A Rose By Any Other Name...

Reposted from the "Rants Far and Wide" thread:

Article in question:
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_574332d4e4b0613b512adf37

From FTPC:
one question then
To
Then wear is the federal law for White people and the handicap, Then I
guess white people can still be call Crackers or redneck & the handicap people can still be called retards? by other people right If you gona make a law, count all of people in. Not just some this, or cut out racist names all together , Trust me i have heard them all growing up

sorry but I just think that the bill is unfair and white and the hadicap

So Trump should burn the bill rather than expand it?

Leah Starspectre wrote: Reposted from the "Rants Far and Wide" thread:

Article in question:
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_574332d4e4b0613b512adf37

From FTPC:
one question then
To
Then wear is the federal law for White people and the handicap, Then I
guess white people can still be call Crackers or redneck & the handicap people can still be called retards? by other people right If you gona make a law, count all of people in. Not just some this, or cut out racist names all together , Trust me i have heard them all growing up

There was a bill passed in 2010 removing the term "mental retardation" from all federal legislation, and racially insensitive terminology against Caucasians doesn't currently exist in it.

This bill isn't to outlaw using racial slurs, just to remove them from laws and legislation.

My opinion: cuss at and insult folk all you like, but the First Amendment won't stop them from reporting you to the police for harassment or hate crime. Just because you're free to do/say something, didn't mean you should.

I guess I don't understand why cracker would even be close to the same caliber as oriental and negro.

Like, yeah, being called cracker might hurt your feelings but it doesn't have the historical weight of dehumanization that oriental and negro have.

Leah Starspectre wrote: This bill isn't to outlaw using racial slurs, just to remove them from laws and legislation.

My opinion: cuss at and insult folk all you like, but the First Amendment won't stop them from reporting you to the police for harassment or hate crime. Just because you're free to do/say something, didn't mean you should.

First correct all this does is change the wording in federal laws and guidelines. A fairly meh bill frankly.
Secondly if someone reported you for one incident as you just described in the US they could be charged with filing a false report or ignored. Because harassment is systemic or continued abuse or contact, and a hate crime has to be harassment, violence, or threats based on race, religion, or sexual orientation etc.

Yes simply because you can do something does not mean you should but that also does not make it a crime nor does it mean it should be a crime.

fine I will shut up

Leah Starspectre wrote: Then wear is the federal law for White people and the handicap, Then I
guess white people can still be call Crackers or redneck & the handicap people can still be called retards? by other people right If you gona make a law, count all of people in. Not just some this, or cut out racist names all together , Trust me i have heard them all growing up

Honestly, how many of us have read US law codices and said:

Citizen wrote: Oh damn, I'm offended that this law from 100+ years ago uses *insert descriptor*

I haven't, so I'll defer judgement to them.

It doesn't change the laws at all in a pragmatic view, and really just seems like smoothing over a couple senators' butthurt. I really haven't ever been offended by someone calling me a cracker, honky, etc (it has happened a few times), but I can understand how minorities might still feel those words are stigmatised (even though the remaining vestiges of systematic racism are self perpetrated imo *for a different discussion*).
Mental retardation is actually a very nice, concise, and accurate description of cognitive disabilities, so you can't really paint a turd gold and make a ring out of it.

Tl;dr
Why do you feel qualified to make a token change to legislation? Why are you even offended?

FTPC wrote: fine I will shut up

I don't think anyone's saying shut up. Clearly you've raised an issue that's important to people. Please, do speak up.

As someone who takes issue with policing language I am in a position where I can both defend and attack the bill.
First of all, as others already pointed out, nothing about this bill bans those words from the dictionaries, or can be used to censor literature, poetry, lyrics, movies or games so it does not actually affect anything in anybody's daily life.
But then that is of course also the objection: I understand that the President is on his last days in office and can politically afford doing pretty much anything short of starting nuclear wars, but given how little the bill affects anything, was it really worth anyone's time, let alone tax money, to sit down and let the entire nation know just how much race is on the minds of their elected officials?
Of course there is neither anything wrong with the new terms and we should be free to use them in legal text (and outside of it) as much as we please, including replacing the old ones. I just think that it is pointless. Words have all the power over us that we are willing to bestow on them and not one bit more. Those who choose to stay ontop of the language and with the substance will hardly be affected (though knowing the internet an audible subset will no doubt complain an awful lot about the evil communist libtard censorship machine) and the more vocal subset of those who choose to be governed by words instead will within the week flood their blogs with how the new words are even more offensive to them than the last and how a bill like that is no solution to the systemic racism penetrating our culture, but only serves to oppress them even more.
Now I wouldn't say that on every scale there is a middle point nor that the middle path, be there one, is strictly better than either extreme. Partly that is because I don't believe that it is indeed always so, but partly because the Rebel way of peeing everyone off has at times more charm in my eyes than the Jedi way to mediate things. So in that spirit, instead of saying both sides have a point, I'll stick with both sides are full of poop.