Dude is mad [homophobic slur] and [ethnic slur] think his Trump shirt promotes hate

I love the fact that there has been less than half a page’s worth of discussion about the OP and roughly six and a half pages of troll baiting. 😀 I think I made the correct decision when I mentally placed the newest troll on “ignore” round about the second page of the thread.

Just went through the whole thread. Wow. Though our newest troll to be gone forever by morning is a great demonstration of the “my ego is directly tied to my ability to feel smarter than everyone else and be right even when I’m not” type.

Cause all of this type do the exact same form of arguing. They start by saying something wrong or stupid and get called out and then what follows is this ever spiraling catastrophe of constantly switching topics and shifting goal posts and making constant passive-aggressive whines about how stupid everyone is and how smart they are and can’t everyone tell what their saying, because what they can’t do is admit fault.

Cause in their heads, admitting that they were wrong about something especially to a group of people they don’t respect or view as inherently dumber than them is simply not to be done. So to avoid that, they spin more absurdities, which also get called out, so they need to dig the hole even deeper and don’t just leave or apologize or even stick to the original topic of conversation, because it’s all about trying to win something so they can pretend the argument was about that the whole time so their fragile self-image of themselves as “smart” can be preserved.

I notice it a lot among atheist douchebag types (atheists who are douchebags, I’m not calling all atheists douchebags), because their self-image is based on “being smart” and “seeing through lies” and that is core to their vision of themselves, they react in very similar ways to the creationists they despise when their core image feels threatened, usually because they’re being an idiot or falling prey to conspiracy theories or social bigotry.

So you end up with someone who refuses to admit obvious fault or mistake even when the stakes are as low as a comedy message board.

Cerberus, I think your analysis is spot-on.

This is mainly for Alan, since he asked about gender neutral pronouns in Scandinavian languages, but it’s really for anyone who might be interested. 🙂

I’ll only comment on the status of gender neutral pronouns in Swedish, since my knowledge of the other Scandinavian languages (and Finnish, Sami, etc) is limited.

Like many other languages, we only have gender specific pronouns in the third person singular. In the subject form, these are han (male) and hon (female). The object forms are honom (male) and henne (female). (From my experience with second language learners, I’ve noticed it’s common to get the subject forms mixed up since ‘o’ is often associated with male, while ‘a’ is associated with female. The object forms are often ignored altogether by second language learners, and simply replaced with the subject forms.)

Since we have gendered pronouns in the third person, naturally we are faced with the same problems as in English when we want to refer to a person of unknown gender, a hypothetical person, a person whose identity is not known, etc. Traditionally, this has been resolved by using han/hon, han eller hon (where eller = or), or some other more creative (but also more complicated) solutions.

All the way back in the 1960’s, the gender neutral hen was proposed in an article in a local newspaper, with reference to the Finnish gender neutral hän. (Skiriki commented on this Finnish pronoun earlier in the thread.) Between 1966, when the word was first suggested, and approximately 2008, the word hen was used by almost literally nobody.

Around 2008 or 2009, the word was picked up mainly by a very small number of trans people and used in blog posts. In this context, obviously a gender neutral pronoun was valuable for other reasons than originally intended, as I’m sure I don’t need to explain further here. Hen was used very frequently by exactly one blogger at this time, and it then spread to other adjacent bloggers. Eventually it came to the attention of the mainstream, and this was the birth of the word hen in the modern sense.

I make that distinction since at this time, it was used mainly for referring to non-binary people, or by those who simply didn’t want to use gendered pronouns ever. This is very different from the 1966 suggestion, which focused on eliminating the complicated han eller hon, while acknowledging the inherent sexism in using a male pronoun for a person of unknown gender.

The mainstream breakthrough happened as recently as 2012. By ‘breakthrough’, I don’t mean that people actually used the word more than before. Rather, the word was mentioned and talked about, and heavily discussed in the media. From 2012 and on, the word has been adopted by political parties, in the legal language of certain regions, by various media outlets, etc, mainly in order to replace han eller hon, while being very careful with using the word in other contexts.

Predictably, many people felt threatened by the mere idea of a gender neutral pronoun, taking it to mean that gendered pronouns were about to be eradicated, girls in blue and boys in pink, boys playing with dolls and girls playing with toy cars, the end of gendered naming conventions, the end of professional sports, the end of the language, the country or even the Universe as we know it, dogs marrying cats, cultural Marxism, communists everywhere raaahhhhh. Of course.

I, and many others, have often pointed out that gender neutral pronouns exist in many languages without needing Marxism at all. I’ve also made the point that all other Swedish personal pronouns are already gender neutral, and have been so since before Marx was even born, and nobody seems to have a problem with those. Apparently Marxism/communism is only needed for specifically the third person singular pronouns? Needless to say, those who responded to hen in this fashion were impervious to any form of rational arguments.

The slightly less outraged opposition took the route of suggesting gender neutral solutions using words that were already ‘in use’. These suggestions include:

– den – translates to it, and rejected for obvious reasons
– vederbörande – translates roughly to the person in question, needlessly long, very dated, never used by anyone, and also not a pronoun
– denne – a demonstrative pronoun, i.e. not a personal pronoun, and also not gender neutral since the -e suggests male, whereas the female form would be denna
– någon – translates to someone, obviously not appropriate
– han eller hon – already rejected, and the reason why hen was suggested in the first place

Over these last few years, I’ve asked probably hundreds of people why exactly they are opposed to using a gender neutral pronoun where it would make grammatical sense, and not one person has been able to give an answer other than “cultural Marxism rahhh”. I’ve asked people with PhD:s in Nordic Languages, and the best answer I’ve received is “I suppose I’m just not ready yet”.

Some people have complained that hen is too close to the female object form henne, and thus isn’t perceived as gender neutral. I take that form of complaint as deliberate trolling.

There have also been discussions on what the gender neutral object form should be. Some have suggested, and still use, henom in the object position, as it’s perceived to be somewhere inbetween honom and henne. This seems to have been almost entirely replaced by using hen in the object form as well, motivated by the fact that the accusative as a ‘case’ is long dead in the Swedish language, and the object form pronouns are simply remnants of a grammar that once existed, and there’s no need to conform to patterns of the past.

Some have cautioned against the use of hen on the basis that it might make the reader upset, thus one should take into account who might read the text before using such a controversial word, lest it take focus from the main purpose. While I don’t generally agree with the idea that we should change they way we speak and write simply to spare the delicate feelings of the perpetually outraged, I do still consider the context before using hen since it is genuinely controversial. I’ve seen many examples of articles and blog posts online, where it doesn’t matter that 999 words were about something completely different, as long as 1 word is hen, that’s what the comment section will be about.

My perception is that hen has now made it past the initial outrage phase and is slowly making its way into everyday use, starting with the least controversial usage as exemplified above. While it’s still rare to see someone actually using hen in a text that isn’t about pronouns, or in a context other than explicitly political left wing, things are moving in that direction.

As of 2015, hen has entered mainstream dictionaries. Yes, 2015, that’s how current this debate is.

To answer your specific question: Yup, it’s an issue. :p

@ dhag

Thank you ever so much for that. That is genuinely fascinating as I do so I very much all the work you put into that.

I love having something to cogitate and mull over, and you’ve really provided me with some wonderful brain toffee! 🙂

So many thoughts already stimulated, I’m going to enjoy this morning now.

ETA: blame me for the teal deer folks, I was the person who wanted this!

To be honest, tl;dr doesn’t matter if the text is well-written and enjoyable to read, as Dhag’s post was: it explained the whole deal in detail, yet didn’t meander and go in useless roundabouts. An entire tl;dr in chanspeak? Good effin’ gods, spare me, that’s an eyesore.

I agree with Skiriki – that was fascinating, IP. Thank you for explaining it so clearly.

@ dhag et al

I’m still digesting all that (in a good way). One thought that immediately comes to mind is what you say about gender neutral documents. Over here we use this formula!

Except where otherwise indicated any reference in this Agreement to the masculine shall be deemed to include the feminine

Funnily enough you do now see the occasional document with the genders reversed, but then it’s all “PC gone mad”. It says a lot though that that does actually stick out when you see it.

An even more bizarre argument against hen was that hen in English refers to a bird, therefore it could be confusing if used in legal texts. I’m not kidding, this is actually an argument they used.

What a bizarre argument.

Since “gift” is “poison” in Swedish, but “gift” in English means “present”, couldn’t they argue that Swedes need to change their word so there’s no dangerous confusion for English-speakers? Somehow, I don’t think they’re going to suggest that…

(Let’s not forget the entire “gifta sig” which doesn’t mean “poisoning yourself”, too!)

@Victorious Parasol
You can still find Time Cube archived on the Wayback Machine (possibly archived for all time – cube and otherwise), if you need to show it to somebody.

IP (Sorry about earlier slip to dhag, btw, slip of memory):

No argument is too stupid when fighting cultural Marxism. :p

Yeah… I’ve noticed.

Right now we have a bunch of right-wing goons proudly stating that they’re defending Finland and Finnish culture and Finnish people from scary foreign things. They call themselves “Soldiers of Odin”.

Can you spot a flaw in this? Countdown! The answer is below!

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“Odin” is in no way a part of Finnish pagan pantheon. We had our own set of deities (some definitely slightly inspired by Nordic paganism thanks to eastbound vikings, but definitely not named after it).

It seems that some foreign elements are just fine… funny, isn’t it? And that they are in no way racist, noooo (well, actual Icelandic Odin-worshippers said “please stop, this is not what Odin is about”, but hey, who cares about that when it is getting on the way of hate?).

Please read heavy levels of sarcasm in this. Bunch of dingleberries, the whole lot. I frankly prefer Loldiers of Odin — clowns who “coincidentally” protest whenever former are on a march. And I got a phobia of clowns.

Cerberus,
I think it’s the same thing with rape. There’s always, always at least one person who says that if a rape victim doesn’t go to the police, they’re either making it up for attention or are to be blamed for future victims of their rapist, because reporting a rape definitely always results in the rapist being jailed. They use this anytime a rape survivor speaks of their rape publicly. They said it about Bill Cosby’s victims even though several of them actually did go to the police and nothing was done.

They know the system is broken and reporting is so often just as traumatic if not more so than the rape itself. They don’t shrug and say “just go to the cops” out of ignorance IMO. Because when someone explains all the reasons victims don’t report, they never say something along the lines of “thanks for bringing that to my attention.” They always just double down. Every time.