Yes, “words” can be powerful. “Names”, not so much.
Yes, the old adage doesn’t prove anything. But it does remind us what we try to teach our children. How would any of us react of our kid, in school, punched someone in the face because another kid said what Trump said?
Honestly, this sounds like something only a white American man could say.
Voting to-day. I will be casting a ballot for Bernie Sanders for President, Ron Unz for US Senate, Joe Dunn for CA-46, and Mio Akiyama for County Board of Education.
There is a recall effort going on to remove the judge involved in the Stanford swimmer rape case. Unfortunately, the judge is currently running for re-election unopposed in today’s election. It will be interesting to see if there is much blowback in the vote.
I wouldn’t be thrilled about it. There would be consequences and I would use it as an opportunity to teach about the need to control your emotions in the face of provocation and report hate speech to responsible adults rather than lashing out.
But I would a thousand times rather have that kid than the kid who repeated what Trump said.
How would you react if a poster had said the following:
“Honestly, this sounds like something only an African-American woman could say.”
Give us an example of what that would be in response to.
Names have as much power as we allow them to have. I learned that from a non-white person. Lived about 2,500 years ago. You may have heard of him.
Tyrion Lannister? I think he’s white, though.
So, they are “words.”
Herodotus? Greeks are generally considered “white” btw.
Hey, that was in the book!
Little Finger, obviously!
I was going to guess the Buddha who, incidentally, was not “white”.
Didn’t think of him, thought he was a little further back. But I’m sure the high caste prince was well positioned to ignore the racial name calling jsgoddess was hinting at.
Totally. Check your privilege, Guatama!
What it is in response to doesn’t matter. Racism and sexism are what they are.
Yeah, I’ll cop to my brush being about ten miles and a few millennia too broad. Sorry.
I do think, however, that if someone said “I punched him to defend myself!” and I said, “Jesus said you should turn the other cheek” I’d get a few million eyerolls in response. Just because some people claim that words are not harmful (and names are words. I’m not going to put in that artificial distinction. Besides, in my schoolyard, the rhyme was “… but words will never hurt me”) doesn’t mean they are actually not harmful.
So I’m very sympathetic to the idea that speech can harm. I just think we need to create bright lines in some places, and the line I think we’re generally using as a society tends to be a pretty good one: Physical violence is not justifiable in retaliation for verbal violence.* Physical violence is sometimes justifiable in retaliation for physical violence. If you return verbal violence with physical, we may think the taunter was a twit for what he said, but you’re on the hook for what you did.
And, because I am also a twit, and one who cannot read, I notice that the original OP complained a while back about this entire conversation happening in this thread. And that, too, is a fair cop. I’m willing to talk elsewhere, but I’m going to bow out of this particular hijack, especially so that people can talk about the results in peace.
You know, the story is he was royalty, took a little time alone and then was a revered religious leader. So while I assume youre joking around a little, it’s probably fair to say he had probably, at best, as much insight into the life of the underclass as John H Griffin.
My emphasis added. There’s a big rabbit hole of differing state laws on assault, That’s not really the line we’re using in the US though.
Assault does not need to include physical violence. Threats of violence, with the ability to follow through, effectively are typically assault. That opens up potential legal justification to use physical force first and have it still be self defense. Language is less than clear though. “I’m going to beat you into the pavement” is pretty clearly a threat of physical violence. Something like “I’m going to make you regret coming here tonight” while waving a fist in their face is less clear but probably meant as a physical threat. There’s a higher standard to convict someone of assault for unclear threats (beyond a reasonable doubt) than is typical for considering the threat real to justify self defense (a reasonable person would perceive the threat.) It’s possible for the person to not be convicted of assault for sufficiently vague threats that still are reasonably enough threats to allow the other person to use force in self defense.
Throw in something like a signifcant disparity of force (heavily muscled, young, behemoth threatening to beat a small elderly target with health problems) and the level of force for self defense can even include deadly force.
Generally we justify physical violence in response to reasonable threats of physical violence. The line is both lower and less clearly bright since the justification is open to interpretation.
nm