[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by shiney

Your argument is you want people to get pissed off at you when you offend them. That isn't the argument I'm trying to make, which is you shouldn't censor yourself to not offend them. If you did that, then you never would have changed, because you'd have never said the viewpoints that offended them to begin with.

My argument is more that people who get angry and respond with hostility to the ignorant statements of others should not be held more responsible for the argument by Moderators and others than the individual who said the stupid and ignorant and offensive comment in the first place.

Unfortunately on NPF it tends to go in the opposite direction -- the people who are ignorant and who say offensive things tend to get away with less a punishment than the people who get justifiably angry by their stupidity and bash them for saying something inappropriate. Ideally it should be the other way around. You can interpret that as enforcing "political correctness" at the expense of sharing divergent viewpoints but I think that's precisely what a good internet community should do. We should not tolerate cultural insensitivity or stereotypical thinking. You should not be able to make feel people terrible here simply for committing the "offense" of being "different or abnormal" in a way that leads to the beneficiaries of institutional privilege making stupid jokes at their expense.