Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

Open Thread, November 1-15, 2012 — LessWrong

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[anonymous]14y80

yeah, one is a monstrous abortion pretending to be its opposite and deluding the eye thanks to the latest scientific techniques, and the other is a weird fruit

This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group. This kind of thing in formal circumstances looks incredibly bad, but that's just it the circumstances aren't formal. These kind of misunderstanding of social norms are easy to stumble into. Maybe a link to an extensive argument in favour of hazing and joke insults among social equals should be put up to avoid this in the future?

I find it kind of funny that the LessWrong site's active users are less racially diverse and have a smaller share of women than the active users and regulars of the unofficial IRC channel yet "sexist" and "racist" jokes on it are also ominously referenced.

Related: Everyones A Little Bit Racist.

MugaSofer14y-40

This is just so utterly over the top I'm mystified that it was taken as anything but ritual insulting for the purpose of bonding/hazing in an informal group.

Hahaha no. That wasn't a "hazing ritual". Not even slightly.

14jbeshir14y

You've been lucky to avoid seeing jokes like this more often when moving around the Internet, then. Over the top jokes at the expense of minority groups are popular when representing actual opinions, not just as jokes to people you already know, particularly in communities where those opinions are accepted norms and the group in question is an acceptable target. The desire to score points often leads to gross caricatures of such acceptable targets being thrown around. It's repugnant, but not that unusual. I've seen plenty of worse things said about gay people when trawling things. To anyone who knows that these opinions aren't actually accepted norms, from time spent in #lesswrong, they're obvious jokes. But for a fairly new arrival, in the absence of this knowledge, and possibly with more experience of genuinely unpleasant communities, it's not an unreasonable interpretation.

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