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> One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone. The difference is that gettin

by imgabe 5y ago

> One could fire a gun randomly into the air with no intention of harming anyone and the bullets still come down and hit someone. The difference is that getting hit by a bullet harms you regardless of what you believe about it. Your friends not getting a ticket to a concert for you can only harm you if you believe it harms you. If you choose to ignore their intentions and feel harmed by it, then you're harmed. If you choose to give your friends the benefit of the doubt and believe that they didn't intend to harm you, then you aren't harmed. This is why the safetyism that equates emotional harms to physical harms is fundamentally flawed. You have a level of control over what happens in your own head that you don't have in the physical world.

chmod775 5y ago
> This is why the safetyism that equates emotional harms to physical harms is fundamentally flawed. For this example it might make more sense to equate that to an allergy then: there's nothing wrong with that tree, but there's something wrong with their immune system and they should consider treatment. However there is real emotional hurt that is 'natural' and not just an improper reaction based on a misunderstanding. Though typically that is not the kind of thing that can be avoided, safetyism or no.
- imgabe 5y ago
  Sure, there's hurt that is an appropriate reaction to a real thing that happens in the world. If your "friends" set you up to be Prom Queen then dump a bucket of pig's blood on your and get the whole school to laugh at you, then it's fair to say it's a correct assessment that they weren't really your friends and betrayed you, and feeling hurt is an appropriate reaction. Where safetyism goes wrong is that it elevates feelings above reality. If you feel bad, then things necessarily are bad, regardless of the reality. But sometimes your feelings are wrong and should be ignored or re-examined.
  - apocalypstyx 5y ago
    You've conflated several things. If you feel bad, that's just a fact; your self-perception is the only determiner of that. That is not necessarily the same as a situation being bad. And even that is open to interpretation: food hitting the floor is going to be perceived very differently between two people if one of them believes in the 5 second rule. And I'm not even trying to say that feelings shouldn't be re-examined --- I would say the opposite, actually. But in an inter-subjective, inter-personal relationship, (which is the definition of human relationships) who is the arbiter of reality? It's the one-sidedness that betrays something. In a relationship, if someone says something that is taken offensively, even if they didn't mean it as such, if they cared about the other person (in the most basic form) they would still apologize and seek to clarify themselves. But the person who doesn't want to do that, they either have the intent of being offensive, in which case any defense along the lines of 'you just didn't understand me' is merely a shield for their own act of purposeful offensiveness, or the speaker is refusing to engage in any flavor of basic human interaction and is either effectively talking to an empty room or trying to force (or is deluded by) the notion that all other human consciousnesses mirror their own.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      The arbiter of what someone's intentions were is that person. Who else would know what they are thinking inside their own head? People do not owe you an apology because you misinterpret their intentions. In fact, if you accuse someone of bad intentions where there were none, basic decency would suggest that the accuser is the one who owes an apology. Of course, it's possible that someone lies about what their intentions are, in which case, sure demand an apology all you want. But it's not likely to be fruitful to continue interacting with someone who's deliberately trolling you.

by imgabe 5y ago

chmod775 5y ago

> This is why the safetyism that equates emotional harms to physical harms is fundamentally flawed. For this example it might make more sense to equate that to an allergy then: there's nothing wrong with that tree, but there's something wrong with their immune system and they should consider treatment. However there is real emotional hurt that is 'natural' and not just an improper reaction based on a misunderstanding. Though typically that is not the kind of thing that can be avoided, safetyism or no.

imgabe 5y ago
Sure, there's hurt that is an appropriate reaction to a real thing that happens in the world. If your "friends" set you up to be Prom Queen then dump a bucket of pig's blood on your and get the whole school to laugh at you, then it's fair to say it's a correct assessment that they weren't really your friends and betrayed you, and feeling hurt is an appropriate reaction. Where safetyism goes wrong is that it elevates feelings above reality. If you feel bad, then things necessarily are bad, regardless of the reality. But sometimes your feelings are wrong and should be ignored or re-examined.
- apocalypstyx 5y ago
  You've conflated several things. If you feel bad, that's just a fact; your self-perception is the only determiner of that. That is not necessarily the same as a situation being bad. And even that is open to interpretation: food hitting the floor is going to be perceived very differently between two people if one of them believes in the 5 second rule. And I'm not even trying to say that feelings shouldn't be re-examined --- I would say the opposite, actually. But in an inter-subjective, inter-personal relationship, (which is the definition of human relationships) who is the arbiter of reality? It's the one-sidedness that betrays something. In a relationship, if someone says something that is taken offensively, even if they didn't mean it as such, if they cared about the other person (in the most basic form) they would still apologize and seek to clarify themselves. But the person who doesn't want to do that, they either have the intent of being offensive, in which case any defense along the lines of 'you just didn't understand me' is merely a shield for their own act of purposeful offensiveness, or the speaker is refusing to engage in any flavor of basic human interaction and is either effectively talking to an empty room or trying to force (or is deluded by) the notion that all other human consciousnesses mirror their own.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    The arbiter of what someone's intentions were is that person. Who else would know what they are thinking inside their own head? People do not owe you an apology because you misinterpret their intentions. In fact, if you accuse someone of bad intentions where there were none, basic decency would suggest that the accuser is the one who owes an apology. Of course, it's possible that someone lies about what their intentions are, in which case, sure demand an apology all you want. But it's not likely to be fruitful to continue interacting with someone who's deliberately trolling you.