Nobody would actually brag about a major that doesn't fall under STEM though, right?

No I'm just observing that you're trying to make a point with pretty much no basis, a logical fallacy if you will. If I really wanted to flex over personal merit you'd probably have a more solid argument.

The notion of a "trigger" is a very real thing that a whole bunch of people without actual issues took and started using for the dumbest shit, that being said it certainly is something that exists. The fact that a bunch of crazy-ass tumblr people decided that it now means their dragon fursona is being marginalized is just a sad side-effect to a pretty legitimate phenomena, and there is a lot of factual shit that supports traumatizing memories being enabled by shit like that.

I mean, you can stay angry about "triggers" if you want, but it would be nice if you would back it up with more than just "if I'm not trying to be abrasive than it shouldn't affect you." While I'm no psychologist, I think I know enough to say that, on some level, memory and words/speech are connected enough to re-live trauma. It's not as if the people who aren't making their trauma up are deliberately setting up a plethora of horribly awkward situations for no reason. I'll admit that "trigger" is a pretty awful term for it, and medically speaking there is probably something more sophisticated on the subject.

Also - I think a lot of the people in this thread are taking this shit as some sort-of personal threat to them. There isn't any reason the believe that anyone is deliberately trying to be homophobic by calling someone in a video game a faggot, the issue lies in that words have serious connotations for some people. It isn't an "I" issue for the majority of us posters, no matter how arbitrary the word ends up being to you as a person, it more than likely holds some inherent meaning to somebody else. If the terms and duties of the feelings-police also includes not honestly trying to justify using the term 'faggot,' then you can go ahead and hand me my fucking uniform, because I am entirely okay with those stipulations.

Besides, there is literally nothing stopping the community from not using them on face, we don't lose out on any special vernacular that is near and dear to our hearts, and there are loads of way funnier and better ways to call someone shitty at video games. Regardless, this community is just better than this shit.

Finally, I certainly agree with the idea that people get too angry about the weird tf2 terminology we have going on, but I don't think that means it's alright to still use them. Plenty of words in the past have been "redeemed," so to speak, of their past meaning, too many for it to be worth listing. However, sometimes that shit isn't worth trying to redeem. The fact that we have to have this debate means that there is a problem, nobody in this thread is being irrational or hypersensitive, just normal people who are voicing their opinion on a controversial topic.

(also, as a ~*~~debater~!*~! i have to say that being, quote, 'nationally ranked in congress' is an accomplishment that is not particularly impressive, at least as far as my state is concerned. it would be cool if you don't leverage this shit against us simpleton tftv posters as if it even matters)

As a Comp/Elec Eng major I approve of the technology behind this post!

Since when am I bragging about my ranking in congressional debate in this thread. It was brought up in a different thread by someone specifically questioning why I would be able to beat them in an economics debate.

Kudos to you for saying that national ranking is not particularly impressive in your state though.

All I meant is that spouting out how cool you are, during a debate, only makes you look silly.

Like, in my four years of fuckin' high-school debate I accomplished almost nothing, evidently because I am trash at debating.

"Hey grandpa, someone got offended because I used the word faggot so I told him 'Why are you so childish, what are you an SS officer for the feelings gestapo?'" I am sure he would find that hilarious.

And why are you using the fighting game community to support your point? Probably one of the most immature communities I've ever seen.

In a different thread, brought up now for ???? reason

Can I just start clipping your quotes too and re-purposing them?

Because a large part of why people now feel this is necessary is I've heard it said repeatedly that the reason TF2 isn't larger or that streams don't get more viewers is because of the language we use. Fighting games are far larger and also far more abrasive.

First of all that was a parenthetical at the bottom of my post, and the least important thing I said.

Second of all, refer to atmo's post, because it is important. The reasoning behind that is that you are attempting to leverage arbitrary qualifications against the rest of the thread as reasoning for you being right, instead of, well, substantive analysis. Don't do that.

So how do you think your granfather would react to you making light of the holocaust? and how old are you?

Both he and my grandmother made jokes about it, they are also both dead now. I'm 20 in two weeks.

I haven't leveraged any sort of qualification of my own in this thread as for WHY I'M RIGHT outside of observing that I'm an english major as a means of pointing out a specific denotation. If you seriously think I'm leveraging my debate success or anything else as an argument from authority for why I think it's dumb to try and extirpate language from a competitive setting then you haven't been reading my posts.

This would be true, feel free to put a piece of duct tape over that part of my post while you read the rest of it.

~TRiGgER WarNinG~

ur all gay

hi

banm me from these forums plz i dont want 2 b here nmymore bye

nmothnig of value was lots

Why do people find it so necessarily offensive? it's like women who claim men shouldn't say raped or black individuals who take racial issues out of proportion that don't even pertain to them. Almost everyone I know supports LGBT including myself and I feel strongly about equality of individuals and the overall standings of a more open, less self-centered society.

But I use raped regularly, I call dave my nigga and I call counterjumpers faggots, however it really isn't offensive unless deemed in good context. We're just all having fun and fun is a two way street, you have to accept other opinions if you want to deem your own valid too.

A slur by definition implies that I am "treating [others] without due consideration" and that I made the point of saying faggot without valuing my peers when in reality I certainly value them as much as they do me, enough for them to know that I don't really intend to hurt somebody's feelings.

Why even talk about the implications of offending LBGT people when comp TF2 is such a sexually integrated scene? If I run into people who don't like it I won't use it but otherwise, allow me to express myself whatever way I want to. I respect the day of silence however, and wish you guys a good one.

And to address your point about tf2 in a public sense using those terms, you are certainly right. If you want comptf2 to get big it's probably a necessity to keep our frontend as professional as possible, but I'm not going to act every day like I dressed formally to pug with cool people.

I'm a mtf and I'm bi
I say "that's so gay" "he's such a faggot" etc all the time, in real life and elsewhere
please stop being bitches

2sy, you're really making yourself look like a 19 year old college student with a self inflated self worth and a myopic world view. It wasn't until I got to this page that this suspicion was confirmed. Once you get into the real world, come back and rejoin the conversation. You're not doing a very good job at making your point or making yourself look like anything different than a 19 year old college student.

Racism, homophobia, sexism, and sexual predation are all very real things. Maybe not in your bio-dome, but trying to simplify this issue into one of pure linguistics is very... Well damn. It's very "19 year old English major" of you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fcja4WFFzDw

I'm sorry if it came across like I was strawmanning you or something, I just don't feel obligated to argue against every post in this thread when I feel I've already made any point I need to make. If you really want a response though I'll offer up some arguments.

I understand that tumblr snowflakes have hi-jacked the term for their own brand of attention-seeking, and I associate the term "triggering" with that brand of feeling-hurting. People who do legitimately have trauma though usually take it upon themselves to avoid situations that would in-fact cause flashbacks/painful memories/etc.; there are plenty of people that are gay and aren't offended by faggot (as evidenced by this thread) so those that remain I would argue are getting offended by people's word choice when there really is no ill will there. Also, a large part of psychotherapy for people that are suffering from trauma is to learn to marginalize and make fun of the issue.

As for it being an "I" issue, sure there is no real particular reason to use faggot/rape/nigger given that it has certain connotations for people. However, I will continue to contend that part of being an adult is learning to discern meaning from word choice, and "I'm offended" is more or less an admission that you can't control your own feelings and ask others to do it for you. I have no issue with avoiding the language on casts or where professionalism is expected, but taking it up as an issue with the community or unique to us is just wrong.

I would contend that there is something to lose by not allowing people to express themselves in this community no matter how crass they want to be, but I'm sure plenty of people would state that's just telling people to be as offensive as they want all the time.

Alright so my defenses are completely irrelevant because I'm now a junior in college because I haven't been in "the real world." Meanwhile, two mtfs, and multiple actual gay people have said that they don't find "faggot" offensive.

I don't see gay an insult, I see it as a term to describe someone who wants a partner of the same sex.

Faggot isn't and shouldn't be derogatory against gays only, it should just be a general insult, like idiot or something.

I don't get offended by either of these words, and neither does my boyfriend. People use this in day to day language, either get used to it or stop talking to people.

MEDICS FUCKING RAPED JUMP HIM RIGHT NOW GOGOGO

lol i pray to the lord jesus that none of you ever play tf2 in a mumble with ghos7ayama you might have a stroke

faggot doesn't offend me its just not a good word and doesnt sound very nice when you say it

i feel the same with nigger and rape and gay and retard even if i say retard casually im sorry :(

No, it's just that this is something I run into all the time. Psych majors, English majors, anything else, when you're in school you think you're the definitive authority, because you've had this whole new world opened to you that a large portion of the world is seemingly ignorant to. Then you get out of school and into the field, and you realize how little you know. Same thing happened to me.

.

me irl

http://imgur.com/Ojv4GBp.jpg

Really? Allowing people to say "faggot" and "rape" in a competitive video-game somehow creates fucking creativity? What is there to lose by telling people not to use a few specific and obviously shitty words? I'm not asking people to stop saying crass shit, that is something that I can't do and don't really want to do. My point was that those specific words, (and a few others, but to a lesser and more personal extent which isn't really worth getting into in an internet forum) don't have any merit to them other than them being insults that are also sometimes hateful, and that there isn't any reason why we should attempt to support them when, essentially, the middle ground of this debate is "don't do it because maybe it is bad." Even if it ends up being harmless, even if it is harmless, there isn't any real reason to say that shit. That's the beauty of language, that there are a whole bunch of ways to convey individual meaning.

Think about like this: all of your analysis defends all crass language. All of my analysis condemns a very specific portion of all that, and I think that we can still be funny and offensive without also going balls deep and saying stupid shit. What I think you really don't get about my post is that I don't care how offensive you want to be, I just think it would be a net positive for the community if we just avoided the terms all together.

And if you honestly think being "grown up" means defending words like "faggot" and "rape" than I don't know what to say to you. You have to realize that a word's significance is not solely determined by the person who says it. That language as a whole is about a mutual interpretation of a bunch of letters than don't have inherent meaning, and the meaning that some people give to some bunches of letters can be attached to a negative experience. I can understand where you are coming from, but ultimately it just isn't a very substantial view-point.

At ETS, I was sitting accross a black League of Legends player. I was playing some TF2 and kept saying "What a fucking nigger" because some dude kept stealing my kills.

http://i.imgur.com/Gf0XMjn.png

http://i.imgur.com/kXguU0C.jpg

if you ever laughed at this you basically holocausted someone's feelings