Katatori-kun said:
I am skeptical that you can truly control your emotions, and I expect it's more likely the case that you simply don't encounter things that offend you much, so you rarely have cause to.
Maybe. Probably. There are things that do get to me, at which point I just concentrate on something else until I feel better. I've accepted that eliminating every or even most sources of distress isn't feasible and acting on those bad feelings is a waste of time. After doing this for a while, those things barely even register.
It's entirely possible I'm giving people too much credit. There's evidence that people react first, and consciously act to rationalize or justify those actions later, and this explains a lot of the experiences I've had. Maybe they can't change that. I'm unsure about that because in looking back on my own life I seemed to have been far more sensitive to negativity when I was in my teens, but maybe that was just hormones, or flawed memories, or something like that, and now I'm simply back to my unfeeling self.
Why on Earth would you expect that everyone should have the same feelings you do?
I guess I just don't believe I'm particularly special or that, excepting pathological emotional instability, most people are fundamentally different enough that they feel things so much differently than I do or can't process their reactions the way I can. Same species, same anatomy, same culture, similar initial conditions. There's not a lot of room for variety in there. And, I mean, if you actually interact with enough people, you start to see patterns, and how similar they are. Look at how you kept referencing the first amendment, (presumably) thinking that was my ultimate justification or that you needed to pre-emptively strike it down before I could use it. Or whatever you were doing.
(The correct answer was: I feel like it and the boundary conditions of the universe allow it. I refuse to arbitrarily recognize the authority of what dead men wrote hundreds of years before I was born.)
It is a big deal when someone knows that their choice in words will cause discomfort but they chose to use them anyway.
Big deal relative to what? SIDS? Rape? Murder? Racism? They're faux-pas, not concentration camps. I get what you're saying about not having the authority to decide for other people what should upset them or how much but there are clearly vast differences between actual trespasses against one another and hurtful words. Even if someone's emotions are much stronger than mine, it's still probably not as bad as breaking their legs.
Neither are desirable but they are distinctly different and responding to them with equivalent severity is too imprecise and unsophisticated for my taste.
I am. One of the perks is that I genuinely don't care about race, or sex, orientation, or even disabilities. Maybe it's another artefact of my personality beyond my immediate control, I don't know. The point is, when I use offensive language, or make misogynistic jokes, it doesn't actually mean anything from my side of co-creation, yet I'm treated as if it does. Frankly, it's offensive and downright hurtful.
I don't actually speak to people like that in my day to day life. I don't speak like that in private very often. The consequences outweigh the benefits. I just think the consequences are way out of proportion. And dumb.
