Quote:
Originally Posted by devonin
When you're offered both from a random person on the street who intends to make you feel bad/guilty/negative about your weight? There is no difference. They are both insults, and they are both personal attacks because the insults are about something to do with the person themselves.
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this doesn't seem good enough to me, because imagine this scenario:
A: I am not trying to insult you. your BMI indicates you're morbidly obese.
B: yes you are!
A: no I'm not
[repeat]
how, exactly, do you prove intent here beyond just stating what your intent is? I don't think it's possible.
in this scenario, there's no way for B to know A's intent. the person hearing the remark just has to have some vague feeling of whether there's an insult or not. but this doesn't actually
make it one.
it seems like to say something is an insult or personal attack you have to be able to point to information about the sentence that makes it one and that indicates intent.
"you're 150lb" is completely neutral without context -- it could be weight loss for one person or weight gain for another person. whether it's an insult or not depends on how the person interprets the information, but the claim itself is not inherently insulting.
so e.g. "you're a fucking idiot" would be a clear insult, but "you're thoughtless" is very possibly not.
the factor for me seems to be the counterfactual. there is a better, less biased version of "you're a fucking idiot", like "you're being thoughtless", but there isn't really any way to say "you're being thoughtless" more accurately without merely telling someone something about themselves that they don't want to hear.