I’ve had this debate before and was unable to come to a conclusion. It seems to me that any criticism, no matter how valid, could be characterized as harassment.
What do you guys think?
Is there a heuristic for determining which one a statement is?
Does everything just exist on a continuum between the two?
Is this harassment?
You could differentiate between criticizing a person or an idea. Also if it’s directed to demean or humilate someone, it’s probably harassment?
There are articles on Wikipedia defining harassment, critique and logical fallacies.
Interestingly the word criticism doesn’t appear in the wiki article on harassment =/
This implies that only statements devoid of criticism could be considered harassment, but I think almost any statement could be characterized as criticism, so this doesn’t seem like a very useful definition =/
I don’t think this implies that. Criticism is not inherently useful. Unwanted criticism very rarely is!
Sometimes the people that need criticism the most, don’t want it ^>^
Yeah, fair enough. But I am reminded of an argument that I used to hear as a kid during the ‘anti-bullying’ debate. The argument was that being bullied was not only helpful but even essential during a child’s development because it helped them to ‘toughen up’ to face the real world.
Yeah, in their mind, they’re serving the public interest.
I guess this means you need to have scientific support for your claims if you’re going to make the “public interest” claim 🤔
I was thinking about this, but sometimes they can become conflated. For instance: if I say “Hitler was a bad guy”, I’m implicitly criticizing his policies; and conversely, if I say “the holocaust was bad” I’m implicitly criticizing its supporters.
I think that we would all agree that intention can make or break this debate, but unfortunately it’s impossible to determine intent, so I would imagine it can’t provide a useful heuristic =/
how about…“Hitler was a bad guy because…[insert the many reasons one can to back this up]”
I’m not sure with determining intent. Say i citizise my spouse for their baking skills in front of a whole audience. Or i do the same thing in private. That says something about what i’m trying to achieve. (I’d probably also go a bit into details to make that somewhat a productive thing.) And most talking behind so.'s back. Or doing such things repeatedly. I believe in real-world scenarios you can tell intent or mallace more often than not.
“Hitler was a bad guy” is probably a factual statement, and a true one. He’s the definition of “a bad guy”. That’d rule out defamation. And who would be harassed? Hitler? He’s dead.
Regarding your other example, i don’t think you can say something and that somehow implicitly says something about the supporters or opponents. That’s not included in that statement. You could say’ …, so all supporters must be evil people.’ But that would leave me with the question ‘And why should that be the case?’ instead of ‘Who might be harassed here?’.
I don’t think that being a factual statement disqualifies the statement as being criticism. Good criticism often contains factual statements!
Calling someone bad to their face can be a form of harassment. But if the person truly is a bad person, the rest of us might be ok with the harassment.
This seems to imply that harassment and criticism are two different perspective of the same thing. i.e. different sides of the same coin. And really the question is: “weather the forum was appropriate”, which is obviously subjective.
I really appreciate how through this response is =]
I agree that the forum in which the critical statement is made is important context to the question of whether or not it’s harassment. I guess this means my examples are incomplete and can’t be answered =/
I would argue that factuality is irrelevant to harassment. For instance, “slurs” are typically factual, but are clearly intending to harass.
It makes a lot of sense that you cant harass dead people, but its conceivable you could collaterally harass someone by harassing a dead person. For instance, maybe “Hitler was a bad guy” could be harassment when said to a skinheads face while shaking your fist 🤔
If I say “trump is an effing r-tard” at a trump rally, I think somepeople would call that harassment >
so everything boils down to context, purpose and intent. saying that to skinheads is meant to offend. calling trump names infront of his supporters is meant to offend.
i’d say critique and harassment are two totally different things. a statement can be one of that, both or neither.
i’m happy with the wikipedia definition of harassment. It’s harassment if the only purpose is to annoy. Regardless of the statement made. You could say something and it’s okay or call someone every night at 3am and tell the same sentence, then hang up… and it’s harassment. It’s not really directly related to the sentence.
The fine line between something that’s annoying but valid critizism and something that’s not is probaby whether it fits another objective purpose apart from annoying someone.