4 ms·

It's hard to know WTF is going to offend people. The result is a choice between potential opprobrium and insufferable blandness. This is how it happens: http:/

by mhartl 15y ago

It's hard to know WTF is going to offend people. The result is a choice between potential opprobrium and insufferable blandness. This is how it happens: http://android.eonline.com/article.ftl?category=Latest+News&id=b302685 http://android.eonline.com/article.ftl?category=Latest+News&... I pretty sure DeNiro didn't burn any crosses.

mhartl 15y ago
I'm
MartinCron 15y ago
It's hard to know WTF is going to offend people Or, you can pay attention to what does offend people and not do those things again in the future. It's not realistic to expect to never offend people, but everyone has a responsibility to understand what their actions do for other people.
- mhartl 15y ago
  you can pay attention to what does offend people and not do those things again in the future Yes, and following this course results in outcome #2: insufferable blandness. The range of things people find offensive is staggering. Indeed, many are offended by the notion that sometimes you just need to grow a thicker skin—which kind of proves the point.
  - MartinCron 15y ago
    Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland? Context matters, there's a difference between what's appropriate in a professional setting and what's appropriate in (for example) art. Please, be as edgy and un-PC as you want, just don't do it in the workplace.
    - mhartl 15y ago
      Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland? The short answer is, yes, there is a middle ground, but it won't stay "middle" for long: the set of "offensive" things expands with time. Many jokes and phrases that were part of the inoffensive "middle ground" twenty or thirty years ago are now considered offensive. To the politically correct, this is mere progress, but to those who oppose political correctness it instead represents cultural and linguistic decline. I ran into a small example of this recently when discussing the movie "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Specifically, I wanted to refer to the ethnic background of Harold. I couldn't remember offhand exactly which country his ancestors came from, so I described him as "Asian". The problem is that, in the modern lexicon, Kumar (being of Indian extraction) is also "Asian". Thirty years ago I could have described Harold as "Oriental" without causing offense, but that changed some time in the mid- to late '80s. (I distinctly remember, some time around 1990, overhearing a high-school teacher instruct one of my Vietnamese classmates not to refer to herself as "Oriental". She was comfortable with the term; he was not. His side won, and we have lost some linguistic precision because of it.) To cite another example, from 1555 until the 1960's the word "Negro" was a neutral term signifying a person of black sub-Saharan African descent, at which point it was replaced by "black" (or "Black"). This lasted until 1988, when (in a domestic context) "African-American" became the preferred term. Meanwhile, "colored person" was also once a neutral phrase (as evidenced by the NAACP), but now uttering it in the workplace (or in a joke) can get you fired. In contrast, the term "person of color", which is almost semantically identical to "colored person", is not only inoffensive but is the preferred term among the PC cognoscenti. It's an achievement that Orwell himself could hardly have surpassed.
      - MartinCron 15y ago
        There's a difference, at least to me, about changing standards in language (which, as outsiders to particular communities can seem arbitrary and capricious-- wait a minute, "Queer is OK to say again?" and how is "person of color" materially different from "Colored person") and things like brazen workplace hostility as described in the original blog post. A lot of being actively offensive is more than just the specific words you use but more about what you say with those words. Even if you don't use any dangerous words, when the content of your message is sexist and demeaning such as "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" that's where the offense is. Telling someone to knock that shit off doesn't make us insufferably bland PC thought police, it makes us civilized human beings.

by mhartl 15y ago

mhartl 15y ago

I'm

MartinCron 15y ago

It's hard to know WTF is going to offend people Or, you can pay attention to what does offend people and not do those things again in the future. It's not realistic to expect to never offend people, but everyone has a responsibility to understand what their actions do for other people.

mhartl 15y ago
you can pay attention to what does offend people and not do those things again in the future Yes, and following this course results in outcome #2: insufferable blandness. The range of things people find offensive is staggering. Indeed, many are offended by the notion that sometimes you just need to grow a thicker skin—which kind of proves the point.
- MartinCron 15y ago
  Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland? Context matters, there's a difference between what's appropriate in a professional setting and what's appropriate in (for example) art. Please, be as edgy and un-PC as you want, just don't do it in the workplace.
  - mhartl 15y ago
    Are you really saying that there's no middle ground between being actively offensive and being insufferably bland? The short answer is, yes, there is a middle ground, but it won't stay "middle" for long: the set of "offensive" things expands with time. Many jokes and phrases that were part of the inoffensive "middle ground" twenty or thirty years ago are now considered offensive. To the politically correct, this is mere progress, but to those who oppose political correctness it instead represents cultural and linguistic decline. I ran into a small example of this recently when discussing the movie "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Specifically, I wanted to refer to the ethnic background of Harold. I couldn't remember offhand exactly which country his ancestors came from, so I described him as "Asian". The problem is that, in the modern lexicon, Kumar (being of Indian extraction) is also "Asian". Thirty years ago I could have described Harold as "Oriental" without causing offense, but that changed some time in the mid- to late '80s. (I distinctly remember, some time around 1990, overhearing a high-school teacher instruct one of my Vietnamese classmates not to refer to herself as "Oriental". She was comfortable with the term; he was not. His side won, and we have lost some linguistic precision because of it.) To cite another example, from 1555 until the 1960's the word "Negro" was a neutral term signifying a person of black sub-Saharan African descent, at which point it was replaced by "black" (or "Black"). This lasted until 1988, when (in a domestic context) "African-American" became the preferred term. Meanwhile, "colored person" was also once a neutral phrase (as evidenced by the NAACP), but now uttering it in the workplace (or in a joke) can get you fired. In contrast, the term "person of color", which is almost semantically identical to "colored person", is not only inoffensive but is the preferred term among the PC cognoscenti. It's an achievement that Orwell himself could hardly have surpassed.
    - MartinCron 15y ago
      There's a difference, at least to me, about changing standards in language (which, as outsiders to particular communities can seem arbitrary and capricious-- wait a minute, "Queer is OK to say again?" and how is "person of color" materially different from "Colored person") and things like brazen workplace hostility as described in the original blog post. A lot of being actively offensive is more than just the specific words you use but more about what you say with those words. Even if you don't use any dangerous words, when the content of your message is sexist and demeaning such as "Oop, Katie's got the low cut dress on today! I know where I'm sitting!" that's where the offense is. Telling someone to knock that shit off doesn't make us insufferably bland PC thought police, it makes us civilized human beings.