It puts two of our primary values at odds with one another. Those are the toughest fights for anybody. Well, for anybody who is honest/self-critical.

This is a good statement, which I will chew on: if these terms could be eschewed, not out of fear of reprisal, but rather out of kindness and care for a large part of the community, that would be the optimal situation.

from the seventies. I remember them from when I was a kid during the second gas crunch. Manufacturers were touting their gas mileage figures from the Gov't.
As for using it today? Probably some old fogie brought it back.
Good discussion on language and intentions, just know that I Will piss people off with my coarse language and attitude. After 53 revolutions around the sun I find it difficult to give a fuck sometimes. You'll Know if it's personal, there will be no mistake. However, I do Try not to make it personal. Just not always successfully.

That his post turned out to become a pool for comments of pissed off and unhappy people is not his fault. The video/post was not inflammatory. May be unnecessary, because for most people it's clear that such appeals won't work and create more discomfort, depression, anger and problems than they solve.

May be we can go back to business as usual and try to love each other?

And my guess is I probably wouldn't care much either--I tend to read right past those words without them having a lot of impact on me--except for the word "nigger," which has a history so loathsome it makes me blench. But that's me.

I wish I were as sure of my opinion on this issue as some others here (including you), like when you say this:

People should be able to express themselves they way they choose, and moralistic calls for censorship of specific terms based on the delicate sensibilities of certain readers is as useless as it is divisive.

People should be able to express themselves the way they choose---well, in general, yeah. But like many ideologies of total individual freedom, that doesn't work out so well in practice. Of course, policing what people say can also lead to incredibly crap results.

moralistic calls for censorship...hmmm, well, the problem is that language is also extremely powerful, and tied to both history and politics. Sorting out how morality and language and freedom and history and action and community exist in right relation to each other is really difficult and complex. Well, it is for me.

Calls for censorship are as useless as they are divisive--Often that's true, but when it's a question of morality, usefulness is not always the best guide for what to do. You have to balance "what is useful?" with "is this a principle that needs to be upheld?" Like marking a boundary even if people continue to cross over it, it can sometimes matter to state a principle, because if you don't state one, norms shift, and you may not like where they shift to. The Overton Window operates on this principle. What people say is real is important even if what's real in practice contradicts what they say.

Take for instance, monogamy, which is about as normative as you can get in this culture (I think something like 90% of people marry, and while some of them are polyamorous or have open relationships, the majority certainly appears to consider themselves monogamous). And yet the statistics on both divorce and cheating are through the roof. Cheating, in particular, contradicts the notion of monogamy, and there's a lot of it about. So what's real in practice contradicts what people say. Yet what people say on this issue is really really important. It establishes a norm that is so intensely policed that it more or less has become perceived reality. Like, people often don't think there's any outside to it, other than "bad people" or "weirdos."

So words have a lot of power to determine perceived reality, something that people who are more libertarian on this issue either don't admit or don't care about. But then again, I've seen communities where the policing of language and thought has taken over the entire damned discussion. I've seen 4-6 hour meetings taken up with it. And that's where the notion of this argument not being useful starts to hold more weight. Because the discussion of who used a hurtful word to hurt whom starts to prevent useful work from being done.

Worst of all, this is often--as joe said--used as a very effective tool for sabotage of movements. I know that if I were an infiltrator, this is exactly the tack I would take: I have about, hmm, potentially three different bases on which I could assert that an injury was done to me, and if I stuck to my guns, I could keep the argument going for a long, long time. Because liberals actually want to be fair, and they want to be kind. But they also want to be free, and encourage everyone's freedom. Pointing out where these values conflict with one another is a pretty sure way to get people arguing.

I want to re-emphasize here that I *don't * mean that every time somebody asserts that they are injured, it's a type of sabotage, and don't attribute that motivation to steven, who is one of my favorite authors here.

The only conclusions I've come to, so far, are 1)these issues are way more complex than they look, and 2)I don't want to lose friends or communities over these issues.

If nothing else than for that sign.

I love that, gotta be from New Jersey, lol!