Good treatment Dave. Thanks. One thought as to why some people might be so bothered:
It's easy to compare this to a neighbor asking you to turn your music down, and in this specific case I tend to agree: A marginalized group of people asked a company to stop using a word and it's not a big deal for the company to be kind and stop using it. Hard to say there's any harm done to everyone else. With that perspective it becomes easy to dismiss all the pushback as irrational and obtuse (i.e. the Pinkbike comment section), but this angle overlooks what seems to be a broader phenomenon:
I think what we're seeing in the PB comments section is a group of people struggling with society going through a significant shift in culture, morality, and systems of social control. For example, the story about Yeti is one in a long string of incidents that some see as an increasing shift towards a culture of victimhood. (see [this scholarly article](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_1) for food for thought on the topic.) These shifts have occurred throughout history and come with conflict and struggle. The conflict occurs over the rise and decline of competing values, the "rightness" and "wrongness" of which are not always so cut and dry as we'd like to pretend, but instead exist on a continuum where certain values are given higher regard in society than others.
I'm still trying to decide where I stand in relation to some of these values: Free speech vs. avoiding offense, patriotism vs. globalism, justice vs. mercy, individualism vs. community, capitalism vs. socialism. While we try to help our societies change for the better, we see people on all sides writing off those with contrary views as obvious fools while we tend to see ourselves as enlightened. I just hope we can be patient with each other and not too cavalier when someone else gives more weight to one virtue when we are inclined to favor another.
July 22, 2020, 7:26 a.m. - Brigham_Rupp
Good treatment Dave. Thanks. One thought as to why some people might be so bothered: It's easy to compare this to a neighbor asking you to turn your music down, and in this specific case I tend to agree: A marginalized group of people asked a company to stop using a word and it's not a big deal for the company to be kind and stop using it. Hard to say there's any harm done to everyone else. With that perspective it becomes easy to dismiss all the pushback as irrational and obtuse (i.e. the Pinkbike comment section), but this angle overlooks what seems to be a broader phenomenon: I think what we're seeing in the PB comments section is a group of people struggling with society going through a significant shift in culture, morality, and systems of social control. For example, the story about Yeti is one in a long string of incidents that some see as an increasing shift towards a culture of victimhood. (see [this scholarly article](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_1) for food for thought on the topic.) These shifts have occurred throughout history and come with conflict and struggle. The conflict occurs over the rise and decline of competing values, the "rightness" and "wrongness" of which are not always so cut and dry as we'd like to pretend, but instead exist on a continuum where certain values are given higher regard in society than others. I'm still trying to decide where I stand in relation to some of these values: Free speech vs. avoiding offense, patriotism vs. globalism, justice vs. mercy, individualism vs. community, capitalism vs. socialism. While we try to help our societies change for the better, we see people on all sides writing off those with contrary views as obvious fools while we tend to see ourselves as enlightened. I just hope we can be patient with each other and not too cavalier when someone else gives more weight to one virtue when we are inclined to favor another.