Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Dick Franks <[e-mail]>]

++

On Fri, 7 Aug 2020 at 07:29, Dan Harkins <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
> On 8/1/20 4:05 PM, Richard Barnes wrote:
>
> 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.
>
>
>   One of the problems of the day is that people forget the Law of
> Unintended
> Consequences. They think that the good intentions of the people who want
> to enact some policy will ensure it will result in exactly what is
> intended.
>
>   That never happens.
>
>   If we allow the listener to decide whether the speaker's words are shitty
> (and that their ambient shittiness needs to be reduced-- I know what you
> mean here in your impreciseness and I would appreciate it if you were to
> say it explicitly) we will further empower victimhood. People will have an
> incentive to claim they are wounded in order to alter the balance of power
> in a discussion, and if people can be expected to do anything we know they
> can be expected to respond to incentives. Nothing good will come of that,
> in spite of the good intentions of its proponents.
>
>   Dan.
>
>
>
>
>