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This is libertarian nonsense. Words have meaning, and declaring Penguin Day is not violence. This is akin to redefining White Supremacy to include punctuality. Just because anyone with sufficient intellect can play 7 degrees of [violence/White supremacy/Kevin Bacon] doesn’t make it so.
This is very similar in form to the “everything is political” crowd. Often on reddit, if someone complains about politics in X, some oh-so-smart objector will point out that everything is political, even a painting of a flower is political (perhaps it is conservative because it upholds traditional notions of beauty or the status quo or is silent on leftist social issues, perhaps it is environmentalist because it presents nature as beautiful). And in some abstract sense I accept that a clever person can extract a political meaning from any text/object/artwork by sufficient mental gymnastics. But all this really does is deprive us of a word. If we are to say that everything is political, then what word do we have to distinguish between a straight up campaign ad for Trump and a painting of a flower. Even if sufficient efforts can divine a political meaning in both there is surely some real meaningful difference in the strength, obviousness, legibility or centrality of that political message, and we could use a word to express that.
Similarly here there is surely a useful difference in violence between punching a guy in the face and Penguin Day that is useful to talk about, and twisting the word violence into contortions just replaces a useful definition of the word with a useless definition of the word. This is only popular with Libertarians because they are the only people for whom the new definition is useful. They want to import the bad scary evilconnotation of violence to new territory by a bit of trickery. They think if they can redefine scary bad feeling word to encompass any government action no matter how benign it will trick people into applying this old emotional association (scary, bad, evil) onto the new definition (any govt action). Woke people redefining White Supremacy are trying the exact same trick
In general a good rule of thumb is this: if someone appears to be using a very nonstandard definition of a word they are almost certainly trying to manipulate you dishonestly.
Are you saying no taxpayer funding is involved in declaring National Penguin Day, or are you claiming that taxes aren't collected by threat of violence? Also if you wouldn't mind providing your definition of violence. I'm using the first one in Merriam-Webster
I believe he's claiming that "Penguin Day">"paid government bureaucrats">"taxes">"violence" is too many degrees removed to meaningfully equate one end of the chain with the other - the sense in which Penguin Day 'involves' implicit violence is so abstract as to be meaningless in any everyday sense of the wod 'violence'. Compare "Starbucks">"cheap imported coffee beans">"Western economic supremacy">"legacy of colonization" as supposed proof that having coffee makes someone complicit in the evils of 18th century colonialism.
Part of the original point is that we aren't discussing common conceptions of these concepts. The chain is not abstract, it is very direct. Violence is the foundation of political action. Political action is forcing others who disagree with you to take part in your ends. At best forcing them to fund your desires. This is the defining difference between political action and non-political action.
Are you saying that is not the chain of events? Without the threat of violence that chain still exists?
I'm perfectly comfortable saying I'd be able to buy coffee today without colonialism.
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