Thanks for the shout out. I do indeed think it's important to cultivate opposition views to your own articles. No comment wall of mine would be complete without a selection of people lodging their objections - it's an integral part of the Penguin experience. I suspect my comments are often hid too.... c'est la vie, I have no control over that.

My rebuttal comes thus.... we've had trigger warnings for around a decade or so now. Is the world getting more or less anxious? I appreciate that trigger warnings allow people who have experienced trauma to not re-experience that trauma - but I the pendulum has shifted too far and we're in danger of allowing people to both define and exacerbate their own poor mental health. That is not a good direction of travel for a society to head.

Let me also be clear.... trauma in the past and societal abuse in the present are different things. Trauma has a diagnostic meaning in the DSM. “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” - it is not as a result of having a stressful life, a divorce, or even being called nasty things by a nasty society. We're losing sight of that. Too many people are giving themselves a diagnosis of PTSD without the T. If there's no T, there's no P and what you have is SD. Stress. These are the people for whom 'trigger warnings' are a boon.

And yes, blocking folks to cultivate an echo chamber is not the way forward. That's why I'm delighted to see you cultivating the opposite arguments. Good for you! I had a very interesting discussion with a fellow author on her story about such things and came to a reasonable consensus around QR codes. https://medium.com/@woodspathfinder/are-you-triggered-af56da380f4a