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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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.

I'm honestly pretty confused by this paragraph. By my definition in this example, you have advocated for violence. Advocating for violence is not the same as committing violence. Furthermore, if you want to say that advocating for violence in the sense of pushing for the state's monopoly on violence to be wielded in some direction is violence, it seems to me that, again, you're saying that, in the realm of politics, all words are swords. Again, fair enough if that's your worldview (but, again, then that raises the question of why you decided to point to this specific incident as if his status as a sword-user differentiated him from any other person who has ever stated a political opinion with the intent to change government policy, i.e. campaigned). I think some nuance between words and violence is valuable for keeping modern Western civilization as prosperous and easy to survive in, but there's plenty of room for me to be wrong.

So, again, there's a difference between convincing someone to enact violence and enacting violence oneself. Depending on the case, e.g. ordering a hitman to murder someone, the former can be just as bad as the latter. That doesn't make them equivalent or the same. I do believe that there's a significant difference in the "violence" committed by someone lobbying AOC or even AOC herself and the "violence" committed by Mangione such that, if we decide to redefine "violence" to include things like the former, then we'd have to create subcategories of "violence" such that we're comparing like for like. Because the word "violence" is just a label, after all, and the point of separating it out from argumentation is that there's something meaningfully different between enacting violence itself and saying something, even if that saying is advocating for actions that play out in violence (i.e. literally every law ever).