Comments

2

"The question is, what does it signal to everyone else?"
The answer is, that she is a total dingbat.

6

Local news has generally been using the word "collision" for the last few years. "Violence" implies intention to harm and would be incorrect.

Also, what @3 said. Society is constantly working toward reducing harmful accidents, including road and automobile design. We don't need new semantics here.

It's a shame, I think Warren is the most qualified candidate but this is exactly the sort of Dem dipshittery that turns people off.

7

This is why most people hate progressives. Who cares about what traffic deaths are called? Why do we need to police the way people talk about it? People have real lives and real problems. Only SJWs walk around thinking "what problem can I create to put my liberal arts degree to use"?

9

@2 But Trump is totally fine.

Like. you know. Sure he's an Anti-vaxer. And sure he believes that you shouldn't exercise because you born with a fixed number of heart beats. Yes, he occasionally pays prostitutes, pornstars for creepy sad sex. And sure, he's an avid fan of nutbag conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and has guested on his show. And, look, sure he get in Twitter rage-outs with lesbian soccer players at 3:30 am spewing misspelled nonsense like your grandpa with Alzheimer's. And okay, okay, he invents quotes, pseudo-facts, and entire persons and then forgets he's done it thirty seconds later. But at least he isn't a dingbat, right?

10

Perhaps OSHA should rebrand to "Workplace Violence"? "Ladder Violence"? "Construction Site Violence"?

The word "accident" does not and has never meant that it couldn't have been prevented. We even add words to "accident" when we want to make it clear what we mean: "freak accident," "random accident," etc.

This is language that's not going to play in the midwest. It's not going to play a lot of places. The media wants to portray questioning Warrens electability as sexism, but she's on a constant mission to be unelectable.

12

@9
OK, Edgelord.

14

"Constable, official vocab guidelines state that we no longer refer to these incidents as 'accidents,' they're now 'collisions.' 'Accident' implies there's no one to blame." Sgt Angel, Hot Fuzz (2007)

Also, I refuse to believe this post isn't some elaborate ruse where you recycled an old Stranger anti-car screed and subbed Warren's name in for any number of Stranger staffers (Ansel or Mudede for a start) who would unironically say exactly this sort of nonsense.

16

I like the term "traffic violence" what Katie failed to point out is that most collisions are caused by excessive speed. also, most car commercials show excessive speed as well! We all think that we are above average drivers but in reality only 49% of us are, including me btw. so slow down!

17

@11 I think voters very closely scrutinize candidates language to see if they're the kind of person that cares about what they care about. For example, Trump—despite in his actual life being a un-Christian, trust-funded, draft dodging, small-business squashing, debt-dodging bigamist—uses his words in a way that reassures people things aren't ever going to change. Without his insane "can you believe people today?" tweets and stump speeches, he'd have zero appeal.

18

Um, the movement to call a crash a crash rather than an accident goes way back. We had it that way in the styleguide in my last local broadcast newsroom (which I left 12 years ago). It's simply a clearer, non-subjective way to write.

19

@12 HAHAHA You honestly do not know what words mean, do you?

20

So the choice will be between Trump and a democrat.

If any of you morons think that any eccentric phraseology or insider lefty speak that any of the likely democratic nominee campaigns have used in offhand comments disqualifies them — and somehow magically makes Trump more sane, likable or more electable — then you're stupid piles of shit. And you get exactly the sort of deranged orange lunatic you deserve.

21

Hot take: nothing interesting or important is at stake in whether you call it "car accidents" or "traffic violence" (everyone knows what you mean either way) and someone who thinks this is a column-worthy topic, rather than the actual crisis at hand (50% increase in ped/cyclist deaths in a decade and getting worse, horrifically inadequate policy response, including recent atrocious decisions by SDOT) is what's really column-worthy here has profoundly fucked up priorities.

22

@15:Katie embedded the tweet, of course I can tell it's real. I was trying to point out how duplicitous it seems of anyone at The Stranger to be whining about this sort of hand-wringing over what to call things, especially in regards to traffic, where multiple staff writers have used identical language in the past.

I thought it was pretty clear I wasn't being serious by quoting from a comedy movie, and even including the attribution, but evidently not.

23

Another brilliant Political Shit No One Cares About piece by the inimitable Herzog.

24

@20 Literally no one here thinks that.

25

It took me three paragraphs to realize this was written by Ms. Herzog. I double checked, but sure enough, it is her. She once again attacked the Democratcit front runner, making snide remarks about her age. Previous attacks took the opposite tack, but with the same pissy attitude. Just to review here: If you make a mistake about pronoun usage, then you are out of touch, and don't understand young people. If, on the other hand, you refer to something in a way that Katie doesn't understand, then you must be "someone suffering from memory issues". Hate to break it to you Herzog, but you are getting old. You ain't as woke as you used to be. This is what the kids call it these days -- traffic violence.

Oh, I know, you can pretend that you are Wired Magazine, attacking Al Gore for a perfectly good pronunciation of router. You can pat yourself on the back for being "contrarian" even though you are basically just wallowing in bullshit. But don't fool yourself. No one gives a shit about attack articles like this. This shit is getting old (it was old the first time you attacked her). Go back to writing worthwhile pieces -- you've done it before. You are actually quite good at it.

Oh, and our "it isn't me, I'm just worried about what gramma will think" bullshit at the end is the real topper. You really don't get it. She is Gramma! She is middle America! Your fear that she somehow doesn't understand or get what "Real America" thinks is naive as fuck. She was raised in fucking Oklahoma! America is tired of bullshit. They want sincerity. If someone thinks that getting run over by a car is a violent way to die, they want them to call it that. If they don't, they want them to call it something else. What they really don't want -- more than anything -- is for their leaders to be coached into saying something they think you want to hear.

Let Warren be Warren. She is smarter than you. Way, way smarter. (She is smarter than me, but at least I am smart enough to realize it).

26

So let’s be clear. In regards to rebranding this or that social ill as “violence,” it’s true that some things “SJW” types (or whatever) say are ridiculous. But this is not that. This is literal violence, with blood and mangled body parts and decapitations and basically every terrible thing that can happen to the meat of human animals. And it’s absolutely true that “accident” is a ludicrously benign word to describe not just the specific results of car crashes, which have been a leading cause of bloody death in the US for decades, but also our car-centric culture. Billions of deaths—yes, billions—will eventually happen due to the ecological ramifications of that culture and what it requires to perpetuate. How is this not violence, again? What twisted realm must you be in mentally and socially to call it anything else? The only controversy or tone-deafness or whatever, is that it’s taken this long for a person of Warren’s stature to unequivocally call it what it is.

28

Amusingly, just this week, researchers released an extensive study of the impact of word choice and framing in traffic reporting. It shouldn't surprise anyone who writes for a living that yes, actually, the language you choose influences how readers interpret your writing. See the November 15 issue of Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, or just search recent real news for "crash not accident."

31

@29 she is smart enough to realize it's a bullshit irrelevant question repeatedly asked by corporatists to confuse voters. The real question is whether people will pay less for healthcare, which is yes.

@30 False. Intent is not required for violent behavior.

32

@30, road rage isn’t intentional? Car companies failing to do recalls or make needed safety improvements out of cost considerations isn’t intentional? Oil and energy executives greasing politicians and lobbying against transit budgets that aren’t mostly about road projects isn’t intentional? I could go on.

34

What about a traffic accident where its not the driver's fault? Is that still "traffic violence," according to the SJWs and car haters?

35

Next she'll want to ban "assault vehicles", or "high capacity gas tanks". This is the vernacular of tyranny and in this country, tyrants are supposed to be SHOT.


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