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If no one else is going to link to Scott's latest CW-related post, I guess I'll try to meet the mods' wishes for a top level comment... (Though I didn't re-read it, so...)
Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target
I agree, inasmuch we stipulate "Political violence in America is morally unacceptable" means "literally, categorically unacceptable, due to our assessment of the threat of fascism" and "(at the current time)" ignores the possibility of near-future change in the threat-assessment. Though I emphatically oppose political violence, I don't think it would be logically incongruent to leave open the possibility that fascism is bad enough that we're near the point of political violence being acceptable. But I don't think Scott's doing a motte-and-bailey, by using a narrow denotation; just stating a motte, with the expectation his readers take it at face value.
Characteristic of Scott, the post is a neat exercise in logical tidiness. However, it only gestures at the bigger, scarier question: How do societies classify danger and determine when violence becomes permissible? The classification of threats is important, because names carry significant policy weight (e.g., Trump labeling Antifa a domestic terrorist organization...). Label something "fascism" as a distinct ideology, and you direct attention towards connotations and lineage. However, use the same term as a moral epithet (i.e., a catch-all for political enemies) and you alter the rhetorical perception.
All political action is violence... or at least the threat of violence. We've put a nice facade over it and depending at what point in history the majority and even the vast majority do not think about this. In my more argumentative days I figured I'd pierce the facade and instead of people giving up violence for petty thing got more "Fine, I'm OK killing you". Since no one wants to be an anarch-capitalist be careful when piercing the facade with unstable people.
Tags: Libertarian "Gun in the Room", Nothing every happens
This is such a bizarre argument, particularly for one I've seen repeated again and again in different variations with negligible pushback. When they say "This movie may contain scenes of violence", they aren't talking about a parliamentary committee crafting legislation. When the FBI gathers events for inclusion in their "violent crime" statistics, they don't count voter fraud. People with a commitment to "nonviolence" have no problem voting, and they aren't regarded as hypocrites for doing so.
People have no problem with recognizing violence (or the lack of it) when they see it, but this novel expansive definition of violence keeps popping up.
A facade, and a wall, and armor plating, and a maze beyond that. Stalin had a facade of nonviolence as he was genociding Ukrainians, but we (practically) have the real thing. People don't think about the "facade" because there are genuine, strong social barriers to using (normally-defined) violence.
One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens.
It gets negligible pushback in places like The Motte because beyond a certain level of political-philosophical acumen, it becomes ubiquitously understood as true. Even doing a study, declaring National Northern Hemispheric Penguin Day, ordering lunch, done on taxpayer time with taxpayer-funded resources. And taxes are backed by threat of violence. Normies push back on this understanding because they attach normative baggage to violence. Virtually no one is a pacifist; we're all cool with violence. The actual debate is not around whether political action is backed by violence, it's when the violence is legitimate.
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.
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