Congratulations Social Justice Warriors, All The Words We Need Are Now Meaningless

A crying baby is among the ten most irritating sounds in the world.

That's not just my opinion, it’s science!

In 2012, a team of researchers strapped volunteers into an MRI machine and studied their amygdala response as they listened to 74 different sounds, ranging from water flowing to nails on a chalkboard. 

Crying babies came ninth, nestled between squealing brakes and electric drills. 

We're hardwired to take action when a baby cries. Partly because we love them enough to tolerate their tantrums, but mainly because the sound is so goddamned annoying, we’ll do anything to make it stop. Yet eventually, as irritating as it is, we get numb to it. 

Because the little fuc…ahem, the little angels do it all the time. 

They don't consider setting or context or proportionality. They don't save their outbursts for genuine emergencies. They don't ask themselves if you've had a bad day or if you have a migraine or whether there might be anything at all more pressing than the immediate satisfaction of their whims.

Sticks and stones, the boy who cried wolf, think before you speak, we've built an entire folklore around teaching kids to express their emotions in healthy, constructive ways. 

It's time we do the same for adults.

---

Of course, as adults, we’ve (mostly) evolved beyond crying when we don’t get our way. Instead, at least in social justice circles, we call each other names. 

Racist, transphobe, fascist, white supremacist, there was a time when these words carried weight. When they described people and behaviours almost everybody agreed was wrong. Where an accusation of any of these would have been taken seriously. 

Now, after so much exposure to these “top-shelf words,” most people just laugh.

On Twitter, Seerut Chawla explained the result of this semantic laziness with beautiful simplicity:

If everything is trauma nothing is trauma. If everything is harm nothing is harm. If everything is racism nothing is racism. If everything is violence nothing is violence.

But this isn’t just about the dilution of insults. It’s about the deliberate rejection of the entire notion of degrees.