{"id":10268,"date":"2015-12-14T13:22:33","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T20:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=10268"},"modified":"2015-12-14T13:22:33","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T20:22:33","slug":"disagreement-is-not-offensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/disagreement-is-not-offensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Disagreement is not offensive"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\" data-conversation=\"none\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">&#8220;A fool takes offense where none is intended, and a greater fool takes offense where it is.&#8221; -Brigham Young <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MaryRobinette\">@MaryRobinette<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AliRadicali\">@AliRadicali<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Joe Vasicek (@onelowerlight) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/onelowerlight\/status\/636642920116830209\">August 26, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Is it just me, or is there an increasing tendency in today&#8217;s world to misconstrue anything and everything as &#8220;offensive&#8221;? This is especially true of the campus protesters, who take offense in everything from Halloween costumes to the name &#8220;Lynch.&#8221; But the most disturbing trend is when they\u00a0find someone &#8220;offensive&#8221; simply because they had the gall to disagree:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9IEFD_JVYd0\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When I saw this exchange between a professor at Yale and one of his students, I was frankly shocked at the intellectual laziness and moral dishonesty of the student. &#8220;It is not about creating an intellectual space here!&#8221; \u2026seriously? You attend one of the most prestigious universities in the\u00a0Western world and you don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s supposed to be &#8220;an intellectual space&#8221;? What did you expect to do here, weave baskets all day?<\/p>\n<p>But notice that the part where she really flies off the hook is when the professor says &#8220;I don&#8217;t agree with that.&#8221; That&#8217;s telling. It shows that the student has no interest in engaging with the professor&#8217;s\u00a0point of view, just in shutting him up. It&#8217;s as if she knows that her ideas can&#8217;t stand on their own, and need to be enforced by bullying.<\/p>\n<p>Well, it appears that the bullying tactics have\u00a0worked, because the professor&#8217;s wife has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.boston.com\/news\/education\/2015\/12\/05\/yale-faculty-member-center-protests-will-leave-teaching-role\/IvNjfCAeymG8BIEq494LnI\/story.html\" target=\"_blank\">stepped down<\/a> from her teaching position at Yale.\u00a0The thing that started this whole mess was an email she wrote defending students&#8217; rights to wear Halloween costumes that other students found\u2014you guessed it\u2014&#8221;offensive.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and that\u00a0racist Halloween party that launched the Yale student protests? <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2015\/12\/10\/yale-finds-no-evidence-of-halloween-party-racism.html?via=twitter_page\" target=\"_blank\">It never happened<\/a>, natch.<\/p>\n<p>I could go into greater detail, but\u00a0this is just one example of disagreement being conflated for offensiveness. I&#8217;m sure that you could cite others. But it&#8217;s not the crybully tactics that shock me, or the ideological blindness: it&#8217;s the sheer fragility of the intellectual framework on which the &#8220;offended&#8221; party&#8217;s argument is based.<\/p>\n<p>Seriously, almost anytime anyone gets offended because someone else disagrees with them, their position is so flimsy that a high school dropout could poke holes in it. That&#8217;s certainly the case with the Yale student shown above. It&#8217;s\u00a0just like the story of the emperor&#8217;s new clothes, where everyone can see that the emperor is naked except for the emperor himself.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, that&#8217;s a perfect analogy, because all this talk of &#8220;safe spaces&#8221; and &#8220;right to be offended&#8221; is nothing less than an attempt to shelter these students from reality\u2014just like the emperor was sheltered from the reality that his new &#8220;clothes&#8221; were an absolute farce. And seriously, how is it not farcical for a student to shout &#8220;it is NOT about creating an intellectual space!&#8221; at one of the world&#8217;s most prestigious universities?<\/p>\n<p>This is on my mind right now for a couple of reasons: first,\u00a0because of an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thepassivevoice.com\/2015\/12\/penguin-random-house-announces-new-ebook-terms-of-sale-for-libraries\/#comment-336882\" target=\"_blank\">online interaction<\/a> I had recently with one of these overly-sensitive types, and second, because of <a href=\"http:\/\/madgeniusclub.com\/2015\/12\/14\/skiving-diving\/\" target=\"_blank\">an interesting post<\/a>\u00a0over on Mad Genius Club. This part of the post was particularly relevant:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I\u2019m a very minor pro, and my tips are probably worth precisely what you pay for them. But here is mine: Pro tip for writers. Learn to put yourself in the shoes, thoughts and headspace of people totally unlike you. Learn to write from their perspective. [\u2026] If you can\u2019t do this, you may have one or two good books in you \u2013 but essentially you\u2019re writing one character, yourself, and those who are very like you. Unless that\u2019s exceptionally appealing\u2026 people get a bit sick of it.<\/p>\n<p>Even if you detest those other people who see the world differently, and wish nothing but ill on them, and plan to destroy them\u2026 you\u2019ll write it a lot better understanding what they do and feel and why they think or act as they do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>If\u00a0you take offense whenever people disagree with you, chances are that you&#8217;ll never be able to cut it as a writer. In order to write well, you have to be able to see things from inside the heads of people who aren&#8217;t like you and probably don&#8217;t agree with you.<\/p>\n<p>This is why I support Sad Puppies: because the SJW types in Science Fiction are usually the first to cry offense over anything that doesn&#8217;t fit into their narrow worldviews. This naturally makes them as vehemently opposed to intellectual diversity as they (falsely) claim that the Puppies are to racial, sexual, and cultural diversity. When you look at the books and stories that\u00a0these people\u00a0uphold as shining examples of the genre, their\u00a0rigidly ideological worldview is as plain as the emperor&#8217;s new clothes.<\/p>\n<p>Disagreement is not &#8220;offensive.&#8221; In fact, it&#8217;s a sign of respect. If your opponent thought that your opinion or argument wasn&#8217;t worth engaging with, then they simply would have ignored you. By saying &#8220;I\u00a0don&#8217;t agree,&#8221; they are acknowledging your position in an intellectually honest way. When you willfully misrepresent your opponent&#8217;s views, or bully them into silence, it is a sign of disrespect that warrants taking offense. And who is most guilty of that? I&#8217;ll give you two chances, and the first one doesn&#8217;t count.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;A fool takes offense where none is intended, and a greater fool takes offense where it is.&#8221; -Brigham Young @MaryRobinette @AliRadicali \u2014 Joe Vasicek (@onelowerlight) August 26, 2015 Is it just me, or is there an increasing tendency in today&#8217;s world to misconstrue anything and everything as &#8220;offensive&#8221;? This is especially true of the campus&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/disagreement-is-not-offensive\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Disagreement is not offensive<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Disagreement is not offensive #SadPuppies #crybullies #SJW","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[992,1009,599],"class_list":["post-10268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-sad-puppies","tag-sjws","tag-thoughts-reflections","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2FC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10270,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10268\/revisions\/10270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}