<i>No, because the response is going to be &quot;Yes you are&quot;, and we descend into a shouting match.</i><p>I don&#x27;t mean literally, the words you say must be &quot;I&#x27;m not a jerk.&quot; I mean the defense must consist of a denial that the behavior was jerkish. If that&#x27;s achieved by laying out standards for jerkishness, that&#x27;s fine.<p>The OP read to me as not even achieving that. It wasn&#x27;t &quot;we aren&#x27;t jerks, because what we did wasn&#x27;t jerky&quot;, it was &quot;we&#x27;re going to be jerks, tough on you, shut up&quot;.<p>&gt;That seems like a fair description of how &quot;victimhood culture&quot; treats the rest of us.<p>I&#x27;m not discussing victimhood culture. I&#x27;m discussing a specific defense to a specific complaint, which I think lacks value. The specific complaint was not trying to make people feel bad, it was to make themselves feel good. The response explicitly acknowledges that they&#x27;re trying to make people feel bad.