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Originally Posted by JinnKai
If we evaluated everything we said to see if it could be offensive to someone, we'd never speak. Likewise, we'd never make social progress. After all, making social progress MEANS saying something that people will disagree with, even get mad at. Even further, we'd be a useless society so involved in being "politically correct" that we couldn't say or notice anything without being inconsiderate or sex/age/race/class-ist.
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It isn't a matter of one extreme or the other. You can show others basic courtesy without censoring everything for every possible offense. Not saying sexist, racist, homophobic things isn't being PC, it's basic human courtesy. Not deliberately saying insulting things or using inflammatory language enhances our ability to communicate a clear message.
If you use language that on its face is meant to be insulting, you shoud not be surprised when people are insulted by it.
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On the other hand, if everyone took accountability for their own fucking emotions, we would be a more intelligent society, one in which people didn't get upset because X person said Y comment to me and thus it means that I am A B and C. One that wasn't effected so drastically by the media, one that wasn't so afraid of everything from SARS to Terrorists, and one that had much less violent emotional reactions. Domestic violence, revenge killings, or oh-no.. terrorist attacks, maybe?
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Wait. Terrorism is the product of expecting people to be polite? You're going to have to draw me a map on this one because I don't see a line from people being offended by careless comments to blowing up buildings.
Sometimes it's entirely reasonable to get upset when person X says Y, depending on who X is and what Y is. You seem to want a blanket endorsement to say whatever you want whenever you want without being in any way responsible for the results. It doesn't work that way. You may wish we had a culture where nobody ever got upset over what another person said, but we don't and we have to live in the world as it exists.
Societal norms have always shaped the perception of beauty within a culture. Nobody is free from outside influences. Being a resposible member of society means being responsible for your own actions and words and for accepting that they effect others and taking that into account. It doesn't mean censoring everything for every possible offense at every moment. There is a nice middle ground somewhere between never saying anything controversial and being free from all restraint.
It's a two-way street. People need to be resposible both for their actions and for their reactions.
Gilda