someone creates them, and someone wields them.
words are tools, tools wielded for injurious purpose are weapons.
wielding a weapon is violence.
and that is how words wielded for injurious purpose ARE violence.
I see DHH as being stuck in one of those finger traps, he’s engaged with a bunch of people who have to have the last word and as such they’ve taken over his life and he is going to go from forced errors to unforced errors. Not least concepts such as ‘free speech’, debate and such are problematic in the age of disinformation, polarization, spam, industrial-scale scams, Russian trolls, etc.
His best bet is to pretend those people aren’t there and focus on positivity and what will happen is his opponents won’t know what to do and surrogates will turn up to give those people the smack down. The harder he fights personally though the deeper hole he digs for himself and he doesn’t get it.
This is a “meme” which ultimately spreads or doesn’t spread and I’d argue that’s the right frame to discuss it as opposed to frames that attribute some meaning to the words or try to situate them in one cause or another, especially any sort of unicause of the left or the right. It is not violent but it causes harm to the host the same way a DNA or RNA virus does. DHH is caught up in it because he doean’t understand that it is pointless to treat this as a ‘discussion’ or a ‘debate’ or communication in the conventional sense.
The people who are fighting with him are not doing anything to make workplaces better, that kind of slacktivism tends to create an equal and opposite backlash and creates a set of people who will oppose what they are doing and precludes any kind of activism, discussion or debate that would make things better. But it’s self-reinforcing the same way a dog will keep barking because it feels good to bark.
If you change the words in someone's sentence, the sentence changes it's meaning. Nothing is new there. Regardless, to your point I would like to bring up the paradox of tolerance[1]
In fact, I think your claim that words are violence IS hate speech.
not violence, these are results of violence, its not always physical injury, and that often isnt the point of the violence, its the coercion, the threat of more violence if you dont obey.
there are different types of violence, such as coercive, sadistic, transgressional..
duxup•4mo ago
jsheard•4mo ago
Posted only two weeks apart!
duxup•4mo ago
Seems I was right.
Fricken•4mo ago