4 ms·

I've seen people deliberately seek to offend marginalized groups with their language, though, and then they cry out about being cancelled and how speech is no l

I've seen people deliberately seek to offend marginalized groups with their language, though, and then they cry out about being cancelled and how speech is no longer free when the people they provoked naturally respond to and fight back against their posts. I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or hateful, as there has always been.

barnesto 5y ago
"provoke debates" the greatest of all evils. how dare people try to engage in debate.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I'll second the poster that this is not "trying to engage in debate". There are some members of TPUSA at the university my wife teaches at. They specifically chose to, as a group, take a course taught by a transgender teacher. They, clearly through some training, determined that they'd be able to write deliberately transphobic hate speech in very specific portions of the course because their writing in these locations is protected by privacy laws and other such things. When called out on this, they responded by claiming that their intellectual freedom was being snuffed out and proposed lawsuits. That's the shit I see. Organized attempts to use the levers of the law to harass and intimidate people from groups they don't consider to be worthy of their respect. And as soon as people resist, an unpaid army of free speech advocates leap to their defense.
  - atok1 5y ago
    The 'intimidated people' are not forced to interact with the 'abusers' though. It's that kind of whining that takes away from their arguments.

barnesto 5y ago

"provoke debates" the greatest of all evils. how dare people try to engage in debate.

UncleMeat 5y ago
I'll second the poster that this is not "trying to engage in debate". There are some members of TPUSA at the university my wife teaches at. They specifically chose to, as a group, take a course taught by a transgender teacher. They, clearly through some training, determined that they'd be able to write deliberately transphobic hate speech in very specific portions of the course because their writing in these locations is protected by privacy laws and other such things. When called out on this, they responded by claiming that their intellectual freedom was being snuffed out and proposed lawsuits. That's the shit I see. Organized attempts to use the levers of the law to harass and intimidate people from groups they don't consider to be worthy of their respect. And as soon as people resist, an unpaid army of free speech advocates leap to their defense.
- atok1 5y ago
  The 'intimidated people' are not forced to interact with the 'abusers' though. It's that kind of whining that takes away from their arguments.