Person A’s opinion is of no consequence to Person B. Person B takes offense to Person A’s comment.
How is this sound?
How can one become offended by “someone else’s ignorance”? How can one become offened by someone to whom they give no merit - for example, a stranger?
Because some people are just looking to get offended. It gives them a soap box. These boards are full of people like that. Somehow they believe that 1) they have the right to NOT be offended, and 2) you have no right to offend. If they didn’t believe these two things, they wouldn’t be so quick to point out when they are offended.
When the opinion offered by Person A is derogatory of Person B, Person B’s creed, race, gender etc. And when the opinion is “hate words” in general.
Strangers or no – a jerk is still a jerk.
Because somebody’s opinion can be offensive! Duh! If somebody said that he believed that all mothers should perform long, thorough, cunnilingus on their infant daughters, wouldn’t you understand people being offended? It doesn’t matter if there’s no “real world” consequence, it’s still an offensive thing to hear. Plus, opinions affect actions; opinions would be pointless if they just sat there in people’s brains, just to exist. No, they exist to guide a person’s actions, and if a person has an offensive opinion, there’s an obvious chance that she’d act offensively also.
When a person describes characteristics that tend to apply to a race, gender, creed, etc, I tend to see a pattern where a lot of people automatically view that as being “hate speech”, regardless of how statistics or personal experience support these perceptions. I find this unfortunate. However, it is easier to go on the defensive and to resort to name calling - racist, misogynist, homphobe, etc. - than it is to to acknowledge that there might be some validity in a person’s obversations as a whole, although it doesn’t necessarily apply to every individual in the group.
Righteous indignation is an easy outlet for maintaining one’s perhaps flawed perceptions, rather than acknowledging reality and striving for positive change.
It’s a thing called emotions. Some of us have them, you know.
No, it is not called emotions, it is called lack of control of emotions.
The shouting down and disrespect of other’s opinions in this country makes me sick. If you think that nothing more than a “Thanks, but I don’t agree” won’t do, then you are a stupid fuck.
[/rant off]
Well apparently some of us have a lacking control over them.
Exactly.
Jinx!
I think that one of the problems with communicating via forums etc is that some people do find it hard to actually express themselves adequately. It is a very hard thing to do, purely by the written word. Therefore, what a person is trying to say, may come across as either aggressive, defensive or even self-opinionated. Whereas perhaps they were merely trying to grapple with the English language, or perhaps peoples’ attitudes from different cultures.
Self-expression is a very hard thing to master. So, in the course of trying to explain oneself they could easily offend or take offence.
The one thing to bear in mind, I believe, is not to go off ‘full-steam’
with abusive responses etc… but to take a deep breath, think about what someone may have posted and then calmly ask them for clarification, or at least try to sound them out.
After all, disagreements are easy enough to have face to face, let alone via this medium.
Of course, personal slurs against a race, creed etc are unnecessary, but unfortunately some people do tend to stoop to that level… perhaps because they are unable to really put their thoughts into words, except in an abusive way.
Don’t abuse the abusers… that’s what half of them want! Don’t satisfy that strange penchant they have for creating unrest and insults. If they abuse or are abusive, if you don’t want to communicate with them on a civil level, just ignore them.
OK, now I’ll shut-up before I get abused :smack:
I think viewing those terms as “name-calling” is a problem itself. Everybody is so god-damned perfect that nobody could even possibly consider that they could be described by those horrible titles. They’re completely valid terms that describe real things.
EXCELLENT demonstration!
The only acceptable response to speech, even hate speech, is more speech.
Of course there are misogynists, racists, homophobes, etc. However, these labels should be used sparingly and only when confronted with indisputable evidence. However, when these terms are overused, they lose their power. And I for one, believe they are thrown out to the point where they really don’t mean much in most cases. If someone uses these terms frequently merely because they don’t like something someone has said, it amounts to nothing more than name calling.
However, sometimes less is more.
Some opinions are simply so stupid that their mere presence is an insult to thinking, civilized people, and the holder of those opinions should be mocked/ridiculed/tarred & feathered as punishment for fouling the air with their very utterance.
Examples:
“Whites are superior to all other races.”
“The secret Jewish conspiracy plots to overthrow the world.”
“George W. Bush is a man of intelligence and honesty.”
“Women who get raped were asking for it.”
Sure, we could just say :putz: to the numbnuts who express opinions like these, but that gets repetitive after a while…
And then other people get upset about other people’s opinions because they beat them into the ground while representing their opinion as fact. Isn’t that right, rjung?
Since most people are misogynists, racists, and homophobes, I think it would be difficult to overuse them. And I think people like to say that they’re overused because they’re tired of hearing about problems that don’t affect them, or they don’t like to think that they’re benifitting so much from injustice (or something, I don’t know). Oh, or they have some strange, hyper-specific definition of those words that conveniently frees themselves from those labels (i.e., I don’t actively try to deny Asian-Americans of their voting rights, so I’m not a racist).
Oh, I don’t know, censorship, jail time and violence have all been considered acceptable by society in various circumstances.
At the heart of the problem is a tendency of people to want to be certain of the correctness of opinions they hold, especially if they hold them with a lot of fervor. (There’s little in life that can make you feel as humiliated and undignified as recalling yourself emphatically and passionately stating and defending an opinion that you subsequently view as ugly and horribly wrong).
But fallible we are nonetheless, and we should issue the disclaimer before marching in to condemn someone for holding what we regard as reprehensible and indefensible opinions.
That should, in fact, be the cornerstone of any true religion: the acknowledgement of unavoidable uncertainty as a consequence of human fallibility, not some formulaic magic that provides a gilded and officially certified certainty as a way of getting around it.
Well, that’s my opinion at any rate.