It's a tradeoff. I get the intention, but in the long run this way of thinking does more harm than good. It compounds into the bureaucratic kind of discourse that tries to force people to be good, or to hide badness behind rigid rules. The heart doesn't function this way, and it's the heart that we need when relating to each other and when dealing with profound human issues like the ones in this thread.
Trying to sanitize too much ends up being bad for health. We've learned this about immune systems; I think this is similar. Each individual move to exclude dirt or kill germs is impeccable—beyond criticism, lest one be accused of favoring germs—but the endgame is sterile and leaves us vulnerable to worse ailments.
Cracking down sternly on everything that is "not appropriate" and "could be offensive" is not taking us to a good place—it's making us meaner and colder, and even in many cases crueler (I'm not talking about you). Online discourse badly needs a way to get off this train. Maybe we need to risk some injury by jumping off before we crash.
I posted this article. I put it in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so it got a random placement on HN's front page. I turned off the flags on it because it's obviously on topic for this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I've moderated the thread by banning or cajoling accounts that were breaking HN's rules, and by collapsing the places where it derailed into flamewar. I've rolled back the clock on it a couple times, too—we do that when a thread is particularly good, sort of like slowing down when you're reading a great book because you don't want it to end. These are ways to, in my view, support understanding and good feeling. From my perspective, shaming people when they make a bad joke doesn't serve love. It's more in the lineage of schoolteachers who used to rap kids' knuckles with a ruler when they didn't behave. We need better ways to learn not to hurt each other.
>Each individual move to exclude dirt or kill germs is impeccable—beyond criticism, lest one be accused of favoring germs—but the endgame is sterile and leaves us vulnerable to worse ailments. Cracking down sternly on everything that is "not appropriate" and "could be offensive" is not taking us to a good place—it's making us meaner and colder, and even in many cases crueler (I'm not talking about you). Online discourse badly needs a way to get off this train. Maybe we need to risk some injury by jumping off before we crash.
Just have to say, I greatly appreciate this response, and it expresses a lot of my personal thoughts in a way I've always struggled to.
As someone with a neuromuscular disease, I make quite a few "cripple" jokes, and while most people get the self-deprecating humor, I occasionally run into people who berate me for being inappropriate, since "other disabled people may find it offensive." Those "occasional" encounters have tripled in frequency in recent years, and it's left me feeling a bit unsettled.
Logically, it shouldn't make me feel unsettled--I mean, people are literally saying, "I respect people like you so much, I don't want to hear ANYONE say mean things about them." But your response puts it beautifully--it's not the individual encounters that make me unsettled, but the over-arching environment those seemingly well-intentioned encounters create.
I like your analogy of an immune system etc. and I bet you're one of the people on the internets who have thought the hardest about these issues. But to be honest in this case I think the OP was just being mean to you.
Laughing at people who are trying to be mean to you can be a more practical and healthy reaction than internalizing and mirroring their meanness.
Kevin Hart talked about how the comedians he came up with throughout his career would incessantly assault eachother with insults, and how this in turn gave him great self confidence and the ability to laugh off anyone who tried to insult him.
Such articles always make me wonder about you, jumping from thread to thread to see what is going on with some "oh shit shit shit" looking at 5 places at the same time.
Trying to sanitize too much ends up being bad for health. We've learned this about immune systems; I think this is similar. Each individual move to exclude dirt or kill germs is impeccable—beyond criticism, lest one be accused of favoring germs—but the endgame is sterile and leaves us vulnerable to worse ailments. Cracking down sternly on everything that is "not appropriate" and "could be offensive" is not taking us to a good place—it's making us meaner and colder, and even in many cases crueler (I'm not talking about you). Online discourse badly needs a way to get off this train. Maybe we need to risk some injury by jumping off before we crash.
I posted this article. I put it in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380), so it got a random placement on HN's front page. I turned off the flags on it because it's obviously on topic for this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). I've moderated the thread by banning or cajoling accounts that were breaking HN's rules, and by collapsing the places where it derailed into flamewar. I've rolled back the clock on it a couple times, too—we do that when a thread is particularly good, sort of like slowing down when you're reading a great book because you don't want it to end. These are ways to, in my view, support understanding and good feeling. From my perspective, shaming people when they make a bad joke doesn't serve love. It's more in the lineage of schoolteachers who used to rap kids' knuckles with a ruler when they didn't behave. We need better ways to learn not to hurt each other.