Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Mary B <[e-mail]>]

+1

On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 6:06 PM Richard Barnes <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 1, 2020 at 5:40 PM Fred Baker <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> On Jul 28, 2020, at 9:17 PM, Keith Moore <[e-mail]>
>> wrote:
>> >
>> > On 7/27/20 5:54 AM, tom petch wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> And that is where I part company with you (and perhaps the starting
>> point of this thread).  To me it is fundamental that I cannot 'make' you or
>> anyone else feel an emotion by what I say or do.  What I say may engender
>> sorrow in one, anger in another, fear in another and so no (although it
>> would not have been my intention for any of this to happen).  Rather, what
>> emotion results is, in a deep sense, a choice made by the individual,
>> perhaps affected by their personality, state of mind, history and so on;
>> they have a choice to feel differently even if the conscious mind struggles
>> to escape its immediate reaction.
>> >
>> > I believe this is technically correct.   I also think that
>> readers/listeners have a responsibility to try to avoid interpreting
>> others' speech in an offensive, oppressive, etc., way unless there's a
>> compelling reason to do so.
>> >
>> > However I also observe that people can have a very hard time doing
>> this...
>>
>> I agree. I think the reason to talk about things like this is to help
>> people make reasonable choices that trend in the right direction.
>>
>> I find myself thinking that the robustness principle applies here, as it
>> does in many places. There are people who seek opportunities to offend or
>> to be offended, or behave as if they were doing so. What I’m observing
>> right now is something I call an “professional wounded person”, which is to
>> say someone who seeks the opportunity to be offended. To the belligerent
>> actor, I would say that there is no long term benefit in it; they harm
>> themselves more than the person they intend to harm. To the professional
>> wounded person, I would suggest that they grow up. The average person isn’t
>> out to hurt anybody.
>>
>
> Hey Fred, I think you've got things a bit backwards here.
>
> The whole point of the draft and statement that kicked off this thread is
> that people hurt each other without intending to.  That is, the point here
> is not the "professional wounded person", it's the "wounded professional
> person", who has to deal with an elevated ambient shittiness level just
> because of things that are ingrained in the way things work -- and things
> that are invisible to a lot of folks because of that ingrainedness.  This
> work is about surfacing those ingrained things, in hopes of reducing the
> ambient shittiness level for the folks it matters to.
>
> --Richard
>