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I don't think you'd actually want to do that. There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be tre

by pg 13y ago

I don't think you'd actually want to do that. There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be treated as superior to some other group. Would you just want to go along with that? In fact it would be impossible to do what you suggest, because the ways in which people want to be respected could be (and often have been) incompatible. For example, what if two people with different religions both want to be treated as believers in the one true religion? There are also plenty of individual cases we'd both find hard to swallow. Murderers who wanted to be regarded as upstanding people, and so on. (And "who" in this case is much stronger. "Whom" introduces a jarringly pedantic note.)

comicjk 13y ago
Yes, all this is the reason I said "if it's no trouble to you." Certainly the desire for politeness can go too far, but avoiding a handful of loaded words is not very far. I don't think it's quite fair to compare a black man not wanting to be called boy with a murderer wanting to be called innocent.
- pg 13y ago
  It's no trouble to me to reinforce someone's mistaken feeling of superiority to someone else. The problem is for the someone else. So the threshold you propose is insufficient. And I nowhere compared the two cases you mention. (That was an extreme case of putting words into one's mouth even for HN.) You're acting as if I said for ∀x-P(x) when in fact it's pretty clear I said -∀xP(x). I'm done with this conversation, incidentally. I find that threads in which I have to say "no, what I said was" to this extent are always irrecoverable.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
DanBC 13y ago
> There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be treated as superior to some other group. Would you just want to go along with that? But you could treat them as your equal until they do something to show they're not your equal, which is mostly what PC should be about. Don't reduce people to a single defining characteristic, because that makes it easy to write them off.

by pg 13y ago

comicjk 13y ago

Yes, all this is the reason I said "if it's no trouble to you." Certainly the desire for politeness can go too far, but avoiding a handful of loaded words is not very far. I don't think it's quite fair to compare a black man not wanting to be called boy with a murderer wanting to be called innocent.

pg 13y ago
It's no trouble to me to reinforce someone's mistaken feeling of superiority to someone else. The problem is for the someone else. So the threshold you propose is insufficient. And I nowhere compared the two cases you mention. (That was an extreme case of putting words into one's mouth even for HN.) You're acting as if I said for ∀x-P(x) when in fact it's pretty clear I said -∀xP(x). I'm done with this conversation, incidentally. I find that threads in which I have to say "no, what I said was" to this extent are always irrecoverable.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

DanBC 13y ago

> There have been throughout history lots of people who on account of their birth or religion have wanted to be treated as superior to some other group. Would you just want to go along with that? But you could treat them as your equal until they do something to show they're not your equal, which is mostly what PC should be about. Don't reduce people to a single defining characteristic, because that makes it easy to write them off.