Several comments have remarked on the obvious-in-retrospect nature of this post. Indeed it seems so obvious now that I find it almost unreal to think of a time (i.e., hours ago) when offense wasn't obviously about status.

Why are we so bad at recognizing some obvious truths, I wonder? I'm pretty sure I had read or at least skimmed that Slate article when it was first published, but it still took me days to make the connection between "offense" and "status" after the controversy arose here. And this was after being primed to think about status from frequently reading LessWrong and OvercomingBias. And the original offending comment itself, which has been quoted multiple times, mentioned status. WTH?