A world where “Words are violence” is more common than “Sticks and stones…” is a world oriented against free speech principles. But we can turn that around.
“…these particular sayings tend to communicate perspectives that are in favor of “small-D” democratic values like free speech, epistemic humility, and intellectual pluralism…”
More accurately, they are in favour of “small-L” libertarian/classical liberal values. Democracy, whether real or the normal oligarchic pretence, is a danger to them.
Also, “It’s not my cup of tea.” Wokies take offense when a person indicates lgbtq, political activism, collectivism, racial grievance, “social justice,” etc. just “aren’t my thing.” Seriously, some of us enjoy simple conversations about music, movies or baseball. Call us old fashioned.
"Sticks and stones ....." .was said all the time by kids when I was in elementary school in the 50's. Be curious as to whether it's said anymore.
Victimhood has become a status symbol as to where you rank in opposition to "the other". The same with the increase in alleged "disabilities", many of which seem to be self identified from TikTok. The idea that you need to just pick yourself up and deal with it , that you were expected to be resilient, seems to have been replaced by a diagnosis culture. The worst part is victim culture undermines real areas of concern that need to be addressed. It all becomes noise.
Doc, I agree that such expressions are abused and tossed around too liberally. But it's even more important to remember the circumstances that gave rise to them. Please recall the "culture" and "society" that supported or permitted lynching in the southern U.S. Please recall the "culture" and "society" that supported or permitted the concentration camps in Germany right outside and supported by German towns (like Dachau right outside Munich). If you disbelieve that “words are violence” or “silence is violence,” please visit Dachau or Auschwitz (or at least visit the Holocaust Museum in D.C.).
Doc, please note that I quoted the parts of your comment that elicited my response. I don't know who uses the expression "silence is violence," and I can't speak for them. But (obviously) that slogan made me think of some examples from history that are far too close for comfort.
Doc, one reason that people look to the Nazis and Hitler is simply evidence. We have copious evidence of how that all started and where it led. That experience wasn't unique or novel. But it was well documented--in print, in pictures and even in video. Not only can we read and view copious evidence documenting what happened and why, but we also can actually see places and feel experiences for ourselves. We can visit Munich and see how close and how large Dachau was. We can visit Babi Yar and see that it was inside a city. We can visit other huge concentration camps and see how people were held, treated and disposed of and how close they were to people outside the camps. We can see the massive official cemeteries that grew out of that experience, e.g., in Normandy. We can look at that evidence and that experience and better understand the experiences for which the evidence is not nearly as accessible.
At least as important, that experience clearly wasn't merely about what happened in concentration camps and battlefields. It was every bit as much about what neighbors and co-workers did to each other and why. We can see clearly how quickly, completely and viciously one part of society turned against other parts. The entirely of that experience started with and was perpetuated by the power of speech and press. Words and symbols did as much work as physical force and violence.
Doc, in my eyes, we never weren't friends (or at least never weren't on the same side). I'm simply saying that we need to open the aperture a bit before we say we cannot see that "words are violence" or "silence is violence."
It’s all in the dose. You can poison yourself by drinking too much water. If you find somebody who has done so, it’s not going to convince me that drinking water is bad for me.
In current parlance, “silence is violence” means “if you don’t fall in line and mouth our shibboleths, you are evil.” Sorry, not going there.
Your logic is that of Claudine Gay in December of 2023, testifying before Congress repeatedly that calling for the genocide of all Jews might not be considered bullying and harassment “depending on the context” at the same time the university she led (Harvard) trained incoming students that misgendering and fatphobia “constitute violence”.
Please go look it up yourself if you think I have misrepresented anything here.
Doctor Mist’s point is that the people using those phrases wield them as leftist ideological weapons and are explicitly opposed to free speech.
And you at minimum seem to be at least somewhat opposed to freedom of speech with your at least partial defense of “words are violence” and “silence is violence”.
I seem to misremember this from a poster sold in head shops, the opening in a lengthy, pacifist sentiment, possibly a bastardization of Ehrmann's musings or the Desiderata (sp?)... Now only familiar boomers or Generation Jones (like me). One of the more positive sentiments or "policies" that were (rightly or wongly) associated with "hippies." Later version incoporatd into songs by Dylan and Neil Young.
I say these things very, very often -- and certainly said them when we were raising our child -- because they accurately express what I mean, believe wholeheartedly and live by.
My writings on Substack are based partly upon this principle, and that the reader is welcome to disagree, supporting the response with evidence and persuasive language without ad hominem.
In the mid-18th century, Montesquieu penned a fictional correspondence between Persian travelers and their homeland, using the lens of outsiders to critique the slow erosion of civic freedom in France. Beneath the satire lay a deep worry that liberty might vanish not through dramatic decree but through gradual forgetting. So too with the quiet disappearance of certain idioms that once upheld a resilient, pluralistic civic culture. These expressions, often dismissed as schoolyard clichés or dated slogans, once served as compact defenses of intellectual humility and emotional sturdiness. Their waning presence is not just linguistic drift. It signals a cultural recalibration away from the habits of tolerance and self-restraint that once buttressed democratic life.
Though recognition of these phrases remains relatively high, active usage has become rare. That gap matters. Idioms like “to each their own” or “sticks and stones may break my bones” are not ornamental. They encode norms that distinguish between disagreement and aggression, between discomfort and harm. The old grammar of dignity culture gave citizens a language for resilience and dissent without coercion. Its decline suggests not just a new generation but a new ethic: one that equates offense with injury, elevates subjective harm above public reason, and welcomes authority as an arbiter of disputes once settled informally through argument and endurance. In such a landscape, even well-meaning speech risks being reclassified as threat, and the virtues of tolerance and pluralism lose their common tongue.
Yet not all signs point to decline. Among younger generations, there is a tentative, uneven return to some of these older expressions. This flicker of familiarity offers a narrow but promising path forward. Cultural norms are not dictated from above; they are sustained or dismantled in daily interactions, in classrooms, on social media, at family tables. The values implicit in these sayings: humility, resilience, the refusal to equate speech with violence, can still be modeled, reinforced, and restored. This is not a plea for nostalgia. It is a recognition that habits of speech shape habits of thought, and that the words we forget may be the virtues we lose.
Montesquieu’s travelers observed a society confident in its freedoms but inattentive to the forms that sustained them. Their letters were not calls to revolution, but to recollection—to remember what made liberty durable. Likewise, a culture that loses the ability to say “Who am I to judge” or “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” is not merely changing its style. It is, quietly, rewriting its ethos.
Speaking of the canceling of the American mind and the war on words, please consider that people who advocate or expound on "the First Amendment" are egregiously failing America and Americans. I previously thought the source of the problem was SCOTUS, but as I learned more, I learned that SCOTUS justices have told the truth, while advocates and exponents of "the First Amendment" have failed to do so. As a consequence, Americans have forgotten that "the freedom of speech" and "press" and "the right of the people" to "assemble" (declared in the First Amendment) were not granted by, and do not exist because of, the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists because our freedoms of expression, communication and association existed (and were demonstrated) long before the First Amendment. Such freedoms were demonstrated and documented in and by the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution.
We the People simply have forgotten that our freedoms of expression, communication and association arose from our own nature (as people) and the nature of our relationship (as sovereigns) to the public servants who represent us in government. As the Declaration of Independence declared in 1776, those freedoms arose from "truths" that (to the People of 1776) were so obvious they were declared to be "self-evident."
First Amendment rights and freedoms arose from our inherent equality before the law ("all" citizens "are created equal") and the most important qualities we decided and declared regarding all American government. In America, all "Governments" must be "instituted" with only "just Powers" derived "from the Consent of the Governed," and the overarching purpose of all government (the duty of all public servants) is to "secure" our "Rights," including our "unalienable Rights" which include our rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Clearly, the people manifest "the Consent of the Governed" by exercising "the freedom of speech" and "press" and "the right of the people" to "assemble" (declared in the First Amendment). Voting is speaking. Suffrage is the speech of sovereigns. Speech regarding public issues (consenting or objecting to the public service of public servants) is at the very core of the rights and freedoms "We the People" secured for "ourselves" when we did "ordain and establish" our "Constitution" to "establish Justice" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves" (as the Constitution's Preamble declares).
Simply put, as John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty and as the Declaration of Independence put it, our liberty (our freedoms of expression, communication and association) are derived from our independence (our sovereignty over our own selves) and our sovereignty over all our public servants.
SCOTUS sometimes has articulated very similar principles pretty clearly. In our “republic” clearly “the people are sovereign” and “the ability” (the power) “of the citizenry to make informed choices” about public servants and public issues “is essential.” Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339 (2010). “Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy;” it is “the means to hold officials accountable to the people” in our “republic where the people are sovereign.” Id.
“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information” is essential “to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.” Id. Accord id. at 339-341, 344-350. “Premised on mistrust of [all] governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor” the “subjects or viewpoints” of speech, especially regarding public servants’ abuses or usurpations of power. Id. at 340.
“For these reasons,” our “political speech must prevail against” regulation “that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence,” so regulation “that burden[s] political speech” is “subject to strict scrutiny,” which “requires the Government to prove” how such regulation “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” Id. To do so, courts must fulfill their “duty” to “say what the law is” protecting speech about public issues and public servants. Id. at 365 (quoting Marbury v. Madison).
That's something 95% of our "conservative" and "libertarian" leaders in media, punditry, and politics do need to hear, as they go into their 42nd month of refusing to report on or discuss the huge pile of evidence regarding widespread (millions killed) Covidvax harms.
These leaders are what I classify as Suppressors. Suppression is distinct from censorship, but related to it in spirit. It is an abdication from a basic journalistic duty in a liberal democracy to report on issues which effect the citizenry.
I again urge Mr. Lukianoff to begin looking into the issue of this Suppression's operation today, even though any suppression is 100% permitted by the 1st Amendment. The Eternally Radical Idea is a single-beat substack, and its particular beat is not related to health issues, and so were it not for the suppression aspect of the Covidvax Disaster, I would never call upon it to cover it in any way, and thus never accuse it of suppression itself. But I believe Suppression, while to some degree a perennial phenom, is becoming used in a new and more potent way--given the careerist corruption of so many journalists and pundits--to permit evildoers to slip around a key purpose of freedom of speech and press, while staying within the letter of the First. We have a situation where what Lukianoff and FIRE defend (and it needs defending!) should permit the media class to do its duty towards liberal democracy, but that class has corrupted itself so radically, than on some issues, it simply will not. I think that means that this substack does have a duty to at least note the issue, even if it can never be its main beat. The public is being systematically kept, but at this point only using a method that is not censorship, from the discussion it deserves to have on this issue, and which surreal-ly, around 2/3 of the public is already talking about on its own, but is rather pathetically resigned to never be allowed to talk about it on official platforms.
It's certainly good to give children armor against words intended to hurt and harm. So it's important to teach them simple but powerfully disarming slogans like, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It's something else entirely to try to make adults think something so simplistic.
I loved the book by Professor Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media." His podcast "Clear and Present Danger" (related to his book) is still my favorite podcast. I have listened to parts of it repeatedly, and I will listen to them again. Anyone who thinks words cannot harm them should read and hear the words of Professor Mchangama highlighting how words historically have caused tremendous harm.
The First and Second Amendments stand as testaments to the eternal truth that expression and communication contribute as much to harm as actual arms. Nobody ever was lynched, no pogrom or war ever was started, no concentration camp ever was built or filled without being preceded by a lot of speech and press.
Lots of federal law even proves our judgment as a society that words can harm us. That's why some speech is criminal (threatening or advocating violence, e.g., against political figures or parties or witnesses to litigation).
I agree that it's very important to teach children and adults not to be too sensitive to offensive speech. But it's also very important not to oversimplify at the expense of truth, enlightenment and empowerment.
Free speech must be doing pretty well if these are the lengths you have to go to in order to complain about something. Do you ever stop to conside the fact that your whole cause is dedicated to being offended by what people are saying about free speech?
FIRE literally just filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security over their crusade to deport legal immigrants over protected speech.
C'mon, Joe. Be fair. Defending the freedom of speech (or "free speech" (whatever that means)) clearly is not even slightly "dedicated to being offended by what people are saying about free speech." Defending a right shouldn't be confused with merely taking offense.
Why don't I use these phrases more often? Mostly because they used to be schoolyard taunts. "Sticks and stones...", "It's a free country...", "You don't have to make a federal case out of it" - these were phrases we used on the schoolgrounds to egg on some overly dramatic playmate as expressions of the ridiculousness of whatever that playmate was expressing.
I just don't use elementary school taunts in my daily conversations anymore. They are pithy, but they are a verbal 'slap in the face', which I do not generally choose to administer to an adult. Maybe I should.....I'll think about it.
“…these particular sayings tend to communicate perspectives that are in favor of “small-D” democratic values like free speech, epistemic humility, and intellectual pluralism…”
More accurately, they are in favour of “small-L” libertarian/classical liberal values. Democracy, whether real or the normal oligarchic pretence, is a danger to them.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/democracy-a-libertarian-viewpoint
Also, “It’s not my cup of tea.” Wokies take offense when a person indicates lgbtq, political activism, collectivism, racial grievance, “social justice,” etc. just “aren’t my thing.” Seriously, some of us enjoy simple conversations about music, movies or baseball. Call us old fashioned.
"Sticks and stones ....." .was said all the time by kids when I was in elementary school in the 50's. Be curious as to whether it's said anymore.
Victimhood has become a status symbol as to where you rank in opposition to "the other". The same with the increase in alleged "disabilities", many of which seem to be self identified from TikTok. The idea that you need to just pick yourself up and deal with it , that you were expected to be resilient, seems to have been replaced by a diagnosis culture. The worst part is victim culture undermines real areas of concern that need to be addressed. It all becomes noise.
And of course right alongside “words are violence” we get “silence is violence”.
I really miss the Left that gave us “do your own thing” and “make your own kind of music”.
Doc, I agree that such expressions are abused and tossed around too liberally. But it's even more important to remember the circumstances that gave rise to them. Please recall the "culture" and "society" that supported or permitted lynching in the southern U.S. Please recall the "culture" and "society" that supported or permitted the concentration camps in Germany right outside and supported by German towns (like Dachau right outside Munich). If you disbelieve that “words are violence” or “silence is violence,” please visit Dachau or Auschwitz (or at least visit the Holocaust Museum in D.C.).
I can’t help but wonder what part of my comment elicited this response.
Do you believe that the folks who popularized “silence is violence” this century were issuing a reminder about the Holocaust? I don’t.
Doc, please note that I quoted the parts of your comment that elicited my response. I don't know who uses the expression "silence is violence," and I can't speak for them. But (obviously) that slogan made me think of some examples from history that are far too close for comfort.
… O-kay.
It’s funny that everybody’s go-to historical example these days is Nazis. I don’t like them either, all right? Friends now?
Doc, one reason that people look to the Nazis and Hitler is simply evidence. We have copious evidence of how that all started and where it led. That experience wasn't unique or novel. But it was well documented--in print, in pictures and even in video. Not only can we read and view copious evidence documenting what happened and why, but we also can actually see places and feel experiences for ourselves. We can visit Munich and see how close and how large Dachau was. We can visit Babi Yar and see that it was inside a city. We can visit other huge concentration camps and see how people were held, treated and disposed of and how close they were to people outside the camps. We can see the massive official cemeteries that grew out of that experience, e.g., in Normandy. We can look at that evidence and that experience and better understand the experiences for which the evidence is not nearly as accessible.
At least as important, that experience clearly wasn't merely about what happened in concentration camps and battlefields. It was every bit as much about what neighbors and co-workers did to each other and why. We can see clearly how quickly, completely and viciously one part of society turned against other parts. The entirely of that experience started with and was perpetuated by the power of speech and press. Words and symbols did as much work as physical force and violence.
Of course. But the Nazis enforced mouthing the shibboleths; silence was violence to them.
Doc, in my eyes, we never weren't friends (or at least never weren't on the same side). I'm simply saying that we need to open the aperture a bit before we say we cannot see that "words are violence" or "silence is violence."
It’s all in the dose. You can poison yourself by drinking too much water. If you find somebody who has done so, it’s not going to convince me that drinking water is bad for me.
In current parlance, “silence is violence” means “if you don’t fall in line and mouth our shibboleths, you are evil.” Sorry, not going there.
Your logic is that of Claudine Gay in December of 2023, testifying before Congress repeatedly that calling for the genocide of all Jews might not be considered bullying and harassment “depending on the context” at the same time the university she led (Harvard) trained incoming students that misgendering and fatphobia “constitute violence”.
Please go look it up yourself if you think I have misrepresented anything here.
Doctor Mist’s point is that the people using those phrases wield them as leftist ideological weapons and are explicitly opposed to free speech.
And you at minimum seem to be at least somewhat opposed to freedom of speech with your at least partial defense of “words are violence” and “silence is violence”.
"You go your way, I'll go mine."
I seem to misremember this from a poster sold in head shops, the opening in a lengthy, pacifist sentiment, possibly a bastardization of Ehrmann's musings or the Desiderata (sp?)... Now only familiar boomers or Generation Jones (like me). One of the more positive sentiments or "policies" that were (rightly or wongly) associated with "hippies." Later version incoporatd into songs by Dylan and Neil Young.
I say these things very, very often -- and certainly said them when we were raising our child -- because they accurately express what I mean, believe wholeheartedly and live by.
My writings on Substack are based partly upon this principle, and that the reader is welcome to disagree, supporting the response with evidence and persuasive language without ad hominem.
In the mid-18th century, Montesquieu penned a fictional correspondence between Persian travelers and their homeland, using the lens of outsiders to critique the slow erosion of civic freedom in France. Beneath the satire lay a deep worry that liberty might vanish not through dramatic decree but through gradual forgetting. So too with the quiet disappearance of certain idioms that once upheld a resilient, pluralistic civic culture. These expressions, often dismissed as schoolyard clichés or dated slogans, once served as compact defenses of intellectual humility and emotional sturdiness. Their waning presence is not just linguistic drift. It signals a cultural recalibration away from the habits of tolerance and self-restraint that once buttressed democratic life.
Though recognition of these phrases remains relatively high, active usage has become rare. That gap matters. Idioms like “to each their own” or “sticks and stones may break my bones” are not ornamental. They encode norms that distinguish between disagreement and aggression, between discomfort and harm. The old grammar of dignity culture gave citizens a language for resilience and dissent without coercion. Its decline suggests not just a new generation but a new ethic: one that equates offense with injury, elevates subjective harm above public reason, and welcomes authority as an arbiter of disputes once settled informally through argument and endurance. In such a landscape, even well-meaning speech risks being reclassified as threat, and the virtues of tolerance and pluralism lose their common tongue.
Yet not all signs point to decline. Among younger generations, there is a tentative, uneven return to some of these older expressions. This flicker of familiarity offers a narrow but promising path forward. Cultural norms are not dictated from above; they are sustained or dismantled in daily interactions, in classrooms, on social media, at family tables. The values implicit in these sayings: humility, resilience, the refusal to equate speech with violence, can still be modeled, reinforced, and restored. This is not a plea for nostalgia. It is a recognition that habits of speech shape habits of thought, and that the words we forget may be the virtues we lose.
Montesquieu’s travelers observed a society confident in its freedoms but inattentive to the forms that sustained them. Their letters were not calls to revolution, but to recollection—to remember what made liberty durable. Likewise, a culture that loses the ability to say “Who am I to judge” or “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion” is not merely changing its style. It is, quietly, rewriting its ethos.
Speaking of the canceling of the American mind and the war on words, please consider that people who advocate or expound on "the First Amendment" are egregiously failing America and Americans. I previously thought the source of the problem was SCOTUS, but as I learned more, I learned that SCOTUS justices have told the truth, while advocates and exponents of "the First Amendment" have failed to do so. As a consequence, Americans have forgotten that "the freedom of speech" and "press" and "the right of the people" to "assemble" (declared in the First Amendment) were not granted by, and do not exist because of, the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists because our freedoms of expression, communication and association existed (and were demonstrated) long before the First Amendment. Such freedoms were demonstrated and documented in and by the Declaration of Independence and the original Constitution.
We the People simply have forgotten that our freedoms of expression, communication and association arose from our own nature (as people) and the nature of our relationship (as sovereigns) to the public servants who represent us in government. As the Declaration of Independence declared in 1776, those freedoms arose from "truths" that (to the People of 1776) were so obvious they were declared to be "self-evident."
First Amendment rights and freedoms arose from our inherent equality before the law ("all" citizens "are created equal") and the most important qualities we decided and declared regarding all American government. In America, all "Governments" must be "instituted" with only "just Powers" derived "from the Consent of the Governed," and the overarching purpose of all government (the duty of all public servants) is to "secure" our "Rights," including our "unalienable Rights" which include our rights to "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Clearly, the people manifest "the Consent of the Governed" by exercising "the freedom of speech" and "press" and "the right of the people" to "assemble" (declared in the First Amendment). Voting is speaking. Suffrage is the speech of sovereigns. Speech regarding public issues (consenting or objecting to the public service of public servants) is at the very core of the rights and freedoms "We the People" secured for "ourselves" when we did "ordain and establish" our "Constitution" to "establish Justice" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves" (as the Constitution's Preamble declares).
Simply put, as John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty and as the Declaration of Independence put it, our liberty (our freedoms of expression, communication and association) are derived from our independence (our sovereignty over our own selves) and our sovereignty over all our public servants.
SCOTUS sometimes has articulated very similar principles pretty clearly. In our “republic” clearly “the people are sovereign” and “the ability” (the power) “of the citizenry to make informed choices” about public servants and public issues “is essential.” Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310, 339 (2010). “Speech is an essential mechanism of democracy;” it is “the means to hold officials accountable to the people” in our “republic where the people are sovereign.” Id.
“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information” is essential “to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.” Id. Accord id. at 339-341, 344-350. “Premised on mistrust of [all] governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor” the “subjects or viewpoints” of speech, especially regarding public servants’ abuses or usurpations of power. Id. at 340.
“For these reasons,” our “political speech must prevail against” regulation “that would suppress it, whether by design or inadvertence,” so regulation “that burden[s] political speech” is “subject to strict scrutiny,” which “requires the Government to prove” how such regulation “furthers a compelling interest and is narrowly tailored to achieve that interest.” Id. To do so, courts must fulfill their “duty” to “say what the law is” protecting speech about public issues and public servants. Id. at 365 (quoting Marbury v. Madison).
“‘I can’t get to sleep. I think about the implications…’”
How DARE you quote an Australian song to defend a uniquely American value! 😏
Words are not violence
But silence is betrayal.
That's something 95% of our "conservative" and "libertarian" leaders in media, punditry, and politics do need to hear, as they go into their 42nd month of refusing to report on or discuss the huge pile of evidence regarding widespread (millions killed) Covidvax harms.
These leaders are what I classify as Suppressors. Suppression is distinct from censorship, but related to it in spirit. It is an abdication from a basic journalistic duty in a liberal democracy to report on issues which effect the citizenry.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-161802357?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I again urge Mr. Lukianoff to begin looking into the issue of this Suppression's operation today, even though any suppression is 100% permitted by the 1st Amendment. The Eternally Radical Idea is a single-beat substack, and its particular beat is not related to health issues, and so were it not for the suppression aspect of the Covidvax Disaster, I would never call upon it to cover it in any way, and thus never accuse it of suppression itself. But I believe Suppression, while to some degree a perennial phenom, is becoming used in a new and more potent way--given the careerist corruption of so many journalists and pundits--to permit evildoers to slip around a key purpose of freedom of speech and press, while staying within the letter of the First. We have a situation where what Lukianoff and FIRE defend (and it needs defending!) should permit the media class to do its duty towards liberal democracy, but that class has corrupted itself so radically, than on some issues, it simply will not. I think that means that this substack does have a duty to at least note the issue, even if it can never be its main beat. The public is being systematically kept, but at this point only using a method that is not censorship, from the discussion it deserves to have on this issue, and which surreal-ly, around 2/3 of the public is already talking about on its own, but is rather pathetically resigned to never be allowed to talk about it on official platforms.
I like to mix my idiomatic phrasing:
Whatever floats your boat + whatever blows up your skirt = whatever blows up your boat!
It's certainly good to give children armor against words intended to hurt and harm. So it's important to teach them simple but powerfully disarming slogans like, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” It's something else entirely to try to make adults think something so simplistic.
I loved the book by Professor Jacob Mchangama, "Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media." His podcast "Clear and Present Danger" (related to his book) is still my favorite podcast. I have listened to parts of it repeatedly, and I will listen to them again. Anyone who thinks words cannot harm them should read and hear the words of Professor Mchangama highlighting how words historically have caused tremendous harm.
The First and Second Amendments stand as testaments to the eternal truth that expression and communication contribute as much to harm as actual arms. Nobody ever was lynched, no pogrom or war ever was started, no concentration camp ever was built or filled without being preceded by a lot of speech and press.
Lots of federal law even proves our judgment as a society that words can harm us. That's why some speech is criminal (threatening or advocating violence, e.g., against political figures or parties or witnesses to litigation).
I agree that it's very important to teach children and adults not to be too sensitive to offensive speech. But it's also very important not to oversimplify at the expense of truth, enlightenment and empowerment.
Free speech must be doing pretty well if these are the lengths you have to go to in order to complain about something. Do you ever stop to conside the fact that your whole cause is dedicated to being offended by what people are saying about free speech?
FIRE literally just filed a lawsuit against the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security over their crusade to deport legal immigrants over protected speech.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time, Joe.
https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-fire-challenges-unconstitutional-provisions-rubio-uses-crusade-deport-legal-immigrants
C'mon, Joe. Be fair. Defending the freedom of speech (or "free speech" (whatever that means)) clearly is not even slightly "dedicated to being offended by what people are saying about free speech." Defending a right shouldn't be confused with merely taking offense.
Why don't I use these phrases more often? Mostly because they used to be schoolyard taunts. "Sticks and stones...", "It's a free country...", "You don't have to make a federal case out of it" - these were phrases we used on the schoolgrounds to egg on some overly dramatic playmate as expressions of the ridiculousness of whatever that playmate was expressing.
I just don't use elementary school taunts in my daily conversations anymore. They are pithy, but they are a verbal 'slap in the face', which I do not generally choose to administer to an adult. Maybe I should.....I'll think about it.
Suum Cuique is literally tattooed on me.