This is not an attempt at trolling, but neither is it an open invitation to have a political conversation here - though I'm open to the possibility, should the mods deem it acceptably on-topic. I have already engaged the mods about non-inclusive, insensitive language here at MTGS, and thus far that conversation has gone absolutely nowhere; the next step is to make a stand, publicly, no matter how inconvenient the topic may be. Awareness is paramount.
Language matters. How people receive that language matters, and their feelings matter too. It's time to face the fact that the term 'lynch' is undeniably racist; please stop using it. Thank you.
The word 'lynch' is racist when used to mean somthing other than "(of a mob) kill (someone), especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial" (Oxford Languages). It was not something that only happened in America to people of color. It has happened elsewhere to others, and an attempt to cry 'racist' to that description of injustice is an attempt co-opt or diminish the suffering of those peoples.
You're right, context matters: historically, lynching has been used disproportionately as an outlet for extrajudicial murder against African Americans. It's just one more cog in the larger machine of systemic racism.
It may be true that lynching has been used in a separate context elsewhere in the world; in order to maintain an inclusive environment here, however, I would defer to whatever language is the least offensive to the most groups / number of people. The fact that it may not be racist to you does not mean that it is also not racist to others, and being racist to only one group is enough to warrant its exclusion.
Look, there are other ways to convey the same idea that aren't even remotely offensive to just a small number of people, let alone almost 52 million Americans. Why don't we just say things that are nice for everyone, yeah? Please? Please. I have no power here to compel you otherwise, so I'm just asking for something that literally takes nothing away from you.
(as an aside, I feel that when you have to devolve into semantics and academic definitions to avoid responsibility for racist language, you've already lost the fight)
We're aware of the connotations of the word lynch and that it draws really ugly historical imagery. The broader mafia community as well as us here have been making small efforts to change our terminology. The largest online mafia community (MafiaUniverse) held a community poll to choose a replacement word and democracy chose "yeet". Here people have mostly chose their own replacements with lot's of variations from condemn (my personal favorite) to flush, squish, eliminate, kill, and destroy.
It's a slow process because there is sub terminology around the use of lynch in the game. The acronyms LYLO and MYLO are ingrained in the culture and we're finding it harder to change them than, but we are making an effort to change!
In the meantime I'd invite both of you to sign up for the game currently in sign ups! We're always looking to grow our community and having fresh outside perspectives helps us realize how insular our community can be with regards to terminology like lynch.
I've had several discussions with many people across communities about the changing of the term. It's not an easy change, especially given that a decent percentage of people have essentially no context for the word being problematic. Any European users being the main example. I agree that the term is problematic and that it should be changed, and in my games and across sites, I've encouraged changing the word. That said, very few sites in the mafia community are actively censoring or banning the word. The standard across communities is to suggest alternatives and at least some people in this community have followed such a standard.
Outside of games with specific flavours, in which unfriend, kick, shock, slick, oust, etc. have been used, the standard top choices have been:
Eliminate (Sometimes shortened to elim)
Execute (Sometimes considered to not be a good replacement as it's considered comparatively brutal)
TK (For TownKill)
Yeet (*sigh*)
Attached are the announcements from a handful of mafia sites.
I had talked to you after the first time you brought this up, which had clearly been in partial response to Shadow being one of the people moderating you. As was posted in the Discord, the approach in this thread does not come across as a good faith attempt. While I do believe that having regular discussions of this are important, coming into the MtGS Mafia community as an outsider with zero participation in said community and saying "I don't like X that some of you do" does very little to actually achieve what you're looking for; people in the community have already dismissed you as not approaching this topic in good faith.
If you want to enable a real discussion which may lead to practical conclusions, that can be arranged, but understand that you have to be coming to such a discussion without an attitude of "Agree with me or you're all ******* racist ********s" or "I want to get back at an administrator who moderated me and I know that they have controversial political views."
This is not an attempt at trolling, but neither is it an open invitation to have a political conversation here - though I'm open to the possibility, should the mods deem it acceptably on-topic. I have already engaged the mods about non-inclusive, insensitive language here at MTGS, and thus far that conversation has gone absolutely nowhere
You openly state how you're specifically NOT interested in a conversation, and you're wondering why your "conversation" has gone absolutely nowhere?
The word 'lynch' is racist when used to mean somthing other than "(of a mob) kill (someone), especially by hanging, for an alleged offense with or without a legal trial" (Oxford Languages). It was not something that only happened in America to people of color. It has happened elsewhere to others, and an attempt to cry 'racist' to that description of injustice is an attempt co-opt or diminish the suffering of those peoples.
I thought we already transitioned to yeet/execute?
I use eliminate by default and then other words for flavourful purposes such as slick. Very few sites are actively moderating or censoring their users to use something other than lynch.
I had talked to you after the first time you brought this up, which had clearly been in partial response to Shadow being one of the people moderating you. As was posted in the Discord, the approach in this thread does not come across as a good faith attempt. While I do believe that having regular discussions of this are important, coming into the MtGS Mafia community as an outsider with zero participation in said community and saying "I don't like X that some of you do" does very little to actually achieve what you're looking for; people in the community have already dismissed you as not approaching this topic in good faith.
I've been invited to join Mafia a few times now, I think, in our private Discord channel; my response has been to demur, because the only interaction I've had with this community, as a whole, has been over this same topic - and quite by accident. I stumbled in with zero understanding or context as to what was going on, immediately quizzed the moderation staff as to why they were using the term, and was roundly ignored. As an outsider, the onus was on me this whole time, apparently, to prove that people weren't being insensitive or racist. Is this behavior typical of how outsiders normally approach the Mafia experience? Because it's been a massive turnoff thus far, leading me to eschew the prospect of joining in altogether, even with people I consider friends.
And I'll be honest, the deference to the status quo on full display here isn't doing much to change my mind.
Quote from osieorb18 »
If you want to enable a real discussion which may lead to practical conclusions, that can be arranged, but understand that you have to be coming to such a discussion without an attitude of "Agree with me or you're all ******* racist ********s" or "I want to get back at an administrator who moderated me and I know that they have controversial political views."
My understanding is that these discussions have already happened, and didn't move the needle on the subject. I'm not inclined to reinvent the wheel over something I consider patently true, and which also boils down to your general premise vis-à-vis moderation: don't be a dick. With or without the alleged ethnocentric aspect, lynch is a demonstrably problematic word, and it takes absolutely nothing from others to respect such a request as "please don't use this word." So... don't be a dick.
You openly state how you're specifically NOT interested in a conversation, and you're wondering why your "conversation" has gone absolutely nowhere?
As I've explained to you in private, the moderators here frown on off-topic conversations. I believe this topic is important enough, and germane enough, to warrant being brought up with some degree of frequency, but erred on the side of caution in my introduction. Some things are controversial, and may undoubtedly lead to heated debate; the fact that lynch is racist should not be controversial, especially when supported with minor educational efforts.
The response to "this word conjures too many images of black people being targeted and murdered, please don't use it" should not be "yeah, but there was also this one time when 11 Italians were killed." Not only should that be another example of why the word is best avoided (Italians being a minority group themselves), it also reeks of the same logic people use to justify how the Irish being subjected to indentured servitude was as bad or worse than actual slavery. At best it's disingenuous, and worst it's just one more cog in the larger machine of systemic injustice.
Language matters. How people receive that language matters, and their feelings matter too. It's time to face the fact that the term 'lynch' is undeniably racist; please stop using it. Thank you.
---
#BLM
#DefundThePolice
It may be true that lynching has been used in a separate context elsewhere in the world; in order to maintain an inclusive environment here, however, I would defer to whatever language is the least offensive to the most groups / number of people. The fact that it may not be racist to you does not mean that it is also not racist to others, and being racist to only one group is enough to warrant its exclusion.
Look, there are other ways to convey the same idea that aren't even remotely offensive to just a small number of people, let alone almost 52 million Americans. Why don't we just say things that are nice for everyone, yeah? Please? Please. I have no power here to compel you otherwise, so I'm just asking for something that literally takes nothing away from you.
(as an aside, I feel that when you have to devolve into semantics and academic definitions to avoid responsibility for racist language, you've already lost the fight)
---
#BLM
#DefundThePolice
It's a slow process because there is sub terminology around the use of lynch in the game. The acronyms LYLO and MYLO are ingrained in the culture and we're finding it harder to change them than, but we are making an effort to change!
In the meantime I'd invite both of you to sign up for the game currently in sign ups! We're always looking to grow our community and having fresh outside perspectives helps us realize how insular our community can be with regards to terminology like lynch.
Outside of games with specific flavours, in which unfriend, kick, shock, slick, oust, etc. have been used, the standard top choices have been:
Eliminate (Sometimes shortened to elim)
Execute (Sometimes considered to not be a good replacement as it's considered comparatively brutal)
TK (For TownKill)
Yeet (*sigh*)
Attached are the announcements from a handful of mafia sites.
I had talked to you after the first time you brought this up, which had clearly been in partial response to Shadow being one of the people moderating you. As was posted in the Discord, the approach in this thread does not come across as a good faith attempt. While I do believe that having regular discussions of this are important, coming into the MtGS Mafia community as an outsider with zero participation in said community and saying "I don't like X that some of you do" does very little to actually achieve what you're looking for; people in the community have already dismissed you as not approaching this topic in good faith.
If you want to enable a real discussion which may lead to practical conclusions, that can be arranged, but understand that you have to be coming to such a discussion without an attitude of "Agree with me or you're all ******* racist ********s" or "I want to get back at an administrator who moderated me and I know that they have controversial political views."
Such as, y'know, Italians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_14,_1891_New_Orleans_lynchings
Which is where the game came from, the Soviet Union specifically (invented in Moscow, popularized by a television show in Latvia).
I use eliminate by default and then other words for flavourful purposes such as slick. Very few sites are actively moderating or censoring their users to use something other than lynch.
I've been invited to join Mafia a few times now, I think, in our private Discord channel; my response has been to demur, because the only interaction I've had with this community, as a whole, has been over this same topic - and quite by accident. I stumbled in with zero understanding or context as to what was going on, immediately quizzed the moderation staff as to why they were using the term, and was roundly ignored. As an outsider, the onus was on me this whole time, apparently, to prove that people weren't being insensitive or racist. Is this behavior typical of how outsiders normally approach the Mafia experience? Because it's been a massive turnoff thus far, leading me to eschew the prospect of joining in altogether, even with people I consider friends.
And I'll be honest, the deference to the status quo on full display here isn't doing much to change my mind.
My understanding is that these discussions have already happened, and didn't move the needle on the subject. I'm not inclined to reinvent the wheel over something I consider patently true, and which also boils down to your general premise vis-à-vis moderation: don't be a dick. With or without the alleged ethnocentric aspect, lynch is a demonstrably problematic word, and it takes absolutely nothing from others to respect such a request as "please don't use this word." So... don't be a dick.
As I've explained to you in private, the moderators here frown on off-topic conversations. I believe this topic is important enough, and germane enough, to warrant being brought up with some degree of frequency, but erred on the side of caution in my introduction. Some things are controversial, and may undoubtedly lead to heated debate; the fact that lynch is racist should not be controversial, especially when supported with minor educational efforts.
The response to "this word conjures too many images of black people being targeted and murdered, please don't use it" should not be "yeah, but there was also this one time when 11 Italians were killed." Not only should that be another example of why the word is best avoided (Italians being a minority group themselves), it also reeks of the same logic people use to justify how the Irish being subjected to indentured servitude was as bad or worse than actual slavery. At best it's disingenuous, and worst it's just one more cog in the larger machine of systemic injustice.
---
#BLM
#DefundThePolice