Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.

Discussion in 'Whatever' started by Roger, Jun 3, 2021.

  1. Roger

    Roger Vintage

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    Catching up on email, I had one from Big Cartel titled:
    About three hours later, it was followed up with one titled:
    Which read:
    I had never heard about this being a racist term, so I did some Googling and found many pages asserting that it was, but with poor sources. This blog post turned up on the second page of search results. It was written by a longtime contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary and other publications about language:

    https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-nit2.htm

    I fully support efforts to make sure words and phrases with actual racist origins (like this one that was discussed after it was used in The Force Awakens) are no longer used, but I feel like Big Cartel may have done the wrong thing by apologizing here.
     
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  2. rattanicus

    rattanicus Mini Boss

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    Talk about walking on eggshells!
     
  3. The Moog

    The Moog Die-Cast

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    The UK's Prime Minister was famous for calling black people 'Piccaninnies' with 'Watermelon Smiles' but it didn't stop him being elected. He refused to apologise for it too ... It seems being a privileged privately educated toff means you can call people whatever you want.
     
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  4. JoeMan

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    My opinion is the discussion of racial epithets and their validity or sensitivity around them isn’t needed on a toy forum, unless they are directly used by a toy maker/brand and their comments warrant discussion. But big cartel is just a big tech company and while some toy makers use it, I don’t think the conversation or what it unleashes belongs here. Plenty of other places on the internet for those discussions.
     
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  5. Anti Social Andy

    Anti Social Andy Die-Cast

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    We have a saying in Yorkshire . . . 'Black Bright', it's an ironic term regarding someone being dirty/grubby/unclean state. It originated from the coal mines of Yorkshire when miners would return home from the pit with faces black with coal dust and has zero racist connotations.

    We recently had a request from a Yorkshire-based client to remove it from some of their own artwork, because they were worried that it 'could be taken the wrong way'.

    How long before the Rolling Stones have to change the lyrics to 'Paint it Beige'?
     
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  6. The Moog

    The Moog Die-Cast

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    This is in the 'Whatever' section, which to my understanding means its fair game.
     
  7. Anti Social Andy

    Anti Social Andy Die-Cast

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    ^^^ This!
     
  8. JoeMan

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    Seems like bait to get someone to put their foot in their mouth to me.
     
  9. liquidsky

    liquidsky Vintage

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    Meanwhile:

    gyp1
    /jip/
    INFORMAL
    verb
    past tense: gypped; past participle: gypped
    1. cheat or swindle (someone).
      "that's salesmanship, you have to gyp people into buying stuff they don't like"
    quote:
    Most people do not realize it's a racist term that stems from nomadic 'gypsies' who are stereotyped as thieving criminals.



    [​IMG]
     
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  10. Brooklyn_Vinyl

    Brooklyn_Vinyl Line of Credit

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    Big Cartel email and follow-up apology.
    We should probably just cancel them altogether.
    It seems to me that fights over political correctness or cancel culture are happening more within liberal institutions. Does that seem accurate?

    That is entirely accurate. The front line has moved, as you accurately point out, from between right and left, or right and progressive, to within progressive circles and within liberal circles. And now we’re hand-wringing about these issues as well—political correctness and freedom of speech.

    Free speech is a really big one that liberal institutions, liberal media institutions in particular, are quite disturbed by. And that’s a new development, and it’s a function of three things. One is the success of the right in mainstreaming these negative notions about progressive or left-wing culture, or social-political activism culture in general. The second reason is that liberal spaces have become really quite preoccupied, especially since the election of Donald Trump in America, and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, with the sense that the right is doing something right, and we were doing something wrong. And, actually, maybe we need to be more tolerant or more curious or more engaged or more open to these notions that we had rejected before. And now they have come roaring back at us and taken us completely by surprise. So it’s also a crisis of confidence within liberal spaces and within the liberal media.

    The third thing is just the proliferation of social-media channels. There is now so much content out there that, before, we just didn’t see, or that liberal institutions weren’t particularly exposed to. These debates were confined to the academy and activist spaces. And now they’re everywhere, and liberal institutions, be they political parties or media organizations, have to reckon with how to deal with this kind of content, what to amplify, what to ignore. And, in that reckoning, they have become embroiled in it themselves.

    Do you think, though, that these institutions are at risk of losing something valuable? I know you don’t see it as a free-speech issue, but do you think that there is a real danger of losing valuable ideas?

    I do agree that these conversations that are happening within these liberal spaces are legitimate and valid and sometimes concerning. I’m not tempted to say that just because there is no cancel-culture crisis or there is no free-speech crisis it doesn’t mean that what is happening within liberal institutions in terms of limits on what people feel like they’re allowed to say, what people feel that they are permitted to get away with, in terms of slightly divergent political positions, is not a worry.

    The thing that I think is happening falls along multiple lines. It’s in part a generational issue. There is a clear generational divide between people who feel like there needs to be less tolerance of certain political positions, certain opinions, certain views on race, on gender, on sexuality. I think the younger generation has a much more zero-tolerance approach to these things.

    But there is a second part to that dynamic, which is that there are also more people in those liberal spaces that fall on the sharp end of the debates that people previously were quite indulgent of. There are more people of color. There are more people from immigrant backgrounds. There are more people who are gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer, and the progress that we have seen in liberal institutions in opening up their doors to people from different backgrounds means that there is now a conflict about agreed-upon red lines that existed in those places before those people came in. And so it’s also a discussion about how a society expands and includes new people in these spaces that are very influential and that manage and amplify national debates on quite controversial or quite sensitive issues.

    We can’t expect that to happen without some messiness or excess. And that’s where I disagree with people who have a moral panic about excessive patrolling of what people are allowed to say or what they’re not allowed to say in the public space or in the media. Excesses are expected, but they are not everything. We can’t collapse everything into the excesses or the transgressions that we see in these spaces where people go too far in insisting that certain views or certain people who hold those views are ejected or shunned from their jobs or from polite society. I think that we should try to use them as guiding points in how we plot the path forward and how we calibrate our responses. But to expect these huge shifts in the makeup of the media and liberal spaces to happen without incident is unrealistic.

    Link to full article:
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-an...ampaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker
     

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