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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 9th, 2023

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  • That’s never happened to me yet. But I would hope we just have to start the level again from the beginning (without checkpoints) and we lose the progress we made on it for that attempt, á la Crash Bandicoot. I doubt they would make you start the whole game again like the original Kao the Kangaroo (if you don’t manually save), that would be brutal.



  • In your examples, I would definitely think we shouldn’t use differential/non-equivalent language between different groups of people/members of society, including races or genders. So that includes not saying “white man” and “man who’s a black” -> I would think this should probably be “white man” and “black man” or “man who’s white” and “man who’s black”. I think being consistent with our language used to refer to people is important to not promote or uphold discrimination. There could be other problems even if it’s consistent, I’m not denying that, but I think lack of consistency of treatment (linguistic or otherwise) is a key issue. I believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity to a degree, that language shapes/influences how we view the world & informs a lot of actions & behaviors in society. So linguistic discrimination is a real thing that can lead to or perpetuate more overt (physical/social) forms of discrimination. For the same reason, it should be consistent between genders (and as a side note, I don’t view male and female to be strictly biological terms to refer to biological sex, but rather that they can be used for gender identity too, as in MtF / FtM [male to female or female to male], which other sociology institutions seem to agree with as well, in case you thought I was being a “sex absolutist” or transphobic).

    The case of using “male and female” for rats in an experiment is interesting because to me it represents a double standard where we are okay with using those more kind of basic fundamental terms for non-human animals, even if we’re not okay with using them for humans (and it’s not like we have terms like men and women for other animals, so it’s somewhat understandable in working within the language). But it also shows that if we only reserve those terms for other animals, it can uphold harmful differential treatment of them (such as conducting experiments/testing on them that they can’t consent to–and wouldn’t since they’re typically cruel in ways we would never do to humans–which could be seen as exploitation/taking advantage of sentient beings), as tied to a belief that humans are superior and are not animals, which is used to rationalize these actions & arguably discrimination (speciesism) of another kind. That’s partly why I question if it’s really valid for us to be opposed to using terms like male and female for humans, or if it reveals something deeper about how we think of ourselves in relation to other animals- as well as just curiosity about if there is really a problem there, and what/why that might be.