Quote Originally Posted by Musashi View Post
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Well, no one wants to educate the ignorant/oblivious. Sure, no one should had to educate someone who offended them, and one should educate oneself. That would happen in a world that approaches perfection better than ours.
However? Discussions are getting inane and insane (this last word, by the way, is also offensive in some circles) because of this principle.
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"[Use of a bad word in an ignorant but innocent context]"
"Did you seriously say that? You [insult]"
"Wait, what? What did I say?"
"You used [bad word]! It's bad! That's terrible!"
"Really? I'm sorry, I had no idea, it's always been used in a neutral way where I live! How is it bad? Where does it come from?"
"We're not here to educate you! Educate yourself! You [something]-centrist [insult]!"
"Why are you mad at me?"
"You're using the tone argument now? [Link to Derailing for Dummies]"
"Could you please not use [something]-ist insults at me at least?"
"[something]-ism doesn't exist, you idiot!"
"I'm sorry you were offended... by the way, if you're insulting someone just because they are [something they did not choose], that's technically -ist..."
"No, you're just sorry you got caught and that we dared being offended at the obvious insults you threw at us. By the way, you're now banned because you're too thick to understand anything! Goodbye, [insult]!"

In short, no one actually learns anything, and everyone pats each others on the back for driving away decent people who made the mistake of not knowing everything there is to know.
What you're describing here is the same, only without the aggressiveness. Hardly better.


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Thanks!
Yeah.
Another "funny" side effect to the phenomenon I described is that certain definitions are considered wrong by these people, generally those that end with -ism or -phobia. The justification for that is that dictionaries are written by white straight cismales, and their definitions tainted by their point of view.
Alright, but then, do I really have to check Internet for the "proper" definitions? How can I know for sure the websites I'm checking for research aren't biased too? (That question never came up, but I'm fairly certain the answer would be "if it's written by an oppressed minority, then it can't be biased, silly!".)
And while some words are obviously bad and should not be used, there are many others who don't look offensive at first glance. Ideally, research should be made before using these, that I agree on. But we're reaching a point where MANY words have bad connotations. Should we research every single word we want to sue? Where, if dictionaries are unreliable?
Exactly. Just because half a dozen people in one place on the internet consider "cookie" to be a bad word doesn't mean anybody else has any way of knowing that. Yes, it would be nice if people knew things on their own. On the other hand, schools and teachers exist because it doesn't work that way. And nobody learns everything in school. When somebody doesn't know something that you think they should know, and they're expressing interest in learning, yeah, teaching them is the right thing to do, whether you "ought" to have to or not.
And you want inane? In my Gender Studies class, we frequently had a couple of people shouting the same things back and forth at each other, getting louder each time.