Atlas Ministry of Purity Crimes Self-Reporting Thread

[politicus]

Come on now. I've talked at great length about having sex with priests

WTF kind of church do did you go to?

Catholic, what else?

[politicus]

I fully support making this the Simfan Update thread.

It would at least give it a point.

[politicus]

What's embarrassing about this thread is that it displays severe ignorance. All of the "jokes" in it are only funny if one is some combination of dumb and sexist. I.e. one thinks, for example, that objecting to sexual harassment means thinking "men can't talk to women". And so on.

A priest and a rabbi would  have no problem walking into a bar together! This is an outrage. Distortion of facts will not be forgotten by The Regime.

Eh...I think you sort of missed my point. It wasn't that jokes need to conform to reality. Or even be inoffensive - I love jokes that a lot of people find offensive. But if your joke about how anti-racist people are really dumb because political correctness has gone mad!1 is only funny to someone who is a bigoted racist then you're probably better off not telling the joke. And the same goes for sexism. It's not a terribly complex issue.

The idea that someone has to be a sexist to find satire about anti-sexism amusing is itself a worthy subject of satire.

Do you guys do anything other than mischaracterize other peoples' posts? What you just said is not what I said. I explicitly said something different and if you re-read the post (or just use common sense) maybe you'd get it. I joke about sexism all the time. In fact, one of my jokes on sexism was posted in this very thread. Amusingly, it seems that none of the misogynists understood it. Which isn't entirely surprising of course. It's sort of like when conservatives think the Onion is real.

Shua is deliberately contrary

And he is very good at it.

[politicus]

Another alternative is to use she as the neutral option. It may seem artificial at first, but there is a certain logic to it. All humans start out as proto-females before some of them become males. The female sex is the basic one, the male a deviation.

[politicus]

Why has nobody ever proposed using "it" as a neutral pronoun? I mean, that's exactly what it is, the singular neutral pronoun! English is lucky enough to actually have it, so why not use it when you're referring to an unspecified person? I guess the reason is that "it" is usually used to refer to inanimate objects and that it has assumed a bit of a negative connotation, but I still think it's preferable to contrived alternatives like "(s)he", or "they".

AFAIK all Germanic languages have neutral pronouns. I would never use the Danish equivalent "det" for a human being. It sounds very dehumanizing as if the person was a thing. Parents to newborn infants typically get very upset if you refer to their baby as "det" (which some tend to do as long as the infant is merely a "crybaby" without a personality). Using it feels equally wrong.

[politicus]

Adding my thing to this debate, in the German language we have had a similar discussion on "gender-ing", though not on the usage of pronouns, more on plural forms (mainly of professions). In German, about every profession has a male and a female form (der Polizist, die Polizistin - the police officer), and a plural in both genders, too (die Polizisten, die Polizistinnen). Now, the usual procedure, also in official use, is to just take a middle way with the so-called "internal I", so to capitalize the "I" while using the femal plural (because you get the male plural if you take away the "in" inside the female plural), which then is die PolizistInnen.
Now that is a debate, because according to some it apparently looks ugly or whatever, and others would prefer if you used male and female forms (then again, some prefer if you take the female first), and so on, and so on... So anyway, this remined me of this here. Consider yourselves advanced to German, as we are still talking about plurals, we haven't even started talking about pronouns

Things like that can generate dispute, but it is small fry compared to using it for a human being since that touches on something a lot more basic - the human soul and mind, humanity and possibly also reification.

[politicus]

How did this thread turn into Sim describing his day in exquisite detail?

Popular demand.