It may seem like a fringe and nearly insane viewpoint when it first emerges in academia, but just watch…
…and it will bleed into the non-academic world soon enough, and the Overton window will move to the point where the left will think it’s just a basic truth. And then half the country – the Democrat half – will agree, as well as the majority of the under-25 crowd.
Case in point: words are violence. That’s such an absurd equivalency that it contains its own obvious contradiction within it. Words are not violence. They are words. Words can incite and inspire violence if they meet a receptive mind. Expressing a difference of opinion is not violence. Words that make a person feel bad are not violence.
Remember the old children’s saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. I wonder whether kids say that anymore. Did they stop saying it decades ago, because it talked about violence? Did it allow bullies to keep on bullying, because of its nefarious suggestion that the bully could keep bloviating and it didn’t matter because it didn’t inflict actual violence?
Why am I going on and on about this? Because of the furor at The New York Times over Tom Cotton’s op-ed.
Case in point:
Of course AOC is in the "words are violence" and "how dare you publish things that I personally disagree with" crowd. Do you have any idea how an op-ed page works? Do you know that the NYT has published op-eds from Putin, Erdogan, and the Taliban https://t.co/BoPGjcDj8L
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 4, 2020
It has been, for some time, a tactic of leftists to claim that their violence should be protected as freedom of expression, while claiming that the speech of their ideological enemies constitutes violence. This is the “logic” (or, rather, lack thereof) behind all the calls from the left for censorship and de-platforming. A current example is the case of Charles Negy, tenured (Hispanic) professor at UCF on whom the Twitter mobs have descended for his recent comments on what he describes as “black privilege.”
Sign posted at our local Chicago suburban city Rec Center – Directly below the COVID 19 All things are cancelled memo:
“Remember George Floyd: Silence is Violence”
You WILL be made to care.
(Note, it’s unclear who posted the sign. I’m not saying it was the City)
Am I crazy to think this is connected to the anti-bullying mania of the last many years? No, I’m not pro-bullying and, yes, there may have been too much tolerance for abusive behavior in the past but it used to be commonly accepted that bullies exist and you needed to learn to stand up to them. For a good long while now that’s been changed to “bullying must be eradicated,” like it’s a disease or something, and that you don’t stand up to bullies, you tattle on them to some authority figure.
That would seem to explain all these people who never learned to actually get along with other people and are used to such interactions being strictly regulated. I get the sense a lot of these “crybullies” have never actually been bullied themselves.
Mike
I believe there’s a corollary to this that must be included in tandem in order to fully understand the underlying Orwellian intent:
“Words are Violence” – and “Physical Violence is Free Speech”
The left becomes more deranged by the hour. They reap the whirlwind as they promote orangemanbad’s reelection.
Am I crazy to think this is connected to the anti-bullying mania of the last many years?
The point of the anti-bullying mania was an excuse to harass youngsters who weren’t giving due deference to exhibitionistic homosexuality and its correlates. Note, the complaint of organized male homosexuality is that others are being a difficult audience and not applauding. (A more particular complaint is that the eccentric social skills of male homosexuals don’t work on an ordinary high school campus, among other places). School officials and the public interest lawyers threatening them don’t actually give a rip about the mundane recipients of bullying. The anxious and awkward students who have trouble making sense of their social world and no mentors who can help them make sense of it so they can learn to be not vulnerable are bearing a problem which has no name and gets no sympathy.
you tattle on them to some authority figure.
Meanwhile, while that’s going on, feral youths are permitted to turn slum schools into a disciplinary ruin.
Yep, hopefully some of the more useless areas of the humanities are culled when the Universities realize they’re losing money due to the economic effects of the Wuhan virus.
Remember the old children’s saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. I wonder whether kids say that anymore.
They shouldn’t. It was always kinda dumb. Names actually do hurt. The point is for the youngster to defend himself against that threat as well as the more straightforward ones.
One trope that has disappeared and whose disappearance should dismay us is ‘It’s a Free Country’.
Finally, (not really ‘finally”) someone else sees it. Or, rather someone else not already commenting on Neo’s site, gets the problem that I have been mono-maniacally obsessed with ever since that class 35 years ago where in a room full of grad students, we parsed Ayer’s “Language, Truth, and Logic” line, (more or less) by line.
It’s not just the folks here, who get it too. People everywhere can see it!
I can now die happy. LOL
https://babylonbee.com/news/association-of-nihilists-release-statement-supporting-black-lives-matter-while-maintaining-nothing-really-matters-in-the-end
Art Deco:
I disagree about “sticks and stones.” It didn’t mean literally that names aren’t emotionally painful. It was something that supposed victim would say both to the bully and to him/herself. It was a way of communicating to the bully that his/her taunts were basically ineffective, because they were not the same as physical violence and could be deflected by a person with a strong will and a strong sense of self-worth. They conveyed the idea of the futility of bullying. They also were self-talk for the intended victim of the bully, to strengthen the will against being permanently hurt by bullying. They were a tool, and often a useful one – plus, a way to taunt the bully.
Art Deco:
Bullying is about a lot more than homosexuals as targets. In addition, in recent years with social media, bullying has taken on more pernicious and vicious qualities than prior to that, and suicides of kids who are bullied have risen. That was one of the big motives for anti-bullying.
The anti-bullying campaign got out of control, however, and ended up making some kids more vulnerable, and also included in the definition of “bullying” almost anything that was mean.
The infection rate of academic mental viruses is really accelerating. Wasn’t the whole idea of post-modernism introduced late 70s? Then it really didn’t begin to get a foothold in academia until mid 90s if I recall, and then finally into the public early 2000s. All of this diseased thinking that we all now are hearing this past week I heard in the faculty just a few years back. The R0 for academic insanity has gone from about 0.5 to 6 or 7 and we are definitely in the exponential part of the curve. I just hope it starts to die out before it kills us all.
physicsguy:
Academic (intellectual) Kuru?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease)
“Bullying is about a lot more than homosexuals as targets.”
Gay kids aren’t the only ones who get bullied but Art is right about this. Take a look at the anti-bullying efforts in schools and it is kind of amazing how the focus isn’t on bullying of black kids or Latino kids or immigrant kids or even Muslim kids. The focus really is all about the bullying of gay kids.
Mike
Are the alphabet kids more special than non-alphabet kids with all other characteristics? It would seem so. Animal Farm.
MBunge:
I don’t about where you live, but where I am it’s much broader than that.
I too have seen “Silence is Violence” going around. I don’t react to it, I just shake my head and move on. I don’t need to speak the way some social media influencer tells me to speak in order to prove I’m not racist. I don’t need to check off a required reading list or post a black square or use the right hashtag or declare my allegiance to certain groups in order to prove I’m not racist.
They conveyed the idea of the futility of bullying.
Except it wasn’t futile. The prospect of dishonor (in that nexus) and social isolation is as motivating as the prospect of a beat down.
Has anyone else seen Ace of Spades post “A Response from Behind the Lines?” I’m obviously interested, and was stunned at his friend’s pull quote:
“…If you are unfortunate enough to be a conservative stuck in that mess, well, it’s not like you didn’t have enough warning and opportunity to relocate. So I feel for you, but I’m honestly not losing any sleep over you…”
Big resonance! My husband described the looting to a college friend. This friend is a retired Foreign Service Officer (told in about 2014-15 that the SD no longer had a place for “people like him”, an older straight white, male). This friend had long described himself as a “moderate”, and in fact he and my husband had worked on Jim Webb’s brief 2016 presidential bid. But Trump’s election had him a “Resistance” supporter, those testifying against Trump in hearings were each Raymond Shaw, “the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.”
This friend answered that the looting was just some broken glass, whereas he himself had been weeping over the footage of Mr. Floyd, and as my husband cared more for broken glass than human beings, he had a “cold, cold heart” and sickened him. A 40 year friendship ended.
I have/had another friend, Ivy-League grad, definitely the scion of “country club” Republicans, worked as a Republican senate staffer for a long time. Highly conscientious and conformist, an archetypical “A” student. Her biggest horror when Clinton came in was that the female staffers didn’t wear panty hose. Her response on Facebook to all this was: “Some good news….They are taking down the statue of Robert E. Lee” in Alexandria.
All this is to say that I think that the Republicans have fully internalized which is the respectable, socially-approved side, but being law-and-order types, are insisting that the unpleasantness be “papered” properly. That’s why Susan Rice cya’d with the “by the book” memo, and appealed to the leftover Cold-War feelings in choosing Russia-gate.
If the Dems can come up with cover, they are definitely on board.
In addition, in recent years with social media, bullying has taken on more pernicious and vicious qualities than prior to that, and suicides of kids who are bullied have risen. That was one of the big motives for anti-bullying.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6630a6.htm
Doubt it was a motive. More an excuse.
This friend answered that the looting was just some broken glass, whereas he himself had been weeping over the footage of Mr. Floyd, and as my husband cared more for broken glass than human beings, he had a “cold, cold heart” and sickened him. A 40 year friendship ended.
Does the specter of trucks loaded with ‘medical waste’ sicken him? Among their clients are the Planned Parenthood Federation.
I started college in 1960 and remember the college riots. The college administrators would talk a good game but then they would collapse like a wet paper sack and give the rioters what they wanted. We joked that there was nothing more craven and cowardly than a college president. At least the college president didn’t kneel to the rioters. Well, now the mayors and governors are kneeling to the looters and rioters. They have outdone college presidents.
Art Deco:
Perhaps you saw Planned Parenthood’s tweet, about how they are “devastated, grieving, and outraged by violence against black lives.”
Ray:
In The Closing of the American Mind Allan Bloom described those administrators and professors as “dancing bears” capitulating to the student’s commands and demands.
Art Deco:
I know quite a few people who worked in school systems and were part of the anti-bullying drive, and it was definitely a motive for them.
Art Deco:
Do you really not get the point, or are you just pretending to not get it, about “sticks and stones” and what it conveys? To convey the idea of the futility of bullying is not the same as stating as a fact that bullying is futile. Of course it’s not futile, and that’s why the little rhyme was popular among children. But bullying is futile if the victim is well-fortified against it. That’s what the rhyme conveys, or attempts to convey (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) – that this particular victim is not playing along with his/her victimhood, and that therefore for this particular victim the bully is engaged in a futile effort.
Do you really not get the point, or are you just pretending to not get it,
No, I get it. I’m pointing out that you’re wrong.
Perhaps you saw Planned Parenthood’s tweet, about how they are “devastated, grieving, and outraged by violence against black lives.”
No, but it doesn’t surprise me. The Planned Parenthood partisan in my family was dead set against thinking anything through when it hit certain emotional triggers.
Art Deco:
How interesting that you think that’s what you did.
[this has no relation to the above at all, just something that came to mind]
If a person makes a point that’s pointless, is it still a point or not or is it dull?
funny things words…
Neo:
I was expecting Art Deco to use his authority and just say you were mistaken. He is so predictable in these situations.
6-7-20 8:25 PM:
James Bennet has resigned from the NYT.
AG Sulzberger and his merry bunch of Red Guards strike again.