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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Milieu" data-source="post: 9403225" data-attributes="member: 7041560">I don't deny that some people do get overzealous in going after people they view as having said something problematic, but there is a no less vociferous and even less open "How dare you call foo problematic!" in nearly every case.See, for example, the inciting incident of this thread: Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro reproduced historical documents exactly in their book. They included a disclaimer that some of the things in those documents are problematic and "These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today." Rob Kuntz (among others) called this "slanderous". How dare they say Gygax was sexist! I find that latter a lot worse than the former.What is socially acceptable changes, sure. That insulting or discriminating against people hurts them doesn't. Sexism hurts people, whether it's socially acceptable or not. And the reason some things are considered "problematic" is that some groups of people find them hurtful. It's not perfect by any means, but nor is it an arbitrary fad (irrespective of the fact the sometimes people DO use "problematic" as a way to look down on others).I don't see the potential for some of the things I've said being looked back at one day as "problematic" as an argument against calling things problematic. Some of the things I've said were problematic, and recognizing that is a good thing. I've learned, and I'm still learning, and sometimes the way I learn is someone points out something I didn't realize was a problem.When I was in middle school, it was common in my cohort to use the word "gay" as a generic insult: anything we didn't like we would call "gay." Lots of people around me did it (not an excuse), and I just kind of absorbed it and started doing it without thinking about it. As obvious as it seems now, I didn't think about the fact that people who were gay would be hurt or insulted by that. Embarrassingly, it didn't even occur to me until I saw <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_Before_You_Speak_(campaign)" target="_blank">an ad campaign</a> calling it out as problematic. I sure felt stupid, but I didn't complain about "political correctness" or that "you can't say anything these days"; I just decided to stop unintentionally hurting people around me. And that's not the only example.So—even if some of them are overzealous; even if some of them are frustrated at hearing the same petty insults every day and so don't always react in the way that is most helpful to me—I am grateful that there are people who expect me to change the problematic things I say.</blockquote>

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