Stigmatised Standard

 It is a mystery, isn't it?

CJ 

It's pretty obvious. You come to an ESL forum, full of teachers, and you expect to always get a completely unbiased opinion? Forums are places where enthusiasts gathers. Often there are real fanatics. All those who are not enthusiastic about the main subject, are basically trolls who should not join and should go somewhere else. Unless you expect to find someone who is not a troll in a rock 'n' roll forum who says he hates rock 'n' roll. Or someone in a forum for soccer enthusiasts who criticizes soccer.

To give you an example of why forums don't lead to completely unbiased and neutral information, consider this forum. How many helpers would answer that using "like" like pepper in, like, the middle of, like, every sentence is, like, normal, common and, like, totally awesome? Probably no one. But ask yourself, how many American native speakers aged 14-20 are there in this forum, helping learners? How many native speakers of African American English? We don't even have Australians, I think.

So on forums you just get opinions, and it's up to you to weigh them and take account of whoever those opinions come from. You already knew this, didn't you?

Anonymous

On a linguistics forum, I wouldn't expect anyone to use words like "that usage is awesome" or "that usage is stupid".

Of course. That's such a subjective way to express an opinion that it would be completely inappropriate in a place where things are supposed to be taken seriously and professionally.
But the intrinsic bias you find on forums, whether implicit or explicit, is always present, because forums consists of people and their opinions, and everyone has their own opinions, right?

If you want to have completely unbiased discussions, then maybe you could try to talk about mathematics (but even in that case, you can find several controversial subjects to discuss, which lead people to express personal "opinions", inherently biased).

It seems to me you want to analyze a language only using logic, and rigorous deductions, as if it was mathematics. Maybe you are forgetting languages are closely related to cultures, history, people... and those are not so predictable and easily analyzable, are they? When people hear an African American accent on the radio, they usually think of a black person, not of a Chinese wise man drinking a beer in Greenland. How can you separate a language form all those other factors? Language is closely related to people, and that's why you get biased opinions. That's actually why it's also such an interesting thing to learn about... it's more like a kind of art.
In the end, you might well consider a language as a "chaotic system".

Anonymous

<It seems to me you want to analyze a language only using logic, and rigorous deductions, as if it was mathematics.>

Show me where I did that, will you?

Hmm, in the other thread, you wanted to hear a definition of a standard from someone, even if you know a real standard doesn't actually exist. And here you are asking why some things are often stigmatized, but others rarely are. So I don't understand what it is that you are trying to find out, or trying to explain. Are you saying that you expect everyone to keep a language separate from all other cultural aspects that are involved, so that it can be discussed logically, an analyzed without any bias, like a mathematical model? That's what it seemed to me... otherwise, you should accept that double negatives and southern American accents still make some people think of "poor education" and "rednecks" (no offense intended, I like southern accents). Of course that's a pretty stupid and ignorant assumption to make... but that's the part of a language that is not logical. Stereotypes and biased assumptions are fundamental in most comedy... so why do you think you should separate a language from all those other aspects? LOL, I'd have a funny video to show you, where "standard English" is stigmatized, but I don't know if I can post it here.