The Flak over Fl4k and what it cost

At this point, there is one thing everyone can agree on. Humans suck. Just… In general.

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Sure, there are good people in the world, obviously. But we’re also the same species who has people literally denying evidence against the Earth being a globe, and think that vaccines are somehow linked to autism, and government control.

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Ah well, there’s no cure for stupidity. Such as me absolutely wrecking my sleep schedule today by staying on forums until three in the morning.

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I don’t think people even realize they care about these issues because of their attempt to gain the moral high ground. I’m sure they really believe they are doing the right thing. I realize there are good intentions behind these movements, but it’s going too far when you start attempting to police pronouns. I mean it’s getting down right comical.

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It is good to live in a country with language that is gender neutral, our pronouns do not have specific genders.

Also, we used the pronouns they/them especially on elders as a sign of respect, even if we meant only one person.

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I really think the issue comes from people thinking they can force change and acceptance. That has, historically, never been a viable option.

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From my mothertongue:
“Het” is both female gendered, and neutral depending on context.
“Geer” is both formal, and non-gendered, similarly to how “U” is in dutch.

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Must be nice to have a language that didn’t rip apart other language and duct tape them back together.

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Queue has no right to exist as a word. You literally only pronounce the first letter.

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Oh well, got my two cents in. Probably should try and salvage the few remaining shreds of my sleep schedule though.

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Heyyy, common ground has been found!

Humans suck.

I also need to go to sleep. :stuck_out_tongue:

FWIW I don’t give a crap about people accidentally misgendering FL4K. And I have not even been flagging things. It all feels like a lose-lose situation right now because it looks like there are a lot of people coming in to stir crap, moderators are moderating, and then people can point to that as “wow that person got flagged for saying ‘he’ once, how unfair” when there’s pretty obviously a pattern right now of lots of new people coming in to stir crap on purpose. And as a nonbinary person I’m just facepalming very hard at the amount of crap getting thrown around and how people are losing their ■■■■ over nonbinary representation being a thing in this game.

Honestly don’t know how to make this whole situation not suck.

Actually I do, BL3 is gonna come out and I’m going to play this game as FL4K and have a great time.

SLEEP TIME NOW BYE

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Well, I shall bestow a single nugget of wisdom upon you before I take my leave. Whoever named Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia was a total dick. For any of you curious on what it is? The fear of long words. And now to try and get a reasonable amount of sleep.

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It’s unfortunately the limitations of the english language, purely because everything is gendered, there’s “it” but it is impersonal. Borrowing a word from another language could be an option (dutch for example is already that in a nutshell), but the question remains if that would catch on.

It’s neither fortunate nor unfortunate. English isn’t even as gendered as the Spanish language, which genders everything. These are both beautiful languages that have linguistic norms that have taken place over long periods of time. When a small group of a populace decides to police a language, whether its gendered or not, the people will react because it is not a part of the regular linguistic trajectory.

In regards to this forum, it’s certainely not a stance I wish would’ve been taken (the censorship I mean of course). Outside it… well, the LGBT community is as much of a mess as things around it tend to be.

I’m not even gonna go there, but yes it seems like many who are LGBT don’t agree with the censorious practices of the LGBT institution. They do not want to be branded as linguistic or cultural fascists, because it’s not who they are. It’s a small percentage of them.

Inb4 they somehow found a way by speech recognition.

:sweat_smile:

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Just a casual reminder that “they is plural” is a bad argument, used in bad faith by wannabe pedants.

It’s quite possible that singular they predates the singular “you”

We use it all the time. For instance in the sentence

“If anyone has a problem with this, they can take it up with the moderators via pm.”

https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/

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no one believes a robot has a gender in the first place. they are using gendered terms because they are more comfortable with them. using they/them is awkward. ppl refer to vehicles, weapons, etc as he/her. the whole spanish language genders inanimate objects. i guess all spanish ppl are bigots out to get you also.

if gender is a made up social construct then you are also making up your own gender. where do we draw the line on which make believe stuff we are forced to call ppl?

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Except that singular “they” is not exactly meant to be used to refer to someone’s gender, and it’s more used for when you’re making a general statement.

Also this link has some interesting topics related to singular “they” and binary people:

IMO, non-binary people should just be addressed by their names only, instead of wanting other people to use certain pronouns to address them. After all, names are as neutral is it could get;

I think this would be a good way to avoid all these discussions from happening and avoid all this stressful bickering where neither side will be trully right.

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I think that is is false that most ppl have never been misgendered. a common insult is to call males a female or a female name. here is a jim rome clip where he keeps calling jim everett chris everett a female tennis player’s name.

Holy ■■■■, what has happened here? I can’t read through all of this, so here my two cents:
I misgendered Fl4k at least 20 times on multiple threads, but I didn’t do it out of malicious intent (or to annoy anyone or to prove a point) and that makes all the difference. I’m german where there is no real neutral pronoun as our “neutral” pronoun is the same as our pluralistic one which is the same as the female one, albeit it used differently. So I have to get used to that.

The thing is that I don’t make a big deal out of Fl4k’s identity as it even fits my imagination, at least linguistically. I imagined them being a horde or a pack and therefore using “they” as the pronoun for both, their gender-neutral existence and for them existing as 4 beings living as one.

I also live by the premise that everyone deserves a minimum of respect from me until they don’t. And so I feel like it is just fair to at least try to respect a writer’s choice, even if it feels weird at first. It’s not like Fl4k’s character is ruined just by their gender.

One thing that gets brought up often in discussions like this is that Fl4k, the AI themself, is just a robot and therefore should be an “it”. There is just one problem with that: They are a sentient being, they feel and they think and they have an individual personality, lore-wise at least. Right now we don’t have anything close to sentient AI, so the debate is basically still underway, but Fl4k as a character somehow demands this question to be discussed: Can AI be considered to live? And this question is something that comes up in other forums all the time, just look into the Fallout forums and their Synth debates. And I don’t want to start the conversation about Fl4k having rights and being considered a living person, but us humans being disconnected as we try to shelter us from the possibility of life coming into existence without evolutionary causes is and will probably always lead to us not recognizing androids as living beings. But Fl4k lives, in the world of Borderlands.

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I find this tread very interesting as it proves that freedom of speech is dead in America and Europe.
I made a factual comment regarding fascism and freedom of speech and was banned yeasterday.

No, you were not.

Otherwise you’d be banned now. You may have been flagged, had a post hidden, or even been silenced pending mod review, for off-topic posts.

Read the forum rules, please, and don’t make misleading posts. That’s what led to this nonsense, a single inflammatory misrepresentation on Twitter, and look at the state of this place. Honestly. Never in all my born days mutter mutter mutter.

If you have any concerns regarding moderator actions, the rules direct you to pm a mod of your choice. So do that instead, please.

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