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I don't condone the celebration of it but is it really so far fetched to accept this as a "Sword of Damocles" situation? Kirk advocated and is directly on record for saying: "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights". Live by the sword and die by the sword. If people want to advocate for positions then they need to personally be willing to pay for the consequences of those positions. Passing the cost onto other people if how we get in this mess. Note this 100% applies to all sorts of lefty positions that elite lefties want to be free of the consequences of.
Now we can't personally ask Kirk if he was willing to die for the second amendment rights but I think the charitable answer is yes. I think all the discussion about killing political opponents is worth having but all the wailing about lefties wanting to kill you rings hollow. They disagree with you and want you to pay for the cost of your beliefs just like you want them to pay the cost of their immigration or "anti-racism" beliefs.
Saying "the few deaths is worth it for our second amendment rights" is specifically living by the word and specifically not living by the sword. Living by the sword would be "watch me as I assassinate this politician who's pro gun-control." No argument that Kirk could ever state around gun control could ever rise to him "living by the sword." Words don't become violence just because they are about violence or condoning violence. Nor do they become equivalent to physical violence.
Campaigning to use the state's monopoly on violence to enforce your beliefs is violence by another name. Just because you can abstract it away doesn't be you are absolved. Trying to enforce your tribal beliefs on others is almost always the non-material reason for war.
One of the lessons in the fable about the Sword of Damocles is about living by the ramifications of your own positions. Kirk clearly had a position that the 2nd amendment is worth a certain amount of blood. Is he willing to pay that cost? Or does he want other people to pay it for him? One is the principled position, the other is a cur not worthy of anything.
Yeah, no. You're the one who's trying to abstract violence into it. Campaigning isn't violence. It's convincing. If you convince someone to commit violence, that person chose to commit violence, based on your speech. Depending on the nature of the convincing, that speech certainly could be legally restricted and censured. That doesn't make it not speech. You're free to play games about cause-and-effect and such, but those games don't actually change what things are.
In any case, the point of using the word "violence" is semantic, anyway. Let's say that using words to campaign for some political position is violence. In that case, literally everyone who has ever stated a political statement with approval has committed violence, and they're living by the sword, and so they could die by the sword. Which is a fair enough view to have, but it also cuts out any possibility of people actually having discourse about policy.
Like, if your claim is that there are no words, only swords, then that's perfectly cromulent, but also very different from what's implied by pointing at a specific person and their specific circumstances and saying "live by the sword, die by the sword."
This is a vapid statement, though. Because literally everyone with any ideological or political view has a position that some things are worth a certain amount of blood. We can speculate all we like about what Kirk himself would have thought, in terms of his own death being worth the cost, but the one thing we know is that no one will ever know or even have much confidence in a guess (at least on this Earth), and so speculating about it is just... vapid. And it's something that could be equally speculated about with anyone.
I'm not really a Hylanka-stan so maybe one of his torchbearers can swing by and tell me if I'm using this term wrong. But to me there is a "Leviathan-shaped hole" with your understanding on politics and the dynamics of power in a society. The role of the state is to enforce violence through the monopoly it extracts from its citizens. By creating laws it is threatening violence on citizens that fail to comply. Creating laws that force people to behave certain ways is by definition using violence. You just get to call it nice words like "Vote", "Campaign", and "Lobby". So a professional political pundit who runs around trying to create laws, and drive political actions is using the state to enact his/her own tribe beliefs and force them on all other tribes that exist in that state-polity. Otherwise why would people commit violence for political means. They are just discarding the useful social tech that we've used to abstract violence away from individual control.
For example if I give speech that: "Gay-ness is an abomination before the eyes of God and we should not allow it in our government or our society" Am I inflicting violence? By your definition I am not, nothing I say is legally able to be restricted as I am not directly threatening anyone. However, say I do get this law to pass, now some faceless bureaucrat is going to punish any gay person they find because they are illegal, and they are going to do so with the full might on the state. Its back to stoning, conversion torture, or throwing the gays off roof tops. By my definition I have advocated for those policies, I have advocated for violence. So I think your definition is naive in the extreme.
Gay people upon hearing my speech AND my effort to get that speech codified into law should rightly see that as violence. Just like Christians do if I were to say "believing in religion is an abomination" AND advocated for laws banning teaching people religious beliefs. Speech does require action but that action doesn't need to be directly violent. I am abstracting that violence to the state to enforce.
The average person isn't really in a lobbying position but Kirk very much was.
You've taken a couple of logical leaps here which are not well founded, and your argument suffers greatly as a result. First, the assumption that to have the government effect policy is tantamount to using violence to effect that policy. I think that this is very much not the case. It's not exactly a new argument (libertarians have been arguing that taxation is theft on more or less the same basis since forever), but it's not a good argument either. There's a reason Scott Alexander calls this form of argument "the worst argument in the world" (and against which he argued much more eloquently than I can). When you invoke a rhetorical phrase for an extreme edge case, it unreasonably connects the edge case in people's minds to the severity of the central example. That is (at best) unintentionally misleading, and (more often) an attempt at rhetorical sleight of hand to try to get people to accept a point they never would if you made it straight out.
Second, all of this seems to be in service to your original question of whether someone has inflicted violence. Even if I was to grant for the sake of argument that such government action was violent (which I don't), advocating for this government policy still would not be inflicting violence. Words can never, ever, constitute violence. Violence only means inflicting actual physical harm upon people. Even a direct threat of violence, like telling someone you're going to hurt them, is not violence in itself. Perhaps you weren't trying to say that advocating for violence (the phrase you used towards the end) is the same as inflicting violence (the phrase you used towards the beginning). But as written, it kind of comes off like you are. And if you are indeed trying to say those things are equivalent, then you're using a completely nonstandard definition of "violence" and there can be no productive discussion until that changes.
Let's entertain a hypothetical, some law gets passed that says "Saying the Democratically elected President has no clothes is now illegal punishable by jail time" I say the President has no clothes. Cops show up outside my house. I refuse to let them enter. What do they do?
In your world the distinction is that when they bust down my door and take me to jail they are the only ones inflicting violence, the law is not violent even though it backed up its authority with the social-derived power to inflict violence as an enforcement mechanism. I obviously disagree. I can infer the causality of that law and directly hold the people who proposed, lobbied, agitated for, etc. responsible for attempting to use the state's power to enforce violence for their own ends.
I feel like your rebuttal fails to understand the social reality of laws and how they are enforced. Can someone break the law and ignore the consequences? Governments that allow their power to be ignored don't survive.
The whole libertarian argument is farcical because those libertarians want the creature comforts that society provides them without wanting to pay for them. By living in society you agree to the implicit social contract. You are welcome to reject the contract and go live in a lawless place. Obviously since societies are land based, they tend to lay claim to all the land and its in their best interest to remove game-theoretical defectors.
idk what slight of hand you think I am doing. My explicit point is that governments are formed on the basis of a monopoly on violence and social consensus (for democratic systems) and their authority is derived from those basses. Thus any action by the government to enforce a law carries an implicit threat of violence against lawbreakers. I am open to you explaining to me how that is not the case but I have yet to see anything to the contrary
I agree that words alone in a vacuum can never, ever, constitute violence. I disagree that advocating for policies that lead to violent action absolves the speaker of blame. How do you think laws and policies get made? Do people not speak words when doing so? When they proposed the "President has no clothes" law was there not someone using words? If the end result is violence is there not some causal chain we can draw to such Words + Actions that directly led to that violence?
EDIT: I feel sort of confused on how my argument relates to the non-central fallacy that Scott is addressing, I'd need to go reread the blogpost. My argument is derived from a Hobbesian sense of social contract theory with observation on how people/collectives/governments actually accrue and use power.
This is literally the same logic as the libertarian "taxation is theft" argument, even though you call it farcical. The logic there is that the government's demand for money is backed up by threat of violence, so it is tantamount to theft under threat of violence. Your logic is that the demands of the law (to not say the president has no clothes, in this example) are backed up by threat of violence, so they are tantamount to violence. And incidentally the same exact counterargument you give would apply back to your thinking: by living in society you implicitly agree to the social contract (don't say the president has no clothes), but you're welcome to reject that social contract and go live on your own, if you can find land to do so. Note that I'm not saying the libertarian argument is correct. I'm saying that to be consistent one must either accept both, or reject both, because they follow the same logic.
I'm not accusing you specifically of rhetorical sleight of hand, for what it's worth (because that would be pretty uncharitable). I am simply saying that this sort of argument is often used for that. The sleight of hand goes like this: "violence" has a certain rhetorical weight to it. When you say something is violence, people instinctively go "oh that's bad" and are primed against it. But that reaction is based on the typical example of violence (like a stabbing or whatever), not very atypical examples like a chain of argument which goes "government policy => putting people in jail if they don't comply => taking them by force if necessary => violence, therefore government policy is violence". Even if the logic holds up under close scrutiny, by using an example of "violence" so far removed from what your audience expects you to mean, there can be a kind of dishonesty there if one is trying to get people to apply their associations with the central examples of violence to the non-central one. This is how it relates to the Scott Alexander post, as well. He cites several examples of that kind of rhetorical trick where it's like... yeah, technically the thing is what you said, but as a non-central example of the thing it doesn't inherit the moral valence of the central examples.
Ah, but I never said anyone is absolved of blame for anything. I simply said that words do not qualify as inflicting violence. Just because something is not in (bad category), doesn't mean it's acceptable. For example if someone cheats on his wife and she kills herself out of grief, he didn't murder her... but he's still a scumbag. Similarly advocating for a government policy (even if the policy was violent) is not violence, but that doesn't mean it's morally acceptable to argue for that policy. For example, I think that it would be immoral (albeit legal) to try to argue for rounding up all left-handed people and shoot them into the sun. But even if I might think "man that's evil", it wouldn't constitute violence.
I guess I see that. I am libertarian-adjacent... I've spent time arguing that argument and I think the devil is in the details. They tend to smuggle a bunch of assumptions into the "is theft argument" even if the core of the argument is the same as mine. Assumptions about the role of government and the necessity of funding it. The President has no clothes argument is meant to convey that the law can be without real governmental purpose unlike most taxes.
I see what you are saying about the noncentral fallacy argument. You are right it does apply. I also understand how it can be abused. However I feel that leaves me at an impasse. To me this argument is not prescriptive, but descriptive. I would love for someone to prove to me this is not how the government functions, it's not now how societies function. Calling this the noncentral fallacy (even if the shoe fits) is essentially trying to ignore the actual meat of the argument to argue over the colloquial definition of violence. "The logic is sound but you can't call it violence because people don't want to think about it like that", feels like an appeal to lemmings and ostriches. Idk how to craft the verbiage to get around that counterpoint. And so it feels like the attribution to a fallacy is akin to attempting to silence the argument. The noncentral fallacy is in of itself a rhetorical trick.
With the qualification that it's not absolving the perpetrator of blame or evil spirit. I suppose I can accept that the words themselves are not directly violence from a definitional standpoint. But from a functional standpoint I think someone acting with "evil" intentions towards you, and using words as a medium for those actions merits a response that might heuristically map towards words->violence.
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