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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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To what extent do you (or legal or ethical theory) conflate or distinguish between force, and violence? Restraining someone is certainly forceful, but is it necessarily violent? If you had cheap, harmless sleep rays to aim at patients, would this be considered 'violence?' Such a technology "feels" unethical, even though it seems like it offers safety improvements.

People generally resist, because you wouldn't be restraining them unless you had to and you have to because they accidentally or intentionally want to do something dangerous, so they resist.

Restraining someone who is resisting involves them attempting to attack you, and you essentially attacking them. It is not safe. It is violent. It is dangerous.

People who do not have experience with these things can easily go "oh well it's a magic controlled situation" and underestimate how brutal it often is, which is one of the reasons I wrote this up.

Policing for similar reasons is inherently violent. The threshold for someone to resist the police is higher because of life long training to be scared of the police but people who do it present a threat to themselves, bystanders, the police.

And the left is training people to resist, violently or in a way that isn't distinguishable from violence in the moment.

That's why this woman died.

She didn't realize just how dangerous what she was doing was.