LMAO
WTF? Setting aside basic human courtesy, his points are entirely valid. We have little control over others' words, but we have ultimate control over their effect on us.
The only caveat I'd accept to that is that if slurs are widely spread and unchallenged, then due to subconscious coloring of thought (no pun intended) such things might have a material effect on us by prejudicing others' perceptions of us as lesser beings.
You fucking idiot.
OK, OK! The last two folk I called fucking idiots for saying that words have no power except what we grant them are off line and haven't responded so I am going to use your response least my words just hang out there.
My intention was to provoke a negative reaction from one of the two above to show that it doesn't matter that words have no more power than what we grant them because we grant them all the power in the world and often can't help doing so.
I insult people all the time to make this point. I tell folk they hate themselves and they get pissed off as hell? Why, because they do and they, as you might expect, hate themselves because they do, too.
So much that we witness here in P & N is the result of emotional content, baggage from the past, that we have attached to works that evoke just those emotions when we hear those words. When I call somebody a fucking idiot, with all the likelihood of being right, because that person will likely react negatively to that comment, while at the same time also thinking that words have no more power than we grant them. In short most of us can't live up to our philosophy but believe in it anyway and that is true in this case because our self hate is unconscious. In fairness, nobody is a fucking idiot because the forces that cause us to be idiots are unconscious and beyond our will.
It is very important, I believe, to know this truth about ourselves, words had their negative effects on us when we were children before the age when we had choice about how to react to things. Our feelings are unconscious and ingrained. And you can't make lesser people feel they are less than others because the whole structure of the ego is designed to prevent this recognition. It is the one truth we already feel and it is what we feel that is our real truth, not our philosophy. I had hoped to demonstrate this truth via actual demonstration.
If we lived by the notion that words have no power there would be no such thing as or any need for common courtesy. We are all sick because we were put down as children.