I have lately been waiting for Dalrymple to address the recently invented, comically stupid notions of “triggering” and “trigger warnings” that have spread through academia like only an absurdity can, a task for which he seems perfectly situated. This piece in City Journal is short but doesn’t disappoint, as he coins a new phrase that perfectly encapsulates what is going on:

In the first place, it might have been worth mentioning that, whatever the validity of PTSD as a diagnosis, most people who experience a traumatic event in life do not suffer from it. As is to be expected of a creature as protean as Man, people respond differently to their experiences. They do not forget the trauma, but its memory does not affect their subsequent lives in any pathological way….The development of PTSD does not follow from trauma as the night does the day, but depends on many things—no doubt the culture of the traumatized among them.

In any case, PTSD is largely irrelevant to what Heer is writing about. He isn’t writing about post-traumatic stress disorder at all, but rather, a new diagnosis of pre-traumatic stress disorder.