "Geometry what is ASA"

ETA: In my defense, it's been 30+ years since I took geometry

Out of curiosity, how was that process for you? Was it easy to find what you needed? Was it clear/understandable?

I didn't respond to your massive earlier wall of text, and it let a confusion about my position persist in your mind:

I don't disagree. News stories typically attempt to refrain from judgement, and refrain from calling things racist or sexist or homophobic explicitly, but instead are descriptive. And I agree that news articles are more likely to use anti-gay which has that more descriptive ring to it (and anti-woman and anti-black are just less common, rightly or wrongly).

I, however, am not a journalist. I'd be closer to the "opinion piece" you ask me to ignore. I have no problem passing judgement, or of using the more emotive terminology. My position was that I am not making a mistake by calling the protesters spreading homophobic messages homophobic, that your language policing of me is both bad and wrong.

I'll give two examples, since you want news stories. First, notice this news article where "homophobic" IS used in a very similar situation of pamphlets, but that the news article is clear to make it a quote and carefully qualify that:
But if it is an opinion piece - which is what I am doing, giving my opinion - then absolutely homophobic is being used parallel to racist.

I maintain that by calling the pamphlet protesters homophobic I am doing so in a standard way, that does appear in articles whether editorial (via quoting) or opinion (directly).

Just to be clear, the article still uses "anti-gay" and "homophobic" interchangeably, but was making the argument against applying EITHER of those labels widely. You seem to believe that "anti-gay" means "low bar" while homophobic means "high bar". The author disagrees.

Secondly, while the author was using anti-gay and homophobic interchangeably, I actually think they are similar but not identical. I agree that anti-LGBT has that more descriptive ring to it, the kind favoured by news organizations, while homophobic has more judgmental connotations. My position isn't that people - particularly news organizations - never use anti-gay, or that they are used exactly interchangeably. Heck, I've used "anti-gay" many times myself on this forum.

Finally, I also happen to disagree with the author's point about maintaining a high bar. With racism we don't just use this for lynchings and CRA violations, and as a normative claim I think we should treat homophobia (or anti-gay for that matter) in a similar vein.


Thanks tips! Obviously I agree the meanings evolves over time. I literally said this earlier. Unless you are approaching this conversation from a fundamentally dishonest perspective, you should be able to realize that when i speak about the standard meaning of words I'm referring to their current understanding today, and not the standard meanings from 50 years ago. That you consistently pull this kind of ****, where you just imagine the least charitable possible interpretation of what someone says, is one of the reason that makes debating you so marginally worth it, despite your tremendous willingness to give action.


Nice attempt at the sole read, but as I already told you, the terminology really makes little difference here. The emotional disgust I feel towards, say, people who oppose marriage equality or whatever doesn't change based on the terminology of the words. I've repeatedly used anti-gay on this forum as well.






Woooooosh! I don't much care whether you use gay or lgbt - both remain common today, and I use both myself. I'm just laughing at you for saying one is more familiar because LGBT has only been around for three ****ing decades.





I clearly delineated the descriptive and normative claims. While it is true that normativly I think homophobia should not be a protected class with extremely stringent conditions, much like how racism isn't, I also think descriptively it is quite standard to have a debate about whether mocking picture of trump and putin is homophobic, despite this being a VASTLY lower bar than the condition you imposed. But the two aren't directly connected; while I happen to have won over you on both points, in the example of "they" I can only win normatively as my preferred option is much less frequent.


It's a simple question. Which do you think is more common:

A: "We still have problems of racism, homophobia, and sexism in our society"
B: "We still have problems of racism, anti-gay bias, and sexism in our society"

You seem to be missing the most obvious of parallels.

Actually it was a breeze. It was mostly a matter of remembering acronyms I hadn't used in 30 years. Reading a couple of sentences was usually enough. ("ASA is angle side angle... congruent triangles... ah, I remember...")

What was slightly more challenging was helping her last year with Alegebra I because the new common core standards required specific ways of arriving at the answer. But that was actually fine, too; she was usually just confirming that her answers looked correct and I could figure out from her explanation what was expected in the "show your work" section.

She's only entering 9th grade this year so I don't anticipate any real problems until 12th grade statistics (which I never took).

Emphasis mine. And I'm just leaving this here as a breadcrumb for the future.

https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...&postcount=374