I didn’t say anything about “social norms”. Please stop making guesses at my opinions and motivations; you keep getting them wrong.
I don’t in the least think that my “public claims of offence” are a good reason for you to change your behaviour. I am arguing that the possibility that what you say, how you say it and where you say it might result in many other people being annoyed, upset or distracted from things that are valuable to them might be a reason for you to change your behaviour.
However, it seems that anything I say that would involve your actions being motivated at all by other people’s well-being or preferences just bounces off, literally as if I hadn’t said it or had said something entirely difference. Perhaps you just 100% don’t care about anyone else but yourself, in which case indeed I am wasting my time raising such issues.
Indeed I don’t make a distinction between speech and action, because speech is one variety of action. Sometimes it’s a variety of action that has relatively slight consequences: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”, as the schoolyard saying has it. But sometimes not so much: the words “I sentence you to death”, said by the right person in the right context, are about as consequential as any action gets.
I don’t know what “lexical traps” you think I’m trying to set, but I’m not trying to trap anyone, I don’t think you’re Satan, I can’t imagine why anyone would think that “who a person is makes everything they say wrong or a lie”. Again, it seems as if you’re arguing with some imaginary figure who is (forgive me for saying) much stupider than I actually am, and it’s not helping.
I am glad to see that you agree that the examples I gave are ones where saying particular things would be a bad idea, but it seems as if you may have entirely misunderstood the point of those examples, which was simply to demonstrate that sometimes saying a thing can have adverse consequences for other people besides the person saying it. You’ve responded as if I were saying that I would expect you to say those things; I wouldn’t, and it’s not relevant whether you would.
And, once again, the way you came into this discussion—“Here’s a fun experiment: look up the correlation between children raised by single mothers and criminality in those children/adults. Then look up the rates of single motherhood in the black community.”—looks to me very much more like its goal is “spreading ideology” and not at all like bravely speaking out against injustice (your first attempt at framing it) and even less like trying to challenge, refine and update your own ideas (your second attempt at framing it).
I dare say we are fundamentally different in various respects, but nothing you’ve said gives me the impression that your mental model of me has very much in common with the reality.
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I didn’t say anything about “social norms”. Please stop making guesses at my opinions and motivations; you keep getting them wrong.
I don’t in the least think that my “public claims of offence” are a good reason for you to change your behaviour. I am arguing that the possibility that what you say, how you say it and where you say it might result in many other people being annoyed, upset or distracted from things that are valuable to them might be a reason for you to change your behaviour.
However, it seems that anything I say that would involve your actions being motivated at all by other people’s well-being or preferences just bounces off, literally as if I hadn’t said it or had said something entirely difference. Perhaps you just 100% don’t care about anyone else but yourself, in which case indeed I am wasting my time raising such issues.
Indeed I don’t make a distinction between speech and action, because speech is one variety of action. Sometimes it’s a variety of action that has relatively slight consequences: “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me”, as the schoolyard saying has it. But sometimes not so much: the words “I sentence you to death”, said by the right person in the right context, are about as consequential as any action gets.
I don’t know what “lexical traps” you think I’m trying to set, but I’m not trying to trap anyone, I don’t think you’re Satan, I can’t imagine why anyone would think that “who a person is makes everything they say wrong or a lie”. Again, it seems as if you’re arguing with some imaginary figure who is (forgive me for saying) much stupider than I actually am, and it’s not helping.
I am glad to see that you agree that the examples I gave are ones where saying particular things would be a bad idea, but it seems as if you may have entirely misunderstood the point of those examples, which was simply to demonstrate that sometimes saying a thing can have adverse consequences for other people besides the person saying it. You’ve responded as if I were saying that I would expect you to say those things; I wouldn’t, and it’s not relevant whether you would.
And, once again, the way you came into this discussion—“Here’s a fun experiment: look up the correlation between children raised by single mothers and criminality in those children/adults. Then look up the rates of single motherhood in the black community.”—looks to me very much more like its goal is “spreading ideology” and not at all like bravely speaking out against injustice (your first attempt at framing it) and even less like trying to challenge, refine and update your own ideas (your second attempt at framing it).
I dare say we are fundamentally different in various respects, but nothing you’ve said gives me the impression that your mental model of me has very much in common with the reality.