Kyo is awesome though. He is the reason I'm still even at Comicfury, he makes me feel safe over there. I was attacked by a large group after posting some comments in a post in a CF forum. It was a suicide post and I've almost commited suicide in the past and I told people to not gossip about the post but to reach out to the person! And I mentioned that there are kind people at the Drunkduck. What started as one turned into a whole group of people attacking me. I was so angry I blocked all of those people so they can no longer see me or my comic on comicfury. I believe one of them was an administrator as well, but I did not want anyone who is willing to attack me to see my stuff. If you have any problems you can message Kyo. He is a really nice understanding guy that will listen.

Yep, learned those lessons the hard way.

Jason Moon wrote:
Kyo is awesome though. He is the reason I'm still even at Comicfury, he makes me feel safe over there. I was attacked by a large group after posting some comments in a post in a CF forum. It was a suicide post and I've almost commited suicide in the past and I told people to not gossip about the post but to reach out to the person! And I mentioned that there are kind people at the Drunkduck. What started as one turned into a whole group of people attacking me. I was so angry I blocked all of those people so they can no longer see me or my comic on comicfury. I believe one of them was an administrator as well, but I did not want anyone who is willing to attack me to see my stuff. If you have any problems you can message Kyo. He is a really nice understanding guy that will listen.

I'm on the fence about Kyo. He seems to have a really itchy trigger finger when it comes to banning people, and while I can understand his perspective behind decisions he's made, he otherwise doesn't really seem to listen to reason, or at the very least, give you a chance to defend yourself and tell your side of a story. Plus, learning from Oz and others about his past piss-poor behavior, and how it lead to the inception of CF out of a motivation of spite and revenge, it really explains a lot about why he is the way he is now.

Well it is Kyo's site so his word is God but he honestly is a cool dude! He could have removed me from CF but instead he sent me a mature kind message to talk to me. I really respect that! And he works really hard and keeps up Comicfury with the best intentions.

I got no such courtesy. I was just banned without warning or explanation, and had to reach out to him myself privately to discuss the matter. Even though his concerns were justifiable, my attempts to explain and defend myself basically fell on deaf ears - I even offered to stay off of the forum of my own volition if he would at least continue to allow me to host my comic on CF after I spent months designing and building the site as rebuilding the archive from SmackJeeves; he wouldn't go for that.

Jason Moon wrote:
Kyo is awesome though. He is the reason I'm still even at Comicfury, he makes me feel safe over there. I was attacked by a large group after posting some comments in a post in a CF forum. It was a suicide post and I've almost commited suicide in the past and I told people to not gossip about the post but to reach out to the person! And I mentioned that there are kind people at the Drunkduck. What started as one turned into a whole group of people attacking me. I was so angry I blocked all of those people so they can no longer see me or my comic on comicfury. I believe one of them was an administrator as well, but I did not want anyone who is willing to attack me to see my stuff. If you have any problems you can message Kyo. He is a really nice understanding guy that will listen.

Wait, people attacked you for asking for respect for someone's feelings or because you said nice things about drunkduck? or both?

J_Scarbrough wrote:
wrote:
Plus, learning from Oz and others about his past piss-poor behavior

Don't hold his past against him though please. That was a long time ago and he's grown out of that.

@Genejoke - Both posts angered enough people to cause complaints to the administrators and my posts were deleted.

That's apparently what the circumstances were for me as well (people complaining about posts of mine, that is), but again, in my case, it just resulted in an immediate banhammer from CF and the site I spent months working on to host my comic deleted altogether, with no explanation or anyone reaching out to me to discuss the matter, which, again, lead to me having to contact Kyo directly through his email to inquire about it. Again, I still can understand his reasonings when he did respond to my inquiry with an explanation, but I still found his blase attitude about the whole thing, and my attempts to reason with him falling on deaf ears quite off-putting.

I still consider it a blessing in disguise in hindsight, because for one thing, I did learn a major lesson from mistakes I made, but for another thing, even in spite of my initial reluctance to come here to DD, I'm super glad I'm here now, because DD's community, while smaller, is so much more insular and welcoming, as opposed to CF's community feeling more like high school cliques.

Anyway, to keep this from being derailed into another CF bashfest, I need to address something that's really, really bugging me right now about the English language - specifically, American English, and that's how inconsistent we are with the meaning of our own vocabulary in terms of what's considered politically (in)correct anymore.

For example: for the longest time, the term “queer” was deemed offensive and politically incorrect on the grounds that it was a homophobic slur . . . but there seems to have been a complete 180 in that mindset, so now, apparently it's regarded as the proper/politically correct collective adjective when speaking of people within the LGBTQ+ community. On the flip side, apparently “dwarf” is now deemed a politically incorrect slur against little people, even though it didn't used to be . . . because that's literally the name of their condition: Dwarfism.

It's just so confusing with the way our society and culture just keeps changing meanings and definitions of certain words like this all the time . . . and don't even get me started on the whole pronouns thing; if you legit want to be addressed by certain or specific pronouns because of its what you identify as, that's all well and good, but there are a lot of people out there who are doing this for no other reason than just to try to be trendy and seek attention.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
. and don't even get me started on the whole pronouns thing; if you legit want to be addressed by certain or specific pronouns because of its what you identify as, that's all well and good, but there are a lot of people out there who are doing this for no other reason than just to try to be trendy and seek attention.

Mu pronouns are “I, my” because it's all about ME. Narcissism has crept into in the way some flaunt their choice of pronouns. Really has hurt the whole thing and created lots of resentment and pushback.

In business English I learned last century that if there's any doubt of gender the default is “they ” . This was around the time of the whole shift from the universal “he” for everyone. So just avoid all problems and it's "they.

Language can be a minefield because it is always evolving. I heard it explained like this by a little person: dwarf is from fairy tales and Lord of the Rings. The connotation is that they're not real. Little people are very real and a part of humanity. Midget is in “no man's land ” where it has been embraced by some and utterly repulsive to others like queer

The thing about queer was that it was the rallying cry of the Gay Rights movement back in the 1970s. “We're queer and we're here!” It was all about embracing the slur and making it your own. It also has that connotation about being odd and strange but fun. That's from my being the token “straight” guy working in Macy's men's department. All decidedly gay and queer and here's the token straight guy.

On the “language changes” argument, I recently discovered this:

Originally in english the singular second person was “thou”, whereas “you” was the PLURAL second person.
So it was “thou John”, or “you Americans”, but never “you John”.
At some point the form “you John” came into use, as a form of plural majestatis: a form of strong respect, very formal.
But with time, this became so common that “thou” disappeared.
I think that people now, even in very intimate situations like the bedroom chamber, speak to each other in plural majestatis, and I chuckle.

In italian we have three forms: “tu” is the singular “you”, “voi” is the plural “you”, and sometimes “lei”, the female third peson (“she”) is used.

Informal: “TU sei contento, John”
Formal: “LEI è contento, Mr. Johnson?”
Formal, now out of use: “VOI siete contento, Mr. Johnson?”

During the fascist period, for some reason Mussolini tought that the “lei” form was effeminate, and pushed to substitute it with the “voi” , but perhaps as a reaction now the disappeared and the “lei” is still in use (though declining).
Also Mussolini tought that the “lei” was an effeminate BRITISH influence, whereas the “voi” would be closer to english use.

Language changes costantly, in many ways.

Jason Moon wrote:
@Genejoke - Both posts angered enough people to cause complaints to the administrators and my posts were deleted.

Seems weird that such sentiments would make people angry. Still that's not likely on Kyo, and that he talked to you sounds like a positive.

bravo1102 wrote:
In business English I learned last century that if there's any doubt of gender the default is “they ” . This was around the time of the whole shift from the universal “he” for everyone. So just avoid all problems and it's "they.

I get that, though I do remember being “taught” that the grammatically correct thing to say is, “He-or-she,” because “they” implies you're speaking of multiple people when you are really speaking of just one person whose gender or identity you have no knowledge of.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

bravo1102 wrote:
In business English I learned last century that if there's any doubt of gender the default is “they ” . This was around the time of the whole shift from the universal “he” for everyone. So just avoid all problems and it's "they.

I get that, though I do remember being “taught” that the grammatically correct thing to say is, “He-or-she,” because “they” implies you're speaking of multiple people when you are really speaking of just one person whose gender or identity you have no knowledge of.

“He or she” was too cumbersome. Besides in a lot of business communications you were probably talking to more than one person. Even if addressing an executive, their administrative assistant would probably be the first one to read it and bring it to their attention.

My wife was a legal secretary. It was annoying and demeaning that all the mail was addressed to the partners and used “he/him” when all the actual correspondence was actually done by women.

I went to school just as the usage was changing and it was discussed in class. My sister has been in business and government since the 70's and also tracked the changes and pushed for some of them. Even today there's always the assumption that the communications will be read by a man when in fact most of it is actually handled day to day by women. Irony.

Of course my favorite is when the address line is an obviously female name but the salutation still says “dear sir ” because someone forgot to do some editing. Lol

Still have my business English manual and Fowler's Modern English usage. There are also style manuals for legal communications that my wife still has lurking around the house.

Oh, these issues about what's politically correct or not… You think it's bad in English, what with trying to ban this or that word on grounds of “political correctness” (whatever that means!) or trying to steer the evolution of a language?
Well, it is.
It's just as bad or even worse in languages where words constantly have sex (which, to quote the late Sir Terry, explains a lot about for'n parts).
In English the focus seems to be on certain trigger words like queer, white, black, dwarf, giant, or fag (which is really bad, because smoking cigarettes is bad for your health or something - and it even doesn't mean that in most of the English-speaking world) sun, rain, or whatever (I don't claim for that list to be accurate), and on pronouns.
In German, some people insist on trying to find gender-neutral job designations for firemen, teachers (Lehrer is male, Lehrerin is female, Lehrkraft sounds stuck-up, which it's why it's the official term) and so on, on the grounds that they're afraid it produces a gender-biased image in your head like all firepeople (is that a word?) being male or at least pretending to be so… Nobody has thought of pronouns, so once you use these terms, you'll inevitably get into floundering.
This is raised to an even sillier level by the way Germans try to make the correct use of the language a law, literally.
So to avoid cumbersome terms, German gendering-preachers coined things like the gender star (*) to make all these words that have sex more inclusive (Schauspieler*in - actor/actress; Polizist*in - policeperson, and so on). Nobody likes it, of course. Then, the Rat für Deutsche Rechtsschreibung - a non-governmental committee to keep our language pure and orderly (Ok, I'm being cynical now, I can't help it), which serves as the main authority on this, ruled that this kind of thing just obfuscates meaning and should be avoided. This could have been a relief for non-binary persons since the gender star clearly doesn't include them, but apparently it wasn't.
The current state now is that in some regions and institutions in Germany it's practically mandatory, while in others, like the one I live at, it is explicitly forbidden to use the * when teaching in a public school.
I appreciate that ban, in fact, because this gender-correct language thing really does make everything unnecessarily complicated without really including or otherwise benefiting anyone.
Meanwhile, how not to get into floundering about which pronouns to use remains an unresolved issue…

I do what any decent person in an overregulated environment does: I completely ignore all of it and write and speak just as my forefathers would have, knowing I'm bound to regularly get into trouble anyway, no matter what.
Turns out that everyone around me seems to see it the same way, so no trouble hath ever befallen unto me so far. ;) At the same time, I'm glad I'm required to teach most of my classes in English, so I don't really need to bother with most of it anyway. (On a side note beside the point, that's also because after six reforms in twenty years I'm actually a good deal better at English spelling than at German, now, even if I've lived here nearly all my life.)

On the other hand, nobody in education has ever thought of banning or revising any classic literature yet. The consensus is that a modern teacher being there to put anything troublesome into context is totally sufficient.

On the whole, I think people have become way too sensitive. While being somewhat sensitive is of course a good thing, there is a limit to which you can push it before it becomes another excuse to install a Thought Police.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
It's just so confusing with the way our society and culture just keeps changing meanings and definitions of certain words like this all the time .

You know, so much of that is actually due to ignorance and I suppose, stupidity. :)

Language changes like that specifically because a past generation stops using the words (because they're offensive or out of fashion), younger generations revive them decades later and don't understand what the correct usage was so they mess them up… and the meaning reverses.

You see it time and again.
Like the phrase “people of colour”… If you used that 40 years ago you'd have seemed like such a massive irredeemable racist and it STILL seems extremely racist to me, but that's a “correct” term now.
Though I'll never not see it as being racist XD


But it's not just loaded terms like that, it's normal words for things too.
Take “jodhpurs”- riding trousers with flared thighs and narrow calves. The British popularised them in the late 19th century, taking a traditional style from India which was named after one of their Sultanates. It became a world wide fashion for work trousers, very popular for riding and military uniforms but also farm workers in eastern Europe, and completely unisex, woman worse them the same as men even when trousers were frowned upon for woman, these were perfectly ok.
The style died out in the 1940s and after that its association with German officers in WW2 sealed the coffin. After that the style was only really worn by East German officers and American motorcycle police.

But the NAME “jodhpurs” hung around. People stupidly switched it to riding breaches- the tight leggings people wore for horse riding, and they called actual REAL jodhpurs “breaches”. The silliest name swap ever.
That's been able to change again these days and people are starting to use the names right again.

Ozoneocean wrote:
You know, so much of that is actually due to ignorance and I suppose, stupidity. :)

As the kids say today: you're not wrong.

@oceanzone

It sounds like you are mixing “people of color” with “colored people”, a term much older than 40 years. It could sound racist but the word “minorities” seems a bit more harsh. Words and phrases are invented as needed in the time they are needed and as always its about context in a rapidly changing culture.

some words are so old no one uses them anymore except as answers on Jeopardy and if you try to use them it feels forced or you come off sounding “a certain way”.

Usage also varied place to place. A century ago in British colonies it was Blacks, coloured people (non white or Black) and white. The difference was enshrined in the legal codes.
(The “u” is included in the spelling to reference the legal terminology)

A half century ago, colored people entered use in the USA for non-whites. It was usually used to refer to Blacks but extended to others where there were non-African colored populations. In NY you'd immediately think it was Blacks in LA it'd include Hispanics. And in the American south, any dark skin was considered “colored”. Sicilians were considered colored. Get to the back of the bus.

You can read through the race laws and see how this was all categorized place to place. First laws in America were in the 17th century. By the 18th they were in place across the British Empire. Colored people has neo-colonialist implications that people of color is trying to overcome. I've read a lot on the subject because when I started teaching social studies I was the only white person in the room. I wanted to try to understand it better. I read some of the works the 1619 project is based on. The more aware one is of the historical legacy the more inclined one is to agree with critical race theory.

Many are trying to “decolonize” language so get rid of the terms used by whites to enslave and belittle other groups. As if you can forget about centuries of mistreatment by switching around a few phrases. By the way in the current usage “whites” is not capitalized but “Blacks ” is. As if a capital letter will make up for those centuries of mistreatment. You see we whites are trying to help you! We capitalized the letter of your group! See! Rueful laughter and eye rolling over the legacy of colonialism and slavery.

takoyama wrote:
It sounds like you are mixing “people of color” with “colored people”,

I'm not mixing anything XD
Using “coloured” to describe people in ANY way is racist. Using “minorities” isn't racist though because that specifically talks about population numbers and it's way more useful and descriptive- people who are in minority population groups suffer disadvantage because the majority groups have better access to services, the majority also has more social and cultural power and they use that to advantage over minorities, so it describes all the issues perfectly.

Whereas “colour” just uses the totally made up concept of “racial” differences based on skin tone and legitimises it in the most awful way. It's shocking O_O
That could only have come about in the USA.
Nowhere else would be that self ignorant… I mean every country has a history of racism and inequality, no one is innocent, but the US tends to rationalise and reinvent more than most.

Ozoneocean wrote:

takoyama wrote:
It sounds like you are mixing “people of color” with “colored people”,

I'm not mixing anything XD
Using “coloured” to describe people in ANY way is racist. Using “minorities” isn't racist though because that specifically talks about population numbers and it's way more useful and descriptive- people who are in minority population groups suffer disadvantage because the majority groups have better access to services, the majority also has more social and cultural power and they use that to advantage over minorities, so it describes all the issues perfectly.

Whereas “colour” just uses the totally made up concept of “racial” differences based on skin tone and legitimises it in the most awful way. It's shocking O_O
That could only have come about in the USA.
Nowhere else would be that self ignorant… I mean every country has a history of racism and inequality, no one is innocent, but the US tends to rationalise and reinvent more than most.

Actually the definition “coloured” as I said above was British colonial designation. The concept of the “racial” other goes back to the English colonization of Ireland that preceded America and just extended to America where it was easier to delineate the “other” simply by skin color.
Very English. The Spanish speaking countries are also very color oriented. Cuba for example has words for over a dozen different skin colors. They're very conscious of it.

bravo1102 wrote:
By the way in the current usage “whites” is not capitalized but “Blacks ” is. As if a capital letter will make up for those centuries of mistreatment.

I think that the reason is that “white” is supposed to be the norm, whereas “Black” is capitalized because it refers to a specific subgroup.

It's the same logic of “people of color”: white is a color as much as black is, but it is not counted as “color” because it is supposed to be the norm.

The concept of “minority” is also quite dubious: for example Catholics of other specific denominations would be a “minority” in the USA, but this is not what is meant by the term (that means more something like “disadvantaged minority”), there is a lot of implicit content in the use of these words.

I remember back in college, a group was doing a survey for research and the ethnicity options were:

European American
African American
Native American
Asian American
Etc.

I was so confused by it and didn't know what to check. I ended up checking “other” and writing “Plain Old American.” Never saw an survey question like that before or again.

It's the same logic of “people of color”: white is a color as much as black is, but it is not counted as “color” because it is supposed to be the norm.

Nah, white and black are shades not colours.

The whole language around skin colour and race is messy and inconsistent.

bravo1102 wrote:

Actually the definition “coloured” as I said above was British colonial designation.

I know where and why it originated- it wasn't Ireland, it was India (and Africa) where they used it in the worst way.
But that's history.
The problem is the way it's used now and that's just as bad (to me at least), legitimising racism based on skin tone, it's so icky!!

Even when people try and use it in a positive way, trying to re-own and re-invent it, it can't get away from the fact that it's categorising people by skin tone and the concept of “race”, which is always bad whoever does it.



But this is one of those dangerous topics that can escalate and turn into something bad XD
So it's probably best not to go further.

The delineation of the racial “other” started in Ireland in the 15th century. Defining it by skin color as opposed to culture started with various Black codes in the American colonies and Caribbean in the 17th century. The Virginia and Caribbean Black codes ( which also covered Indigenous peoples) were the models used in other parts of the British Empire. It's fairly well documented in any number of works.

bravo1102 wrote:
It's fairly well documented in any number of works.

I think you miss this?
- "it wasn't Ireland, it was India (and Africa) where they used it in the worst way.“

-I'm not arguing where I thought it ”started“, just that the worst excesses of the British in their institutionalised racism were in India and Africa.

XD


Though racism is as older than humans… Pre-humans killed each other over differences. they mated too but mostly killed. Which is why Denisovans and Neanderthals died out.

The racist term ”blackamoor“ was used from the 1400s onwards all over Europe (in different variations), Mainly to describe north African people but also any ”exotic“ person with a darker skin tone (Arabs, Indians etc.).

And it has to be said that other cultures where Light skinned European people were minorities had racist terms for them as well as other different groups- eg. Indians vs Chinese and so on.

Let's not forget religious differences that also become ”racist“. Like the Endless persecution of Jews and gypsies throughout Europe in the medieval period onwards. Terms like ”buggers, troglodytes, heathens, kafirs, infidels…“ often had religious origins but came to be used as ”racial“ terms (though today many have become generalised insults).


The reason I say America drives this in the modern day is that they incorrectly transpose their own ethic and political situation on all the rest of the world, as if their own issues and history are universal and eternal rather and extremely specific to them (i.e. Slavery of African people and dispossession of the native people peoples was very different in the US to other places as well as immigration patterns in general).


Besides most people have the incorrect idea that racism is ”white people VS everyone else“. Instead it's about demonising and grouping anyone by physical inherited traits that define obvious ethnic differences and imagining that equals a made up idea of a different ”breed" of people (which is a horrible idea!).
-That was especially brought home to me in many conversations with African immigrants. In countries like Mali there are always tensions between dark skinned Africans and Arab Africans, and dark skinned black Africans looking down on light skinned black Africans there, and people with certain names being higher caste etc.
It's a fiendishly complex topic! :(

The typical American and European idea of racism isn't the only one (like they imagine), it's just one of the crudest and most simplistic and the most offensive thing about it is that they think it applies to everyone the same outside of their own countries.
-No, it isn't “white people VS everyone else”, that's just you guys and some places like Australia with roughly majority white populations, but everywhere is different.

/rant XD

I've come to believe the “everybody against whites” came from that it was whites beating up and oppressing every other group for the past few centuries. There's a bit of that kind of paranoia present in 19th century race theory and eugenics. Let the superior whites sterilize everybody else before they outnumber whites or get any kind of advantage over the superior race.

And that is not as rare a point of view as it once was. The internet has led to a ballooning of white supremacy. The US may be leading the way but a lot of other places are working really hard to catch up. The basis of all conspiracy web content eventually leads to racists and various supremacy groups (not just white. All kinds of ethnic groups have their right wing supremacists like Albanians and Macedonians who claim Greece was over run by Turks and they're the true inheritors of Greek culture. Or European Russian slavophiles who insist all of Asia was once a Russian empire and totally deny any achievements by any Asian peoples some even include China in that. Some of these types are the ones who even deny the Holocaust and Stalinist genocides.

There's a meme that if built by people of color they obviously didn't do it without help. But something similar done by white Europeans? They did it themselves. It's worse than you think. Reactionaries will react.

I think maybe I had a psychotic break today. Not sure. It was really weird and like I'm a dream and I was kinda watching myself and time was really slow and sometimes skipped. Totally not high. Also people looked somehow different like I was seeing them for the first time.



Edit
I just realized I described a typical time on thc. But I was sober as all hell