On Wed, Dec 02, 2020 at 07:02:20PM -0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
If you say something and someone tells you "that's offensive to me because ...." - the civil thing to do (and I would say 'correct') is to say "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cause offense - this is what I meant" and then learn from it and don't do it again.
I cannot possibly agree with such requirement stated this absolutely general way which does not admit any exception. There is a lot of people who could be offended by being told e.g. - that they did something wrong - that they are wrong - that they made a mistake - that they should read the documentation Do you really want to say that whenever someone feels offended by one of these, we should stop telling them these things even if we are right? The fact that someone is offended by something does not automatically mean that they are right and that the thing is wrong and should not happen again. As a thought experiment, just imagine someone would tell you he is offended by your statement I quoted above because it denies him the right to decide if he really did something wrong or if the response is inadequate. (Or any other reason, actually, you don't seem to give the accused "offender" any right to validate the reason.) Would you happily apologize for it and refrain from repeating it ever again? Michal Kubecek