At the risk of sounding like a dead horse beater, you've got two problems- people that insist that demeaning a protected group of people/minority/The Other is their God-given right and corporations that understand that people are expendable and that liability reduces profits. The latter tolerate the former because the former support elected officials that will reduce corporate liability/taxes/regulations/etc and will do their best not to offend the former. They'll flip the script when it's fiscally/socially advantageous to pantomime support for whatever group/minority/social ideal (and there might really be some merit to the rote inclusivity/diversity training if inclusion actually makes it into the collective unconscience) and will do just enough lip-service to put on a good public image without supporting real social change. The exception here is probably where social change IS the public image (GamesDoneQuick springs to mind), but then the uncomfortable verbal goose-stepping you're afraid of there comes from retaliation from message deletion and collateral damage from people who are actively trying to be agitators/actively malicious.
The onus is on the speaker to protect profits and the status quo. Blame capitalism for this social issue.
I think it might be more pathological than that, on several fronts.
On the first one, you have employers that just want the problem to go away. Really, that is all they want. They look at the mandatory inclusivity training (which is offensive and demeaning to somebody that is already inclusive, and was instead just fudge-smeared because of a misunderstanding, but the situation cannot resolve naturally because of problem 2 below) as a quick and easy solution to absolve themselves of any onus or responsibility. So, they use it that way, which is inappropriate.
On the next, you have people who are suffering from "straw that broke the camel's back" syndrome, that are literally exhausted from, and have no further reserve for, any perceived slight against their person/status. They are tired of correcting for incorrect pronouns. They are tired of people hitting on them. They are tired of X. AND SOMEBODY JUST DID X. (or, more often, somebody did Y, but BY GOD, IT SOUNDED LIKE X! THERE WILL BE BLOOD!) They are this way because of item 3 below, but the fact remains that they have no reserve left to deal with the false positives, and the false positives happen sufficiently often that it makes life a living hell for other people, because of how conditioned to pick up on the abuse they have become, and how easy it is to set off the nuclear firestorm as a result.
And finally, you have the "Wont change for nobody, No how!" types, who pine for the days when they could grab female staff by the ass, when they could beat up "they gays" and "The nerds", (and quite frequently, the spouse at home) and generally act belligerently toward anyone outside of their scope of "normal, right, and proper". (If they are male, they tend to feel that women should stay at home, cook, clean, and be their personal fuck slave--- and if they are female, tend to think that men should be strong, commanding, and should defend their honor, and other nonsense. ) No amount of inclusivity training is going to fix this about them-- They feel offended that the world has changed away from what they found right and proper, and they relish every opportunity to be belligerent asses about it.
Overarching all three, you have federal and state legislatures that are made up of people so conditioned to bending to how the wind blows that they never progress society away from the awkward transitional mess it finds itself in right now, and have left it to flounder since the 60s.
The drive to remove all instances of the trigger from the people pushed to the edge by the assholes, results in an endless and eternal deathmarch of both social policy and language itself, toward ever greater degrees of absurdity. There is an endless rinse-and-repeat cycle where a word gets smeared with group 3's negativity, gets used by group 3 (because they relish every opportunity to be assholes that way), which then corrupts the word, the word becomes taboo, group 2 blows up whenever it gets used (BECAUSE ITS X!!!), not matter what the context might actually be, and much like the employers who just want the problem to go away as easily and unmessily as possible, society just says "Ok, We cant use that word anymore, so lets just do THIS easy thing instead!" (which in the case of language, and word use, is just substituting another innocent word on the altar to get corrupted, taboo'ed and sacrificed-- rather than dealing with the real problem-- People of group 3-- because that is HARD.)
Consider: The progression from "Slow" -> "Retarded", -> "Special", -> to now "Special Needs", as it relates to children with learning disabilities. That's just within my own lifetime.
The attempt to "TABOO IT AND IT WILL GO AWAY!" a word, never actually removes the causal use of that word. It just creates a vaccum in the language where the word used to be, that gets filled very quickly with the new, sacrificial word, which then falls victim to the same cycle. Tabooing a word is easy, and thus is the path everyone always takes, in their effort to "Never offend anyone!"
The healthy and proper solution, is the social compromise:
Keep the current negative word. Let group 3 out themselves at every opportunity. Let them fully and completely demonstrate themselves, so that people using other words arent wrongly implicated by accident. Accept that most people are not people from group 3, and as such, most interactions you have will not be with persons from group 3. Accept this, and take it to heart; If something SEEMS like it is one thing, very carefully follow through in establishing that it is in fact that thing, before going off the rails. Accept the fact that people can push your button on accident, and not mean to, and that most of the times your button gets pushed, it is from that. (which is why clearly demarcating people in group 3, as group 3, is necessary, so that they can be unambiguously identified.) Due to this acceptance, accept that you cannot live your life without ever being offended, or without ever offending anyone. Instead, be courteous and accepting/accomodating when that happens, and work together for a better future.
That is not the path that society is taking though.
Society is taking the path of "Oh, you POOR DEAR THING--- You SHOULD have the **RIGHT** to never be offended!"
and then it crafts rules that lead to very strange places, like we are finding today. Those rules, with that intention, invariably lead to those strange places, because the objective is not achievable.
Instead, the path society should be taking is:
"Are you a belligerent asshole that gets off on hurting other people? There's a place for you. Prison." with a copious dose of "Verify quite surely, that this person is indeed that thing, before you put them there."
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14569494 times)