Abstractly, I see the idea that words are intangible and can't possibly hurt you. But we are social animals and it doesn't work that way in reality. Words can get you loved or hated, married or fired, can put you in jail or set you free, start wars and end them, destroy someone's ego and life or elevate it. Words are the most hurtful things there are. The pen is far mightier than the sword.
Spoken like a true first world child who has never experienced the sectarian violence, highly infectious diseases like TB/malaria/hiv, starvation, lack of clean drinking water, and the psychological effects of practically insurmountable poverty. These arent theoretical possibilities but facts of life experienced by billions of humans, the vast majority of whom have practically zero chance of escaping the cycle unless they happened to be born to well educated or wealthy parents.
I apologize for how offensive my comment is to you and your PC Principal, but christ, how can you think a perceived verbal assault on American college students (who are supported to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year by their parents and/or Freddi Mac) can even possibly compare to the life and death situations experienced by billions of people in the world on a daily basis?
You can't dismiss the lived experiences of people simply because someone has it worse.
It doesnt matter if theres a genocide going on in every single country in the world - its still going to hurt when you get dumped, cheated on, fired, break your leg, get in a car accident, suffer a loss in the family, etc
I wasn't dismissing anyone's pain or suffering outright, I was simply responding to an absolute assertion of fact ("Words are the most hurtful things there are", emphasis mine). The GP's post said unequivocally that offensive speech is worse than everything else and I found that to be a very selfish and ignorant statement, entirely disconnected from a reality where hundreds of millions of people don't so much as have access to clean drinking water (literally an order of magnitude more than there are college students in the United States [1][2]). I'm not saying that one group's suffering is irrelevant just because another's is more dire and life threatening, I'm just trying to put things into perspective in the face of a ludicrous statement.
>The pen is mightier than the sword because a pen will move armies with swords.
And that is exactly what the right words will do. If it's seen as socially acceptable to insult someone, then it's not far from that to having it be socially acceptable to commit physical violence against them. Historically, that's the way it's always worked. I've never once seen or read about an instance of a marginalized group where the insults stopped at racial or ethnic slurs.
You really have to measure these things against the numbers involved though. One person using racial slurs is just one person being a fool. One person with thousands of followers might be a problem.
This is anecdotal (is it really that anecdotal?), but I have been called so many names throughout my life, and my response is almost always "go fuck yourself", whether said out loud (in so many words) or internally. I honestly don't care, and the bullies don't stop me.
Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
>Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
Meh, divorces happen over words, massive conflicts happen because of it, etc. "Just words" is not a great counterargument for anything.
Saying we don't need safe spaces is basically exactly the same as saying reddit doesn't need moderation. Or a community doesn't need a code of conduct. Sure, you don't need it, but the words used end up forming the cultural base of the group, and I really don't need to go to University 4chan.
> Adults don't need institutions to protect them from name calling and hurtful words. Children do.
That's a remarkably naive way of looking at the history of hate speech and hateful rhetoric both in the United States and globally.
(I'm not saying what happened at Yale approaches hate speech, but the idea that "words can't hurt you, and if they do you're just a child" is, well, pretty child-like in its understanding of social forces.)
Actually, in contrast to what you're saying, words hardly matter at all. What's important is intention of the communication, not necessarily it's form. You can be the nicest-spoken lady/gentelman and have a vicious effect on the well-being of people or whole communities, by being hypocritical, judgemental or manipulative.
For a concrete example, black people are usually OK with being called "niggers", as long as it's by other black people; I assume that's because they assume different intentions than when a white person says that word (which is quite racist, ironically).
I understand what you're getting at, but that is hilariously untrue and a perfect representation of the delusion that the social justice movement operates under.
Abstractly, I see the idea that words are intangible and can't possibly hurt you. But we are social animals and it doesn't work that way in reality. Words can get you loved or hated, married or fired, can put you in jail or set you free, start wars and end them, destroy someone's ego and life or elevate it. Words are the most hurtful things there are. The pen is far mightier than the sword.