It was announced at the struggle session that your intention in doing or saying something doesn’t matter. All that matters is if feelings were hurt.
This is a standard woke talking point, and it’s so delusional that it blows my mind.
Last week, I was carrying a bunch of unwieldy objects and accidentally hit a person in a crowded space on the back. Would it have made no difference if I came up and hit him on purpose?
A colleague accidentally took home an envelope addressed to me. Would it be exactly the same if she purposefully stole my mail because she hates me?
I elbowed my kid in the chest because she tried to squeeze between me and the door when I wasn’t expecting it. Is that the same as if I intentionally beat her? Are both actions child abuse?
When she was an infant and woke me up at night, I wasn’t upset. But if my husband were to wake me up 4 times every night, I would be livid. The same action has a completely different effect if you know that a person isn’t trying to hurt you on purpose.
How can people confidently and loudly proclaim there’s absolutely no difference between somebody intentionally hurting another person and somebody doing it by accident and feeling contrite for the unintended mishap?
These bastards are doing everything they can to poison any human relationship because it’s easier to bully people once you’ve turned them against each other.
Clarissa's Blog 
The paranoia that the woke bring is this – what if your stated intentions are a deliberate deception (gaslighting)? Or, what if your stated intentions don’t match your enacted intentions and you’re not even aware of it (unsconscious bias)? What if the harm is operating at a level of analysis where intentions are less important than outcomes (systemic racism)? [Arguably, public policy should be judged on outcome, not intent.]
Also, isn’t this somehow related to the literary theory idea of “authorial intention doesn’t matter”?
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Authorial intention doesn’t matter because you can’t dig up most authors and ask them what they wanted to say. But if a person is right there, it should be easier. But yes, absolutely, the goal is to make everybody feel guilty.
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I had an ethics class in high school that used this example:
Situation 1: A young woman boards a city bus with a young baby and diaper bag, and sits in a seat with the diaper bag at her feet, not realizing that a small portion of the bag sticks out into the aisle. An elderly woman boards behind her, and as she moves down the aisle, her cane catches on the diaper bag and she falls, breaking her hip.
Situation 2: A young woman boards a city bus with a young baby and diaper bag, and sits in a seat with the diaper bag at her feet. An elderly woman boards behind her, and as she moves down the aisle, the young woman nudges the diaper bag with her foot, intentionally pushing it into the aisle in an attempt to trip the elderly woman. It catches the elderly woman’s cane, but she manages to avoid falling and continues to her seat, unharmed.
Everyone in the class agreed that while the broken hip was a very bad outcome, the purposeful action that was meant to harm (but failed to) was MUCH WORSE. Because intent does matter.
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Interestingly, this is a very anti-Christian view, in which a morality of an act depends on (1) the object chosen or an act of a will, (2) intention, and (3) circumstances of the action, which also include consequences. The struggle session wokesters are over-focusing on (3), while completely dismissing (1) and (2). I do not suppose a recommendation of taking a moral theology class (or at least a suggestion of reading a catechism of a Christian denomination of their choice) would go over well?
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If I did that, they’d be completely convinced I’m stark barking mad. I’d be rolled out on a stretcher straight into a psych ward. 🙂
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(Note: trying this again because WordPress ate it the first time, please delete the duplicate if one appears)
“These bastards are doing everything they can to poison any human relationship because it’s easier to bully people once you’ve turned them against each other.”
It’s also not that they don’t have any ideas, although they don’t have many ideas.
It’s that it’s easier for them to roll over to New Vichy than to stand up for anything because the latter comes with the risk of losing a job.
William S Lind recently had an excellent piece about the current Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, but because his Web server is being attacked (with the usual HTTP error 503 being the result), I’ll link you to it via other means, perhaps some that your Woke non-allies may consider highly offensive (which should be rather satisfying in and of itself).
Go to Vox Day’s site and look for “Rule by ontology” posted on 1 September 2021, there’s a link to William S Lind’s “Nominalism and the defeat of Afghanistan”.
Two quotes from Lind you should absolutely pay attention to:
“… if you want to become and remain a member of the establishment, you must never make waves. Since almost all the people in question want to be something, not do something, they follow that rule regardless of where it leads. A defeat in war is but a small matter when compared to a risk to their careers.”
“… members of the establishment are almost all nominalists. That is to say, if they give something a name, it takes on real existence in their minds. The Afghan National Army offers a perfect example. Because we called it an army, gave it lots of American money, equipment and training, and knew its order of battle, it was an army. But it wasn’t.”
Think about this from a broader perspective than the military: kids do this nominalism thing as part of their personal aspirational propaganda.
“I want to be a police officer!”
Well, little Johnny, that’s great, but have you thought about what the position requires?
Versus: “I want to catch people who commit crimes against other people and property, help save lives, and make my community a better place to live.”
That’ll be a tough sell for little Johnny because he has his eyes on “being” rather than “doing”, and all of that doing sounds like hard work with few rewards.
And so the US military is full of people who chase each other’s tails “being generals” and “being colonels” and so forth because it’s full of people whose self-value comes from being and not doing.
As it is with your Woke “colleagues”, who are not really your true colleagues, but instead are Placeholder McDoctorates sitting in those positions because they’ve aspired to being professors as being preferential to doing the work of professors.
Some of the work of professors, of course, is to take the kinds of contrary positions and to do the kinds of oppositional research that moves the state of the art, science, engineering, and so forth on some axis that we can think of as being “forward” rather than backward.
But this won’t happen when you think up absurd slights and aggressions, then believe they exist solely because you thought them up.
Not even science fiction authors are that bent.
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// Go to Vox Day’s site and look for “Rule by ontology” posted on 1 September 2021,
// there’s a link to William S Lind’s “Nominalism and the defeat of Afghanistan”.
503 Service Unavailable error
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Sorry that you are going through this, that sounds super-annoying.
But I find it an interesting topic and can think of acounterexample.
Let’s assume that I am deeply, sincerely convinced that men are intellectually vastly inferior to women and unable to think for themselves. This is how I was brought up and I view everything through that lens.
I now encounter a man who says something clever and original and respond with: “Oh wow! I’m sure you must have heard that from a woman, I am curious, who was she?”
My intention isn’t to hurt the man. I am genuinely believing that he could not have thought of this himself.
People now get upset with me, tell me I have to apologize to the man who looks very hurt.
But I truly meant no harm to him!
Don’t you think that in this case the intent truly isn’t important, but what’s important that my worldview itself is problematic?
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Here is how the same principle works with your example. Let’s say you are not convinced that men are inferior to women. However, you dislike this particular man and want to hurt him. He says something insightful and you, in your effort to put him down and make fun of him tell him , “Oh wow! I’m sure you must have heard that from a woman, I am curious, who was she?” and now his feelings are hurt because you meant to hurt them.
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That can be problematic but mistakes can be corrected in a more practical manner than the woke crowd tends to prescribe. They tend to immediately turn to extreme reactions such as firing and demotions. A person who does not understand why what they said is offensive may just need a simple explanation of why that was a poor thing to say. Some leeway will always be necessary as clearly not everyone will have the same understanding and background.
In contrast, the offender in Random Reader’s example is outright malicious. Correction for maliciousness should always be more severe than that for honest mistakes. Context is key.
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Every time I see this, all I can think is:
This results in every person anywhere on the autism spectrum being euthanized for the good of society.
Somebody convince me I’m wrong. Please?
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I couldn’t agree more, Clarissa! This is further proof that Wokism is a mental illness all in and of itself. And I believe the woke instill this belief for a purpose, which is so they can have a reason to bully others. We’re all human and we make unintentional mistakes, and one of those mistakes is that sometimes we say and do the wrong thing merely by accident. The Left knows this so they spread this paranoid nonsense to justify their bullying of others, even their own. Thank you for posting such a truthful, powerful, and awesome post!
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