Re: IESG Statement On Oppressive or Exclusionary Language

[Richard Barnes <[e-mail]>]

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