this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Post: Uses the word normies in a positive sense and literally says it's great that gaming is more accessible
Fediverse: Is this a neckbeard?
It's amazing that a non-slur single word can get y'all so fucking bent out of shape. It was worth a double take, but not shitting on the entire post. It's literally a post about a non-traditional gamer / not-power-user / etc person finding a sense of community and fun because of the rise of handhelds. Is shutting down that discussion over one word worth more than seeing the good in recent trends?
I hope we continue to see more good handhelds get made - I'd personally love a Steam Deck, but seeing Valve get some good competition would be good for the technology (not you, Apple / Meta). Maybe I'm just too old, but I'd love to see slide-out keyboards again...
The reaction is a bit more like
"B-B-B-BUT THE CONNOTATIONS!!! Bro you just LITERALLY used a word that has PROBLEMATIC CONNOTATIONS because it's ALSO USED by PEOPLE I DON'T LIKE, and that makes you GUILTY BY ASSOCIATION!!! I am PROUD of how I combine purity testing and code switching into a DEFINITELY accurate litmus test, because I think I'm a character from Dune!! I don't know what the FUCK 'context' is but it SOUNDS like something the ALT-RIGHT would care about!!!!"
If I ever caught myself taking an obvious self-effacing remark seriously, I would be so ashamed. Anyone coming into this thread with hurt feelings about the word "normies" is a huge dork and needs go outside.
I would really appreciate if we stopped doing the “if you disagree with my opinion you’re an [insult] and also must be out of touch with reality so I will say you need to go outside” thing. It’s really exhausting. This is Beehaw, the be(e) nice server and I’m kind of getting sick of seeing this kind of snark on a server where the expectation is people being nice to each other.
I was skeptical at “normies” but the overall tone of the post is inclusive, so I’m not the target of your rant because I figured it out. I was able to figure it out because I’m terminally online and have the experience with online posts to know that some people use it as a pejorative and some people use it as a self-deprecating catch-all for people who aren’t too into their hobby.
I also have autism and some people with the condition aren’t as good as me at putting together the connotations of words AND the overall post to figure out the poster’s intentions. And some people aren’t terminally online and have less exposure to seeing this word used. They’ve likely overwhelmingly seen it used as a pejorative, and end up very skeptical of this post. I don’t like the idea that people like me, or that people who might have reasonably arrived at a different conclusion about this, are being told that they’re huge dorks who need to go outside.
Really starting to feel like Beehaw is just like any other online space. I see the same amount of snark and negative assumptions of people who didn’t see something the commenter’s/poster’s way. Sure, it’s free of bigotry, but all the spaces I occupied were already bigotry-free. Even back when I was on Reddit, because in the small subreddits I looked at the few bigots were downvoted to hell and had their comments hidden. (I’m aware that not everyone was lucky enough to only be interested in topics that had easily accessible bigotry-free areas so Beehaw still serves a useful purpose for them.)
Yeah, I get it. Here's the thing though, this specific part:
Those people all have one thing in common: nobody put a gun to their head and said "what's going on with this post? Make the call and post your comment NOW". One thing all we here on the internet do all have in common is the ability to read, and to use our sapience to make decisions about what we read. To say "this seems out of line. Could it be what I think it is, or am I assuming?" By process of elimination, a person either chooses to do that, or chooses to be assumptive. And also:
There is no reasonable way to get to the wrong conclusion.
Ever.
If you're being reasonable, you either find the right conclusion beyond all reasonable doubt, or you concede that you don't have enough information and then move on with your life. The only way to get to the wrong conclusion is to jump to conclusions, because being reasonable requires you to start from the point of "there may be no answer I can find". The people in this thread who got it wrong made assumptions, jumped to conclusions, and defended themselves by being belligerent. That is a fundamental lack of respect for others' intelligence that goes beyond being rude to people and using mean words.
I’m assuming you’re human right now, even though the possibility exists that you are an alien who hasn’t revealed themselves as such and that your alien self prioritizes engaging here instead of talking to the world’s governments. I’m choosing to be assumptive because I don’t care to track you down and try to match your identity to a human person in real life, because I find doing that distasteful even if I never end up exposing your identity to anyone else in the world, and because I am extremely confident that this assumption is correct. But it is still an unproven assumption.
Should I hold the possibility that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog or alien or something in my head because it’s an assumption? Probably not. I should probably assume you are human. People will make assumptions they believe to be reasonable, and people will also call out what they believe to be bad behavior even if they’re wrong.