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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   42069 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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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.

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.

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'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.

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?

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.

This is literally the same logic as the libertarian "taxation is theft" argument

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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