The experts arguing on behalf of Pro-Football, Inc. attempted to stick to this story: that "Redskin" is a descriptive term, but also that, if the term is, indeed, offensive, its offensiveness only started in recent years — after the trademark was registered, meaning that it was legitimate then and, by extension, now.
Note that Dworkin construes-or misconstrues-MacKinnon's argument as a version of the old moralistic argument that objects to pornography on grounds of its offensiveness; and, as we have seen, liberals reject offense as legitimate grounds for preventing the voluntary consumption of pornography in private.
And yet, however offensive those one-drop policies may appear today, that offensiveness alone doesn't strip the reasoning behind them of all descriptive truth.
About half the "taste" protests concerned issues of gender (usually, ads deemed degrading to women) while about 3,400 were about "offensiveness", including the religious sort.
Driving extremist views underground will only allow them to fester and allow their proponents to present themselves as martyrs.As for Holocaust denial, for all its absurdity and offensiveness, criminal penalties are the wrong way to combat it, as The Economist has always argued.
Despite Mr Dimon's admirable private candour, the authors urge executives to devise a plausible narrative about their failure that includes "clearly denying culpability, shifting responsibility for the mishap, reducing the offensiveness of the act, giving the appearance of reasonable behaviour and offering acceptable motives".
In response, Ms Stiviano, 50 years Mr Sterling's junior, gently points out the absurdity (if not the offensiveness) of his comments, asking "Do you know you have a whole team that's black?" and noting that she herself is of black and Mexican descent.The resulting uproar put Adam Silver, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association NBAA), in the hot seat just two months into his tenure.
If Brasillach's fascination with Nazi Germany fired his erotic imagination, when he was writing about Jews, sexual fantasy combined with an acid vein to produce passages of an offensiveness also found in the writing of his fellow fascist, Louis-Ferdinand Céline.From 1937 to 1943, Brasillach edited Je Suis Partout, a fascist newspaper with a circulation of 250,000.
Unlike these, it tries to mitigate the offensiveness of the subterfuge: though the patriarch did endanger the honour of his wife to save his life, his statement was not untrue but merely (deliberately) misleading.
For many, the persistent misogyny in N.W.A.'s work, which was alternately cartoonish and savage in its offensiveness, was less defensible.
I'm a little bit punchdrunk when it comes to offensiveness".
