Sure you can, you just recognize that the person saying it is a very different kind of person.
Who was actually offended by Terry’s schizophrenic ramblings? Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad? Is it racist or just nonsense?
“Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
I don’t think it’s remotely the same thing. What comfort are you sacrificing for the disabled in the real world? On the pseudo anonymous internet it’s impossible to tell whether you’re dealing with a very different type of person or just a troll hellbent on sabotaging your community. When the quality of discourse is in the dumps, who caused it or why won’t matter when folks have lost interest in engaging with that community any longer.
It was very, very easy to tell that Terry was a “very different type of person” and not just a troll hellbent on sabotage. Nearly any post from him had a particular word salad (or a link to such word salad on his TempleOS page) that was readily recognizable as a sign of mental illness, and I’ve never in my decades of following news-for-nerds sites seen a troll emulate it.
Obviously you don't have "showdead" set to "yes", because I do, and I see mentally ill racist people posting the n-word and other unhinged hate speech word salad to Hacker News all the time.
Are you saying we should un-ban them all too, just because they are obviously insane?
And that all you have to do in order to openly and repeatedly harass anyone you feel like with sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti semitic hate speech is to act insane?
> when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality
Implicit in this question is the idea that everyone viewing the thread is on the same page about why the person is spewing racist crap. This is never the case.
Imagine you stumble upon a brand new forum, where you know nothing about the regulars or years of built-up social dynamics. You find someone making racist remarks, and everyone is just... fine with it. You have finite time before you die: you're not going to wait around to see if there's a good reason for it. The reasonable thing to do is write it off as a forum that tolerates racism and move on with your life.
What do you want to do, flair people with "kind of crazy, don't worry if they say racist shit sometimes" labels? How are you planning to verify these people and tell them apart from people who just want to say racist shit? I guarantee there are a lot more of those than there are Terry Davises. This is, to put it gently, not scalable.
I've seen this is at small scale, too. Tolerance leads to the problem getting worse over time. You need to stand up for your rules of conduct, and hope the offender learns the right lesson from it. If not, that's not your responsibility. Your responsibility, as a group leader or admin, is the environment everyone shares.
>The missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed," but around whom the group chooses to work by discreetly warning newcomers of their behavior, rather than address them and their behavior openly. The "missing stair" in the metaphor refers to a dangerous structural fault, such as a missing step in a staircase; a fault that people may become used to and quietly accepting of, is not openly signposted or fixed, and that newcomers to a social group are warned about discreetly. [...]
>Meaning: The analogy of the missing stair makes it clear that the problem is the predator (the missing stair) and that the solution is stopping the predatory behavior (fixing the stair).
>An article about industry sexual harassment on comics news site ComicsAlliance posed the question: "Which one of these statements makes more sense to say: 'These people need to find more ways to stop people from harming them.' OR: 'These people should stop causing harm.' If you ever find yourself saying the former instead of the latter, take a moment and ask yourself why."[3]
>In a 2014 post on the anti-rape blog Yes Means Yes,[4] lawyer Thomas MacAulay Millar wrote that the missing stair analogy was consistent with his understanding of rapists' motivations and behaviors, based on research carried out by clinical psychologists David Lisak and Paul M. Miller, and by Stephanie K. McWhorter, a researcher with the U.S. Naval Health Research Center. Millar wrote that while a small number of rapists are "one-timers" who may be making a mistake or are confused about consent, the majority are repeat offenders, averaging six rapes each.[5] "We need to spot the rapists," Millar wrote, "and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They don't accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that's where they end up."[6]
> Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad?
Yes. Absolutely. 100%. While I get what you're saying, it's not on the recipient of an n-bomb to look up the person who just called them the n-word to judge their mental competency.
> “Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
I vehemently disagree. I can't think of any way that making accommodations for wheelchair friendliness inconveniences anyone. The doors and aisles are wider? That's great when I'm carrying a large box! Text is printed largely and in high contrast for people with vision impairments? Yay, now I can read it more easily!
I'm not saying Terry was a bad person. However, his illness caused him to say some outlandishly awful stuff to people. Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
> I can't think of any way that making an accommodation wheelchair friendly inconveniences anyway.
Well, I've sacrificed a heck of a lot of great parking spaces to accommodate the differently-abled.
> Why should they have to endure having those epithets hurled at them?
I contest that the mere act of reading or hearing certain words could be construed as a task of "endurance" - one is perfectly free to avoid reading or hearing such things if one finds them overtaxing.
On the other hand, if one chooses to "endure" for a moment, one might realize that the schizophrenic delusions of a madman have little bearing on the exact epithets being "hurled" (hurled where? Nowhere in particular, unless one glows in the dark!)
Sticks and stones... RIP Terry. I also don't mind that he was banned from here though, as much as I'm for unfettered speech, if the person in charge decided they didn't wish to host his, that was their prerogative. Terry certainly had other outlets.
Would you be this hard-line on a tourettes sufferer with coprolalia? Society seems more ready to make concessions for them. Terry was closer to the illness "uncanny valley" for some, I guess.
My father had schizophrenia, and my wife has tourettes.
It's a completely different scenario. Someone with tourrettes knows what just happened. They're probably deathly embarrassed and apologetic.
In the schizophrenic case, they're being aggressive, hurtful, belligerent -- no one is obligated to sit through that. There's no reasoning with them, there's not even a discussion happening.
If the sufferer was repeatedly and unapologetically throwing n-bombs at specific people, yes, of course.
I'm sympathetic to Terry. His illness turned him into a right bastard, though. If someone's illness caused them to punch people, I don't want to be around them because I don't want them to punch me. It's not because I think it makes them a bad person. I still don't want to be punched.
And darned if I'm going to be the one to tell a black person that they have to let someone call them the n-word repeatedly without wanting that person to go away.
> it's not on the recipient of an n-bomb to look up the person who just called them the n-word to judge their mental competency.
This is absolutely true, but the context of the conversation was how community members and leaders could/should "manage" such a person, not as much how should the victims of mentally ill drive by retorts respond.
Who was actually offended by Terry’s schizophrenic ramblings? Is the n word really that disturbing when used by someone without a firm grasp on reality and in the midst of a word salad? Is it racist or just nonsense?
“Rule are rules”… well, people in wheelchairs get a different set of rules and I’m perfectly fine sacrificing some of my own personal comfort to make accommodations.
Why isn’t this the same with mental illness?