[HAAAAMMMM]

> You're a well-meaning person, and you want to avoid causing unnecessary harm with your words.

I don't like the weaselly binary assumption here. You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not." That's an unbelievably narrow (and, honestly, childish) view of human interactivity. It also implies that you alone hold a monopoly on how "well-meaning" is defined and that it is your sacred duty to impose that doctrine on others.

You're basically attempting to confuse people into accepting your moral ethos as a candidate for common assumptions of what "well-meaning" should be.

This is underhanded and not well-meaning at all.

Perhaps you should try avoiding causing unnecessary harm with your words next time.

[bmelton]

'You are implying "You are either a well-meaning person or you are not."'

I think that's appropriate, actually. That you've defined well-meaning to encapsulate more people than it does is probably the core of the disagreement, but I think it's fair to say that most people are well-meaning, but not all people are.

Comparing and contrasting "almost everybody" to "Ann Coulter", and I think it's easy to draw such a distinction. Most people are simply trying to communicate without deliberately pissing everybody off, while Ann Coulter gets pretty decent play out of pissing people off for the hell of it.

That said, your point on "well-meaning" being an arbitrary distinction holds, though I would assert that if more people assumed good faith until proven otherwise, we wouldn't find ourselves being offended by every little thing.

[Cushman]

Huh, I don't get it. I'm being really sincere here; I want you to think seriously about what it means, to you, to be kind to others, and then change your use of language -- or not -- however you see fit.

But that message didn't even get past the firewall. Instead you decided to elaborately deconstruct what is probably the least presumptuous part of what I wrote, as a way to impute some contrived ulterior motive to me, as a way to not engage with what I was saying, at length.

I guess I don't see what you're hoping to get out of this interaction at this point. Like, okay, you don't need to think about how your words affect other people... if you really don't want to?