Quote:
Originally Posted by browni3141
... You're not just shutting down discourse with r-words. You're shutting down discourse with anyone who wants to avoid the toxicity of politics, including some of those who may agree with you...
First, someone who mentions the r-word, or any other word for that matter, isn't "shutting down discourse". When discourse is "shut down" in these kinda situation, that's always 100% because somebody else is the one shutting down discourse
as a reaction to hearing that word.
Example:
A: Who's that lady over there?
B: You mean that c***?
A: I'm not going to talk to you if you use that kinda language!
Second, shock can be just as effective as coddling.
For example, let's say we're talking about a bilateral face to face chat, dude A comes in saying "I don't see anything wrong with ALEC style voter id laws", and dude B wanted, for whatever reason, to jawbone A into changing his mind.
Well, B has lots of options. One is to say: "Dude, those laws are r-word". Some
non-zero percentage X of A's in the real world are going to respond "Tell me more", and will eventually change his mind. And sure, some
non-zero percentage Y of A's will get so bitter having to had heard the r-word that they'll shut down the discourse (and won't change their minds).
It's flat out idiotic to assume X is always zero, and Y is always 100%, for all possible dude A's.
OK, now let's consider the case of an interwebs forum... where there are several A's and several B's all chatting as a group. If our B's are each 10% likely to say "those laws are r-word", what's our odds that no B will do so? Well... one B it's 90%, two B's it's 81%, and at 20+ B's it getting to be a lock.
What this means is that all A's are going to hear "Those laws are r-word", and also all A's are also going to hear whatever the equivalent coddling response might be etc/etc/etc. Therefore...
any successful tactic to change some of the A's minds in this kinda venue simply can't depend on all the A's being coddled all the time.
Got it?