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An interesting issue is that what you can or cannot say, depends a lot on how you say it. If you talk in a way that is easy for people to ignore, you can get aw
by curi 19y ago
An interesting issue is that what you can or cannot say, depends a lot on how you say it. If you talk in a way that is easy for people to ignore, you can get away with almost anything -- people just won't pay enough attention to understand what you meant.
At the other extreme, if you take ideas that are currently say 90% accepted, and you talk about them in such a way that the other 10% feel strongly pressured to change their minds, you can seriously offend them. You can generate resentment, by saying there is no reasonable middle ground, and the wrong view is wrong, and elaborating in detail on how bad it is, and why it's so bad, and how they are hurting their friends and family and themselves by not changing their mind, etc... Even if all that is true, and even if there do not exist any half-decent arguments for the 10%-and-declining view.
You can even offend people who agree with you, but who think you're putting it too strongly, or something. Even if they have no rational reasons for saying your claims are too strong. They may not even consider it a matter of truth, but instead a matter of being nice, or something. Most people think that way, some of the time.
What you are actually talking about matters too. On some subjects, it is easier to trigger defensiveness, on others, harder. So there are some "least possible to say" things, and they are a lot worse than discussing sexism.
PS I think you may have a typo with that double negative isn't + non.