Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)
We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”
What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”
For decades, the U.S. government has tried to define "militant" or "terrorist" to mean any non-American person who dies when an American weapon explodes. We've seen twenty years of these lies and uncountable other lies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. When caught, the military nonchalantly "corrects the record" without apology or explanation, even though there was no basis for the initial claim. A dramatic example of this occurred when Wikileaks (see "Collateral Murder" video) exposed the killings of Reuters employees who the U.S. claimed were "terrorists." It recently happened again in a dramatic way, as CENTCOM's mendacity has been exposed. Those dead "terrorists" turn out to have been an aid worker and a family, including multiple children. In wars, truth is the first victim.
As Glenn Greenwald noted, much of the legacy news media (including the NYT and WaPo) played right along with the initial lie. This is one of those rare cases where the reporters kept digging.
As Sandel notes, Trump was wired into these politics of humiliation and never invoked the word “opportunity,” which both Obama and Hillary Clinton made central, instead talking bluntly of “winners” and “losers.” (Interestingly, Bernie Sanders also stayed away from opportunity-talk, focusing on inequities of wealth). Trump understood that huge numbers of voters were tired of being told “You can make it if you try” by a generation of politicians that had not only “not governed well,” as Sandel puts it, but increasingly used public office as their own route to mega-wealth, via $400,000 speeches to banks, seats on corporate boards, or the hilariously auspicious, somehow not-illegal stock trading that launched more than one member of congress directly into the modern aristocracy.
The Tyranny of Meritocracy describes the clash of these two different visions of American society. One valorizes the concept of social mobility, congratulating the wealthy for having made it and doling out attaboys for their passion in wolfing down society’s rewards, while also claiming to make reversing gender and racial inequities a central priority. The other group sees class mobility as entirely or mostly a fiction, rages at being stuck sucking eggs in what they see as a rigged game, and has begun to disbelieve every message sent down at them from the credentialed experts above, even about things like vaccines.
The eternal squeamishness Americans feel about class will prevent this topic from getting the attention it deserves, but the insane witches’ brew of rage, mendacity, and mutual mistrust Sandel describes at the heart of American culture is no longer a back-burner problem. Tension over who deserves what part of society’s rewards, and whether higher education is a token of genuine accomplishment or an exclusive social rite, has become real hatred in short order. In the pandemic age, Americans on either side of the educational divide have moved past rooting for each other to fail. They’re all but rooting for each other to die now, and that isn’t a sentiment either side is likely to forget.
In this video, Matt Taibbi (Journalist/Commentator), Nadine Strossen (former President of the ACLU), Amna Khalid (Carlton College History Professor) and Nico Perrino (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) respond to the lopsided NPR presentation. Each of these participants recoiled at the idea that there is such a thing as a "free speech absolutist," an idea repeatedly promoted by the NPR panel. Matt Taibbi explains:
This idea that we're free speech absolutist is something that's been invented by people who are against the who want to regulate speech in a way that i think is new and very repressive. They're mischaracterizing the positions of people like all of us.
Nadine Strossen further explains:
Government may restrict speech if but only if it can satisfy an appropriately heavy burden of proof if it can show that the particular restriction is necessary and the least speech restrictive alternative in order to promote some countervailing goal of compelling importance whether that goal be public safety for example or individual safety and when you think about it that just makes common sense of course most of us would be willing to trade off free speech for you know public safety or even national security but it's a fool's choice to give up free speech if we're not gaining safety in return or worse yet as is often the case if the censorship no matter how well intended does more harm than good which is typically the case.
Taibbi points out that the NPR panel has no solutions to the "problem" that speech is often unruly and offensive:
It's so important to our conception of what our society is all about this idea of of being able to express ourselves that is preferable to the alternative. The alternative is that somebody would have to regulate the speech and that's the problem is once once we get into who's doing that regulating that that's where we get to the scary part and they don't address any of that. All they want to do is, in a very narrow way, say "Oh this libertarian hands off approach to to speech regulation doesn't work." But it's so much more complicated than that.
Amna Khalid accuses the NPR panelists of being myopic, over-focusing on the relatively functional state of American culture compared to the many vast oppressed populations in other parts of the world, where free speech is desperately needed:
In our current moment if you cast your eyes beyond the pond and look at the rest of the world you will see so many examples of how limitations on free speech are a way of shutting down the rights of minorities.
I've listened to the NPR presentation and repeatedly heard the NPR panel members attack the straw man they labeled "Free Speech Absolutist." It is as if those panel members never heard of widely recognized restrictions on free speech, including libel laws, incitement laws, laws prohibiting speech constituting hostile work environments and laws prohibiting fraud. I highly recommend this discussion:
I haven't written much lately, but I'll be back--I've got a lot of topics I'd like to explore.
In the meantime, I'm still reveling in my memories from my recent visit to Yellowstone National Park. Here are two more photos from Yellowstone. These photos capture some of the immense spaces and textures of the park.
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