161
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
161 points (89.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43394 readers
1431 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Descriptively speaking, I think that it's more complex than it looks like - the determination depends on the linguistic community, not just the listener.
Whether offense exists is more on the listener (or audience rather). Whether any action (a simple "sorry" or more severe) should be expected is the complicated part.
The offence existing or not can't depend solely on the listener, because existence is an objective trait and feeling offended is subjective. Your parentheses get it though - it includes the audience (the linguistic community, not just the listener). I'll use a silly example to show that.
Let us suppose that someone ("Bob") got offended by your usage of the word "listener", claiming that you're insensitive towards people who communicate through sign languages, and since they're mostly deaf that you would be ableist. (It's insane troll logic, but bear with me.)
Bob can certainly feel offended by that. But that won't change anything, if other people do not consider it offensive. At most they'll tell Bob "you're making shit up, touch grass" and call it a day.
The picture however would change if Bob got offended by something and people around him agreed with him.
Both are complicated, I believe.
Maybe you're right. I don't know. I'm now thinking about someone going off on a racist tirade alone in the woods. I guess that's offensive.
But with your example, if you are offended by "listener" then offense exists. The greater community advisory corrective action could be "no action required, don't even say 'sorry' is you don't want to". What action is taken does not change the fact that I offended someone. There could be a social-sphere that actually comes down on the other side and says "we don't use that word here", I don't know. But I wouldn't feel right trying to argue about.
I want to be clear to anyone reading this, no I do not think there is or should be anything like a formal committee. Just the social-sphere you wish to inhabit.