Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Dan Harkins <[e-mail]>]

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.