Hateful, Offensive, Other...

A few years ago a study asked people whether certain statements were “hateful,” “offensive,” or neither.

I think the only way some of these statements qualified in either category was that the study must have defined “hateful” or “offensive” in a very broad way.

In order to answer the study for myself, I find it necessary to begin with working definitions:

“Hateful” means that I hear the statement as identifying someone who genuinely hates the people described, at least if it’s made seriously by an adult.

“Offensive” means that the statement offends me, such that I wouldn’t want to talk to the person any more if person affirmed the statement was made seriously.

Several "Other" categories would call for the Dreaded Blue Pencil if someone wanted to publish the statement here.

And, mind you, I think people have a right to say all of these things. If they are haters, by all means they should make it easy for others to avoid them.

The study used twelve statements. Its biases were made obvious by its not including twelve more. Here are the twelve it used:

1. “A racial slur” we’re too nice to print. Word meaning Black Americans that starts with N. Word meaning Asians that starts with G. A word meaning White Americans that starts with H might be considered analogous. Funnily enough, although there are words for various tribes, parties, and denominations of Europeans and Native Americans that have been used to express real hate during past wars, those words aren’t heard as communicating real hate today because so few of those people really hate each other today. “Roundhead” is a word for a British anti-monarchist that used to be screamed at people identified as such before someone shot at them, but nobody is shooting at them any more. "Hun" is still a term of hate, but it usually expresses free-floating petty spite toward humans generally, or clients/customers/bosses, with no violent intentions and not necessarily even a belief that the people at whom the word is spat are German. Anyway, yes, the N Word is most often used by Black people trying to detoxify it, but it still offends older Black people enough to be considered hateful.

2. “Person says one race is genetically superior to another race.” Person is probably spouting ignorance, but that’s not the same as hate. We still don't know much about genes but we know that some genes are more desirable than others. People who know what they’re talking about usually talk about specific genes or traits. Still, in saying “I want to marry a man who is tall, dark, and handsome” a girl may be saying that her expectations for more relevant character traits are so low that she doesn’t care what a good character a short blond man may have, or that she’s chosen a mate who is tall and dark, but she’s not saying that short blond men should be treated badly by the rest of society.

Personally I find it easy to ignore “race” traits because I’ve found that people who are congenial to me share the High Sensory Perceptivity trait, which is much more important in predicting how well people can work together. I don’t want to waste a lot of time even trying to work with non-HSP’s. I wish them well. Fellow HSP’s are my people. Non-HSPs live in their own perceptual world, which seems to me like a darksome land of wild wolf-cliffs and windy wilderness, but pity seems more appropriate than hate.

3. “Person calls homosexuals vulgar names.” I’d say hateful, despite the probability that person is simply being vulgar. Hatecrimes against homosexuals happen. If you spout hateful words about them you can reasonably expect to be suspected of committing or encouraging those crimes. Don't.

4. “Person calls women vulgar names.” Definitely hateful, though people doing this are likely to be women. Vulgar names for women are usually used to disparage and discourage various behaviors. The behaviors may deserve to be discouraged but women need to clean up our act, name the behaviors, and present evidence if we think a particular woman is guilty of those behaviors.

5. “Person says that all White people are racist.” That’s hatespeech. Jesus said that lustful thoughts amount to “adultery in the heart” but we don't call people adulterers in the absence of evidence of sins actively committed in the flesh. Left-wingnuts need to feel the weight of society’s censure of hatespeech when they call anyone a racist without evidence of positive racist activity.

6. “Person says that ‘transgender’ is a mental disorder.” I’d say ignorant. Because (a) few people are physically gender-confused and (b) some so-called male-to-female trannies are physically normal men whose "transitions" are part of a strategy to commit hatecrimes against women, many people don’t realize that genetic gender-confusion is a real biological possibility; they don’t know that one of their acquaintances is a “woman” who was married five years before “she” found out that she wasn’t having babies because not all of her chromosomes are female. Calling a physical quirk a mental disorder is obnoxious. If you’re not interested enough to study human atypicalities in a scientific way, you shouldn’t talk about them.

(Though, yes, it's also possible that an individual's claim to be transgender may be a symptom of that individual's mental disorder--there's a pattern of multiple personality disorder with "alternate personalities" of different sexes--just as an individual's claim to be a victim of a crime, or have a physical disease, or some other claim that's not true, can be a symptom of a mental disorder. But although there's a well-known pattern of mental illness in which nerve damage feels to the patient like, and is reported as, being bitten by invisible ants, nobody says "Being bitten by ants is a mental disorder.")

7. “Person says that America is an evil country.” Person may merely be an old-time preacher who believes that telling people they’re evil, doomed, and damned is the way to lead them to repent and reform, but I hear this as offensive and ignorant. It’s not an effective way to lead people to repent and reform. “America” is not the name of a country. It’s the name of two continents. Evil has certainly been done on both continents, but talking about “an evil country” suggests that you believe that one country is more evil than another, and when you don’t even know the name of the country you’re blaming most...I’d go so far as to say “stupid.” And, if you don’t love it, leave it.

8. “Person says that homosexuality is a sin.” Person is misrepresenting some religion and probably doesn’t even realize it. Homosexual acts are a sin, according to the sacred texts of many religions. Homosexual tendencies that cause people to feel tempted to commit that sin are part of their sinful nature, in the same way that the heterosexual proclivities that cause people to feel tempted to adultery are part of more typical humans’ sinful nature, but they’re not active sins. A lot of other things are active sins. Many of the religious traditions that teach that homosexual acts are sins also teach that not attending services at those churches is a sin. We are all sinners. Which sins we choose to repent of is up to us.

9. “Person says that the police are racist.” Depending on which police department person is talking about, person might be right. There will always be temptations to abuse any authority society gives one person over others. If a person saying the police in per neighborhood are racist can provide evidence, person is addressing a real concern and should be listened to. If the person is saying that having a police department is racist, person is babbling idiotically and should be ignored.

10. “Person says that illegal immigrants should be deported.” That’s what the word “illegal” means. The problem with this argument is that it was tried, for many years, and it worked like saying to criminals “If you regularly commute to a city on our side of the border to commit crimes, we’ll give you a free ride home.” Anyway, as long as there are laws saying that someone shouldn’t be here, then saying that person should be sent back to where person came from is reasonable and humane. Saying they should be hanged or drowned or herded into a building which is then set on fire would be hateful. Saying that the laws should be changed might be reasonable, if we were still an uncrowded nation with acres of arable land and nobody to farm it, but it would be revolutionary. Also, as things are today, stupid.

11. “Person says Islam is taking over Europe.” Evidence is what determines whether this is a statement of panic or of fact. When countries have been taken over by socialism, Islam is probably an improvement.

12. “Person says military women should not serve in combat.” Person should take that up at the Pentagon, not here. It’s a biblically based opinion. Modern combat is mechanized enough that a valid case can be made for saying that women can do it as well as men. All this web site has to say about it is that we ask readers kindly to refrain from disparaging or discouraging women who may be serving in combat. We lost the claim that the U.S. Army should follow biblical rules when we allowed the draft. 

Now some blue pencil bait that left-wingers don’t seem to realize is hateful and offensive, but it is:

13. “Person says anything implying that socialism is still a viable idea, which is bad enough, and/or identifying ‘conservatives,’ or even right-wingnuts, with Germany’s Nazional Sozialism.” While Hitler was able to sell his brand of socialism to the “more conservative” faction in Germany (largely by Big Lies, such as claiming that he was a Christian), relative to the positions considered “conservative” in the United States Hitler was indeed a “Man of the Left.” Anyone in any confusion about this should read Jonah Goldberg's book. Fascism, considered as a simple political program for co-opting the nominal owners of big businesses instead of overtly “nationalizing” their businesses, is not inherently an unreasonable idea, though it gives enough power to its leader almost to guarantee his corruption, and is therefore unlikely ever to serve any country well; still, Spain survived Franco. Mussolini’s peculiar twist on fascism, which aligned him with Hitler’s Nazism, added a violent tyrannical dictator and policies of blaming and persecuting arbitrarily chosen groups of citizens. If you do happen to know of any right-wingnuts who are advocating shooting the conductors of trains that run late, putting all the Jews or all the Muslims or all the Scientologists in prison camps, requiring the head of state to be saluted in every greeting exchanged between citizens, etc., please inform this web site. We do not know of any and so we will regard people who confuse Republicans, even old conservatives like Barry Goldwater, with Nazis as badly confused wingnuts who need therapy not publication.

14. “Person wants to go to war with anybody, even Russia.” Modern war means killing non-combatants: children and old people and animals. At the time of writing the urge to apply a two-by-four plank to the Russian leader is understandable, though it’s stooping to his little-boy level. The urge to try filling the Internet with examples from recent history, of how trying to overrun smaller nations as a tyrant conqueror has worked less well than trying to sell them the benefits of a close alliance has done, is worth trying. Talk about war appeals to haters. God has not guided us to our current levels of technological sophistication, wealth, and enlightenment so that we could waste more of anything on more wars.

15. “Person expresses confusion about the nature and purpose of sexuality, with specific confusion about whether person wants to share pleasure with Biden, Putin, or some other public figure or to do them some other sort of ill-defined bodily harm.” The sexual act is about sharing the joy of life and love and the commitment to rear a child together. If people don’t feel and want to share those things, their imagining that they’re ready to think or talk about sex is hateful. 

Google, not I, is the source of the policy that this web site will not display a comment like “Hi, I’m back, I just got married and went on a Caribbean cruise and didn’t even gain any weight because we spent all our time in our cabin trying different ways to make babies.” That is a delightful time in life and deserves to be celebrated, but because of Google this web site would have to request that the celebrant stop after "didn't even gain any weight." Let readers fill in the explanation from our own memories.

But I object to the “F’k Trump/Biden/whomever” kind of thing. If you want to kill a leader, say “kill.” If removing him from office would do, say “remove” or “impeach” or “down with.” Google would object to a comment saying “Kill Trump/Biden/whomever” too...remember how, when posting the “What a Difference a K Makes” puns, I substituted William McKinley for Bill Clinton because no reader could possibly think “Kill McKinley” was a suggestion? Some might say that, as long as “Kill (whomever I’m criticizing or disagreeing with)” was clearly a fantasy not an actual order, it’s all right. I have no problem with that. Google has. It does make a sort of sense. In a democratic republic it's not necessary to kill people to remove them from office. We want to make that point clear to our international readers.

15a. Person claims to be comfortable with the “F’k (whomever)” expressions of ill will but is not comfortable with substituting “Snip (whomever).” Actually I think a case could be made for the position that if a male has directed an “F’k (you/her)” toward a female, he should not be allowed to say anything but “I humbly beg the honorable lady’s kind pardon, and that of all the other kind ladies present who are allowing me to speak today” without generating an instant, incessant, loud chorus of “SNIP YOU, SNOTBOY!”

16. “Person advocates censorship as a way to ‘keep people safe’ from ‘harmful’ content.” The way to keep people safe from genuinely harmful content, like “Everybody, even babies, should have an experimental vaccine against a disease that’s mostly harmless” or “If you don’t feel like smiling, you should be popping feel-good pills!” or “Spraying poisons on unwanted plants or animals is safe and effective,” is to put more accurate content out there and let people see for themselves which ideas are non-starters. Censorship actually functions as a way to suppress corrections to profitable Big Lies. The people demanding censorship are the ones who’ve just blown another million dollars on a lying ad campaign. They are enemies of society and deserve public humiliation.

17. “Person advocates spraying poison on anything under any circumstances.” That always harms third parties, even when what’s being sprayed is paint or perfume. This web site endorses using paint and perfume, especially the mosquito-repellent kind, but not in a sprayable form.

18. “Person talks about ‘safety’ and ‘fighting crime’ and then suggests that people, or people in some category or other, just stay home.” You’re not safe when you’re hiding in some sort of corner or burrow. You’re cornered. Giving people false safety tips qualifies as a way of harming people you hate.

19. “Person talks about ‘going Green’ and then goes on to talk about unsustainable anti-Green ideas like living in cities, building apartment towers, using the Internet instead of real books, building cars to run on batteries that have to be plugged into the power grid every few hundred miles, or implanting microchips in any living thing.” These misrepresentations of Green ideas offend True Greens. Work out whether you are talking about True Green ideas or “Agenda 21” ideas. As a clue, if Wendell Berry said it, it’s probably Green, and if Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez said it, it’s probably Agenda 21.

20. “Person suggests that women, especially women who have studied a topic scientifically and debunked a profitable Big Lie, are irrational, incompetent, or less intelligent than men.” That’s hate, and it should be a total career-ender. In scientific matters the way to express disagreement, if any, is to present conflicting facts and discuss ways further study might reconcile the conflicting data. In matters of opinion, the way to express disagreement is “I disagree; I think/feel X because...” And, if a woman’s or girl’s competence is seriously being evaluated, in honor of all the women who have been declared incompetent, individually or collectively, by men who didn’t want to accept their differences of opinion, only mature (post-menopausal) women should be asked for opinions. The #MeToo campaign did some good despite its excesses. Women could profitably follow it with a #MadMan campaign used to identify and punish males who set themselves up as fit to judge women’s competence or intelligence. It's a man's responsibility to present impeccably realistic, logical, and impersonal arguments that support his claim that he is competent to debate anything with any woman. A reasonable default assumption, not always true but always possible, is that a man is disagreeing with a woman because his male hormones predispose him to quarrel with everybody and the woman is less physically intimidating to him than a man would be. A man's competence to debate is partly a matter of demonstrated freedom from this merely emotional urge to quarrel--ability to listen, learn, and support women's arguments.

21. “Person says it’s acceptable to use force, violence, intimidation, harassment, or censorship to silence people who refuse to participate in gender-confused persons’ day-by-day arbitrary gender reassignments for themselves.” If your pets have been cats and chickens, animals whose gender identity is hard to ignore after puberty but often hard to guess before puberty, you learn to tolerate gender confusion. There are, however, limits to everything. The gender-confused don’t have to participate in conversations with anybody. If they do want to participate in conversation, they should be able to handle people’s assumptions about their gender with good will and good humor. If they are going to become suicidal about "being misgendered," they should take advantage of the institutions society offers mental patients. Every American has an unalienable right even to chant in that annoying way, “Na na na na na, Bruce Jenner is a boy.” To which Jenner has a right to say “Act your age." That's all.

22. “Person fails to participate in a ‘hue and cry’ raised against people who have failed to pay others for work done.” The distinction between “property crimes” and “crimes against persons” is specious. Depriving people of what they have earned is a crime against persons. Theft and property damage are also crimes against persons, but the general rule should be that, the less the person robbed or cheated has, the more heinous is the crime of depriving the person of per earnings.

23. “Person demands, or expects, that any individual will endorse any self-celebratory displays of any demographic group even if the individual belongs to it, much less if the individual does not.” For example, it’s been reported that some federal offices demanded that heterosexual employees turn out in support of a “Gay Pride” event. That was unethical and immoral, and costs all similar events all credibility since we now know that the participants may have been bullied and blackmailed into being there. Irish people have never demanded that anyone else celebrate St Patrick’s Day; we just enjoy it enough that they want to. Other demographic groups that may conceivably be facing as much hardship and hostility as Irish people faced in the mid-nineteenth century (although offhand we can't think of any such groups) should profit by our example.

24. “Person says it’s acceptable for government to demand that any person buy any thing.” In a democratic republic government should never try to do for one person what it’s not doing for all, so, in the absence of a clear consensus that government should require every citizen to buy whatever it is you make or sell, including long free-verse poems about your self-focussed emotions, government should not require that you buy anyone else’s product either. That includes insurance, and it includes any part of any “public service” you do not intend to use, too. Supporting the use of either public funds or government mandates in this way is discriminatory, hurtful, and hateful. No decent human being would seriously suggest any such thing.