The original post by @spujb@lemmy.cafe was a woman wearing a shirt that says “Italians do it better”. Someone asked what they do, and drag explained the joke as best as drag understood the intention, though drag disagrees that Luigi killed that CEO. It’s not a call for violence, it’s an explanation of a joke. Other people interpreted the joke the same way.
Less than an hour later, Flying Squid banned drag for that explanation, and for saying Luigi is not guilty. According to Flying Squid, referencing the CEO shooter case and saying Luigi didn’t do it is a call for violence. Expressing support for Luigi Mangione is a bannable offense on LemmyShitpost.
EDIT: The Picard Maneuver responded to drag’s appeal and reversed the ban. Drag will be deleting this post as it is no longer relevant to the current state of affairs on Lemmy Shitpost.
I’m going to drop a bit here. Normally, I don’t take bait like this, but I think it relevant to the overall question of whether or not the posted event was power tripping in that it goes to evaluation of the person making the post, in the context of their pronoun proclivities.
Neopronouns are a pain in the ass. They aren’t a bad thing in and of themselves. They make people think. That’s good by itself, but unfortunately, they don’t work beyond being an interesting and compelling thought experiment. They’re never going to be respected because of how the brain works with language patterns. Well, but in English anyway, your could probably get them working in Esperanto, or other languages, but since each neopronoun needs integration and conjugation as it arises, you can’t make it part of early language development in English without also screwing up normative language acquisition even more than English already does.
Drag knows this. Drag may or may not agree, but drag has to know this because it’s evident across the board, in almost every situation where it comes up.
And that is where this post becomes one where the mod accused of power tripping, isn’t.
See, there’s this thing called shit stirring. It isn’t the same as rage baiting, or trolling, though it overlaps some, and very commonly overlaps with sealioning. And that is what drag does a lot of, shit stirring.
Now, as I said before, I don’t think the ban was about the specific comment made in this case, but as a result of repeated shit stirring by drag. Drag may not consider it shit stirring, and may have even convinced themselves that it isn’t. But drag has a long habit of making targeted posts that are worded in just the right way to claim plausible deniability of trolling, but are very obviously going to stir shit.
Why? No clue. Could it be some fundamental disconnect where drag just doesn’t get Edgar they’re doing? Maybe. I’ve met people that stir shit and think they’re just having a conversation.
Could it be that they think they’re doing something socially motivated? Maybe. I’ve seen people play word games and sea lion with a seemingly genuine intent the make people think. Alas, it ends up eventually failing because it’s a dick move. Nobody is going to be able to consistently nail every attempt at it. So they’ll end up just being a dick here and there instead. They lean too hard into the bit and it flops.
Could it be a troll akin to what has been done before, where by pretending to advocate for neo pronouns, the troll is actually making a mockery of trans people in general? I kinda doubt it myself. Drag does tend to advocate for trans rights overall, so it doesn’t add up to a malicious troll. Which is separate from whether outi not neopronouns hurt that cause or not (which isn’t part of this, but I’ve seen it pointed to in some drag-related drama).
This might give the impression that I have beef with drag. This is not the case. Until a post like this comes up, I don’t really think about them at all. It’s one of those internet things that’s curious, but effectively meaningless outside the forum it occurs on.
I think the idea is interesting, and it’s made me think harder about neopronouns than I otherwise would have. Didn’t change my conclusions, but that’s tangential.
However, drag, the ban was deserved, just not for the specific comment you made. You’re dead right that what you said was not a call for violence. That it took that long for the ban to happen is surprising, but it really shouldn’t have happened with “calling for violence” given because it’s a bullshit reason. The rest of that ban reason is perfectly valid. You do have a long history of stirring shit, intentionally, or through some lack of social and language awareness. The why doesn’t matter when your written words are still the same as someone would use if they were doing it as a bad actor rather than some naive or tone deaf person with the best intent.
Seriously here, no hate, I’m just telling you that if your goal isn’t shit stirring, that you are way off in your understanding of how English, public discourse, and basic manners work.
Drag would like to make you think a bit more, if that’s okay. Neopronouns certainly do catch on. For example, singular ‘you’ used to be a neopronoun. It replaced ‘thou’. Likewise, singular ‘they’ was a neopronoun ten years ago. It took less than a decade to catch on and become ubiquitous. And ‘it’, when referring to a person, is currently a neopronoun. One that’s very easy to use from a grammatical standpoint, but gives some people trouble, because it feels disrespectful.
You said that neopronouns impair language development. But drag thinks the precise opposite: neopronouns are absolutely essential to the acquisition of proper language skills. You said yourself that drag made you think about the nature of pronouns. Over the past month drag has met a lot of people who think conjugation is a function of grammatical person rather than a function of the individual pronoun. They’re native speakers who don’t understand how their own language works. Because they’ve never been properly challenged.
English is in dire need of more neopronouns, so that adults who think they’ve mastered the language can still learn something. And so that children can have a broader set of experience to draw from to facilitate learning. Otherwise they’ll pick up false assumptions like the conjugation thing.
Making people think isn’t an act of violence, it’s a civic duty. A person who’s stopped learning is practically dead already. Making people think saves lives from monotony and stagnation. And that isn’t to say drag’s identity isn’t genuine. Drag just wishes there were more interesting queer people in the world committing the seditious act that is existing.
Well, I’ll give a brief response now, and let it all percolate in my brain for a while since I’m riding insomnia at this point.
The first thing I notice is that you’ve got a misconception about how languages as they exist came about. Thou/thee to you was a gradual transition. The words used before that were also a gradual transition into thee/thou and other archaic english pronouns.
Every word in every language currently spoken evolved into what they are now, with possible exceptions in isolated languages I haven’t run across.
A neopronoun, by the only definition I’m aware of, is a coined word, it’s created whole cloth, or intentionally changed from an existing word. Thus, “you” has never been a neopronoun unless you’re stretching the term for colloquial usage. Which is fine, but it still negates the idea that current pronouns in common usage were once new. They weren’t, they just had pronunciations shifted over time as languages do.
Secondly, I said that neopronouns impair language acquisition because they add a layer of complexity that doesn’t (typically) match established grammar and usage. By that, I mean that if a pre-verbal child is picking up language from people around them, which is the normative way, the more complex the structure of pronouns, the longer it takes to have the full vocabulary of them, and to understand how they’re used.
Which is where I have an initial thought. Neopronouns could fit in fine if there’s a limited number, but individualized pronouns would greatly complicate early language acquisition, and even early education, though once you reach the stage of formalized education, I dunno that complexity is a good or bad thing, but it does make it take longer and more difficult for the students.
I still say that individual pronouns is an utter fail because it breaks too many social contracts, and requires constant shifting of language in a confusing and energy wasting way. As an example; if I am talking to my friend Bob about drag, then I have to either use drag both as the nickname and pronoun, or choose to ignore it as a pronoun entirely for the sake of Bob being able to understand the sentences. Now, not everyone using individual pronouns made the choice of using one that’s the diminutive of their name (and you may not have done so offline, but you aren’t going by your legal name here, so it’s irrelevant). So, for them it’s less of a cognitive clusterfuck than what drag runs into on lemmy.
But even when you’ve got someone named bigdog, and uses pup as their individual pronoun, the problem exists that there’s extra steps placed in between the two people talking. You have to take the time every time, to set up the frame of reference. As a thought experiment, that’s great fun.
But it’s an utter fail in practice because it’s not something a consensus of people will be willing to do. It just isn’t. It would require convincing not even just those that actively oppose it, but even allies that are just exhausted with it, and the vast majority that don’t care enough at all. Convincing that many people to rebuild not only their own language usage, but formal education as well, all to the dubious benefit of a minority that can’t even agree on a consistent and reliable way to go about using individual pronouns, it won’t happen.
So it remains a thought experiment. An exercise.
Remember, all the shifts from “thee” , “thou”, and"you" to just “you”, and the ones that led up to that, were shaped by consensus. You had prior words that turned into thee and you. Then, people gradually stopped using thee as first person, thou as 2nd person singular and you as 2nd person plural, and switched to just using “you” for all three. Well, that’s what my memory says each word was; I could have switched up which were singular vs plural, but I think you get the point that it was a lot of people changing words they were already using, not replacing those words with new ones.
But you won’t hear me argue that language can’t change. Any language being spoken actively by people will change. It will even change via writing, though it would be slower since we tend to stick to more formal, codified grammar and vocabulary since the age of print came about. My argument is that any given specific change has to pass muster as useful and acceptable to enough people before it happens, and neuter neither neopronouns, nor individual pronouns have a snowball’s chance of that happening.
There’s also an off topic side issue that it’s not the right time to fight for it, but that’s definitely off topic.
Drag thinks we’re confusing a couple of things in this conversation. You’re talking as though the only possible implementation of neopronouns is that everyone has to use them. But as this conversation proves, that’s not true. Drag is perfectly capable of using drag’s pronouns even if you don’t. If we consider the case of neopronouns only being used by people who care more about respect than convenience, then the only problem with them is that grumpy people will start arguments for arguments’ sake. And that can be solved by simply not doing that. It seems to drag that a lot of people are complaining about being forced to put in extra effort to respect drag, while they casually put in extra effort to complain about drag. Drag certainly thinks it would be an improvement if most people did neither.