If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind. Otherwise what exactly are we saying? And emotions are complex, especially offence, it is practically impossible to say that something will reliably offend a specific person without trying it and seeing how they react. Even for the reactee. Someone can easily say "whatever happens I won't get offended". But they might get offended anyway and then we're rolling the dice on whether they are vindictive enough to hold a grudge.

People learn that lesson then don't stir the pot without reason. Rather than saying "I don't get offended" it is generally better to prove it and push people for feedback from time to time.

There is also a subtle point here in things like "if the design is wrong, say it is wrong" - how is someone supposed to know if the design is "wrong"? Philosophically it isn't possible for a design to be wrong, the idea is nonsense. Designs have trade-offs and people might or might not like the trade offs. But a design can't be wrong because that implies there was already a right solution that people could deploy. If someone is going to be direct that is also a problem they run in to constantly - they're going to be directly saying things that are harsh and garbled. A lot of humans aren't comfortable being that person, there is a more comfortable style of being clear about observations, guarded about making value judgements from them and associating with like-minded people from the get-go rather than pushing to resolve differences. And spending a lot of time playing social games to work out how to organise all that.

> If we accept that any one person can take responsibility for their feelings then it follows that everyone is responsible for their own mind.

I don't think this follows! People are very different, so something can be genuinely true of a subset without generalising to everyone.

Crocker's Rules definitely wouldn't work for me, but it's explicit in them that they can only be self-invoked. Some people seem genuinely to be very thick-skinned (but easily annoyed by indirection and politeness) and able to 'take responsibility for their own feelings' in this sense. I doubt (m)any of them are truly unoffendable... and one could argue that they should be taking responsibility for their own feelings of frustration triggered by normal politeness... but I assume they know themselves well enough to know that they are better off when people try to be as direct as possible when interacting with them.

Where it breaks down is if/when they treat this as an objectively superior state of being and mode of interaction, and use it as an excuse to be rude to others.

I think the point was that directionally, on average, we might need to swing the pendulum the other way.

Incidentally, this reply.