Public service announcement

[tim]

Dear world:

Please stop using the phrase "I'm sorry if I offended you."

If I'm calling you on your bullshit, your error wasn't to hurt my feelings. If I were actually hurt, I probably wouldn't have the energy to confront you about it, unless you were someone I knew well.

Rather, your error was to say something that made you look like an ignorant clown.

So why are you apologizing to me for that?

Love,
tim

---

Another way of saying it (in re discussion in comments here) is that there is something to learn from any criticism. If "Alice" thinks something you said makes you seem like an ignorant clown, then there's probably something in either what you said, or how you said it, or both, that's worth examining. Unless, that is, you have no respect for "Alice" whatsoever. If "I'm sorry if I offended you" connotes "I have no respect for you whatsoever", is it really a polite thing to say?

Comments

[tim]

Why?

[hitchhiker]

because people are by and large nonconfrontational unless they have some sort of stake in the discussion. a personal emotional involvement is the commonest sort of stake.

[juli]

Citation needed.

[hitchhiker]

no citation, just personal observations on the steady state societies settle into. some variant of "mind your own business" or "don't get involved" is ingrained in everyone i know, to a greater or lesser extent; it takes *something* to counteract it.

[juli]

Are you qualified to make that observation? Which societies? For all their conflict-avoidance, the Swiss have rebelled against many long-standing aspects of their society over the last hundred years, and are quite glad to be confrontational with people who want to be Swiss (seriously, they're not so keen on immigrants.) If you're talking about closed systems, I have some MC Hawking for you: the Earth's not a closed system, it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists.

[hitchhiker]

just my i-am-not-an-anthropologist crystallised views from having lived. all i'm saying is that there's an "activation barrier" for getting in someone's face, and that the other person is likely to project his own motivations on you when you scale that barrier.

[tim]

Doesn't that just return to my original point, which is the false elevation of the perspectives of people who lack a personal stake in the situation being discussed?

[hitchhiker]

yes. that's what i'm getting at. it may be false, but it's inductive rather than out of thin air.