[bro-kaizen]

In cattle country, the law is "fence them out," ie. if you don't want your neighbors' cows grazing on your land, it's your job to fence them out, instead of his job to fence them in.

Claim: We need something analogous to "fence the out" for "being offended" if we want to construct a broadly participatory society, complete with free, open, and vibrant debate. In other words, perhaps our society should standardize on the convention that it is your job to not be offended by things, instead of other peoples' job to not offend you. Perhaps this might boil down to civilly agreeing to disagree.

Given a large number of religious/ideological groups and a larger number of issues with non-negligible probabilities of offending someone, it becomes likely that many statements in the public discourse will be offensive to someone.

We can model the situation binomially and compute the likelihood of at least one success (offending some group) in N trials, where N is the number of events in the public discourse per day (perhaps 10^5 in today's fractured media landscape) and the probability of offense is on average perhaps 1/(.001N). It's not hard to see that at least one success will probably happen every day. That's why I think we need a more robust system for dealing with this.

[sthrs]

What about being bigoted and prejudiced contributes to a democracy?