Hacker News Reader

Comment by sreque | Hacker News Reader

A better analogy is if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Results do matter more than intentions, but sometimes results are out of your control or even disconnected from your actions. You may say something perfectly reasonable and yet someone takes unreasonable offense. Who is to define what is reasonable to say and what is reasonable to take offense to? In the past decades, the political left has taken us too far in the direction of giving a small minority tyrannical censorship power to silence by taking offense at whatever they dislike, and then cancelling the person who said it.

View on HN

What? I can’t call someone a “f*** f*” anymore?

Every generation thinks the next generation’s rules are tyrannical. Speech and culture is messy and it’s not black and white. To say it’s all been bad is ignoring a lot of violent speech that is no longer acceptable and the benefit that has brought to the the same small minority groups you’re referencing, from being less subjected to verbal attacks.

>What? I can’t call someone a “f** f*” anymore?

If this is what you honestly think they're referring to then I feel like that says a LOT more about you then it does about them. They were very clear that they aren't talking about situations like this one you've just described.

Are you being disingenuous or do you honestly need someone to explain what they meant? They're talking about crybullies who will disingenuously misinterpret what someone says and take offense to it. Very much like you've just done.

Were you alive in the 80s? I literally heard this complaint multiple times from multiple people. The point is is that calling someone a “f_____ f__” would be considered a “micro aggression” by some in the 80s that only the “radical left” would get upset about.

The point is that if you’ve lived long enough you’ve seen people complain about culture changing enough times to know that it’s always changing and always uncomfortable for those that don’t like it.*

I'm pretty sure name calling with malicious intent has always been considered a macroaggression.

Even today, using that terminology in jest may be completely acceptable and benign with no malicious intent at all, depending on the social circle it's being used in. Cultural norms do not translate to universal cultural axioms.

Yes, and the 1970s. The expression "microagression" hadn't been invented, but nobody imagined it was anything but aggressive.

Things go too far in one direction, and the speech restrictions in the former Eastern Bloc were considered unacceptable for more than 20 years after its collapse.

Now some people are trying to reestablish the same control mechanisms.

P.S.: No one is asking to permit the slur you cited to make a point, it isn't a great example.

> if you don't intend to run over someone with your car and they jump out in front of you, then you are not at fault, nor were you doing anything wrong.

Not if you are in a pedestrian crossing (especially unsignalized one).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com