Both are used for the same thing, though: for dismissing the person’s points of view by the simple act of applying a label to them.
“You’re a leftist so I don’t bother listening to you.”
“You’re woke so I don’t bother listening to you.”
It doesn’t matter if the person has a good point or if they’re right. If the other party disagrees with them, they don’t need to come up with any kinds of rational counterarguments because they invalidate the other person in their mind.
No-one’s really completely immune to this, of course. Our interpretation is always skewed by our opinion on the person we’re communicating with. If it’s someone who shares a political approach with me, I tend to interpret what they say more favorably than if the person is on the other wing. Or, if I remember a person used to act as a jerk on the CE forums, I’m less likely to agree with them even if their idea is good.
But at least I recognize this phenomenon in myself so I can at least try to consciously counteract it. Most people don’t.
So, rather than trying to cast blame for the excessive word filtering on any particular demographic group we happen to dislike, I would recommend focusing on asking Funcom to apply some damn common sense to the filtering. If they want to censor every word that might offend someone, they need to remove all words from the game. Considering that there are thousands of languages in the world, most of which have at least some sort of profanities, the odds that any string of phonemes can be interpreted as offensive in some language are extremely high.
1 Like