erinja:

Alkanadi:I have always wanted to check out a Jewish community just out of curiosity.

If you live in a place with a synagogue, you are welcome to visit. Jews do not proselytize but non-Jews are welcome to attend services.

Thanks for the advice. I will do that sometime.

Okay we have covered language, race, religion, and politics. All that's left is sex. There I've mentioned it. Now all bases are covered. Can we please draw a line here before this thread turns nasty(er).

Taking aside the question whether the OP was a friend of orthohawk or an alias and all the stuff afterwards, there is still a very important claim uttered here which cannot be left without comment:

If indeed this is any indication of the wider Esperanto community, I'm very glad not have wasted any time or money in it these past 30 some years. There was such promise.

All of this has happened in an anglophone forum (of course for Esperanto learners, but still in English, not in Esperant(uj)o), so if someone wants to make deductions about wider society, please don't blame the Esperanto movement.

I think that orthohawk's thread 'Do you use ci?', which in any case should have been posted in the Esperanto forum, would have had better reactions in Esperanto than in English.

Kirilo81:I think that orthohawk's thread 'Do you use ci?', which in any case should have been posted in the Esperanto forum, would have had better reactions in Esperanto than in English.

Let me just remind that “Do you use «ci»?” was not an Orthohawk's thread but a question posted by Ravana. I can assume (based on the claimed “basic” knowledge of Esperanto) that he decided to ask this question in English, because he knows English better.

All went fine with people answering the question by describing whether (and why) they use (or don't use) this fundamentan word, until the conversation turned into condemning answer Orthohawk has given, calling his decision to use it with beginners as an inappropriate behaviour, some unpleasant remarks at his religious beliefs and suggesting he'd be better stop using Esperanto and start using Ido.

erinja:

Alkanadi:I think "Kike" means Italian. Is it antisemitic?

It means Jewish. There are a couple of anti Italian slurs on a similar level but I'm not going to repeat them here.

For non-native English speakers (or, I guess, native speakers who have never come across it before), I would like to underscore that the "k" word quoted above is an extremely vulgar and hateful term. It does mean Jewish, but in about as vile a way as possible. Please do not use it, ever, to or about anyone.

mbalicki:some unpleasant remarks at his religious beliefs and suggesting he'd be better stop using Esperanto and start using Ido.

If normative Esperanto grammar is against his religion, that's fine. No one is asking him to change his religion. If you're a vegetarian offended by the presence of animal carcasses, maybe you shouldn't work at a deli counter that serves meat, right? But in that case he might be happier speaking Ido and not answering questions about his grammar every ten seconds. That was a totally sincere suggestion. In the Ido community, people might actually listen to the content of what he is saying versus the grammatical elements of his sentence. He would not have to answer a single question about singular versus plural "you" because it is part of their normal language to distinguish. At any rate, I wouldn't expect him to be that happy in Esperanto, because his Facebook page makes him look like a person who has trouble accepting diversity among people. People who have problems with accepting all kinds of diversity tend to have a problem in Esperantujo, which is by and large a diverse and accepting place.

A member of a religious minority is just going to be sad and upset all the time if they react aggressively and defensively to people who question you and disagree with your choices.

Sorry, but no one is going to congratulate you and give you a pat on the back for doing something that comes off as extremely strange in the society you live in. I say this as a person who has many religious practices that are extremely strange in my society. You make friends versus enemies by accepting that people are going to think your practice is illogical and wrong, acknowledging that it looks like a strange practice to outsiders, and continuing on with being pleasant to others while you continue doing what you feel you religiously must do. You say "Yep, I'm weird!" and then do what you have to. Ah also it helps not to use ethnic slurs against people who disagree. That also helps.

erinja:At any rate, I wouldn't expect him to be that happy in Esperanto, because his Facebook page makes him look like a person who has trouble accepting diversity among people. People who have problems with accepting all kinds of diversity tend to have a problem in Esperantujo, which is by and large a diverse and accepting place.

Thank you for being so heartwarming and accepting, especially for people who (I'll repeat it again and again) use fundamentajn words according to their definitions from the Fundamento de Esperanto, just not these you happen to like.

erinja:A member of a religious minority is just going to be sad and upset all the time if they react aggressively and defensively to people who question you and disagree with your choices.

Sorry, but no one is going to congratulate you and give you a pat on the back for doing something that comes off as extremely strange in the society you live in.

Did anyone ask you to do that? You've been just asked a simple question “Do you use «ci»?” and right off decided to call people not agreeing with your viewpoint as “gratuitously, wilfully offensive”. (And Tempodivalse began by saying about freedom of speech about “neo-Nazism as in Germany and Austria”. So not exactly reductio ad Hitlerum but closest you could get at this point in the discussion.)

What surprises me about Orthohawk was the gradual descent into anger and confusion. I had previously known him as a fairly nice person - certainly not the kind to resort to slurs at a moment's provocation. It may be that he's having difficulties in real life, and it's spilling out online. It happens. I wouldn't be so quick to judge.

The underlying issue, I think, is that if one chooses to act in a way society labels "strange", one has to (for better or for worse) accept that label, regardless of whether it is justified or not.

One can't change others' perceptions, but one can change how one perceives others' perceptions.

(And Tempodivalse began by saying about freedom of speech about “neo-Nazism as in Germany and Austria”. So not exactly reductio ad Hitlerum but closest you could get at this point in the discussion.)

I think you're taking this out of context. I didn't "begin" with that; it was a side-comment.

It began when orthohawk insisted he had a right to free speech - which he'd previously invoked when making anti-gay comments.

I pointed out that freedom of speech does not extend to privately-run websites like Lernu, where the admins are (fortunately) able to redact user content at their discretion.

He insisted that he still had the right to act as he pleased on the website. Rather incidentally, I pointed out that free speech is not an absolute even in permissive Western law, providing some counterexamples - including hate speech. In retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have made that digression. But no comparison was made between orthohawk and fascism.

mbalicki:All went fine with people answering the question by describing whether (and why) they use (or don't use) this fundamentan word, until the conversation turned into condemning answer Orthohawk has given, calling his decision to use it with beginners as an inappropriate behaviour, some unpleasant remarks at his religious beliefs and suggesting he'd be better stop using Esperanto and start using Ido.

Mbalicki, I am a member of a religious minority as well, and in the strongest possible terms, I believe that the rights of people to practice their sincerely held religious beliefs must be respected at all times. I don't believe that people should ever be obligated to engage in behavior that violates their convictions barring overwhelming state interest (such as the impending death of a child, etc.). However, having said that, there are some things here that do not add up:

1. It is against Orthohawk's religion to use a second person pronoun without distinguishing between singular and plural forms---but yet he can cuss, be vulgar, and call someone a filthy name? Does that not strike you as oddly inconsistent?

2. It is one thing to be deceptive, but it is quite another to be merely non-specific. All languages have ambiguities that require context if more specificity is needed. Orthohawk fixated on the word "you", but what about the word "we"? If I say "we", do I mean it inclusively ("you, the person I'm speaking with and I" ), or do I mean "I and these other people" (excluding the person I'm speaking with)? Context has to unravel that mystery.

English and Esperanto both have three gender specific third-person pronouns (he, she, and it), but only one plural form (they). So when I say "they", am I talking about men, women, things, or a combination of them? I'm not being specific when I simply say "they". But I'm not being deceptive, either--it's just the way the language works. I don't go showing off some odd, bizarre, or out-dated dual plural "we" or try to make some gender-specific form of "they" , foist it on everybody else, and then claim I'm "practicing my religion" by doing so.

3. I, too, was incredulous that anybody would claim that being called "ci" offended them--honestly, that just seems a little overly prickly. I can't see anything even remotely offensive about being called "ci", no matter how outmoded it might be--so I'll concede that point. Life's too short to worry about some odd speech quirk that somebody feels obligated to use. But "ci" is also not a singular "you" form, either, and Orthohawk was wrong to insist that it was. Lashing out defensively and being rude to people who don't accept your notions at face value leads to this sort of thing.