FAQ (Feminist-Asked Question): Is Giving Someone a Compliment The Same as Sexually Harassing a Stranger?

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: Also no. (That contains twice as many words, hence, "longer answer.")

Sexton's piece on this is good. Also worth considering is this observation noted the other day by Instapundit:

Social groups create their own tropes and codes of behavior. The internet has empowered a group with a fringe fascination for finding "problematic" behavior where no problem exists. They get valorized for this, retweeted and praised, which then encourages other people to similarly get offended by every fucking thing.

If you subsidize something, you get more of it.

I'm aware that there is a possible "bullying" aspect to telling these people to grow up, butch up, and shut up. Piers Morgan lit this woman up, and, presumably, a mob then joined in and told her to shut up.

That, I have to admit, tends to pressure her to remain silent.

However, people like her have had an open field for leading mobs to get other people to remain silent. We're all walking on eggshells due to them, wondering when the time comes that we get savaged by a mob.

While I would tend to offer the advice, "Let her have her speech, unencumbered by jumping down her throat just for expressing an opinion you don't like" in ordinary circumstances -- circumstances in which the Censorious Left (joined by their enablers in the Speech Patrolling Right) did not have such excess power and did not condition so many people to adopt their group norms of never-ending speech patrolling and mob-shaming -- given that these people do in fact have an open field for constant social mugging of everyone else, I think it's acceptable, bordering on necessary, to mob up on them and tell them to grow up, butch up, and shut up until people can once again express a trivial sentiment ("Tell someone you see something beautiful in them") without having a pack of pussyhat hyenas hounding them.

Once social norms have been changed so that this kind of behavior is not valorized and not encouraged, then we can let the fringe idiots who still love speech patrolling do their thing without bothering them about it.

There's a saying in medicine: It's the dose that makes the poison. Many, many substances are potentially poison, but only in high concentrations. Even water is poisonous in very high doses.

A society can afford to let loudmouthed, perpetually aggrieved neurotic malcontents shriek hysterically about everything to give their empty lives some sense of struggle and purpose. But only when the dose of that is beneath the level that makes it a poison.

The current dosage of this is well and truly poisonous, keeping us from speaking freely. Hell, keeping us from thinking freely -- how many of you have stopped yourself from writing something because your Survival Instincts kicked in and warned you "You'll get incredible grief for expressing this inoffensive, normal opinion"?

I double-think myself all the time: And I hate the League of Censors (on both the left and right) for this.

Until the dosage of this brain-crippling poison is brought to low, nonlethal levels, I think it's fair to begin offering the antidote, which itself does, I admit, include some possibility of shaming and making people walk on eggshells, and hounding these people until they begin observing the Silver Rule of Leaving Other People the Hell Alone Unless You Have a Really Good Reason to Bother Them (and No, Your Outrage Over Every Trivial Thing is Not a Really Good Reason).

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:22 PM

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