this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
54 points (100.0% liked)
Lemmy.ca's Main Community
45 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to lemmy.ca's c/main!
Since everyone on lemmy.ca gets subscribed here, this is the place to chat about the goings on at lemmy.ca, support-type items, suggestions, etc.
Announcements can be found at https://lemmy.ca/c/meta
For support related to this instance, use https://lemmy.ca/c/lemmy_ca_support
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Guilty as charged. I'm one of the refugees. :)
Refugees are people whose lives are in mortal danger, and who have lost everything they own for a chance of safety. I wonder if a more tasteful analogy could be drawn.
Yes, it could be. But words can also be used metaphorically.
Sure. I actually called it an analogy, which a shcolar like yourself will no doubt recognize as a form of metaphor.
Lots of words can be used as metaphors. Words like "retard" for example. But sometimes we choose to do better than that.
The dictionary defines refugee as : "a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster." While those could lead to mortal danger, they may only lead to undue suffering. Fleeing one's home to avoid said undue suffering still qualifies as refugeeism, as refugee is defined by the dictionary.
Of course, the dictionary is only a record of observation around how people have commonly use words in the past, not some kind of rule of law. Language is merely a tool, and one that is available to be used by the user as they see fit. Refugee is whatever we want it to be, and from context we understand that refugee here means someone who left Reddit to use Lemmy. How refugee is used in other contexts is irrelevant.
It's irrelevant to you. It is not irrelevant to actual refugees, who are present in this forum. It trivializes their experience. The same way you would not use rape victims as a careless metaphor for whatever your current First World Problem is, you should not abuse refugees in a similar way.
This verbal rape is poorly considered. There is no reason not to use rape as a metaphor when it works. This is like saying I wouldn't butter my toast with a knife because some people have been unwelcomely stabbed. Except I would, because there is no connection between someone being stabbed and me buttering my toast. Words are just a tool. Ascribing emotions to a tool may be something people do, but it does not make sense to.
No doubt there are stabbing victims who are affected by someone buttering toast with a knife, but at some point it has to be their problem to sort out. Society would stop functioning if we had to consider everyone's irrational idiosyncrasies. But we have chosen to live in a functioning society, so that means only problems shared by the collective as a whole are to be considered by the whole. Individual concerns are on the individual to figure out. Like it or not, that is what living in a society entails.
Stopped reading. Thanks for letting me know I'm wasting my time with you.
You come to write comments on an Internet forum when you could be doing literally anything else with your life and you only just now realized you were wasting your time?
Wildfire evacuees ... our house burned down from the uncontrollable wild fires of capitalism and now we have to start a new life somewhere else :(
I'm also a Reddit transplant, still learning the ropes but lemmy seems like a breath of fresh air.