It's another dismissive slur in the same vein as "Social Justice Warrior". The basic idea behind it is that anyone who has a problem with racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. language or behavior just needs to get over it and STFU. It is mostly said by angry young white dudes on the Internet.
There's social justice warriors (SJW) who do fight the good fight and try to point out (and/or stomp out) racism, bigotry and homophobia when they see it, but then there are also those who take it to far. The extremists. They adopt the SJW ideology and wrap themselves up in it like a warm blanket. I think that 'slur' would refer to those extreme individuals. An example of someone taking it to the extreme would be someone frothing at the mouth because you said the word "spider". They're angry, upset and offended because they're scared of spiders and you didn't put a trigger warning in front of it (Yes, those people really exist). They're hypersensitive and find everything and anything offensive for the sake of being offended because their outrage nets them a form of attention.
On every side of every issue, you're going to have extremists. I think it's best to stomp out extremism when you come across it because they inevitably do more harm to their cause then good.
This is actually a great write-up on the trigger-warning phenomena:
Quote from the article: "I believe the current P.C. agenda, by demanding purity from its allies, is showcasing its inherent weakness." She is right. We do not advance the cause of justice by censorship or by claiming to be traumatized by other people's opinions."
I, for one, am glad MeFi is full of "social justice warriors" and the "trigger warning crowd". It gives the community standards, makes discussion far less aggressive, and allows marginalized groups to really open up. It's one of the few places online where you can get truly life-changing threads like this one[1]. This is by far the better side to err on.
And actually, I've noticed the same thing happening in female-majority subreddits as well. (/r/askwomen)
No, those are chilling effects due to uncertainty about the stance of the moderating staff because they side with an increasingly smaller and louder minority. Read Larry Lessig's book about the outsized threat of campaign contributions beyond the actual contribution budget. Or, read about the Panopticon prison model or behavioral studies of the psychology of loss avoidance.
There are all kinds of peaceful forums that have this problem and Metafilter is just a prominent example. The thread you linked is interesting but not outstanding for a web forum, and the cost of it is probably several threads that a healthier community would have made.
This is hard for you to see because you probably read about new people entering these communities and praising them for closely fitting their preferences. What you don't see is how many people leave, don't join or reduce participation.
But again, these are common forum issues. The owner of Metafilter has managed the situation pretty well and especially over sixteen years. I'm sure the personal attention to the community by Metafilter staff is a big reason why it's as similar to its old self as it is.
1. I strongly disagree that it is not outstanding.
2. There are going to be "chilling effects" (read: norms) in any community. It is inevitable that like-minded people will stick with each other. The question is how these effects manifest themselves. The MeFi model is community enforcement and moderation: "uh, that's not really OK to say". The Reddit model is outright mockery, threats, ganging up, and disturbing PMs. Show me a community that a) accepts widely opposing viewpoints, while b) keeping the discussion pleasant and respectful. Personally, I'm done with the Reddit model.
"No, those are chilling effects due to uncertainty about the stance of the moderating staff because they side with an increasingly smaller and louder minority."
This seems like misuse of the term "chilling effects" to mean, "I don't like it when someone tells me to stop being an asshole."
The common usage of the term "chilling effects" is when legal mechanisms are used, such as cease and desist letters and DMCA takedown notices, where the threat of legal repercussions are used to shut down communication. To apply it to someone calling out the use of a sexist slur, for example, is to diminish the term "chilling effects" or to elevate some people's free speech (usually that of white males) above the free speech of everyone else.
In short, a lot of the time when free speech is used as an argument, it is because others are exercising their free speech to criticize something shitty someone said. It isn't breaking free speech to call out sexist/racist/homophobic language for being sexist/racist/homophobic, it is exercising it in the best way possible.
Now, of course, if moderation is used aggressively even in questionable cases, that's a different thing, and one worth discussing (with the moderators of said site). It isn't really "chilling effects", I don't think, because a privately owned community website choosing to enforce its own customs and norms is almost certainly not oppression, even if we don't like their choices.
There are many sides to it, and I don't think it's useful to make it "us against them" on most fronts. I believe a lot of useful, and a lot of hurtful, stuff came out of those various very personal articles and blog posts discussed in your link.
But, I do find it interesting that the author of the piece you've linked seems to believe it was women and feminists who made the majority of the "neckbeard" and fedora images...when, in fact, they are the work of predominantly young male redditors and occasionally 4channers. There are several subreddits devoted to this kind of humor, and from what I can tell they are disproportionately (even for reddit) occupied by young males.
So, there are many other sides to it. Nerds get shit from a lot of directions...not just from women. It sucks to be a nerd. And, it sucks to be overweight. It sucks to be a minority. It sucks to be a woman. It sucks to have a disability. It sucks to be poor. Humans are awful to one another in so many ways.
Sometimes, it's worth considering whether we should say what we're thinking...not because we want to be politically correct. But, because sometimes the things we say can contribute to maintaining a culture of oppression, and if we are decent human beings we prefer not to contribute to empowering oppression with the weight of numbers. And, if we are striving to be more than merely decent, we'll spend some time trying to stamp out those internalized oppressions that make it hard to see when we're being assholes to our fellow human beings.
In what way can anything that Scott Aaronson said be construed to be contributing to maintaining a culture of oppression? Patriarchy and structural oppression are useful models for understanding lots of things, but they are not isomorphic to reality, and you do not deserve to be pilloried for explaining your experience in some other terms.
This is why people find the internet SJW community so distasteful. Not only are they completely ineffective at improving the lives of the people they claim to be fighting for, but they also delight in doing active harm to defenseless people for merely using another model of the world in some circumstances.
"In what way can anything that Scott Aaronson said be construed to be contributing to maintaining a culture of oppression?"
I don't believe Scott Aaronson said anything contributing to or maintaining a culture of oppression. Though, as others have pointed out, his language does seem to indicate women are not complete human beings with their own needs, wants, fears, problems, etc. in his mind (or, at least, were not complete human beings during the painful time in his life when women were a source of seemingly overwhelming distress to him). I believe Scott Aaronson is a genuinely nice guy (not in the pejorative sense). He got caught in the cross-fire of a battle being waged on the Internet between people who aren't always as genuinely nice as he is.
But, that doesn't alter the fundamental reality that there is structural oppression, and many young white men on the Internet are willing participants, beneficiaries, and proponents of it, including in communities that I wish with all my heart were above it (such as reddit, and HN, which are communities that I love and that are frequented by many people I respect and admire).
I want to occupy communities that work hard to be inclusive of people that haven't been welcomed into tech communities the past. I'm willing to be more careful about what I say to achieve that (and, I'm a middle class white guy in America, I do not have a history of needing to watch what I say, so it's foreign to me, too). Not for fear of offending someone, but for fear of pushing away voices that aren't like me. I don't want an echo chamber where a bunch of middle class white guys rant at each other all day.
Whereas declaiming someone a "racist sexist homophobe" at the first indication of heterodoxy is nothing like using "dismissive slurs" to hand-wave away another's statements, especially if the culprit is one of those young white dudes whose thoughts no one should ever pay any attention to anyway.
Interesting that you read what I wrote as calling someone a "racist sexist homophobe", when what I wrote about racism, sexism, and homophobia, was specifically and emphatically about language and behavior, and made no mention of people. The people in question aren't what I have a problem with, only the language and behavior that contributes to social norms in some communities on the Internet that are exclusionary of women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks.
The only thing I said that was about people was "mostly said by angry young white dudes on the Internet". Which was, in fact, intended to be dismissive of some people's words. I believe it is a boringly predictable and reactionary display of privilege that deserves nothing other than to be dismissed. It is not merely coincidence that it is almost universally angry young white men who make these kinds of statements.
Note that one side of this debate presumes semantic-semiotic equivalence (that any discussion of a subject X will come with the same connotations) while the other side presumes linguistic relativism (that you can talk about X using word Y or word Z, and the connotations are attached to the words, not the subject.)
"Political correctness" (and the concept of a "trigger warning", and a few other things) is only a coherent concept under the assumptions of linguistic relativism. Since the two sides have different axioms, they can't really engage in a debate.
