Yes! Finally an excuse to hire an assistant for playing TF2!

You forget about their secret weapon... AG truktruk

elbereth elbereth elbereth

nethack extraordinaire.

Right, as if the moment we tell people to stop saying faggot is also the moment that the tf2 competitive scene becomes a literal police state. You are making the broad implication that because, as a culture, competitive video games have historically used these words, that all of the sudden means you are okay to use them. Nothing about preserving these words in our community fights censorship, there isn't any reason to believe that getting rid of that terminology will somehow open the floodgates, and that one day you'll get banned for saying "fuck" in a post. It is entirely unrealistic, frankly. If you can prove that that scenario is, and would be, the case for the tf2 community, by all means you are right.

But, at the moment, given every single community that I have ever been a part of that has told their members to not say shit like that, I can safely assume that the removal of terms like "faggot" and "rape[d]" from our vernacular could only really become a good thing.

There will come a point where we can no longer get away with this shit, and I think we should all just transition away from it (which we are, admittedly, doing rather well so far) now, than look like all of those comp CoD videos where it's a bunch of people shouting stupid shit at each other.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)