On Sun, 18 Nov 2018 21:32:16 -0500 Sam Varshavchik <mrsam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > William Oliver writes: > > > The bottom line is that if someone desperately wants to be offended, > > they will find a way. Conversely, if someone doesn't want to be > > offended, it's almost impossible to offend them. > > > > This seems to be a mysterious secret to a lot of people. Many years > > ago, I realized that being "offended" was completely up to me. I > > made the conscious decision not be be offended by anything anybody > > said to or about me, unless it served some particular tactical > > purpose. It was amazingly liberating. > > I framed pretty much the same concept but in a different way. Some > time ago I decided upon the following personal policy, or a > principle: from now on my permission is required before anyone can > offend me. If they did not get a personal permission from me to > offend me, then they cannot offend me. > > From that point on, nobody offended me unless I gave them explicit > permission to do so, first. Reading this thread, I think that Sam, William, and Wolfgang have pretty much the same response to this, a very self-actualized response. I congratulate you, because your attitude is a great one to have. However, I want to point out that you are probably capable of that attitude because of a couple of fortunate circumstances. First, you probably had an upbringing that enabled you to have the ability to adopt that attitude. i.e. your environment programmed you without harming you, and gave you good base values and beliefs. Second, your brain is probably wired in a way that made it easier for you. Many people in this world don't have those advantages. They had abusive childhoods that programmed them as victims. They have cognitive wiring that makes it harder for them to overcome this. For example, there are people who have to jump off mountains wearing wingsuits in order to feel truly alive. And there are people who find going to the supermarket a near overwhelming experience. They just have different gain wired into the sensory circuits of their brains. If everyone in the world was like you, or even capable of being like you, then 'anything goes' could be the rule. Your boss would call you in to give you a pep talk as so: "XXXX, what is this latest turkey you produced? Have you got shit for brains? A five year old could do better work than this. I'm surprised you can walk and chew gum at the same time. Now get out there and produce something worthwhile, or I'll fire your useless ass!" But everyone in the world isn't like you, and so if we want to make contributions from everyone welcome, we have to make all those psyche styles welcome. That means everyone has to coalesce around a greatest common divisor style, a mostly non-confrontational and non-belittling style, a style that probably isn't completely comfortable for anyone. In the old days, like last century, before the web and trolls and likes and followers and ..., that was called being polite. Everyone gave a little, and we got along, mostly. Political correctness is a hijacking of such politeness. It's an attempt to move that greatest common divisor style to one end of the spectrum, to ensure that even the most sensitive and disadvantaged person never feels slighted. I remember reading a science fiction story once. It was a world where everyone was lowered to the lowest common denominator. So less intelligent people wouldn't feel slighted, more intelligent people had constant distractors like noises and electric shocks applied. Dancers wore weights and unbalanced shoes. And so on. That's political correctness, not politeness. It is in effect saying that one person is more valuable than another, that offending one person is more valuable than disabling another. We will all disagree where the line should be drawn, so there will be conflict and debate. As long as this is, it's still simplistic, so lots of untied ends. _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://getfedora.org/code-of-conduct.html List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
