[ineedasername]

Racism and homophobia aren't just bad words, and they were literally in the first three things I looked at.

If you find that hard to understand, maybe stay away from HN where we try to have at least some minimum of reason in our discussions: you either lack that by minimizing racism and hatred to "bad words" or you are a troll arguing in bad faith.

[Thorentis]

I think you are the one doing the conflating. You've jumped from "these words are sometimes used" to "these words are used solely for the purpose of expressing racist and homophobic feelings".

[ineedasername]

[flagged]

[Thorentis]

Please never visit /r/WallStreetBets. The humor will go right over your head.

[Blikkentrekker]

> I don't know what land you're in if it's a place where calling someone a "fa--ot [n-word]" doesn't get categorized into some sort of hate speech.

This is the main point of contention. No one denies that such words are a common occurrence on 4chan, but you believe these words are automatically indicative of racism.

Are you open to the idea that someone who refers to himself as “an Archfag” is simply communicating on his being an Arch Linux user, and not otherwise intending to communicate his sexual orientation, and certainly not to proffer a negative view of his own sexual orientation?

[solosoyokaze]

> "these words are used solely for the purpose of expressing racist and homophobic feelings".

There's no other way to use these words. They're always racist and homophobic. That's the point, /pol is a cesspool of racism and homophobia.

[hda2]

> There's no other way to use these words. They're always racist and homophobic.

The way this thread progressed was very fascinating to read.

First, an absurd baseless generalization was made. Then, when challenged, the generalization was narrowed down a bit. Then it was narrowed down again and again until we got this comment which asserts an outright lie.

These words aren't always used in a racist and homophobic way. 4chan is proof of this.

[solosoyokaze]

These words are always racist. It doesn’t matter what 4chan claims.

[throw7]

> There's no other way to use these words.

Try to step back and move into another level.

What are words?

What is this "vibration of air molecules" hitting my ear?

What is the meaning behind them?

Why so?

Do these certain "frequencies" always mean a certain meaning? Always?

[ineedasername]

I don't think that analyzing racial slurs at the level molecular interactions is a useful exercise in understanding racism or hate speech.

[Blikkentrekker]

They clearly can, and are in this case used, to communicate information where neither the listener nor the speaker is even thinking about race or sexual orientation, and no comment thereon is made.

If you wish to still call that “racism and homophobia”, then neither of which necessarily has anything to do with race or sexual orientations, or even disdain. — you should also know that your usage of these words is then quite nonstandard, and does not align with what most mean with them.

The word “nigger”, in particular, has been of particular interest of study in how depending on context the word can very much be about race, and negatively so, to a simple form of address that has no implications of race.