seattle prattle wrote:
So I said that anything could be offensive if someone says so. He plainly indicated yes and went on with the presentation.
The presenter was full of the highest caliber postmodern trash that was typical of the 80s and 90s. The main tenant of this is essentially deconstructionism, where words, symbols, and even actions have no one true meaning. Everything is internalized to one's own personal phenomenology.
The problem is that this creates either a paradox where something can have conflicting meanings or it implies there is no meaning, in which case it's entirely a triviality. Intersectionality attempted to answer this through a sort of identity scoping that could somehow assign meaning from phenomenology the identity, but that just layered on another paradox when even people of the same race, sexual orientation, or identity had further contradictory views.
A lot of people find Islam an offensive religion, especially in its treatment of women, but we're not getting rid of mosques are we? In fact, for every object, I think it's reasonable to say you could find at least one person who is offended by it in some way.
The answer here is sort of simple and part of what postmodernism actually got right : that which is offensive is socially constructed. It's part of the times. No one person defines, but rather it simply becomes in vogue. It is an eternally moving target. If someone used the term "colored folks" today then you'd certainly raise an eyebrow. If someone said it in 1960 then they very well could have been gearing up to march for Civil Rights (relativism is, by the way, a total fvcking plague).
So, Igy, 1) get with times; 2) it's syrup - who the fvck has time to care about syrup right now, let alone who's on the bottle (only boomers, that's who).