The primary implication is that the corpus of banned content includes generally agreeably banned content, arguably banned content, and a record of historical shifts in bannability.
The primary implication is that the corpus of banned content includes generally agreeably banned content, arguably banned content, and a record of historical shifts in bannability.
That's fair. I absolutely acknowledge that my emotional response is making me get ahead of myself (I have an axe to grind with linguistic and moral relativism in general) and my apologies for not crafting the most reasonable arguments, here.
And don't get me wrong, I don't think the service is at all a bad idea. I just think that it could have been presented without falling back on the "Someone will always find something offensive and hate your label" comment.
I think it's obvious that everyone is offensive to some non-zero count of people. Even if that is challenged, there is strong precedence that your current words can be read as ruinously offensive under currently-unknown future social sensitivities, which could retroactively punish you (assuming a continued extrapolation of punishable offensiveness from the current state).
In that, the nature of "being offensive" in and of itself is specifically not a valid distinguisher as it's always true. It's only when the level of offensiveness reaches some agreeable flash point where society acts in agreement that something is "too offensive" (as opposed to simply a binary "offensive"). But since everybody is "offensive" to some non-zero amount as a binary predicate, that word by itself becomes purely selective enforcement with everybody guilty by default.
The statement of "Something is always offensive" is well founded and speaking to a real problem, but yes it is unfortunate that its wording is very similar to defensive, reactionary, relativistic dismissal. In practice, "being offensive" is not actually that which is railed against; it is "agreeably too offensive" (or simply "antagonistic" which is a separate concept) that is the actual pursued distinguisher, while the former phrase is overly broad to a fault and is used in that way to cause real damages.
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Having said all that, I wholeheartedly agree that all of the above can come across as stuffy, pedantic, and disconnected; and that people obviously tend to use "offensive" to mean "agreeably too offensive". HOWEVER, all of this is critically important when dealing with situations that have high stakes real world implications, especially when specifically codified terms of service, policy, or legislation are involved where the "letter of the law" rules.