This is why. In the other reply to me you said "This is a silly example: beauty is subjective. Thus, what you are doing you are insulting a person, and of course there are consequences for that." So you clearly understand that insulting people can have consequences. I take your combined arguments to either be that everything Kirk said was objective (as if it being objective would automatically mean people can't be insulted). Or nothing that he said should have insulted anyone and therefore should not have consequences.If you can't find quotes in context made by Kirk that people would find insulting, then that is a search issue. Does that mean he should have been killed? Absolutely not. But again, it is quite obvious that saying things that insult people can lead to consequences. And those consequences can vary because people vary.
reliabilityguy|5 months ago
> So you clearly understand that insulting people can have consequences.
It seems to me you cannot differentiate personal insults (e.g., saying to a dude in a bar "your wife is ugly!" -- as you suggested), and opinions about ideas, e.g., "capitalism is a bad system". Are you saying that arguing the point of why capitalism is bad should be treated as an insult to people who think capitalism is better?
The difference between making a personal insult (the key word here is personal), and arguing why something in aggregate should or should not exist are completely separate issues. However, in the world of identity politics these two are inseparable.
> Or nothing that he said should have insulted anyone and therefore should not have consequences.
Or, let's listen to the whole conversation and not a rage-bait excerpt, and see if it was what you say it was.
> If you can't find quotes in context made by Kirk that people would find insulting, then that is a search issue.
Arguing ideas is not an insult. If you believe that any challenge to any claim is an insult, then it basically kills any sort of discourse unless the point made is in full agreement with your beliefs.
logicalmind|5 months ago
Your current iteration is trying to differentiate between insulting a person (ie. the ugly wife) and insulting people in aggregate. And arguing that ideas about an aggregate is not insulting a person, and therefore, the aggregate cannot be insulted or offended.
Then you jump to a logical fallacy that if you challenging some ideas is offensive, then challenging all ideas is offensive.
You do realize that co-workers discussing whether we should use AWS or Azure as our cloud provider could be a rich debate on the topic. But is highly unlikely to result in someone becoming offended and evenly less likely to result in some form of violence.
But this is altogether different from other kinds of ideas. We can discuss ideas along the same topic and at some point we transition from rational debate to offense. We can start with the idea that people with blue eyes are fundamentally different than those with other eye colors. That's not too offensive. Let's take it further, people with blue eyes are inferior to all other eye colors. This might offends some people. What about, people with blue eye color are so inferior that we should expel them to "blue-eyed people island". How about, people with blue eyes are so inferior that they would be better off as slaves for people of other eye colors.
What if I went on a tour across the country to debate blue-eyed people on the topic. Did I incite any violence? Did my ideas offend any aggregate? Would you be surprised if my ideas resulted in violence against me?
If you replace "blue eyes" with other things, you can see the number and ferocity of the aggregate changes depending on the topic at hand. Your ideas are so provably contradictory to the ways of the world that I don't understand how this isn't obvious to you. Wars have been waged over the idea that one religion is superior/inferior to another. Galileo was imprisoned for his idea that planets revolved around the sun. I can go on and on.