Let's Talk About The Racism Rule *this Time Without Removing This Post Because It's "inflammatory"

[RainSilves]

Let's begin with a look at your rules for your CS:GO Jailbreak server.

• No Cheats, exploits or 3rd party tools that give you an unfair advantage over other players.
  
• No ghosting.
  
• Be respectful to everyone! A certain amount of smack-talk is ok, but do not be disrespectful.
  
• No sexual harassment of female players.
  
• Do not be racist or use racist terms! These servers are for everybody.
  
• No useless spamming of the mic, text, or radio. That means no songs/soundbytes, especially if fellow players are complaining.
  
• No recruiting or advertising for other clans in here.
  
• Do not wear the -hg- / [HG] / HG | tag unless you are an HG member!
  
• No name impersonation of ANYONE, especially not HG members.
  
• No horrid/pornographic sprays (nothing below the belt).
  
• If you are caught trying to crash or lag the server you will be permanently banned.
  

 

"No sexual harassment of female players" is the only thing on here besides your ban on racism. This excludes the serious amount of sexual harassment that male players experience by the casual usage of words like "fa****" that seem to be thrown around all too much. Yet, I can play Dr.Dre's "Bitches Ain't Shit" on full spam on your Jailbreak Server and unless it gets to the part where he says the "N-Word" than It's totally okay. (And I totally do, I go by Ralph Nader The Anal Invader on your servers).

 

However, this blanket ban on racism without a refusal to reject all forms of sexism is stupid. The underlined portion of what I'm copying and pasting is the important stuff here.

 

One form of oppression is not more important or independent from all others. It is not helpful to compare oppressions or to specify which oppression a person feels affects them more deeply. They are all interconnected in our social institutions.

Yep 3, Lovaas, and Elia, Professors @ San Francisco University, 2003.

(Gust, Karen, and John, Journal of Homosexual Studies, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4,, pp. 25-26, JCE)

 

People inhabiting and navigating the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality experience violence and oppression simultaneously based on such systems of social ordering (Kumashiro, 2001; Yep, Lovaas,&Ho, 2001). These systems are neither independent nor additive (Combahee River Collective, 1979/1998; hooks, 1990; Kumashiro, 2001; Lorde, 1984; Smith, 1998; Takagi, 1996; Yep et al., 2001). It is not theoretically useful or pragmatically helpful to compare and rank different forms of oppression. For example, a claim that Asian Americans are more homophobic is futile without specification of the interplay between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and the purpose and basis for such a comparison. Neither is asking an individual to specify a rank order for their oppression (e.g., do you feel that oppression based on your race is more intense than your sexuality or your gender?). According to Weber (2001), race, class, gender, and sexuality are systems of oppression. As such, they are complex (i.e., intricate and interconnected), pervasive (i.e., widespread throughout all social domains), variable (i.e., ever changing and always transforming), persistent (i.e., prevailing across time and space), severe (i.e., serious consequences for social life), and hierarchical (i.e., creation of social stratifications that benefit and provide options and resources for some and harm and restrict options and resources for others). For individuals located at these intersections, the process of “performing the hybrid self†(Muñoz, 1999, p. 138) means negotiating different histories, economic disparities, and sex/gender systems, and experiencing the violence of racism, sexism, classism, and heteronormativity.

 

Let's look at another article, from different scholars.

 

Intersectionality is inevitable—to focus on a single form of oppression makes impossible wider struggles for liberation. This means that your refusal to reject other forms of hate speech is a net WORSE for EVERYONE rather than just not banning the language at all.

Green and Ellison 7/4 (Kai M. and Treva, “Black, queer, trans, and anti-capitalist scholars, activists, and artists based in Los Angelesâ€â€”their byline, Dispatch from the ‘Very House of Difference’: Anti-Black Racism and the Expansion of Sexual Citizenship – OR – We Need to Do So Much Better at Loving Each Other, The Feminist Wire, 7/4/13, http://thefeministwi...ing-each-other/)//LA

The productive tension between sexual citizenship and expansion of militarism, surveillance, policing, and incarceration rely on a discursive and material separation of race from sexuality. This is why for example, queer youth of color can be exposed to extreme police harassment and interpersonal harm even in so-called “gay ghettos.†The very question of whether “gay is the new black†requires and enacts a unconscionable forgetting of the systems of domination and creative destruction that operate in part through a construction of gay and Black as mutually exclusive. These kinds of representational traps attempt to make “equality†for queer racialized sexualities unintelligible and unthinkable as they support the kinds of relations that perpetuate harm and violence, sometimes against the very people they purport to protect. These harmful dichotomies aren’t just uni-directional in flow; they don’t just come from politicians and the HRC but also from us, from how we narrate and define our struggles. In the November 1978 November issue of “The Black Panther†journalist Reggie Major wrote a commentary titled “The Privileged ‘Oppressed,’ in which he criticizes White gay male gentrification in Alamo Square, Haight-Fillmore, and the Mission District. Majors notes that “some Blacks†take issue with the equation of the gay rights struggle with the Black liberation struggle saying: “One of the reasons for this objection is the fact that many gays are involved in exercising White male privilege at the very time they are claiming to be members of an oppressed group,â€[3] Majors points out that White gay males have benefited from racist housing and loan policies by receiving bank loans, which were previously formally denied to Blacks, and taking advantage of the fact that Black-owned properties in Black neighborhoods were appraised at lower values. He makes a call for White gays to be in solidarity noting that Black organizations spoke out against the Briggs Initiative, which sought to bar gays and lesbians from working in California schools. Majors ends the article with a call for solidarity: “There has to be a broad front that pushed for increased human and civil rights for all citizens, and Blacks and gays should be members of that front,â€[4]. The disaggregation of race from gender and sexuality evinced in the separation of “gay†and “Black†helps to cohere the polemic and call to action but also participates in a framework of intelligibility that renders black queerness unthinkable and ignores how White gay gentrification impacts LGBT people of color and poor White LGBT people. When we frame our struggles in ways that ignore the various and complicated ways that harm and violence circulate, it becomes difficult for people to show up as themselves or in some cases to show up at all. Desires for equality have a tendency to move people to become more invested in sameness instead of thinking about the reality of difference. We are not the same. Audre Lorde told us this. Toni Cade Bambara told us this. Gloria Anzaldúa told us this. Marlon Riggs told us this. We are not the same and it is our differences that give us strength. It is our ability to see that our freedoms are all connected and of equal value, but our oppressions while linked are not the same. We must not allow one kind of oppression to displace another in our political imaginaries, especially if that displacement is more of an ideological fallacy than a material reality. For those who understand oppression through one dominant identity, say as a white woman, it might be easy to come together as women to rally around how this society devalues women’s lives and labor, but it might not be so easy to see the ways in which as a white women you can create systems that are oppressive and closed to women of color or people of color in general. We have to do better. Our lenses must be broadened so that at all times we are not only aware of our particular positions of oppression, but also our relative positions of privilege. Understanding privilege is not about guilt, though this is what seems to be happening these days. I don’t need you to feel bad about what happened during slavery or what’s happening with the expansion of the prison industrial complex. Guilt is paralyzing and it doesn’t produce much movement or change, it’s just stifling. Relinquish your guilt and use your privilege to change the structures that produce that privilege. Don’t include me in your privileged ranks, it means nothing if I can’t take my people with me. Barack Obama as first Black president means nothing if Black people as a class remain in crises. This essay begins with recounting places and moments of injury. These stories are the kinds of stories that become unspeakable and unknowable in a discursive order and model of reform that privileges single-issue politics over mobilizing around the material conditions that produce trauma, vulnerability and death. There are certainly reforms to be made, but we need to become more aware of the places and people we are asked to give up in order to receive something that could easily be retracted. We don’t have to become Black. We don’t have to become gay. But we must be able to build beyond our own individual positions whether we stand in the intersection or not, we have to develop a model for recognizing the intersection, these moments when race, gender, class, citizenship, sexuality and ability collide (and they are always colliding). We must look for those who are lost; those who we’ve been asked to forget about because they are not our own. To dwell in the house of difference is to think, plan, and create with the intersection in mind and in heart. The dispatch has been sent. Will you heed the call?

 

The point I'm trying to make here is that either A. Your refusal to reject all forms of this offensive language refuses to acknowledge that intersectionality exists within the sphere of social justice, and that allowing the rest of the "isms" besides racism ignores that they exist, and means that since they are invisible, they becomes worse. You don't get to just claim that a word like the N-word is any better or worse than a word like bitch or fa**** just because "it's used more often". You ignore the structural violence you commit to those queers or women who want to play but have to do with this language.

 

Or B. You don't give a flying fuck about social justice. Fine, I understand that. I understand that the second you read this you'll think that I'm some hippy piece of shit who's too sensitive. That's fine. In that case, if none of this matters, than remove the rule against racism. It's not like it was helping anyway, and tell them god damn blackies to ignore it and laugh every time they hear "boi" and "nig-nog".

 

Oh, and I'll even pre-empt a few arguments I know I'm going to see against this proposed rule change.

 

To which I give you some reading

 

Your server is a perfect erasure of the other (Blacks, Gays, Etc). You craft an image of the other in terms of their own systems of knowledge. This image inevitably overwhelms the other and denies them any sort of individual subjectivity.

 

Linda Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy, Women's Studies and Political Science, Director of Women’s Studies, Syracuse University, 1995, Linda Martin-Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,†http://www.alcoff.co...speaothers.html.

 

This is partly the case because of what has been called the "crisis of representation." For in both the practice of speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of representing the other's needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are, based on my own situated interpretation. In post-structuralist terms, I am participating in the construction of their subject-positions rather than simply discovering their true selves. Once we pose it as a problem of representation, we see that, not only are speaking for and speaking about analytically close, so too are the practices of speaking for others and speaking for myself. For, in speaking for myself, I am also representing my self in a certain way, as occupying a specific subject-position, having certain characteristics and not others, and so on. In speaking for myself, I (momentarily) create my self---just as much as when I speak for others I create them as a public, discursive self, a self which is more unified than any subjective experience can support. And this public self will in most cases have an effect on the self experienced as interiority. The point here is that the problem of representation underlies all cases of speaking for, whether I am speaking for myself or for others. This is not to suggest that all representations are fictions: they have very real material effects, as well as material origins, but they are always mediated in complex ways by discourse, power, and location. However, the problem of speaking for others is more specific than the problem of representation generally, and requires its own particular analysis. There is one final point I want to make before we can pursue this analysis. The way I have articulated this problem may imply that individuals make conscious choices about their discursive practice free of ideology and the constraints of material reality. This is not what I wish to imply. The problem of speaking for others is a social one, the options available to us are socially constructed, and the practices we engage in cannot be understood as simply the results of autonomous individual choice. Yet to replace both "I" and "we" with a passive voice that erases agency results in an erasure of responsibility and accountability for one's speech, an erasure I would strenuously argue against (there is too little responsibility-taking already in Western practice!). When we sit down to write, or get up to speak, we experience ourselves as making choices. We may experience hesitation from fear of being criticized or from fear of exacerbating a problem we would like to remedy, or we may experience a resolve to speak despite existing obstacles, but in many cases we experience having the possibility to speak or not to speak. On the one hand, a theory which explains this experience as involving autonomous choices free of material structures would be false and ideological, but on the other hand, if we do not acknowledge the activity of choice and the experience of individual doubt, we are denying a reality of our experiential lives.9

 

 

Not letting "The other" (Minority groups, like the LGBT or Blacks) is a form of spiritual genocide. This is from the words of a black, lesbian women. She can uniquely speak about this position.

 

Williams 1987 (PATRICIA WILLIAMS, Associate Professor of Law, The City University of New York Law School at Queens College, University of Miami Law Review, 42 U. Miami L. Rev. 127, September)

There are certain societies that define the limits of life and death very differently than our own. For example, death may occur long before the body ceases to function, and under the proper circumstances, life may continue for some time after the body is carried to its grave. n71 These non-body-bound, uncompartmentalized ideas recognize the power of spirit, or what we in our secularized society might describe as the dynamism of self as reinterpreted by the perceptions of [*151] other. n72 These ideas comprehend the fact that a part of ourselves is beyond the control of pure physical will and resides in the sanctuary of those around us. A fundamental part of ourselves and of our dignity is dependent upon the uncontrollable, powerful, external observers who constitute society. n73 Surely a part of socialization ought to include a sense of caring responsibility for the images of others that are reposited within us. n74 Taking the example of the man who was stabbed thirty-nine times out of the context of our compartmentalized legal system, and considering it in the hypothetical framework of a legal system that encompasses and recognizes morality, religion, and psychology, I am moved to see this act as not merely body murder but spirit-murder as well. I see it as spirit-murder, only one of whose manifestations is racism -- cultural obliteration, prostitution, abandonment of the elderly and the homeless, and genocide are some of its other guises. I see spirit-murder as no less than the equivalent of body murder. One of the reasons that I fear what I call spirit-murder, or disregard for others whose lives qualitatively depend on our regard, is that its product is a system of formalized distortions of thought. It produces social structures centered around fear and hate; it provides a [*152] tumorous outlet for feelings elsewhere unexpressed . n75 For example, when Bernhard Goetz shot four black teenagers in a New York City subway, an acquaintance of mine said that she could understand his fear because it is a "fact" that blacks commit most crimes. What impressed me, beyond the factual inaccuracy of this statement, n76 was the reduction of Goetz' crime to "his fear," which I translate to mean her fear. The four teenage victims became all blacks everywhere, and "most crimes" clearly meant that most blacks commit crimes. In the process of devaluing its image of black people, the general white population seems to have been socialized to blind itself to the horrors inflicted by white people. One of the clearest examples of the mechanics of this socialized blindness is the degree to which the public and the media in New York repeatedly and relentlessly bestialized Goetz' victims. Images of the urban jungle, of young black men filling the role of "wild animals," were favorite journalistic constructions. Young white urban professionals were mythologized, usually wrapped in the rhetorical apparel of lambs or sheep, as the tender, toothsome prey. n77 The corollary to such imagery is that the fate of those domesticated white innocents is to be slaughtered in confrontation, the dimensions of which thus become meaninglessly and tragically sacrificial. n78 Locked into such a reification, no act of the sheep against the wolves can ever be seen as violent in its own right, because active sheep are so inherently uncharacteristic, so brave, so irresistibly and triumphantly parabolic. Thus, when prosecutor Gregory Waples cast Goetz as a "hunter" in his final summation, juror Michael Axelrod [*153] said that Waples "was insulting my intelligence. There was nothing to justify that sort of [characterization]. Goetz wasn't a hunter." n79 Furthermore, most white people do not seem to feel as criminal the dehumanizing cultural images of sterile, mindless white womanhood and expressionless, bored but righteous, assembly line white manhood. n80 For example, although it is difficult to document in any scientific way, I think many whites do not expect other whites to rape, rob, or kill them. n81 They are surprised when it happens. Perhaps they blind themselves to the warning signals of approaching assault. Some do not even recognize it when it does happen; they apologize for the assailant, think it must have been their fault; they misperceived the other's intent. n82 [sHE CONTINUES] If Americans are subject to such utter emotional devastation, it is no wonder that the urge to act as a victimizer is so irresistible; it [*155] appears to be the only right thing, the only defensible thing to do. It is no wonder that society has created in blacks a class of ready-made, prepackaged victims. To discount as much violence as we do in this society must mean that we have a very angry population suppressing explosive rage. Most white Americans, at least those in urban areas, have seen the angry, muttering "lunatic" black person who beats the air with his fists and curses aloud. Most people cross the street to avoid him; they don't choose him to satisfy their need to know the time of day. Yet for generations, and particularly in the wake of the foaming public response to incidents like Howard Beach, the Goetz shooting, n87 and Forsythe County, that is precisely how white America has looked to many black Americans. For these reasons, I think we need to elevate what I call spirit-murder to the conceptual, if not punitive level of a capital moral offense. n88 We need to see it as a cultural cancer; we need to open our eyes to the spiritual genocide it is wreaking on blacks, whites, and the abandoned and abused of all races and ages. We need to eradicate its numbing pathology before it wipes out what precious little humanity we have left.

 

When you speak for others, by claiming that "black people don't like the N word, but females are okay with the word Bitch" you ignore there agency and instead speak IN PLACE OF the oppressed group. Let those who are oppressed make the decisions on what they believe is offensive and not offensive.

Foucault and Deleuze ’72 Legendary French Philosophers

(Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Libcom.org, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation Between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,†http://libcom.org/li...-gilles-deleuze)

 

FOUCAULT: It seems to me that the political involvement of the intellectual was traditionally the product of two different aspects of his activity: his position as an intellectual in bourgeois society, in the system of capitalist production and within the ideology it produces or imposes (his exploitation, poverty, rejection, persecution, the accusations of subversive activity, immorality, etc); and his proper discourse to the extent that it revealed a particular truth, that it disclosed political relationships where they were unsuspected. These two forms of politicisation did not exclude each other, but, being of a different order, neither did they coincide. Some were classed as "outcasts" and others as "socialists." During moments of violent reaction on the part of the authorities, these two positions were readily fused: after 1848, after the Commune, after 1940. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. The intellectual spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence. In the most recent upheaval (3) the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves. But there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge, a power not only found in the manifest authority of censorship, but one that profoundly and subtly penetrates an entire societal network. Intellectuals are themselves agents of this system of power-the idea of their responsibility for "consciousness" and discourse forms part of the system. The intellectual's role is no longer to place himself "somewhat ahead and to the side" in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of "knowledge," "truth," "consciousness," and "discourse. "(4) In this sense theory does not express, translate, or serve to apply practice: it is practice. But it is local and regional, as you said, and not totalising. This is a struggle against power, a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious. It is not to "awaken consciousness" that we struggle (the masses have been aware for some time that consciousness is a form of knowledge; and consciousness as the basis of subjectivity is a prerogative of the bourgeoisie), but to sap power, to take power; it is an activity conducted alongside those who struggle for power, and not their illumination from a safe distance. A "theory" is the regional system of this struggle. DELEUZE: Precisely. A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don't revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others. It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don't suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat. A theory does not totalise; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalise and it is your position. and one I fully agree with, that theory is by nature opposed to power. As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical. Either reforms are designed by people who claim to be representative, who make a profession of speaking for others, and they lead to a division of power, to a distribution of this new power which is consequently increased by a double repression; or they arise from the complaints and demands of those concerned. This latter instance is no longer a reform but revolutionary action that questions (expressing the full force of its partiality) the totality of power and the hierarchy that maintains it. This is surely evident in prisons: the smallest and most insignificant of the prisoners' demands can puncture Pleven's pseudoreform (5). If the protests of children were heard in kindergarten, if their questions were attended to, it would be enough to explode the entire educational system. There is no denying that our social system is totally without tolerance; this accounts for its extreme fragility in all its aspects and also its need for a global form of repression. In my opinion, you were the first-in your books and in the practical sphere-to teach us something absolutely fundamental: the indignity of speaking for others. We ridiculed representation and said it was finished, but we failed to draw the consequences of this "theoretical" conversion-to appreciate the theoretical fact that only those directly concerned can speak in a practical way on their own behalf. FOUCAULT: And when the prisoners began to speak, they possessed an individual theory of prisons, the penal system, and justice. It is this form of discourse which ultimately matters, a discourse against power, the counter-discourse of prisoners and those we call delinquents-and not a theory about delinquency. The problem of prisons is local and marginal: not more than 100,000 people pass through prisons in a year. In France at present, between 300,000 and 400,000 have been to prison. Yet this marginal problem seems to disturb everyone. I was surprised that so many who had not been to prison could become interested in its problems, surprised that all those who bad never heard the discourse of inmates could so easily understand them. How do we explain this? Isn't it because, in a general way, the penal system is the form in which power is most obviously seen as power? To place someone in prison, to confine him to deprive him of food and heat, to prevent him from leaving, making love, etc.-this is certainly the most frenzied manifestation of power imaginable. The other day I was speaking to a woman who bad been in prison and she was saying: "Imagine, that at the age of forty, I was punished one day with a meal of dry bread." What is striking about this story is not the childishness of the exercise of power but the cynicism with which power is exercised as power, in the most archaic, puerile, infantile manner. As children we learn what it means to be reduced to bread and water. Prison is the only place where power is manifested in its naked state, in its most excessive form, and where it is justified as moral force. "I am within my rights to punish you because you know that it is criminal to rob and kill . . . ... What is fascinating about prisons is that, for once, power doesn't hide or mask itself; it reveals itself as tyranny pursued into the tiniest details; it is cynical and at the same time pure and entirely "justified," because its practice can be totally formulated within the framework of morality. Its brutal tyranny consequently appears as the serene domination of Good over Evil, of order over disorder.

 

The above piece is quite important to me, as a gay man. I do not care if the word fa**** is used in a video game personally, but in the case where one gay person does. It becomes the ethical obligation of HellsGamerz to change your rules. Either acknowledge that you don't give a flying fuck about social justice and remove your rule against racism so as to stop making all other forms of oppression invisible in comparison, or ban all of this hate speech.

[->SK<-]

TL;DR of OP; Remove racism or become the NSA.

 

You do realise the words "fag" and "fa****" have changed meaning to the wider community, and do not reflect badly on a homosexual such as yourself?

 

We give a fuck about social justice, but here's another thing; how are we as a gaming community, who sit behind computer screens even able to know this prior to you coming on? We would if we were the NSA, but we are not.

 

Also it's HellsGamers. Not HellsGamerz.

 

We are not the judges of the world either. We as a gaming community cannot hold those who discriminate responsible for their actions because the other party remains silent. If you have a problem with said things, report it.

 

I think I made myself clear.

[Slophole]

hey dood,

I usually don't make replies to threads like this but...

 

 

 

Keep in mind that Racism, and Sexual harassment/assault towards players is disrespect. disrespecting players is against the rules. If you ever have a problem and you feel directly attacked and there is proof that it is directed towards yourself make an abuse/ban report. don't spend your time making lengthy threads explaining why its ok to say one word and not another.

 

 

 

Respectfully,

 

Slop.

[Guest The_Monkey]

You don't even want to hear my reply to your rant. You just don't.

[CantBeFaded]

[Toast]

Don't we have a limit of words or letters per post? #omggeeez

[Weeman]

Locking this thread. Stop making them, you've got your answer.

[Guest The_Monkey]

I'm bringing this back.