Quote:
Originally Posted by microbet
Burning someone's empty house is not violence, not really...
My forever pep peeve... this is arguing what the "official and only true" definition of a word is.
A little story... on 1999-12-1 I boarded the
Coast Starlight from Seattle to Los Angeles. This was before ubiquitous cells/wifi, and I missed whatever stations stops that I could have got a newspaper. I was in a information bubble for two days. During that time, I was confused that all the new passengers were telling me about all the horrendous violence there was the day before in Seattle. The reason I was confused, was at the time a believed peeps simply meant "active harm to people and animals" when they used the world 'violence'.
It turns out what the MSM was using as a definition is "harm to people and animals -or- breaking things". Which, I quickly then found out was consistent with the most common dictionary definitions, and largely consistent with the laws in the US. The horrendous violence the MSM was carrying on about was simply some trivial vandalism on that day before.
There are two problems here. First, the powers-that-be will consistently use this broader definition as a bait-and-switch as above. Trivial vandalism fits these dictionary definitions of the word 'violence', so always except the MSM to trumpet the world 'violence' in the headlines, but bury or ignore the fact that nothing close to "harm to people and animals" occurred. This is how we get these RWNJ fantasies about roving mobs of antifa thugs/etc/etc.
Second, it causes never ending idiocy among us radical direct action folks. The reason being that a lot of us try to define 'nonviolence' as "good", and 'violence' as "bad". Which bankrupts the language, as there is no longer a distinction between descriptive usage, and normative concepts.
Examples: Is hate speech 'violence'? The way a lot of us folks use the word, it is. Which means that use of the word 'violence' is no longer tied to (non verbal) actions. Is breaking a physical police barricade to avoid mass arrests 'violence'? To some of us it is not... because they feel it is morally justified. Which means use of the world 'violence' isn't describing actions at all, but instead is describing norms. Is stepping on and collapsing an anthill 'violence'. Well assuming the ants are harmed, it trivially meets the dictionary definition, but (almost) all of us will ignore this type of stuff.
What I always advise regarding the MSM is (a) consistently pointing out that the MSM is always going to conflate breaking things with harm to people and animals.
And (b) among us radicals, reserving the word 'violence' to a strictly descriptive usage: a vandal breaking a window is doing a 'violence' act; a Good Samaritan braking a window to save peeps from a fire is also doing a 'violent' act; an eviction is a violent act; a cop or civilian shooting another peep is a 'violent' act, regardless of the context. And... then discuss what 'violent' acts we will are (if any), or are not, willing to reach a consensus on as our "rules of engagement".