Opinion
Words are not violence – Why Will Smith was wrong to strike Chris Rock.
This article submitted by Levi Kump
It is news to exactly no one, that Sunday night, Will Smith responded to a contentious, and arguably tasteless joke, by walking on stage at the Acadamy Awards and slapping the the offending party, one Chris Rock, across the face. Much has been made already about whether or not the incident was staged, though the ensuing furor has rendered that debate largely moot. Many people have chimed in on the issue, some saying the Smith was unequivocally wrong, and some, including no less than The National Post’s Barbara Kay, coming down on the the side of a face slap being fair play.
Let it be known, I believe Smith and Kay, are both wrong. First and foremost, because one of the tenets of civilization in general, is the old adage that, “ones right to get angry, stops at the next fellow’s nose”. Nothing new here. Setting aside for a moment that the slap was to the cheek/jaw area, I believe that notion still holds water. Genuine or not, this incident implies that there are some statements for which the only possible rebuttal, is the fist. The challenges with this way of thinking are legion, and until only a few years ago, seemed to have already been worked out in western society. Not the least of said problems is this: if words are violence itself, and answerable as such, then we no longer have any reason to use words. When one equates the verbal with the somatic, it is a very quick descent indeed, to using violence in any given situation. Why struggle for the ‘mot juste’, when one can move stright to a head kick?
Following this line of reasoning, we end up back, hundreds of years, to the time of, “might makes right”; which again, our civilization had once worked out, but now seems to be forgetting. One of the more common lines of reasoning for the “speech as violence” crowd, is that disparities in power give far more weight to some people’s words, than others. In the Smith/Rock debacle, this is hardly worth a mention, as both men are of the same demographic, read: multi-millionaires of the same skin tone. Though there are those who will point out, as did Barbera Kay, that the target of Rock’s joke, was not Will Smith himself, but rather his wife, Jada, who does in fact suffer from an auto immune disease, and whose hair loss is by no means her own fault. A powerful comedian making jokes about a/an (equally powerful?) woman’s physical condition should be off limits, or so goes the argument. The easy reply here is that there are
those, myself among them, who do not believe that anything should be off limits in speech.
Noting here that, not unlike our separation of words and action, society did away with the idea of ‘lese majest’ some time back. There are yet some who do not believe in this, and who think that the relative power of two parties (and exactly how do we quantify this?) matter to a verbal exchange. That the words of the more powerful party are in fact so weighty, that again, the only fair response, is a physical one. This begs the question, that if the words of the powerful are
unfairly weighted, how much more so are thier blows? It is to me, an untenable position. Slapping a man for speech only ends badly for everyone. Until very recently, we all seem to have understood this.
There was once a common convention, that words, for all their power, are clearly not violence. The fact that this is now somehow considered up for debate, does not bode well for society writ large. Any reasonable person will admit that words can be incredibly hurtful, damaging, and cruel. To deny this is foolish. Physical violence however, has all those dangers, along with a side order of split lips, contusions, and concussions. Indeed, whatever “damage” one suffers from words, one is still left with the ability to speak in rebuttal. A solid blow of any kind can not only dissuade retort, but neuter it completely. Perhaps this is what the proponents of violent response are after in the first place? If so, its disappointing. As I said, i thought we had worked this out.
Levi Kump is a former competitive international Muay Thai champion.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
Following the removal of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump said the U.S. government might reimburse oil companies that invest in Venezuela.
In a Monday afternoon phone interview, Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker that an expansion of the U.S. oil industry in the South American nation could be “up and running” in less than a year and a half, but this would require “a lot of money.” Hours after announcing Maduro’s capture Saturday, Trump said in a press conference that the U.S. is going to “run” Venezuela until there could be “a safe, proper and judicious transition” — a remark that sparked much discussion over exactly what will come next for the country.
“A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue,” Trump said in his interview with Welker, referring to rebuilding the beleaguered oil infrastructure in post-Maduro Venezuela.
The president did not specify how much money is required for oil companies to upgrade the infrastructure, NBC News reported. Trump previously said he was going to “have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure and start making money for the country.”
“It’ll be a very substantial amount of money [that] will be spent,” Trump added in his interview with Welker. “But they’ll [the oil companies will] do very well. And the country will do well.”
Trump told the NBC News host that Venezuela producing oil is “good for the United States because it keeps the price of oil down.”
He also told Welker that his administration did not brief oil companies before carrying out the surprise attack that deposed Maduro.The companies, though, “were absolutely aware that we were thinking about doing something.”
Welker, on NBC News’ “Meet The Press” Sunday, asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “Why does the United States need to take over the Venezuelan oil industry?”
“We don’t need to. We don’t need Venezuela’s oil,” Rubio said. “We have plenty of oil in the United States. What we’re not going to allow is for the oil industry in Venezuela to be controlled by adversaries of the United States.”
“Why does China need their oil? Why does Russia need their oil? Why does Iran need their oil?” the Secretary of State asked. “They’re not even in this continent. This is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live.”
Also on Sunday, a Venezuelan man in Buenos Aires, Argentina went viral while celebrating the end of the Mauro regime, after he pushed back against critics who said the U.S. is only interested in Venezuela due to its status as an oil-producing country.
“Those who say that the U.S. is only interested in our oil, I ask you: What do you think the Russians and the Chinese wanted here? The recipe for arepas?” the man asked in Spanish, naming a popular street food in Venezuelan cuisine. “Impossible.”
Business
President Trump And The Doomsday Glacier… a blow to the planet, or to funding for climate alarmism?
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Steve Milloy
President Donald Trump is driving climate researchers literally to the ends of the Earth as they try to save their taxpayer funding. Expect to see a slew of hand-wringing reports about, and even perhaps from, the Thwaites (aka “Doomsday”) glacier in West Antarctica.
The glacier got its nickname from a Rolling Stone reporter in 2017 in an article titled: “The Doomsday Glacier: In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.”
Past the ominous title, the scare is that the Thwaites is melting and could raise sea levels by 10 feet, which would submerge about 2-3 percent of the global land mass, excluding Antarctica.
Last May, the Trump administration announced it would cut funding for the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a football field-long icebreaker that has been taking researchers to study the Thwaites glacier. In its 2026 budget request, the National Science Foundation said it was terminating the lease. There is no replacement ship on the horizon.
Researchers wanting to go to Antarctica, where it is now summer, have had to scramble for ships. This scramble has been made more challenging because ship owners and researchers, afraid of losing taxpayer funding, are also taking reporters and their crews along to dramatize the budget cuts using the backdrop of the scariest thing they can imagine – the Doomsday glacier.
New York Times reporter Raymond Zhong has already filed articles since Dec. 30. PBS has a reporter aboard a ship sending alarmist reports. Undoubtedly, there are other reports on their way as well.
Will the Doomsday glacier live up to its name? Or will it be another in a long line of failed, if not dishonest, apocalyptic climate predictions?
It seems to be true that the Thwaites glacier is melting. But there’s much more to consider just than that.
The rate of melting is very slow. A 2023 study estimated that over the next 50 years, the Thwaites glacier might add as much as a few millimeters (about one-tenth of an inch) to global sea level over the next 50 years. That is a far cry from the claim of 10 feet of sea level rise.
Next, the fate of the Thwaites doesn’t seem to have anything to do with emissions or “global warming.” Research indicates that there are 91 volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet. Not surprisingly, the Thwaites glacier is melting from the inferno beneath.
Of course, the Thwaites couldn’t be melting at the surface because there’s been no warming in West Antarctica since the late 1990s. In fact, West Antarctica has cooled by about 3°F since 1999.
Another recent study reported that the Thwaites glacier started melting in the 1940s as the result of an El Nino, a little-understood, but periodic natural warming of the Pacific Ocean: “The glacier retreat in the Amundsen Sea was initiated by natural climate variability in the 1940s. That ice streams such as Thwaites Glacier and Pine Island Glacier have continued to retreat since then indicates that they were unable to recover after the exceptionally large El Niño event of the 1940s,” the researchers concluded.
The more one reads about the Thwaites glacier, the easier it becomes to understand why they have to call it the “Doomsday glacier.” Once you understand the non-threatening reality, the only way to make it scary is to give it a scary name and hope people are too frightened to look past it.
Three cheers for Trump for defunding this and other climate research. As these researchers lose their funding, maybe they can move to Hollywood and try writing disaster scripts.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
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