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> There is a trend on the political left right now that basically equates speech directly with violence (e.g. asking whether a man is capable of getting pregnan

> There is a trend on the political left right now that basically equates speech directly with violence (e.g. asking whether a man is capable of getting pregnant is violence) I must admit I have not seen an argument like this outside of a strawman characterization.

thisiscorrect 4y ago
In fact, there were even claims during the 2020 riots that "White silence is violence." See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs. That's right, even _not_ saying anything at all (including not parroting the expected slogans) is a direct act of violence.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  This is not the same thing. If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid. If you do something (call child services, for example) and it fails, you tried, and should try again lest you fall in the same trap. It is similar with police violence and racism. If you sit idly by and don't demand change, despite knowing people are getting beaten and things like that, you are partially responsible. I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with other things too: You knew someone was taking money from the company yet did nothing, you are at risk of getting in trouble too. It isn't a concept that exist in only one arena.
  - xdennis 4y ago
    Yes, but see what you did there? You're comparing an individual case where you have personal information to a general vibe promoted by the media. The general public has been led to believe that thousands of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year. In reality it's around 20. [1][2] Saying that "silence is violence" coupled with misleading information is a means of manipulating people. I prefer the old fashioned "sicks and stones, ...", "due process", "innocent until proven guilty", ... [1]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice-column/3235072001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-blac... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States#2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...
    - deanCommie 4y ago
      You're missing the point. You DO have personal information that you can do things with in your daily life. A simple example: challenging racist or sexist jokes from your friends.
      - peteradio 4y ago
        What about yo momma jokes?
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours. A failed intervention may carry the risk of violence being used against you as revenge. If you’re unfortunate, the police may refuse normal interaction if you later need it (say, because they found no evidence, or if they for some reason ignore domestic violence as a rule of thumb). You’re sticking your head out for someone who you don’t even know. Even assuming that there are reasons to help that particular person, why is there suddenly a burden on me to do or say something? Doing or saying nothing will of course mean that I’m an an asshole, sociopath, or <insert derogatory term >, but that still shouldn’t compel me to do or say anything. Compelled action and speech aren’t compatible with personal freedoms, or so I gather from the current consensus - so why is there suddenly a pressure to act?
    - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
      "The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours." I'm sorry, are you really asking why I wouldn't care about others in general? In some cases, it doesn't matter if I know them.
  - lodi 4y ago
    > If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid. You're doing something bad in this hypothetical scenario, but it's not violence. Maybe it's "accessory to violence" or "willful ignorance" or some other immoral or illegal thing that you should be jailed for, but it's not literally "violence". Blurring this distinction is dangerous; people will start using actual violence against figurative "violence" in a kind of aggressive "self-defense".
Dig1t 4y ago
https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41 https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41 Here is a good example: > "I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and opens trans people up to violence" This is a US senator and a Berkeley law professor talking in court.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  That's not making the claim that the line of questioning is itself violence. It's making the claim that a consequence of the line of questioning is going to be violence against trans people (in an unspecified time and place). I don't know the context, or how sane the claim is. But I don't think it's an example of what GP said.
  - FFRefresh 4y ago
    But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm. Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.
- deanCommie 4y ago
  Let's start with this: I don't know how I can explain why this kind of discourse opens trans people up to violence if we can't first agree why this is transphobic. Fundamentally we keep having this conversation in humanity. "This is wrong (homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, casteist)" "No it isn't!" And over and over and over again. And we look back and think how could it have been possible that we were SO discriminatory in the past, but SO enlightened now, and yet we repeat the same mistakes again. And you have some feminists that exclude trans women. And you have some black people perpetuating homophobia. 15 years ago we were having EXACTLY the same discourse about gay marriage as we do today about trans rights. It's exhausting how much some humans are committed to making the lives of other humans on this planet shitty. Fuck, let people live their lives. We all only get one.
throwaway09223 4y ago
I have been directly told this several times. In one case, in an awareness presentation at a large tech company. I suspect many of us have had this experience.
brippalcharrid 4y ago
Perhaps you hadn't yet encountered the subject of Epistemic Violence, in that case: “I have thus defined epistemic violence as a forced delegitimation, sanctioning and repression […] of certain possibilities of knowing, going hand in hand with an attempted enforcement […] of other possibilities of knowing.” Sebastian Garbe 2013 https://epistemicviolence.aau.at/index.php/en/home-2/ https://epistemicviolence.aau.at/index.php/en/home-2/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/
mpalmer 4y ago
There is a quality of leftish ideas and initiatives that people find discomfiting, even those with liberal values like myself. "Speech is violence" is an over-simplification of this quality. It is easy to dismiss in its sensationalism, and its lack of prominent examples. It's a special case of the real insidiousness - what you should really be looking for when people say things that don't sound right to you: You are not only responsible for what you do and say, but for what anyone chooses to do or say as a result, at *any* time. The legal definition of incitement is something like "the deliberate encouragement of imminent lawless action". Remove "imminent" and replace "deliberate" with "inadvertent" and you'll have something resembling a explanation of the impulse behind "speech is violence". "Speech is violence" means that by expressing opinions that are critical of X (or arguments for policy that protects X), you are making it more likely that bad actors will commit violence against X.
- generj 4y ago
  From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time? The alternative is that we allow stochastic terrorism, where figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action. And legally we do allow this, as it isn’t incitement. But are we required to ignore the obvious reality in front of our eyes and not call the stochastic terrorists out on it? Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence, full stop. They knew or should have known what their speech enabled. The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia - every genocide has always been accompanied by a large group of people not explicitly engaged in violence but speaking that it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group. Non-inciting speech like that by enough people creates genocide.
  - mpalmer 4y ago
    From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time? Yep, I don't disagree with that in the slightest. --- figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action Guessing by "figures" you mean public figures, or otherwise someone with a platform. Yeah, absolutely there's a "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest" dynamic that's troublesome, and I believe anyone who uses their platform to do this is deeply unethical and irresponsible. --- Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia "it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group" These are all examples of speech that advocates for or suggests there is value in violence, genocidal or otherwise. If the people who claim speech is violence are referring exclusively to speech like this, I would have to agree with them. But that's not the full scope of what some people mean. Some people include in their definition unpleasant speech, speech that offends, shocks or otherwise stands in opposition to their strongly held beliefs. --- Here's a couple of representative examples from a set of op-eds[1] justifying violent protest against a speech by Milo Yiannopolous at Berkeley in 2017: "the ideology they peddle perpetuates ideas that urgently endanger members of our community" (Given the subject of the protest, the ideas here are presumably about the rights of trans people and undocumented immigrants) How do ideas endanger people, let alone urgently? Obviously we are excepting the direct advocation of violence, which I addressed above. Say someone publicly announces their opposition to (for instance) DACA on the grounds of their belief that it will cause more illegal immigration, which they oppose. Someone hears this statement and is inspired to commit a violent act against a person of color. What (non-legal) responsibility does the speaker have for this? I posit, and am curious whether you agree that in the general case, advocating for or against a particular law or policy is not and cannot be violence. "asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act" I find this a particularly distasteful example of semantic gymnastics, and one that seeks to use the concept of speech-as-violence to justify actual violence against the speaker or related entities. "[A]sking people to maintain peaceful dialogue" is an evasive way of saying "requiring that people are not violent". "[People] who legitimately do not think their lives matter" are presumably people that deserve violence for having the wrong opinion and sharing it. Granted: Milo Yiannopolous has frequently skirted the line you and I agree on, naming undocumented immigrants, outing trans people, etc. This is unacceptable behavior and an obvious example of the "meddlesome priest" dynamic. BUT - the quoted author cares little for the specific context of Yiannopolous' past actions, making a sweeping statement that is unquestionably intended to draw a rhetorical line in the sand on what generally constitutes violence. Not sure about you, but I find this hypocritical, counter-productive in the extreme, and yeah, kinda evil. [1]: https://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/ https://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

thisiscorrect 4y ago

In fact, there were even claims during the 2020 riots that "White silence is violence." See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs. That's right, even _not_ saying anything at all (including not parroting the expected slogans) is a direct act of violence.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago
This is not the same thing. If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid. If you do something (call child services, for example) and it fails, you tried, and should try again lest you fall in the same trap. It is similar with police violence and racism. If you sit idly by and don't demand change, despite knowing people are getting beaten and things like that, you are partially responsible. I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with other things too: You knew someone was taking money from the company yet did nothing, you are at risk of getting in trouble too. It isn't a concept that exist in only one arena.
- xdennis 4y ago
  Yes, but see what you did there? You're comparing an individual case where you have personal information to a general vibe promoted by the media. The general public has been led to believe that thousands of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year. In reality it's around 20. [1][2] Saying that "silence is violence" coupled with misleading information is a means of manipulating people. I prefer the old fashioned "sicks and stones, ...", "due process", "innocent until proven guilty", ... [1]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice-column/3235072001/ https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-blac... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americans_killed_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States#2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...
  - deanCommie 4y ago
    You're missing the point. You DO have personal information that you can do things with in your daily life. A simple example: challenging racist or sexist jokes from your friends.
    - peteradio 4y ago
      What about yo momma jokes?
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours. A failed intervention may carry the risk of violence being used against you as revenge. If you’re unfortunate, the police may refuse normal interaction if you later need it (say, because they found no evidence, or if they for some reason ignore domestic violence as a rule of thumb). You’re sticking your head out for someone who you don’t even know. Even assuming that there are reasons to help that particular person, why is there suddenly a burden on me to do or say something? Doing or saying nothing will of course mean that I’m an an asshole, sociopath, or <insert derogatory term >, but that still shouldn’t compel me to do or say anything. Compelled action and speech aren’t compatible with personal freedoms, or so I gather from the current consensus - so why is there suddenly a pressure to act?
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    "The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours." I'm sorry, are you really asking why I wouldn't care about others in general? In some cases, it doesn't matter if I know them.
- lodi 4y ago
  > If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid. You're doing something bad in this hypothetical scenario, but it's not violence. Maybe it's "accessory to violence" or "willful ignorance" or some other immoral or illegal thing that you should be jailed for, but it's not literally "violence". Blurring this distinction is dangerous; people will start using actual violence against figurative "violence" in a kind of aggressive "self-defense".

Dig1t 4y ago

https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41 https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41 Here is a good example: > "I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and opens trans people up to violence" This is a US senator and a Berkeley law professor talking in court.

pmyteh 4y ago
That's not making the claim that the line of questioning is itself violence. It's making the claim that a consequence of the line of questioning is going to be violence against trans people (in an unspecified time and place). I don't know the context, or how sane the claim is. But I don't think it's an example of what GP said.
- FFRefresh 4y ago
  But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm. Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.
deanCommie 4y ago
Let's start with this: I don't know how I can explain why this kind of discourse opens trans people up to violence if we can't first agree why this is transphobic. Fundamentally we keep having this conversation in humanity. "This is wrong (homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, casteist)" "No it isn't!" And over and over and over again. And we look back and think how could it have been possible that we were SO discriminatory in the past, but SO enlightened now, and yet we repeat the same mistakes again. And you have some feminists that exclude trans women. And you have some black people perpetuating homophobia. 15 years ago we were having EXACTLY the same discourse about gay marriage as we do today about trans rights. It's exhausting how much some humans are committed to making the lives of other humans on this planet shitty. Fuck, let people live their lives. We all only get one.

throwaway09223 4y ago

I have been directly told this several times. In one case, in an awareness presentation at a large tech company. I suspect many of us have had this experience.

brippalcharrid 4y ago

Perhaps you hadn't yet encountered the subject of Epistemic Violence, in that case: “I have thus defined epistemic violence as a forced delegitimation, sanctioning and repression […] of certain possibilities of knowing, going hand in hand with an attempted enforcement […] of other possibilities of knowing.” Sebastian Garbe 2013 https://epistemicviolence.aau.at/index.php/en/home-2/ https://epistemicviolence.aau.at/index.php/en/home-2/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/ https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/

mpalmer 4y ago

There is a quality of leftish ideas and initiatives that people find discomfiting, even those with liberal values like myself. "Speech is violence" is an over-simplification of this quality. It is easy to dismiss in its sensationalism, and its lack of prominent examples. It's a special case of the real insidiousness - what you should really be looking for when people say things that don't sound right to you: You are not only responsible for what you do and say, but for what anyone chooses to do or say as a result, at *any* time. The legal definition of incitement is something like "the deliberate encouragement of imminent lawless action". Remove "imminent" and replace "deliberate" with "inadvertent" and you'll have something resembling a explanation of the impulse behind "speech is violence". "Speech is violence" means that by expressing opinions that are critical of X (or arguments for policy that protects X), you are making it more likely that bad actors will commit violence against X.

generj 4y ago
From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time? The alternative is that we allow stochastic terrorism, where figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action. And legally we do allow this, as it isn’t incitement. But are we required to ignore the obvious reality in front of our eyes and not call the stochastic terrorists out on it? Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence, full stop. They knew or should have known what their speech enabled. The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia - every genocide has always been accompanied by a large group of people not explicitly engaged in violence but speaking that it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group. Non-inciting speech like that by enough people creates genocide.
- mpalmer 4y ago
  From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time? Yep, I don't disagree with that in the slightest. --- figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action Guessing by "figures" you mean public figures, or otherwise someone with a platform. Yeah, absolutely there's a "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest" dynamic that's troublesome, and I believe anyone who uses their platform to do this is deeply unethical and irresponsible. --- Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia "it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group" These are all examples of speech that advocates for or suggests there is value in violence, genocidal or otherwise. If the people who claim speech is violence are referring exclusively to speech like this, I would have to agree with them. But that's not the full scope of what some people mean. Some people include in their definition unpleasant speech, speech that offends, shocks or otherwise stands in opposition to their strongly held beliefs. --- Here's a couple of representative examples from a set of op-eds[1] justifying violent protest against a speech by Milo Yiannopolous at Berkeley in 2017: "the ideology they peddle perpetuates ideas that urgently endanger members of our community" (Given the subject of the protest, the ideas here are presumably about the rights of trans people and undocumented immigrants) How do ideas endanger people, let alone urgently? Obviously we are excepting the direct advocation of violence, which I addressed above. Say someone publicly announces their opposition to (for instance) DACA on the grounds of their belief that it will cause more illegal immigration, which they oppose. Someone hears this statement and is inspired to commit a violent act against a person of color. What (non-legal) responsibility does the speaker have for this? I posit, and am curious whether you agree that in the general case, advocating for or against a particular law or policy is not and cannot be violence. "asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act" I find this a particularly distasteful example of semantic gymnastics, and one that seeks to use the concept of speech-as-violence to justify actual violence against the speaker or related entities. "[A]sking people to maintain peaceful dialogue" is an evasive way of saying "requiring that people are not violent". "[People] who legitimately do not think their lives matter" are presumably people that deserve violence for having the wrong opinion and sharing it. Granted: Milo Yiannopolous has frequently skirted the line you and I agree on, naming undocumented immigrants, outing trans people, etc. This is unacceptable behavior and an obvious example of the "meddlesome priest" dynamic. BUT - the quoted author cares little for the specific context of Yiannopolous' past actions, making a sweeping statement that is unquestionably intended to draw a rhetorical line in the sand on what generally constitutes violence. Not sure about you, but I find this hypocritical, counter-productive in the extreme, and yeah, kinda evil. [1]: https://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/ https://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/