It's a consequence of relativism. "You're wrong" is an absolutist argument; "I'm offended" is the cooresponding relativist one, and has the further advantage of allowing no rebuttal.

Thing is, very rarely are any of these people actually "offended"; the "offensive comments" do not cause them genuine emotional distress or insecurity. Rather, they home in on something that they've targeted as unacceptable, figure they're supposed to be "offended," and then act it out from there.
— Semolina

I'm offended that my easily offended neighbors must think I'm so wracked by timidity and self-doubt that I would care whether they are offended.

I think Mike hit the nail on the head. I also think it's a consequence of elevating emotion over reason. "You're wrong" is a factual argument, requiring reference to antecedent facts connected together with logic. "I'm offended" is an emotional argument, requiring nothing beyond direct reference to the alleged feelings of offense.

The proper response to "I'm offended" is -

Of course you are.

Most of the above comments have expressed dto point very well. The complaint that one "is offended," by speech is so easy to take down, that is scarcely an objection at all.

The response need only be "I can see that you are offended. Now let us explore why." This is very much the same thing as saying, "Who cares?" but is somewhat more genteel. I was giving a talk on Linguistic Relativity in relation to multicultural education the other night, and I led off with the warning that I was dealing with controversial issue, and asked my audience that if they had to throw things, to please not throw objects which were too heavy.

I got a nice laugh, then proceeded to spend 45 minutes annihilating the politically correct idea of "code-switching," by which children of a sub-culture are encouraged to maintain their "mutha" tongue and learn to use standard American English as a second language. No one walked out, no one interrupted, and the questions and comments were reasonable and polite. This was definitely a hot-button talk, for my conclusion was that education must strive for the extinction and supplanting of non-standard and pseudo-dialects and that it is in the interest of all concerned that non-adaptive ways of speaking continue to disappear from the Earth, taking their non-adaptive ways of thinking with them.

My point in recounting this experience now is to show that is is possible to propound and maintain conservative positions in the face of emotional opposition if one has prepared to fend off trivial emotional attacks. I try to follow the Scholastic technique of making replies to objections part of the argument. I doubt very much that the Chomskyite Marxists in the audience were converted to the Numenorean side by my talk, but at at least I didn't have to put up with their "I'm offended by. . ." attacks.

[I'm trying out for an "obscure, pedantic allusion" award by using "Numenorean side" to denote Western triumphalism.]

Lou,

I always thought that was being Talmudic not Scholastic.:)

It is funny when confronted by someone who in response to some of my more unconventional positions says something along the lines of 'How can you say that?' or 'How dare you say such a thing?' They can't specifically outline the nature of their objection but merely resort to sputtering outrage. In ordinary people,it's not such a big deal, but when people make their living thinking about stuff, it's pathetic and embarassing.

I don't know if it's 'code switching' but when I'm in public, at work or in some professional setting, I use standard English. However, if I'm with family or with Jewish friends, I will liberally sprinkle my speech with Yiddish or even structure sentences in accord with Yiddish grammar, throwing verbs at the end of a sentence for example. Frankly, there are times I know a Yiddish or, for that matter, French word or phrase for something or some idea and then have to search for the English(particularly if I've had a few). If I have an interlocutor who is conversant in the same language it's just easier to do what I do.

The difference is that I never do it when others are around and that it is never appropriate in a formal setting.

Offensensitivity: Or, Don't Just Sit There - Nag Your Opponent To Death!

Too funny, Peter.

Lou:

I don't think too many of the psycho-rabble aspire to be noble. And I doubt if any orc ever wanted to be elvish.

Of course, they hated their own state, just the same.

Bart: Whether you are code-switching in using Yiddish fragments is questionalble. Survivals of Germanic sentence-structure point to bidialectalism, but that's not really too much of a problem. Yiddish is a major dialect of a functioning world language, and has well-established phonological and morphological rules and a pretty good literary corpus.

The problem with bidialectical education is that the fragmented pidgins it attempts to validate and empower have no such strengths.

I have long known that Scholastic disputation was a Talmudic tradition, as colleagues of the Jewish tradition have pointed this out to me in various academic and professional contexts. I can't really say who copied the style from whom, although I seem to recall that Will Durant more or less holds that the Dominicans received it from the Jews. I picked it up from Studying the Summas of Acquinas.

I think that the zeitgeist has shifted a little. The formerly offended are now often heard to be made sad by that which formerly offended them.

This trope is even more pathetic and makes it even harder to resist offhand dismissal. Like "Awww, poor baby."