How to identify and quash “offense-bullying”

https://devinhelton.com/2015/03/23/standing-up-to-offense-bullying/

by devinhelton • 11 years ago

5 1 11 years ago

richmarr• 11 years ago

I'm always intrigued by what motivates someone to write a piece like this, and I always read them on a knife edge, trying to unpick why they would:

Are they some eloquent academic trying to break new ground in terms of our understanding of the human condition. Are they a free-speech extremist trying to communicate a nest of rationalisations that explain their trollishness? Or are they something else?

Stripping the argument down, it seems at its heart to be an argument that taking offence is a tool that's used by the subconscious of people who aren't truly oppressed to defend self-interested behaviour. Countless studies support the conclusion that the subconscious mind constructs many of our perceptions and responses. You only have to look at Wikipedia's list of cognitive biases to get an idea just how driven we are by our subconscious. So the idea that the mind behaves in this way sounds plausible at first glance.

And yet stapled to the belly of all this science is the assertion that people who take offense aren't "truly" oppressed. No definition is given as to what constitutes True oppression, other than it resulting in people who are "downtrodden and submissive". No data or study is cited to support this.

This is strikingly similar to complaints by Gamergate and men's rights groups that women and minorities now have 'too much' protection (usually accomanied by snarling and foot-stomping about "SJWs") and that actually med and/or 'gamers' have hard, or even harder lives.

The author goes on in a follow-up post to attribute the origins of the Ferguson riots to black people 'offence-bullying' the rest of the country, along with "agitprop" from "Democrat-aligned parties".

While this post is more eloquent than most I've seen that push this argument, it still layers up assumptions and hypotheses in order to justify a conclusion... as evidenced by its insistence on inventing new terminology.

This is an inherently disengenuous position from someone who purports to understand psychology & social science. It's textbook confirmation bias.

How to identify and quash “offense-bullying”

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