[...] a cavalcade of posts all saying pretty much the same thing and making the dude defensive for 3 or 4 (or 9) pages

No, this did not happen, actually. What happened is we called him out for saying something that's offensive to me and some other people on a very deeply personal basis. We told him to not do that anymore. IceSage never "became defensive". We pointed something out to him, he asked a question about it, and then he simply apologized.

Absolutely nothing happened.

You know what did happen? Afura decided to take this moment to complain about the (INCONCEIVABLE) fact that someone like Geodude could get angry about hearing a gay slur. And I don't like that. I said something about it. That's the moment we bogged down into this discussion, not before it. This entire thing could've been avoided easily.

As was pointed out by Vellfire, it's much more effective to simply have a few public posts, for everyone to see, telling exactly why it's wrong to say such a thing. And we were right on track to getting IceSage to understand our point of view, which happened a few posts further down. No one's brilliant insights about how you should only respond to slurs with the nicest of decorum were necessary. In fact, those are pretty insulting and ignorant of exactly how damaging those slurs can be, and they did absolutely nothing to help us talk with IceSage about this.

it's people repeatedly responding in a way that has proven (by the bi-monthly recurrence of these incidents) to be, for the most part, nonconstructive.

Let me repeat: this entire discussion is completely fabricated, and the method we were using to talk to IceSage proved to work. He says he didn't know, he apologized. This topic literally didn't get really derailed before Afura's post.

it's not about niceness but rather maturity. but if you think you're handling this in a mature, grown-up way then godspeed.

So explain to me what you would consider more mature, then. Do you think I should say "sorry, I was wrong"? Wrong do what, exactly? To tell Afura I don't care about him trying to set standards for how nice you should respond to a gay slur?

Everybody seems to be complaining about how "our methods don't work", but nobody seems to be actually reading the topic. If you read the posts in order, you'll see they worked just fine. IceSage responded and apologized and he hasn't said a single word about this whole thing since then. We're actually chatting about something entirely different on IRC now. This whole topic has already been forgotten.

Literally, this whole thing is fabricated by the responses made by Afura and Hundley. If you remove those posts and the responses to it, there's nothing going on, because the problem you guys are describing literally doesn't exist.

That's why I had the middle part of the post there, where it said that that's what has happened before, & what people had reason to expect might happen again. We aren't generally talking about this discussion
[...]
I agree with Velfarre that there should be public posts, at first & at the conclusion. That's why I'm suggesting that after the initial exchange, if there's not some give on the other side, you try to discuss it more privately, when they feel a little less pressure from a larger audience.

That sounds good to me. And I agree with you, it went perfectly right this time. If you take away the hysteria, the actual calling out of something IceSage said went pretty well. I think that doing it like this in the future is not such a bad idea, and keeping it private if it doesn't work right away or has a possibility of turning ugly isn't a bad idea either.

edit: I mean the other topics all had their specific circumstances so I don't know if you can really compare them, but putting that aside, I agree that if there's no end in sight we should just call it quits and either tell the person to never do it again or (hopefully not) just get rid of them. That actually sounds quite reasonable to me.

This whole thing is just kind of bonkers. I'm actually talking with IceSage on IRC now, about something entirely different. He came online right after this exchange and we haven't said a word about this topic. It's already been forgotten.

the best color is obv #006AFF

dada, I was literally responding to you saying that being irrational was aok. My response goes for any context.

When someone calls you by a slur that specifically targets your demographic, whether it's a homophobic slur or a racist slur or anything else, I think it's perfectly understandable (as well as predictable) if you get angry in response. And I don't think we should blame those people. I honestly think it's OK to get angry over something like that. You can't expect people to take that kind of abuse with a straight face and an impeccable Vulcan demeanor. If you tell these people you can't get angry over that sort of thing, I think you're putting a very heavy burden on them, and I don't think that's moral.