Your local zoning board might object. I live in PA, and one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government when I started growing corn, squash, and beans in my backyard while raising a couple of chickens for eggs.
> Please keep that sort of slur off HN. We don't need it here, and you don't need it to make your substantive points.
I think that may be an overly heated response.
Given that I have seen the term used as a pronoun applied to multiple genders, sex preferences, races, ethnicities, etc, I see the term as speaking to behaviors, rather than being a pejorative unique to a group. Here are good examples of it being applied across multiple ethnicities and genders [1] & [2] . There is even a transgender karen [3] .
Normally it is applied to people acting improperly, hall-monitor type of behaviors where it is not warranted. Someone maliciously reporting food growing in a backyard meets the definition.
Please don't make decisions based off Wikipedia [4] or dictionary.com [5] redefining a word to meet a specific agenda.
'internet forum aspiring to curious conversation' and 'youtube videos making fun of people's public meltdowns' have different standards and HN's are pretty well documented.
The word Karen reaching a tipping point in public awareness associated with the Gamestop incident I already pointed out. Many of us have seen it. We're aware of it, we know about it. And we know it is potent, otherwise it wouldn't be on the chopping block for redefinition. And forever, when I think of the word Karen, I think of that particular incident.
The word in that sense, has a great deal of similarity with a tiny little phrase, of a mere two words.
Mission Accomplished.
Whether tearful, premature, ironic, deceptive, tragic, or an example of great hubris, many of us living will forever associate those two words with George W. Bush on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the incalculable human suffering of an unpopular war. The friends we lost after that, and military adventurism run amok. The missing Weapons of Mass Destruction. So much is wrapped up in those two words. And forever, when I think of the phrase Mission Accomplished, I think of that particular speech.
Please do not tell me that HN is going to redefine a word for me, whether it is Karen, or Mission Accomplished, or some other phrase.
We don't need civilized pejoratives that are completely decent for dinner table talk to be conflated with uncivilized utterances not fit for the written or spoken word.
To say 'Au contraire' you have to provide some sort of meaningful counter-argument. You have 'comedy' youtube videos, oddly overwrought bombast ('dictator', 'agenda') and something about a completely different phrase which, unlike 'Karen', is not intended as an insult.
Directing tropey slurs at people is mostly not ok on HN and it's been moderated like that for ages.
The 'examples' obviously don't fit HN at all and beside you, nobody has mentioned racial or ethnic slurs nor made any argument the word should be treated here in some way that's different from the way it's widely interpreted. That seems more reach-y and redefin-y than simply asking people not to be trope-wielding jerks on HN.
I don't know if the comment was edited or not, but I hope you're not claiming "vigilante" is a slur. I looked up the definition of slur just to be sure and you are technically correct, but I'd say you're abusing language far more than the person you're responding to.
Editing a comment after the fact in a way that deprives a reply of its original context and makes it look stupid is, in most cases, a dick move. I think most users understand that. It doesn't make a difference whether the reply was by a moderator or not.
- Getting snarky because they did the reasonable thing and got rid of the slur after it was pointed out
- Calling said user a dick. If Karen is a misogynistic slur, How is dick not moreso misandristic? I realize you said "dick move", but that's functionally the same. Saying something was a "c?nt move" or a "n????r move" would be tantamount to calling someone a c?nt or n????r.
- Because maybe it made your comment "look stupid"
Jawdropping desecration of the guidelines. You need a vacation.
In most of the spaces I frequent, an edit to change objectionable wording after being called on it is acceptable. Since you've made it plain that that sort of approach doesn't work here, I'll keep that in mind.
It's not a borderline case. People have trouble with the distinction between a judgement about a word overall, and a judgement about what a word will do to an HN thread. Also, people just like to gripe.
A Karen is no more an inappropriate slur than many other useful words and phrases that are negative, such as goody-two-shoes, busybody, bully, crank, etc.
She griped about both, the zoning board demanded I get rid of the chickens.
I was tempted to leave their corpses on her doorstep and egg the municipal building as a petty sort of revenge, but that would have been too obvious.
Those chickens were good eating, though, especially with some homegrown corn on the cob and baked beans. The squash didn't work out so well, unfortunately.
What was she griping about with the garden? Chickens I can understand if there are smell complaints. In San Francisco you are allowed to keep them but there are rules about the number you can have and the minimum distance their enclosure can be to any neighbors window, etc. But squash? That’s really an odd thing to complain about.
backyard chickens don't have a smell, that's only once you start mass producing them in a factory. The same way yours or your neighbors dogs, that produce substantially more feces than a chicken, don't cause neighborhood wide odor.
My biggest problem with my neighbor's chickens was that they kept getting out an coming over to my property and he'd have to ask me to let him in the back yard so he could take them back home. Never noticed any smells near their coop which was near the property line.
Never really bothered me since they mostly just hung out around the back fence far from my house, but finally another neighbor complained to the city and they had to get rid of the chickens. Chickens are allowed here (up to 10 per property), but have to be kept confined and on your own property.
I was probably just interpreting the ordinance requirements of a minimum distance of 20 feet from any neighbor’s door or window as having to do with smell when I read it.
Obviously regulations vary across counties and municipalities, but when/where I lived in PA, the zoning rules spelled it out pretty clearly that hens were fine but roosters weren't.
Growing a garden and raising livestock are pretty different in practice & impact from my experience. Assuming you voluntarily moved into the zoning and "Karen" objected to you violating them, it's all on you.
The zoning change came after I moved in and after I got my chickens. If I had the time, money, and inclination I might have been able to find a lawyer willing to appeal on ex post facto[0] grounds, but it wasn't a battle worth fighting. I had had a year's worth of free eggs by then, and the chickens themselves didn't go to waste.
Quite true, and the potential for gardening is quite situational. OTOH, current forecasts of mega-scale hunger, famines, & death look pretty useful, if you wanted to paint such, ah, busybodies, in a rather negative light, and try to get some rules changed.
> one of the neighborhood vigilantes immediately ratted me out to the local government
Better than your previous phrasing, but try again; if the action that they took was to report you to the government then they are the opposite of a vigilante by definition.
The original word (which: I can't keep up, is that really bad now? When did that happen, last week?) made more sense, really. "Vigilante" is way off from it.
I don't think it's right to co-opt and despoil that name of doubtless many real people, so if there is a pushback against using "Karen" as an insult then I'm in favour of it. That said, this is first time I've seen anyone else say anything against it. Perhaps I also can't keep up? ;-)
It also takes well over an acre to support a single person, and that's if you know what you're doing and have the time to manage a garden of that size.
> To grow all the food for one person's needs for the whole year requires, for most people, at least 4,000 square feet—though some diet designs are possible that can use a smaller area.
> A 0.44 acre of land can produce enough vegetables and fruits to meet up with the daily calories needed for one person to feed for a year.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1993:
> It is realistic to suppose that the absolute minimum of arable land to support one person is a mere 0.07 of a hectare–and this assumes a largely vegetarian diet, no land degradation or water shortages, virtually no post-harvest waste, and farmers who know precisely when and how to plant, fertilize, irrigate, etc.
> The minimum amount of agricultural land necessary for sustainable food security, with a diversified diet similar to those of North America and Western Europe (hence including meat), is 0.5 of a hectare per person. This does not allow for any land degradation such as soil erosion, and it assumes adequate water supplies.
Cut out meat and it gets better, but not that much better.
Only if you use traditional farming. Hydroponics, Aeroponics, and Aquaponics use far less resources (more startup capital but far less inputs), can grow year round (assuming indoor grows), and has 5-10x the yield per sq ft.
The post you're replying to suggests a Victory Garden. While a personal victory garden may not have a big effect on global food supplies, it can absolutely help supplement food for households that are squeezed by higher food prices (which is another side effect of global food shortages).
Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Germany during World War I and World War II. In wartime, governments encouraged people to plant victory gardens not only to supplement their rations but also to boost morale. They were used along with rationing stamps and cards to reduce pressure on the public food supply.
I just wanted to look out my window and see something more useful than grass, OK? If I got to enjoy a couple meals out of what I grew, so much the better.
I've zero objection to "I like gardening" and "I love a home-grown tomato" as reasons to have a garden. I simply don't think it's a meaningful part of a fix to a collapse of the supply chain.
