@serious-fase:

better to have loved and been raped than to never have been loved at all. that's my silver lining. also, it is both a joke and my opinion, as i both love and hate my now deceased rapist. yeah, i'm being cheeky but so wut.

too complicated for me to give a shit if my fucked up life and sense of humor triggers someone. try sitting in group therapy with me, sucka. fuck your conservative sensitivity. boo fucking hoo. it's rape. it happens. people get over it and laugh. we don't have to live like goddamn trolls under a bridge just because we are rape victims. honestly, stfu.

i wrote something similar in a therapy session after forgiving my rapist and being annoyed at people that coddled me because i'm a "victim". great, i'm a victim? fuck you.

honestly, if you're not over your rape trauma, don't watch a fucking rape joke video. JESUS. if the world wasn't so overly protective of this shit, maybe we wouldn't be laden with our constipated emotional issues and ineffectual pharmacological solutions which turn into accidental overdose victims every goddamn day. if you can't laugh, that's when you die.

your psychiatrist and therapist and all those tools that convinced you to take all of those drugs and wear the cap of the victim: FUCK. THOSE. PEOPLE.

OOOOORRRR if you like self worth at the cost of a censored life of half triggered social anxiety: Riiiiiiiiiiide the train to proper thoughts and chilled out operational defintions that make doing business and living healthy in corporate america a snap! just shame people for laughing at things that hurt you. and convince others that not shaming others into this is not right. oooohhh, that's the moral thing to do!!!

yeah, no thanks on that one -- laughing at what hurts me most is the only thing that gives me the will to keep living. you wanna shame me for laughing at my problems? that's a bunch of HORSE SHIT. talk about rape -- let's talk about the rape of our fucking minds every fucking day by institutions that teach us this bullshit philosophy.

i'm just tired and hungry -- and i had a good fucking laugh at this video. before you respond to me, fuck you, don't bother. i don't wish to discuss how i deal with my victimization through humor and even if you do -- not reading it

When they said he "can't make jokes about rape" what they perhaps meant was "he can't make _jokes_ about rape".

Its dangerous ground. Not saying it shouldn't be walked on, but if you go there with the kind of self-righteous free-speech stuff it always fails to amuse me. I know your joke is offensive. I heard it. When you tell me how offended some ppl were it just sounds like a boast, and don't that sour the whole thing a bit? I mean, maybe I'd feel differently if I thought any controversy was in danger of censoring his material rather than fueling it.

but w/e. No accounting for taste. People still occasionally link me Ahmed the Dead Terrorist, and while that is certainly less risque than the whole rape thing it is a total deal breaker. It's just before "using momentarily to describe something as occurring imminently rather than as something that will be occurring for only a moment" and after "sleeping with my best friend". pet peeves innit.

"Letting them know that you're about to have a lecture on very sensitive material is totally fine. I mean, I've done that."

Then congrats, you're OK with trigger warnings.

And like most instances where people panic about them, Oxford hasn't made any sort of official policy. Professors are able to do so at will or ignore the use of the warnings all together. Much like they have been doing for years and years.

Curious how victims of sexual assault that often develop PTSD for periods following are somehow "coddled censors", yet the same doesn't apply for any sort of accommodation for other mental or physical ailments. We don't see people freaking out about warnings of flashing lights in various media for the epileptic, we don't mock the soldier suffering from PTSD who asks for accommodations, and we don't mock the migraine sufferers who avoid certain situations, food, etc to prevent attacks.

But somehow, the physical effects triggered by certain stimuli of a lingering sexual assault is different. Better alert the news media, the PC police rape survivors are here to ruin everything with their asks for "Hey, maybe consider my physical issues?"

@enoch, words are important. You should know as you seem to be unable to edit any of them out.

Briefly (because responding to your entire post would put us considerably closer to the entropic death of the universe) yes, I used to respect Frys opinions, now I don't. This is called changing your mind in light of new evidence.

Previously he was eloquent and compassionate, saving his ire for those deserving of it. Here he's just spiteful and grouchy, and his target is abuse victims??

As I said, even he realised how completely wrong he was.

But more importantly, you (and everyone else on this particular"anti-PC" bandwagon) seem to have confused criticism with censorship.

Go back and read my posts. Did I ever call for him to be censored? No, I responded to what he said and called it stupid. That is the essence of free speech.

I don't even fully disagree with him on a lot of his points. I don't really believe in "safe spaces" (I can understand the desire for them, but university is not an appropriate venue for them. I'm not keen on trigger warnings either, but OTOH, I haven't suffered that kind of trauma, so ultimately, I really don't think they do any harm, (although I would argue that a few seconds research should render many of them unnecessary). I would certainly never say that you can't study Titus Andronicus in class, but I don't see the harm in warning a rape survivor of the content either.

Basically, you and he are inventing boogeymen. There are a few instances of stupidity out there, but they are always there.

As I've said before, the "dangers of PC" are vastly outweighed by the dangers of people using the so-called dangers of PC as an excuse for racist, sexist bullshit. This is how it works. They get to say their shit and we get to call them on it.

I was always amused by W.C. Fields exclaiming "Godfrey Daniels!" to get past the censors.

Heh, I made a similar argument years ago to a friend of mine but I wasn't so harsh on the common people.

I don't think it is so much that people are sheep as it is the fact that the system is designed to keep people as preoccupied as possible with their own survival so that they simply can't afford to be truly political activists.

Think about it--in the U.S. you can be legally fired from your job, for example, for expressing political opinions your boss disagrees with. It isn't a freedom of speech issue because freedom of speech only prevents the government from censoring your speech--not private business. Hell, it doesn't even have to be a political opinion. When someone wears an ostensibly "offensive" Halloween outfit and pictures of it show up on the Internet, they can be fired without having any kind of recourse.

Now you add on top of that how the middle class has been eroded away. A lot of families need dual incomes just to survive. That means you also need to pay for childcare if you have kids. Prices have increased but wages haven't kept pace. Now add debts on top of all this, whether it be from college loans, credit cards, car payments, mortgages, or whatever.

What you get from all this is a society where, as bad as things are in Washington, it's not bad enough for people to risk their already precarious circumstances by boycotting work to attend protests or engaging in some other form of extreme activism that would probably be required to effect real changes. A lot of people are one bad circumstance away from, if not bankruptcy, then at least a drastic lifestyle shift where they'll lose most of their personal belongings and possibly dreams (like having their kids go to college).

So things plod along pretty much the way they always have, with those in power continuing to consolidate that power and see how far they can push it. Barring college students with pretty much nothing to lose (they have both the free time and probably economic freedom to protest and engage in political activism), the best most people can do is gripe about things on the Internet.

Let's remember he's a comedian, it's pretty facile to overlook the fact that he has to be both entertaining and funny regardless of the message he wants to get across. It is extremely difficult to be funny enough to attract widespread popularity as a comedian and at the same time exhaustively cover a nuanced topic to deliver the most devastatingly convincing points.

I know it's that difficult because no one can do it. Ricky Gervais tries to do it sometimes but he either sacrifices the comedy in lieu of the message or vice versa. Who is to say if he would be as popular as he is now if he didn't do that?

So then is it better to make the perfect point to a smaller number of people, or to make a point to a lot of people and hopefully inspire them to take an interest or discuss it? Well, here we are discussing it, so i think he probably achieved exactly what he wanted to.

Carlin said that if the context is right, any word is fine. But in your "stupid" example, you try to discredit Carlin by describing a context which is clearly not right. So it turns out this is just a strawman argument. He didn't say he wants people called stupid (or retarded) or n-word like the old days, he said that words like retarded and n-word are ok in context. I don't know how you can disagree with that. I also don't know why i censored the n-word because the context was right, but it felt a bit gratuitous when i wrote it.

Well, that's the problem.

The thing about free expression, as you know, is that our freedom to play the game is just as much at issue as their freedom to make it.

When the enemy succeeds, through whatever disincentive complex you don't want to call force, in blocking the production of art to which they're ideologically opposed: it isn't only the company or its creators who are harmed. It's the entire world they're censoring, and then we have to live in the fucking thing.

You're right with me up to the point we reach the kinds of censorship you happen to support.

What's the penalty for incurring the ire of the social justice elite? Well, only that you'll be branded a sexist or whatever by the entire gaming media, perhaps have your Twitter account banned or your videos taken down from YouTube, or maybe you'll just be arrested on false charges of harassment. It's a storm that a strong individual might weather, but from which any company will steer away automatically. Of course it's censorship.

Games are being censored (they came for the japanese bikini simulators and I said nothing...); social media is being censored: Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia and any number of even less reputable sites are being censored - all in response to social justice histrionics. This crybaby, zero-offence, closed-minded, closed-mouthed malaise is damaging to our culture: damaging to art, to academia, to journalism. And if you acknowledge the need for open expression, you will oppose it.

"There is more than one way to burn a book," wrote Ray Bradbury of interest groups taking offence, "...each ripping a page or a paragraph from this book, then that, until the day came when the books were empty and the minds shut and the libraries closed forever." You don't recognise any of this?

Yes, 'critics just don't have the talent to create' is a tired old fallacy and I regret echoing it, but there I was thinking particularly of the likes of Wu and Quinn: loathsome reptiles and degenerates whose own creative efforts are so miserably inept that to garner sales, patreon donations, and fraudulently positive reviews they resort to pretending themselves the brave minority voices raised against the misogynistic, LGBT-phobic, uni-racial establishment - in an industry that has never actually had any of those problems.

As for Anita Sarkeesian; that liar, mountebank, fascist collaborator, and 21st century Jack Thompson; that professional victim and demagogue who harnesses manufactured outrage for profit; or in the most generous possible light, that half-educated nincompoop who somehow rode a tide of hysterical activists-without-a-cause to a broadcast platform for her worthless, narcissistic rambling:
It isn't the fact of her fuck-witted critique to which the gaming community so righteously objects but the baffling inaccuracies and outright slanders therein, her self-promotion via false claims of harassment, her attacks on artistic expression and internet freedom.

And these are exactly the kind of sub-intellectual trash who will presume, against all standards of rectitude and conscience, to instruct their betters on what kind of jokes they're allowed to tell.

You never cede an inch to these fucking people. That's how you get Mary Whitehouse, or the Comics Code Authority, or McCarthy, or the FCC, the BBFC, the OFLC, the IWF.

I was right with you up to this point. I'm going to give you a the benefit of the doubt and assume that was a typo rather than a pointless antisemetic tangent and address the point directly.

Criticism of a piece of art does not equal desire to suppress or censor that art. I thought Twilight was a fucking awful piece of writing; and yeah, part of that was because of the horrendously misogynistic abstenience promoting bollocks. Would I ban it? Fuck no.

Sarkeesian and her ilk 100% have the right to criticise lazy sexism in video games, and they don't have to "have the skill to make themselves" to criticise it.

There's a difference between dictation and criticism.

Wait, a sexy g****y* costume? Has she even seen traditional Romani garb?

(*Holy shit this is the first time I've ever seen gypsy censored out - I mean, it's obviously racist and antiquated, but I've always seen it as more akin to 'colored' - racist and antiquated and shouldn't be used, but not so offensive that it makes your ears bleed if you accidentally hear it)

There is absolutely no suppression.
It's not analogous to 'banning books', it's more like not checking out and reading certain books, or certain authors. No author has the right to force their 'work' on others. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose.
You simply don't have a right to 'be acknowledged'. That is not a right. EDIT: Freedom of speech is not the freedom to force others to listen.
You absolutely SHOULD be able to remove someone from your personal existence. As you said, there are even laws to do it in real life, which actually effects the actions of the other party, unlike this, which is more like blocking their phone number and emails at best. Do you think it should not be possible to block phone calls and emails?
How do you find that offensive? Why do you feel that a person's right to force their views on another person outweighs that other person's right to NOT have a person's views forced on them?
Again, NO ONE IS SILENCED. How do you not get that? To censor, you must hide the work from OTHERS, not simply not look at it.
I clearly explained the reasons I asked for it, you just don't get it for some reason.
The behavior you described is exactly what was happening, but was done in such a way that the moderators said it didn't rise to the level of banning or even hobbling them (although I still can't understand how, since at least one of them was repeatedly using the N word, others using the C word to describe any woman, others making nasty personal insults, etc.) Since ban and hobble weren't happening (now ban, THAT's censorship...but for cause), something else was needed, this was it.

@lucky760 @newtboy

Censorship according to the internet: "the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts."

I see public internet communication as a constantly published work of the human intellect, therefore all digitally published and public communication is media and therefore subject to censorship -- and Videosift now offers a form of individual censorship to its members, not simply the acceptable ignore feature which allows you to check the communication if you so desire.

It bothers me that people would completely block out other people's published work -- and not just their published work but their very existence -- for the same reason that it bothers me that people ban books I don't read at libraries. Mein Kampf is still a book, a poorly written book which glorifies hatred, but still an important part of human literature.

You can choose not to read it, but you can't censor it's existence from reality. Not without burning every copy and then erasing every digital copy. Though perhaps in the future an algorithm will be available which does something similar on an account wide level, visually removing all unfavorable literature and blocking people's facial features, making it so that that person and their communication might as well not exist. But I wouldn't want it to be nullified from my vision while walking through a library, anymore than I would want to nullify a person's existence who offends me; and by extension I believe the freedom to exist and to be acknowledged is an important freedom that we take for granted. You should NOT be able to remove someone from your personal existence. Yes, there are laws in place to do this, but they require criminal abuse to come into effect.

There are greater implications of this type of censorship, that perhaps do not apply directly to the Sift in it's short temporal existence and small community. But it's still an offence to my sense of justice in the realm of communication that such a thing is possible. Even the < ahref="http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-04/14/google-algorithm-predicts-trolls-antisocial-behaviour">troll algorithm isn't intended to ban or censor trolls outright, but rather to detect problematic people and find a way to limit the harm they do to a community without removing them from a community.

I think it's one thing if you want to prevent someone from posting on your profile -- which is what should actually be an option (if it isn't already) -- but to silence their voice in video comments is a high form of censorship that I fundamentally stand against. I quite enjoyed some of what Chilngalera had to say; not always and often he offended me -- but not enough to desire to remove him from my existence. I don't think anyone except violent/sexual offenders deserve that. If he vocalizedd violence and sexual threats, why would he still be in the community at all? And if he's banned, why do you need to have an option to block out people's existence?

I was employed for many years to police several massive online roleplaying games, and an ignore feature was a widely accepted form of preventing harassment -- but when it came to erasing the person's avatar or their character's physical body from the game, we always voted against such outright blotting out of a human being. Our rational was and is to this day that if the person cannot communicate to you via explicit words, their presence is an acceptable form of nonverbal communication and a reminder that they are a human being in the community, even if verbally hobbled -- because at that point they have no means of articulating hurtful words.

But to erase that person's presence is a greater act against both the human spirit and human expression as to be a reprehensible act in an of itself. Unless they commit such atrocious behavior in the form of real life physical threats of violence, constant racial/sexual slurs (in a bucket system of soft banning leading up to a permanent ban) or other forms of insidiousness, preserving their humanity is more important to a community than erasing another human being.

First, it's not censorship in any way shape or form. Not reading someone's post is simply not what the word 'censorship' means.

Second, it's actually not what people said about me that got my goat (mostly...Chingalera did make numerous personal attacks though), it was what I saw as repeated intentional provocation, racist, misogynist, and other hateful postings that, while they were designed to not cross the line and get the people banned, were certainly not what I come to the sift to read. When those posts were unavoidable because of others replying/quoting, even though the posters were ignored, it made the sift a place where reading the comments section was becoming intolerable. Now I don't have that problem.
(there are also a couple of people I ignore because they asked me to, not because they were nasty. I do wish I had the option to select who's totally ignored, or at least a way to un-ignore those on that list, but no solution is perfect, and this one was the best I could think of that was possible.

Once more I'll thank @lucky760 for his work helping me with this, it kept me from leaving the sift...I'll leave that for you to decide if that's a good or a bad thing.

My question for you, why does my not reading a few sifter's posts make you think someone has been censored anywhere besides my screen?