2:32am May 4, 2015

“To put it simply: sometimes someone is being too angry. Sometimes an activist’s rage is doing more harm than good. Sometimes there is no good being done by it whatsoever. Not every emotion we have is a great strike against oppressive forces. Sometimes you are just being too loud, abusing people verbally, triggering them, and so forth. Sometimes you are just being a jerk and your tone is a fairly reliable indicator of this.
When an activist attacked me and a friend who made a rhetorical mistake by saying she hoped my friend died sooner from her lupus, that is not a question of righteous anger or of an idea that one hopes to censor through “tone policing.” It’s, quite simply, abuse.”

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