Home People telling crass jokes in private chats has a different moral valence than doing so publicly, or voicing earnest, violent intentions in confidence, or having a single heated moment, or making repeated and calculated offenses of various kinds for the purposes of cruelty or offense for its own sake, the subject, manner, timing, and audience for which all matter. Our failure to distinguish these contexts—treating every utterance as equally revealing of a person’s character and equally prosecutable—is dumb and mostly insincere political posturing but also the sign of a culture that has lost any feel for the moral texture of human life, and on account of this blind stupidity attempts to collapse everything into a formless blob of equivalence. Different things are different, and yes, it’s possible, I promise, for you to evaluate them differently.
26 August 2026
People telling crass jokes in private chats has a different moral valence than doing so publicly, or voicing earnest, violent intentions in confidence, or having a single heated moment, or making repeated and calculated offenses of various kinds for the purposes of cruelty or offense for its own sake, the subject, manner, timing, and audience for which all matter. Our failure to distinguish these contexts—treating every utterance as equally revealing of a person’s character and equally prosecutable—is dumb and mostly insincere political posturing but also the sign of a culture that has lost any feel for the moral texture of human life, and on account of this blind stupidity attempts to collapse everything into a formless blob of equivalence. Different things are different, and yes, it’s possible, I promise, for you to evaluate them differently.
