Thursday, June 4, 2015

Responsible Offendedness

There is a considerable amount of well-meaning tone-policing, word-policing, and, well, thought-policing on Facebook lately, mostly meant to raise awareness and politeness, but sometimes with haughty moral superiority that is not so empathetic and actually meant to start a witch hunt against those who think non-hatefully, but simply have different ideas on how everyone can achieve even more happiness using broadly different and scientific tactics (totally not me or anything!). In everyone's rush to get everyone to think like them and to get those pesky individuals who think differently to at least act like they do by following arbitrary "rules," I propose a few "rules" about REPONSIBLE OFFENDEDNESS, and, according to the current doctrines, I Totally Can Do This because I am gay and hispanic. No privilege tho.

1. If someone offends you, it doesn't mean they hate you or XYZ group.
2. If someone offends you, it doesn't mean they're wrong. It means you had an experience, and the truth is independent of that.
3. If someone offends you, it doesn't mean you're right. You could be right, but your level of offendedness doesn't correlate with the truth.
4. Don't immediately try to unemploy someone who holds a view that is different than yours, or who feels differently towards a subject than you or what everyone is supposed to feel/think.
5. If you find yourself trying to unemploy someone after an interaction with them, you are probably doing something shitty and don't care about free speech.

If these rules seem severe, check out the other rules on your feed. You obviously don't have to follow these rules, but see what happens when you don't follow the others!

"Kids in school don't know how to think anymore. They feel something and they think they're thinking." ~ Thomas Sowell, very summarized quote

(I almost posted the above on my Facebook. What was I thinking!)

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