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> Speech is the one thing that can equalize rich and poor, and has the ability to evaporate decades of work and reputation. I feel like this is a bit of a pass
by rtpg 9y ago
> Speech is the one thing that can equalize rich and poor, and has the ability to evaporate decades of work and reputation.
I feel like this is a bit of a passive way of saying this.
If someone says something, _they said it_. It evaporates their reputation because _they did something_.
And when saying things, it's to communicate the idea to others. I don't really think that speech exists in a vacuum. If you know saying something to somebody could offend them, you're kinda signing up to the criticism.
It feels like a lot of the essay is trying to say "we should listen to other people with controversial opinions." We were doing this in another domain for a while, with sexism.
A lot of us have just nodded and grimaced when our coworkers would make "those comments". When we'd see the berating of female colleagues. Even the words already had such an obvious effect.
I'm not saying "ban bad speech", but I do think as society we should be reinforcing the fact that words _are_ important, especially in this political climate. And that people are responsible for what they say. And... you can always apologize and change! And the world will be better for it.
- aestetix 9y agoThat's not entirely true. What if you get misquoted in a newspaper? By the time the newspaper prints the correction, the damage has already been done.
- rtpg 9y agoSure, some damage might have been done. But this feels pretty orthogonal, more of a problem of newspaper interests or simply the difficulty of cutting down text into smaller pieces. We all should be making sure we're hearing stuff properly. I don't think many of these things are _really_ about misunderstanding, but it has happened. Inversely, just because the speaker says "I meant X, but I didn't mean for it to offend" doesn't completely absolve the person. The words have meanings, and if you want to share you ideas, it's important to do it properly (just like you should know how to drive before going out there with your car).
- aestetix 9y agoI was more using that as an example to separate speech from the person saying it. In terms of speech that offends, we can only control what we say, not what people think about it, nor whether their thought is reasonable. Therefore, punishing someone for what they say because it offended someone seems pretty illogical, unless you can make a damned good case, based on context, that it was probably going to offend. A simple way to resolve that question is to ask the person who said it, "Why did you say that?" If they have a response that is not "because I wanted to offend" that is also reasonable, then I'd suggest the onus falls at least equally on the person who claims offense.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nv-vn 9y agoThere's a difference to me between truly abusive comments and offensive opinions. I wouldn't argue in favor of workplace sexism (at least my definition of it), but if someone gives their genuine opinion then it should be tolerated to the extent that we should listen, allow them to speak, and then engage in dialog if we disagree. If they're making abusive comments for the sake of hurting another person, that is an entirely different matter. I don't think that's what the author had in mind either based on the examples given in the first blog post.