[Discuss] free email less intrusive than google

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 04:07:13PM -0400, Gordon Marx wrote:
> Yes, you are aggressively missing the point.
> 
> "apparently my intentions don't count"
> 
> Your intentions, in fact, do not count, Your impact is what counts. I
> can't tell what your intentions are, and all the good intentions in
> the world don't stop actions from doing damage.

Intent DOES matter, and it MUST--it's the only thing that the actor
can control.  Intent is a big part of proving many kinds of crimes for
exactly that reason.  Your philosophy puts the burden on literally
every human to know what might offend literally every other human, but
that is very obviously unreasonable, particularly since that is mostly
arbitrary, depending on a wide variety of factors that are impossible
to know in the general case, like the person's local / regional social
norms, ethnicity and culture, personality, etc..  The only way to live
up to that is to never say anything.

I once saw a black man become irate on a street corner because he was
referred to as "African American" -- he was very clear that he was
neither African nor American.  I was once myself castigated by a
Chinese-American woman for using the word "Oriental" in a cultural
context, because "That's derogatory," when my girlfriend at the time
was Chinese and used the word proudly.

You simply can not know what will offend people, and getting uppety
about people's usages of particular phraseology is, I think, a waste
of your energy.  Impuning someone publicly for doing it with innocent
intent is, for my money, much more offensive than the act itself.  And
it IS a form of oppression.  Now, if someone is being intentionally
disrespectful, that's another matter... but frankly I see far less
peer pressure from the PC crowd here or elsewhere in those situations
than in this one, so long as the discourse contains no hot-button
phrases.

Some of you claim PC is about being respectful.  But if that was your
goal, you'd message the OP privately about his comments that bother
you, to show him respect, keeping the noise off the list to respect
the other list members in the process.  So I call BS.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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