In the NY Times of all places:
Last week the NY Times published a piece titled “When is Speech Violence?” which purported to show that speech can have real world health consequences.
If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?
This question has taken on some urgency in the past few years, as professed defenders of social justice have clashed with professed defenders of free speech on college campuses. Student advocates have protested vigorously, even violently, against invited speakers whose views they consider not just offensive but harmful — hence the desire to silence, not debate, the speaker. “Trigger warnings” are based on a similar principle: that discussions of certain topics will trigger, or reproduce, past trauma — as opposed to merely challenging or discomfiting the student. The same goes for “microaggressions.”
The author’s project is to suggest that maybe there is something to this idea that speech is violence, scientifically speaking. Today, the Atlantic has a response from Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, the authors of a 2015 piece on the topic titled “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Haidt and Lukianoff point out that the author of the NY Times piece has made some leaps of logic, i.e. failing to show how a short-term stressor like a campus speaker could be responsible for the kind of prolonged stress that is harmful to the body…
It brings up an interesting aspect of rabbitry. Right now Conservatives are feeling a lot of stress, because they know the migrant hordes are bad, our national finances are in ruins, and an economic Apocalypse is on the way to touch off violence and anarchy. We know all of this could be attenuated somewhat if our societies would accept some hardship now, but the left seems hell bent on flooring the accelerator and taking off into the Apocalypse at full speed.
When the Apocalypse hits and K-strategists find themselves living in the K-selected environment they are designed for, I suspect their stress levels will plummet and their health will improve, in ways they would never believe. Want to feel like Superman? Watch leftists running for their lives every night on the evening news, and everyone agree how stupid leftist ideals are.
Liberals meanwhile will experience stress unlike anything caused by Milo or Vox Day today. At the very moment when their lives will be on the line as the savages go on the offensive in the cities, liberals will become chronically sick, and unable to face any of it.
I don’t see that aiding r-strategist survivability.
Spread r/K Theory because in liberal minds, it is as good as violence
[…] Free Speech Equals Violence […]
I guess the irony is lost on the NYT that speech is violence only if offends Leftists. If it offends right wingers well they can just go pound sand.
Well, migrant hordes, finances and economics are part of it. But the elections of 2016, a major shift to the right- and what has congress done? Its the least productive congress in 164 years. Most of the lifetime of the Republic. The people have spoken, are they being heard by anyone but the President? This shows that democracy and representative government in the West is almost dead, it is being replaced by a corporate police nanny state. Of course, the tide can be reversed, but the Republican Congress has to actually do something.