2021-2022 NHL Thread

[rdowdall]

... Toronto Sun shills leaping to the defense of Panetta and Quenneville...

I agree except that I'm having trouble with this part. I've learned a lot about myself (including my own biases) and those of others and the importance of intent vs impact (and I've been on the receiving end.) But it also took until my 30s to start to have a real understanding of these things. I used to struggle with the word "privilege" and what it really meant. Same with "racist" and "racism." But I'm learning -- actively (taking courses/workshops/having conversations, etc.)

These issues are obviously of great importance to you and they should be to everyone. But I think there's some nuance that gets ignored. Panetta is a relatively young man playing in a competitive sports league. While it doesn't matter, I found his response to be genuine.....sincere. While you're absolutely correct that the impact is what's important, I find some of the responses to be dismissive of someone like Panetta; demonizing even.

People are calling for his indefinite suspension; some even for a permanent ban from professional hockey. Is this how we want to teach people?

I don't know Panetta; I don't know Subban. Panetta might be a completely racist douchebag, or he might be a sincere young man who truly regrets -- and has learned from -- this event.

Panetta, like me, likely doesn't understand the impact of these gestures (ill-intentioned or not) as he hasn't experienced life as a black person in white-dominated hockey culture.


I'm not being dismissive nor am I defensive; I think Nik's response about culpability and ignorance is well-articulated.

EDIT: Herman in this post I assumed you were white.  If you are not, I am sorry for making that assumption.  I shouldn't have done that.  I did it because I thought the story would be more relatable if I used one of the nicest posters on this board.  If it offends you I will modify it.

I think this sums up how I am thinking.  I don't demy that Panetta made a mistake but I think it could have been used as a learning experience instead of him never being able to play in the league anymore.  The sad thing is that this could have been avoided if someone had said to him after he did the body builder pose to one of his white opponents earlier "Hey, I wouldn't ever do that to an African American because it really looks like you are imitating a monkey" but no one did that.

The scenario I have in my head is something along the lines of this.  Let's say Herman runs into a friend in a Starbucks.  He chats for a while, and his friend makes an inside joke, so as Herman is leaving he gives his friend a wink and a smile.  Now as he is doing that he passes an African American and he sees the wink and a smile routine.  Now let's say that in the old days this was a reference to two slave owners making a deal, so the African American rightly so takes offense, records a video of Herman, explains the situation and explains way it is a racist act.  The video goes viral and by the time Herman gets to work, his boss has seen it and fires him for showing that side of himself.

Now I have to say, that I think Herman is one of the most conceitous and cordial posters here, so I would have a really hard time agreeing with him being fired on that basis, but I only know his persona from this site.

I was on a leadership course not to long ago, and I learned a lot about myself and how I view other cultures.  For the course, we had to take a cultural acceptance assessment.  I thought I would do really well in this because I always thought that I was very accepting of other cultures.  I always live learning about how people live and grow in different corners of the world and I find Canadian culture to be somewhat lacking. 

I did okay on the assessment but not as well as I thought I would.  The instructor explained that one of my shortcomings is that when I am dealing with people I wouldn't take culture into account.  Now I did this because I believed that by removing cultural background for everyone I was levelling the field and treating everybody equally, but as she explained, you can't do that because culture helps to define who we are, so by dismissing culture you are essentially dismissing a part of that person.  So now I approach things differently and try to understand a person and their culture and how that plays into them as a human being.  So I'm better today, than I was ten years ago, but it's possible there is a person out there that thinks I hate their culture because I dismissed it in an effort to be fair to everyone.

Like even now I am somewhat scared to post this because I am unsure if I should use the term African American.

 

[herman]

Well thanks for thinking I?m one of the nicest and most conscientious!

No, I?m not white and I took no offense to anything. You don?t have to be white to be privileged. Being a cisgendered heterosexual right-handed male is a very privileged position in this society too.

I tried very hard in my response to not outright castigate Panetta; for the most part, I don?t actually care about the determination of guilt/innocence here. My response is more to the league(s) and the sport?s culture in general being very resistant to recognizing the toxicity within. One of the ways they (media coverage spin control) bury their heads in the sand is to zoom in microscopically on the minutiae of the inciting incident and any foothold (no intent, good reputation among friends and family and teammates) and magnify that to drown out the actual conversation: what upstream policies, cultural norms, influences allowed this to happen?

Like any time someone comes forward about a sexual assault, there is a segment of the media and public that will question what that person was wearing or interrogate how much they had to drink and the news photos of the alleged perpetrator are always of their graduation photos or some other well-to-do picture, while the victim is shown in one of their beach vacation or nightclub photos pulled from facebook.

 

[herman]

https://twitter.com/craigsmorgan/status/1486712565665202182
Guess how many seats this rink has lol

 

[L K]

3-4 year temporary home for at team that doesn't have a permanent home available to them after Tempe rejected their development plan (that was really just a plan and didn't have the financial backing to actually implement it)

If the NHL okays this its embarrassing.

 

[Kin]

The scenario I have in my head is something along the lines of this.  Let's say Herman runs into a friend in a Starbucks.  He chats for a while, and his friend makes an inside joke, so as Herman is leaving he gives his friend a wink and a smile.  Now as he is doing that he passes an African American and he sees the wink and a smile routine.  Now let's say that in the old days this was a reference to two slave owners making a deal, so the African American rightly so takes offense, records a video of Herman, explains the situation and explains way it is a racist act.  The video goes viral and by the time Herman gets to work, his boss has seen it and fires him for showing that side of himself.

I understand the point you're going for but I think your hypothetical sort of exposes the problem with this line of thinking because for this to be valid there'd need to be some sort of expression or mannerism that could both be entirely innocent but also widely known and understood to be associated with a terrible historical crime like slavery and it's sort of inherently impossible for something to be both.

I can only sort of speak for myself here but with using my own history of being something of an ethnic minority I feel like people maybe don't understand that, like, instances of prejudice that are commonly experienced by ethnic minorities tend not to be primarily seen through the lens of "Ah good, a chance to teach a wayward youth the error of his ways" and expecting it to be is putting yet another burden on a victimized group. Especially within the context of a fairly public endeavour like professional sports I think the emphasis should probably be more on the "How do we stop this from happening" and not the personal growth of Jacob Panetta. In sports the "How do we discourage this behaviour" is usually about harsh punishment, not a training course on why it's bad to break the rules.

 

[Kin]

3-4 year temporary home for at team that doesn't have a permanent home available to them after Tempe rejected their development plan (that was really just a plan and didn't have the financial backing to actually implement it)

If the NHL okays this its embarrassing.

At what point do the players, who are "Partners" making 50% of the revenue, get to maybe have a say about one of the 32 teams playing in a 5000 seat arena for 3-4 years instead of looking for a real home?

 

[L K]

3-4 year temporary home for at team that doesn't have a permanent home available to them after Tempe rejected their development plan (that was really just a plan and didn't have the financial backing to actually implement it)

If the NHL okays this its embarrassing.

At what point do the players, who are "Partners" making 50% of the revenue, get to maybe have a say about one of the 32 teams playing in a 5000 seat arena for 3-4 years instead of looking for a real home?

At what point does MLSE and the half dozen other franchises that are propping this corpse up finally get a say?

The whole reason moving the Coyotes to ASU works (aside from there is literally no other option because no-oone in Arizona wants to touch them) is because Alex Merulo bought the team to get a gambling licence.  That's all non-hockey related revenue.  So the league gets to subsidize the losses of Arizona being a useless franchise and Merulo gets to pocket gambling money.

Arizona isn't THE reason the Leafs are having to pick away at their team but Arizona being a tire fire absolutely is playing into the flat cap.

 

[Kin]

At what point does MLSE and the half dozen other franchises that are propping this corpse up finally get a say?

I'm a little less sympathetic there. If those 6 or 7 NHL franchises wanted a say in not being materially responsible for the financial health of the Coyotes franchise they had their chances to not support a cap but did so because they thought it'd ultimately be good for them financially. Likewise, if they don't like the approach Bettman is taking about Arizona I assume they can yell at him about it at the next BoG meeting.

But you do hit on why just the whole nature of the guaranteed revenue split was such a dishonest framework to begin with. Owners have all manner of financial interests related to the game that have nothing to do with HRR but will use their team's balance books to cry poor in CBA negotiations.

 

[herman]

I can only sort of speak for myself here but with using my own history of being something of an ethnic minority I feel like people maybe don't understand that, like, instances of prejudice that are commonly experienced by ethnic minorities tend not to be primarily seen through the lens of "Ah good, a chance to teach a wayward youth the error of his ways" and expecting it to be is putting yet another burden on a victimized group. Especially within the context of a fairly public endeavour like professional sports I think the emphasis should probably be more on the "How do we stop this from happening" and not the personal growth of Jacob Panetta. In sports the "How do we discourage this behaviour" is usually about harsh punishment, not a training course on why it's bad to break the rules.

This is a salient point. In a slightly ridiculous example, if a young driver (an otherwise an upstanding citizen) accidentally/or negligently struck a pedestrian, should the public and news media be asking said pedestrian to teach this young driver how to drive safer, or blame that pedestrian for walking in the way of the car?

If anything, punitive measures in these instances should target the team: loss of draft capital, forfeiture of games/standings points; it would certainly encourage teams to self-monitor and develop their player pools to weed out those elements, even if their organization does not truly value inclusivity and diversity.

 

[herman]

EKane to Edm, which was expected and embarrassing for the league

 

[rdowdall]

Well thanks for thinking I?m one of the nicest and most conscientious!

I enjoy reading your posts and you always take the time to break down what it is that you are posting.  I'm not going to lie, I am sometimes intimidated to enter into a conversation with a differing view because I am not going to be able to do the research required to keep up with the other side, and I don't think that is fair to those that do take the time to research, given the amount of information that people tend to use on this site to support their arguments. 

No, I?m not white and I took no offense to anything. You don?t have to be white to be privileged. Being a cisgendered heterosexual right-handed male is a very privileged position in this society too.

I am glad I didn't offend you.  That is the worst case scenario in my book when entering into a debate.  I like the discussio, and I like the back and forth with different ways of looking at things, but as I have grown older, I try harder and harder to make sure that the discussion doesn't leave scars on people. 

I tried very hard in my response to not outright castigate Panetta; for the most part, I don?t actually care about the determination of guilt/innocence here. My response is more to the league(s) and the sport?s culture in general being very resistant to recognizing the toxicity within. One of the ways they (media coverage spin control) bury their heads in the sand is to zoom in microscopically on the minutiae of the inciting incident and any foothold (no intent, good reputation among friends and family and teammates) and magnify that to drown out the actual conversation: what upstream policies, cultural norms, influences allowed this to happen?

Like any time someone comes forward about a sexual assault, there is a segment of the media and public that will question what that person was wearing or interrogate how much they had to drink and the news photos of the alleged perpetrator are always of their graduation photos or some other well-to-do picture, while the victim is shown in one of their beach vacation or nightclub photos pulled from facebook.

I agree on the media coverage front.  I find more and more it is less about reporting and making sure people are informed on what they need to be informed on and more and more about making sure they get the most people watching their version of the news. 

I'll fully admit that I was ignorant on some of the details on what happened that night.  I hadn't previously read what the crowd did, and after reading that I realize that raising the questions as I did is insensitive to what Subban must have went through that night.  Knowing more of the story, I would have approached the topic differently. 

 

[rdowdall]

I understand the point you're going for but I think your hypothetical sort of exposes the problem with this line of thinking because for this to be valid there'd need to be some sort of expression or mannerism that could both be entirely innocent but also widely known and understood to be associated with a terrible historical crime like slavery and it's sort of inherently impossible for something to be both.

I get what you are saying, but I think it's possible.  I'm an incredibly ignorant person when it comes to these things.  I am not worldly, and it's what causes me to try and learn as much as I can about cultures as I move forward so that I can avoid doing something that offends someone.  Look at the misstep that I made with Herman.  I made assumptions, and I shouldn't have done that.  I try my best, but I make mistakes.

Take the monkey reference that happened in the game.  I honestly didn't know that was a thing until someone threw a banana peel on the ice at Wayne Simmonds during a Flyers preseason game a few years back.  That's the first time I heard the reference.  Up until then, I just didn't know it was a thing.  Now, to be fair, it's not like I would bring that up with someone either, so while the chances are slim, there still is a chance that I could make a joke, or do something without understanding the implications of what I was doing because I was ignorant.  Please don't doubt my ability to be socially inept.  I say sorry alot.  I just found out what "Proud Boys" means from Saturday Night Live because of a MacGruber skit. 

However, that's not what happened here.  I am sure that Jacob Panetta knew about the reference.  My thought pattern was more along the lines of "Did he know he looked like he was imitating a monkey".  Still regardless, he made a choice, and it lead to terrible outcomes, so he needs to deal with the consequences of that.  I guess what I am trying to learn from it is what can I do to make sure I don't insult an entire race of human beings like this, because while I would deal with the consequences of it if I did insult a an entire race, I would rather be a person who didn't insult a entire race, because I would like to be known as a good person. 

And if I am inept, then I look at my children and think "God, it's up to me to educate them", but I think they are further ahead then me.  In the past I've used abstract examples about not being insulting to people or degrading and to focus on the type of person they are over everything else, and then I zero in on the specifics like "You must never ever ever use the n-word.  It is a word that must not be said ever", but honestly there is a lot of ground to cover and I could miss things.  Like, I believe you have mentioned that you have a partial Jewish background.  Now I know a couple of slang words that are derogatory to the Jewish community, and I obviously know the context of World War 2, but outside of that, if there is something else that is big, I am not aware of it.  I try my best.  For example I try to always use the full version of Jewish, just because I think shortening it can lead to a negative connotation sometimes.  Add on top of that the diversity that our world contains, and it becomes very hard to be knowledgeable about everything that is offensive to different cultural or ethnicities. 

For example, I have heard that there are some people that have a problem with Nacho Libre.  They find it insulting.  I have also heard that there are some people who are insulted by the movie Borat.       

I can only sort of speak for myself here but with using my own history of being something of an ethnic minority I feel like people maybe don't understand that, like, instances of prejudice that are commonly experienced by ethnic minorities tend not to be primarily seen through the lens of "Ah good, a chance to teach a wayward youth the error of his ways" and expecting it to be is putting yet another burden on a victimized group. Especially within the context of a fairly public endeavour like professional sports I think the emphasis should probably be more on the "How do we stop this from happening" and not the personal growth of Jacob Panetta. In sports the "How do we discourage this behaviour" is usually about harsh punishment, not a training course on why it's bad to break the rules.

I see what you are saying and the burden side is something that I hadn't considered and it makes total sense.  I think there a couple of things to consider.  There are the large scale things that everyone should know because of history and you should be conscience of the impact of what those things have on the lives of people.  Nobody should need explaining on those.  If you use those references to demean someone, then that makes you a terrible person in my books. 

I do feel though that there are a lot of lesser known things that I don't know about that can be insulting if referenced improperly, and that the only way to make sure they aren't referenced improperly is through education.  Life isn't a shared experience inherently, and that experience is what shapes these feelings. 

 

[rdowdall]

I can only sort of speak for myself here but with using my own history of being something of an ethnic minority I feel like people maybe don't understand that, like, instances of prejudice that are commonly experienced by ethnic minorities tend not to be primarily seen through the lens of "Ah good, a chance to teach a wayward youth the error of his ways" and expecting it to be is putting yet another burden on a victimized group. Especially within the context of a fairly public endeavour like professional sports I think the emphasis should probably be more on the "How do we stop this from happening" and not the personal growth of Jacob Panetta. In sports the "How do we discourage this behaviour" is usually about harsh punishment, not a training course on why it's bad to break the rules.

This is a salient point. In a slightly ridiculous example, if a young driver (an otherwise an upstanding citizen) accidentally/or negligently struck a pedestrian, should the public and news media be asking said pedestrian to teach this young driver how to drive safer, or blame that pedestrian for walking in the way of the car?

If you are trying to use the analogy to assign fault, then I think it's a hard question to answer because that is situational.  If the driver is doing 80 in a school zone, and doesn't stop for a cross walk, that is on the driver.

However, if the driver is following the posted speed limit, driving within the rules, and a child runs out from between two cars and the driver does not have any humanly possible way to stop the car, then that is on the parents of the child who did not explain to the child that it's dangerous to run between two cars because of physics.

Another example is if the pedestrian is jaywalking.  True story, when I was in high school, me and a couple of friends skipped school to go to the mall.  We were rushing back to school so we could catch our buses home, and we were running across the main street in the town where we grew up.  As we are running across the road, one of my friends gets clipped by a car.  The ambulance shows up, the cops show up, and man did we get in trouble.  That one was definitely on us.   

If anything, punitive measures in these instances should target the team: loss of draft capital, forfeiture of games/standings points; it would certainly encourage teams to self-monitor and develop their player pools to weed out those elements, even if their organization does not truly value inclusivity and diversity.

I'm for whatever is going to help reduce these types of incidents.  I am not equipped to understand how it must make people feel that these sorts of incidents still occur.

I was thinking about this last night, and my thoughts drifted to drunk driving.  If you think about it, it's crazy that as early as the the 1980's, drunk driving was still very prevalent (as was driving without your seatbelt on, not really relevant, but still crazy in hindsight).  M.A.D.D gets founded in 1980, and over the course of a decade changes the perception around drunk driving and why we need to stop it.

I am on the outside looking in, but it feels to me like that there has been a lot of talk about how this must change, but there is very little movement forward towards change.  To pull in the MeToo movement into this conversation, it feels like even there, there has been very little progress made in actually improving the situation.  So while a majority of society agrees that these things should change, it feels like there is just enough opposition, or enough powerful opposition to slow forward momentum.

Also it got me thinking about the incident ( not sure if that is the right word, if there is a better one, I am all ears) involving Matthews and the security guard, and in retrospect, I am not sure there was really a penalty there for what he did, other than he didn't get made team captain. 

 

[Frank E]

EKane to Edm, which was expected and embarrassing for the league

Desperate times...

3 in row for Edmonton now after last night...and I don't know if you guys saw that McDavid shootout goal...man, that was something pretty.

 

[Kin]

I get what you are saying, but I think it's possible.

If you're saying it's inherently possible for a person to be ignorant of all manner of widely known historical realities, that's true but what I'm saying is that it is impossible for something to be clearly associated with having a terribly racist history and then fall into common usage the way you describe. So someone might not understand the history of the fascist salute but it stretches credulity to believe anyone would be ignorant of its history and then just spontaneously decide to do it for a while. They might not understand it's context and simply be imitating something they saw but people, as a rule, don't come up with fun salutes to give each other. 

Take the monkey reference that happened in the game.  I honestly didn't know that was a thing until someone threw a banana peel on the ice at Wayne Simmonds during a Flyers preseason game a few years back.  That's the first time I heard the reference.  Up until then, I just didn't know it was a thing.  Now, to be fair, it's not like I would bring that up with someone either, so while the chances are slim, there still is a chance that I could make a joke, or do something without understanding the implications of what I was doing because I was ignorant.

Sure but to some extent that's still on you. Being ignorant of something broadly known historically doesn't make you a bad person but to some extent there is a sort of cultural literacy we're all expected to have to function in society and just like someone may not know they're not supposed to, say, smoke pot and drive that doesn't functionally absolve them of the consequences either. There certainly isn't a dearth of opportunities to learn these things.

Like, I believe you have mentioned that you have a partial Jewish background.  Now I know a couple of slang words that are derogatory to the Jewish community, and I obviously know the context of World War 2, but outside of that, if there is something else that is big, I am not aware of it.  I try my best.  For example I try to always use the full version of Jewish, just because I think shortening it can lead to a negative connotation sometimes.  Add on top of that the diversity that our world contains, and it becomes very hard to be knowledgeable about everything that is offensive to different cultural or ethnicities.

Sure and, going on that example, I don't think the expectation here is that everyone's going to have a PhD in everyone elses culture but, again, I do sort of think there's this fairly reasonable situation where you're not expected to know the obscure things that may offend someone but by the same token but by the same token the chance of you really insulting someone by accident by referencing something terribly obscure is pretty unlikely. So for instance you know not to make jokes about the Holocaust because that's pretty well known but, say, if you didn't know about the Holocaust well, it's pretty unlikely that you'd ever just accidentally imply that there was a genocide of European Jews in the 1940's or make any specific references that were associated with Nazi death camps. Likewise, I feel it's somewhat reasonable to expect reasonably intelligent people to have some sort of framework for that stuff.

Along those lines, the idea of a "Court Jew" is an old and relatively unknown instance of Anti-Jewish bigotry from the past so you couldn't reasonably be expected to know about but by that same token the idea that anyone would, refer to their one Jewish friend as their "Court Jew" without knowing that history is so unlikely as to really not be a credible defense if it happened.

So to bring it back to the incident here, I don't think what we're talking about necessarily fits. The issue doesn't seem to be "Panetta doesn't understand that making a gorilla gesture at a black player is offensive" but rather it's "Panetta says he didn't make a gorilla gesture at all". Then it's could what Panetta say he did be reasonably interpreted as an offensive gesture and should he know that and not do it.

So this is where it gets back to what we were saying where it doesn't seem to be particularly useful to try and decipher intent because there's really no way for any of us to know what Panetta was thinking. Ultimately he wasn't careful enough and the league decided it merited legitimate punishment. If the end result is that people think a little more carefully and maybe are overly cautious not to offend an opponent with a childish taunt, racial intent or not, is that really a bad thing? Do any of us really care about the ECHL career of Jacob Panetta?

 

[Joe S.]

https://twitter.com/grumblingspod/status/1487158900570955782?s=20&t=cJOD3yT2lXywdLNkgG7zpg

 

[louisstamos]

https://twitter.com/grumblingspod/status/1487158900570955782?s=20&t=cJOD3yT2lXywdLNkgG7zpg

 

[rdowdall]

If the end result is that people think a little more carefully and maybe are overly cautious not to offend an opponent with a childish taunt, racial intent or not, is that really a bad thing? Do any of us really care about the ECHL career of Jacob Panetta?

That's a great question.  I was thinking about this last night.  I was worried that people reading my posts would be thinking "It really sounds like SI wants a get out of racist jail free card?", which is not the case, so I was trying to walk back to figure out how we got here.  If you go back to what Bullfrog posted, I think I have a theory on how this sort of conversation goes off the rails like this.

My theory is that some of us put ourselves in Jacob Panetta's shoes.  So it's not that we care about what happens to him, but more along the lines of "What if I did something like that?"

The thing is that I think most of us here are decent human beings. Maybe not as nice as Herman, but still decent human beings.  So there is a disconnect there, because we wouldn't ever really be in that situation.  I think this is where threads centered around victim blaming and a focus on how the offender wasn't in the wrong start and it's just that we are incorrectly trying to construct a defense because we are scared it could happen to us.  That we could be accused of something like this, but we didn't do this horrible thing, because it not who we are or who we want to be.  That's why it doesn't really line up or make sense. 

I think where I have been slow to react, and maybe some others as well, is in realizing the extent to which the emotional bank of race and gender relations is completely empty.  It may even be on fire.  There is no such thing as an honest mistake anymore (maybe there never was).  History, and more recently the multitude of people like Weinstien, Trump, Spacey, C.K., various members of the police force in the United States, etc, etc, etc, have made so many extreme withdrawals from the bank that there is just nothing left, and any sort of goodwill that may have been there that could have been put forth to discuss a potential misunderstanding is gone.  Those races and women that have been carrying that burden of the multiple atrocities that they have suffered have had enough with honest mistakes.

The good news is that I think most decent people are able to read the temperature of society and construct boundaries, and those boundaries are what allow us to avoid situations like that and provide support where needed.  We construct these boundaries from things like "Don't discuss politics or religion in the States" or "Men are worried a women will laugh at her.  Women are worried a man will kill her" and things of that nature that pass around through society.  Some of us have narrower boundaries than others, which is where you get the ruffling around the edges, but for the most part, decent people will stay within the lines.  If you look at our conversation, I think it largely amounts to me whining "But what if I go outside the lines by accident?" and you going "That's on you dumbass", which is fair.  We all need that reality check from time to time, so thanks for bearing with me. 

Now I do feel that we lose something by having to establish those boundaries.  I'm not sure what to call what it is that we lose, maybe human interaction?  I don't really know. I'll give you an example of what I mean.  When the company I worked for was smaller, we were 8 white males ranging in age from 25 to 45 years in age.  One year we hired a 20 year old female co-op, and it scared the beegeezus out of us.  Not because we were extremely unprofessional or anything, but it was just really important to us that we created a positive work environment for her, and we were just worried about any blind spots we might have because there were no other females in the office.  Thankfully we were very successful which I feel is proven by the fact that she came back for another co-op term and still maintains a connection with many of us, even though she has moved on to other ventures.

Now at my work we have this thing where the employees go out for lunch to some random restaurant on Fridays.  It's a part of our company culture.  We were at a restaurant and the waitress comes over and says to the co-op "That's a really nice sweater", and she lights up, and they start talking about where she bought it and it seemed to really pick up the co-ops day.  I realized, that's the sort of thing that no one in my office is going to say to her.  That's one of the boundaries that we have put up.  We don't want to take the chance.  No one in the office wants to comment on something like her clothes, because we don't want there to be a misunderstanding.

It's a small price to pay versus the alternative.  I think that the boundaries do tend to get narrower over time, and so I think that has an effect of separating us further to a certain extent, but that might be just the way it needs to be.

 

[groundskeeper willie]

I've been following along with this conversation and, while trying not to butt in, I'd just like to say how refreshing it is to see such a civil discourse on the subject. This kind of extremely sensitive topic usually causes explosions on the internet and it is so rare to see it handled so well by everybody on both sides. Kudos to everybody for keeping your emotions in check!

 

[Kin]

The good news is that I think most decent people are able to read the temperature of society and construct boundaries, and those boundaries are what allow us to avoid situations like that and provide support where needed.  We construct these boundaries from things like "Don't discuss politics or religion in the States" or "Men are worried a women will laugh at her.  Women are worried a man will kill her" and things of that nature that pass around through society.  Some of us have narrower boundaries than others, which is where you get the ruffling around the edges, but for the most part, decent people will stay within the lines.  If you look at our conversation, I think it largely amounts to me whining "But what if I go outside the lines by accident?" and you going "That's on you dumbass", which is fair.  We all need that reality check from time to time, so thanks for bearing with me. 

For what it's worth, I think my central point has been less "That's on you, dumbass" and more "that doesn't really happen and that offending people 'by accident' is usually just an excuse used by people who offended people carelessly" and generally speaking my experiences have been that nobody in my day to day life has had a hair trigger with regards to taking offense. Quite the opposite in fact.

I think we've sort of reached the end of this topic's relevance to hockey but I do think it's worth saying that I also sort of disagree with your central theme. The reason, I think, you see these sorts of "boundaries" is not because we're losing anything but because we're making gains in diversity. We weren't closer with each other before people had to worry about offending other people, just some people were more comfortable(the people who offend people) and some were less comfortable(the people who didn't comfortably fit into the norm). The reason racial taunts or gay slurs or whatever are becoming less acceptable within the confines of the game is because we want the game to be a more accepting place and someone like Jordan Subban to think he has just as much right to be there as Jacob Panetta.

I don't know what to tell you man. I've had conversations with female co-workers that would make a dockworker blush.