Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-24011918-20131214001227/@comment-10950063-20131216054402

I didn't really weigh in on the topic before and I think it should be mentioned.

Whenever you ban a word, you're essentially moving the goal post for offensive forward. That is to say, it's easier to ban another word because you've already banned one. It's hard to argue that calling some a racial slur shouldn't be a bannable offense.

Well, once you've got the racial slurs down, you should probably hit the sexual identity insults. Yeah, that's reasonable. Soon the idea of banning words isn't reasonable because the word is so offensive, it's reasonable because all those other words are banned.

If I called Crash a "potato eater" because he's Irish, some people would be offended by that. Even though it's a silly phrase and a good percentage of the world eats potatoes. You could ban the word "dumb," because it's a politically incorrect way to refer to people who can't speak. And we think, "Well, we would never ban the word 'dumb,' that's silly." But I'm sure there was a time when people would have though that a day instaban for "retard" was silly, or even "gay."

It's the same with jokes. Rape is an awful thing, that's something that doesn't need saying. It's easy to see why rape jokes are offensive. But when you say that people can't make rape jokes, you also have to say people can't make jokes or references to death. Death is upsetting, people die every day. Who knows what user will have recently lost someone they loved?

The same could be applied for anything that could be construed as inappropriate.

It's a very slippery slope, made all the more slippery by how easy it is to argue in favor of it.