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I dislike this article. It’s a little old now, but there are several things blisteringly wrong with this idea at its heart.

Purely for example, if you read a book on dragonflies and take offence because you see racial similarities between whatever race a person is and dragonflies, that’s an issue with you, not the source. You are relying on your opinion on what the source says. Since opinion varies per person, you should not dictate policy based on opinion. It’s an insurmountable hill to cater to whatever opinions are since opinion will always change - it’s an unsound basis for any form of logic.

Let’s do a thought experiment:

If a trailer-dwelling white person in the USA reads about the Vistani, and takes offence because they also live in a trailer, sees that as a negative, and assumes the Vistani are a potshot at him, is he right to be offended and call for a ban?

If a nimble Canadian POC (which is also a terrible term as it literally applies to everyone on the planet) reads about Elves and assumes they’re talking about him because he also happens to know how to use a bow and is skinny with a lithe frame, is he correct in calling for a ban? What if he sees being nimble as a negative for some reason (because positive / negative characteristics are opinions and what people see as negative is not objective)? What if he sees it as being racist by saying the source is calling ALL Elves nimble and therefore good at sports? “But they stereotypically have a different skin colour!” I hear you saying. So do Orcs. That argument applies here and if you can’t square that circle, then the logic falls apart utterly.

Personal identification with aspects of characters in a source material are not cause for alteration. You are an individual; you are not a group. Grouping people into camps based on visible traits or histories is a disgusting habit.

Treat people as individuals and racism dies. Treat people as groups and call out the differences constantly and you’ll have people fencing themselves in while calling themselves inclusive.

    • fathog@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Smart people talking like this is why Trump 2024 is a sad reality. You seriously have to be so condescending? In a community dedicated to discourse? Sad.

      • Gamoc@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        A smart person would understand why someone shouldn’t be so dismissive, that improvement is a common goal with which we can help each other. Someone who dismisses someone and insults then like that isn’t a smart person, they’re a stupid person trying desperately to appear smart.

    • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Think again about the objective of this community and whether your comment is on the spirit of that.

      Closing down debate because of grammatical inaccuracy isn’t why we are here, surely.

    • Ace T'KenOPM
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      9 months ago

      “There’re” was never used in my original writing.

      One apostrophe was misplaced in the original due to the phone I was writing on and has been fixed.

      And hey, as long as we’re being smug and missing the point entirely, I don’t know if you know this, but the words “little” and “blue” aren’t one word like in your user name and there’s supposed to be a space there.

        • Ace T'Ken
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          9 months ago

          Your insulting and infantile trolling isn’t welcome here. Go make some other Community worse because you are not welcome in this one.