Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
What offends people varies a lot. And why should the things that offends parents be the same thing that will offend children? And why should you protect people from being offended?
Bad reasoning for example offend me. And books that promote bad reasoning are bad mutatis mutandis.
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I gratefully agree that the offences of people, taken in aggregate, are numerous. I think that to take offence at something is a sign of disagreement, which requires criticism, which denotes thought rather than reflex if that offence is allowed to be borne and contested. I may be wrong, but I think that the fear expressed by Redcard is that, where offence is something that we are protected from by obstructing those ideas that clash with our own, the danger is that the rest is also lost. Conservatism of the sort that bans or resists books and ideas bypasses criticism and thrives in converting offended sensibilities into obstinacy. Allowing offences to be systematically categorised and pointed to by parties interested in obstructing ideas could, thereby, provide a tool to make the process of censorship that much easier.
What I see in this discussion is that adding informational tags to ideas for prospective consumption threatens to limit that consumption; is this qualitatively different than including a synopsis with the product, or a matter of scale?