[Discuss] free email less intrusive than google

[joe at polcari.com (Joe Polcari)]

Thank you for saying what I obviously was not not capable of saying.




On 3/15/16, 5:48 PM, "Derek Martin" <invalid at pizzashack.org> wrote:

>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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