Emotions are real, and emotional pain is real. Of course words can hurt you, they evoke emotions.
“It's now very common to hear people say, 'I'm rather offended by that.' As if that gives them certain rights. It's actually nothing more... than a whine. 'I find that offensive.' It has no meaning; it has no purpose; it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. 'I am offended by that.' Well, so fucking what." -- Stephen Fry
You can not have free expression if the only thing required to shut down that expression is to claim emotional harm. I did not respect that position when it was the Christian right claim harms if gays spoke nor do I today when the authoritarian left claims emotional harm over the wrong pronouns
Yea, this is bunk. What do you think fuels things like mass hysteria? What do you think fuels illogical decisions made in mass?
I'm not advocating for mass censorship, but lets not pretend humans are either logical or capable of handling their own emotions. They're terrible at it. Look at any collection of humans. You can't walk forward without stubbing your toe over examples. Daily commute traffic is full of humans who can't manage their own emotions. edit: Even police know that human memory can't be trusted. What do you think fuels decisions we make, if our memory is so mutable?
Likewise, if it was just emotions up for discussion that would be one thing. But it's not, it's so much more. It's "facts". A mass information war is taking place. Standing on the sidelines saying again, people can handle it, has already been proven false. Repeatedly. People cannot nor will not handle it, at least without help.
The more quickly we recognize how horrible humans are at handling emotions and information ingestion the better we can make reasonable decisions about how to aid humans in actually making progress.
then proceed to advocate for mass censorship, you are functionally saying we need fact checkers the problem is I do not trust the fact checkers that have been appointed in the past because they have been proven to be partisan hacks that spread "approved" disinformation only dispelling unapproved disinformation
Nor do I trust government agencies (like the CDC or the WHO) to be the "source of truth"
