On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 04:46:43AM -0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
On Thu, 03 Dec 2020 22:41:40 +0100, Michal Kubecek wrote:
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
There are good ways to tell someone that they did something wrong or that they are wrong without saying they're stupid.
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?
That's not what I'm saying at all.
But if someone pushes back and says "you called me an idiot, and that's offensive", maybe take a look at the situation and consider that perhaps engaging in an ad hominem attack was the wrong way of expressing that they had made an error.
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.
Of course it doesn't. I would never suggest that it does.
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?
This is getting silly. It should be pretty clear that I'm not talking about things that are factually incorrect, or dangerously so.
But if I were to say "Michal, you're an idiot for thinking that that's what I meant" - I'd be causing you offense for no good reason - and I'd be shutting down the discussion, which doesn't benefit anyone.
I'm talking about approaching the discussion with kindness first. Otherwise, you tell the person you're discussing things with that they should stop listening to you.
I'm sure that's not your intention (impersonal "your" there - I don't mean "you" personally here - talking in general terms about the person who is causing offense).
Summed up, you did not actually mean what you wrote. While that's a relief for me (that statement was really scary), you now say essentially the same as me and others you argued with: when someone tells you he is offended by what you said or did, you have right to assess if his response makes sense to you and, based on that, decide if and how you act upon it. Just one important note: being offended has little to do with facts or reason, it's an emotional reaction. Which is why even if I'm not denying the "right to be offended", I will always fight for it to be balanced by right to say "well, that's your problem". Michal Kubecek