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》 Words are the most hurtful things there are Spoken like a true first world child who has never experienced the sectarian violence, highly infectious diseases

》 Words are the most hurtful things there are Spoken like a true first world child who has never experienced the sectarian violence, highly infectious diseases like TB/malaria/hiv, starvation, lack of clean drinking water, and the psychological effects of practically insurmountable poverty. These arent theoretical possibilities but facts of life experienced by billions of humans, the vast majority of whom have practically zero chance of escaping the cycle unless they happened to be born to well educated or wealthy parents. I apologize for how offensive my comment is to you and your PC Principal, but christ, how can you think a perceived verbal assault on American college students (who are supported to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a year by their parents and/or Freddi Mac) can even possibly compare to the life and death situations experienced by billions of people in the world on a daily basis?

unprepare 11y ago
This is called the fallacy of relative privation. You can't dismiss the lived experiences of people simply because someone has it worse. It doesnt matter if theres a genocide going on in every single country in the world - its still going to hurt when you get dumped, cheated on, fired, break your leg, get in a car accident, suffer a loss in the family, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation
- akiselev 11y ago
  I wasn't dismissing anyone's pain or suffering outright, I was simply responding to an absolute assertion of fact ("Words are the most hurtful things there are", emphasis mine). The GP's post said unequivocally that offensive speech is worse than everything else and I found that to be a very selfish and ignorant statement, entirely disconnected from a reality where hundreds of millions of people don't so much as have access to clean drinking water (literally an order of magnitude more than there are college students in the United States [1][2]). I'm not saying that one group's suffering is irrelevant just because another's is more dire and life threatening, I'm just trying to put things into perspective in the face of a ludicrous statement. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 [2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_water_20120306/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_w...

unprepare 11y ago

This is called the fallacy of relative privation. You can't dismiss the lived experiences of people simply because someone has it worse. It doesnt matter if theres a genocide going on in every single country in the world - its still going to hurt when you get dumped, cheated on, fired, break your leg, get in a car accident, suffer a loss in the family, etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

akiselev 11y ago
I wasn't dismissing anyone's pain or suffering outright, I was simply responding to an absolute assertion of fact ("Words are the most hurtful things there are", emphasis mine). The GP's post said unequivocally that offensive speech is worse than everything else and I found that to be a very selfish and ignorant statement, entirely disconnected from a reality where hundreds of millions of people don't so much as have access to clean drinking water (literally an order of magnitude more than there are college students in the United States [1][2]). I'm not saying that one group's suffering is irrelevant just because another's is more dire and life threatening, I'm just trying to put things into perspective in the face of a ludicrous statement. [1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372 [2] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_water_20120306/en/ http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2012/drinking_w...