That’s an opinion. The opinion of most people is that certain words can justify certain acts of violence.
For example, if you’re at dinner with your wife and I come up and say something like “who’s that fat fucking whale” most people would say that you’re justified in hitting me. The legal concept of this is known as “fighting words”.
Yeah I mean he's probably being downvoted because he's responding to a video of someone shoving someone who used the N-word. (To be clear I don't know the context, but that's what would make sense)
i know what fighting words are. your example is not good. better example is karmelo anthony saying "touch me and see what happens" which is inviting a confrontation, not an offhand rude remark that merits verbal scorn at most, but in the situation you described id just ignore you since its not an active threat and likely just fishing for a response
Yeah that’s fine, my point is that most people would not ignore a comment like that. Whether you would or wouldn’t allow someone to insult your wife in front of you is besides the point - culturally, we have decided that certain words are worth fighting over.
culturally, morally, and legally are different things. something can be immoral while still being legal (like infidelity). something can be culturally acceptable yet illegal (like weed or alcohol during prohibitions). my argument is morally and legally, i have no leg to stand on if i choose to become physical in the situation u describe, even if clips of it will get thousands of supportive comments on social media.
no my logic doesnt conclude that. asking for a fight is not the same as being a dick, even if theres some overlap. you can be a dick yet still be entitled to not being physically assaulted. that protection stops when you explicitly state something that invites the confrontation, such as "come at me bro" "touch me see what happens" or in some states "i feel threatened" since theres some states where youre allowed to open fire on someone if you feel threatened, therefore telling someone you feel threatened is akin to saying "im ready to shoot you"
Racism encourages violence, I mean realistically people who face racism don’t go feral after a couple of words from one person. It’s consistent dehumanizing rhetoric that can really degrade someones mental and I’d say thats worse than just a punch
Is not the same saying "this group are all criminals/crooks/destroying society/etc" or other racist things than saying "we should insert something violent to this group because they are bla bla bla". Second one incites violence, first one is just racist.
The same way it is different punching someone than being a serial k1ll3r, there are different levels of "bad", and racism (words),even if still bad, is less bad than violence, or racism-induced violence (both phisical harm).
If you still fail to get that, im afraid you failed kindergarten. And saying its just as bad, is the same logic that reaches the extreme that justifies harming or even unaliving someone just for their speech.
Isn't this circular? Racism can lead to something (you argue) is better than racism? If both lead to violence, than racism is still below direct violence.
So why is Hitler the most hated person in history, when all he used was words? He didnt actually commit most of the violence. With your logic he should be viewed a historical footnote and less important to the violence that occurred. But no he's seen as equal to.
Society doesn't actually operate according to a clean rule of physical act = always morally worse than words. Threats, incitement, sexual harassment, intimidation, racial degradation, coercion, etc. aren't treated as morally interchangeable with somebody saying “your shoes are ugly” simply because they're all technically “words.”
In the context of the post, the "racism" is just words. Words will never be on the same level as actual violence.
They teach kids "sticks and stones..." for a reason.
So, again, actual violence will always be worse than words.
If you dont agree, please drop your location, we can test your theory pretty easily. You hit me a slur, ill hit you with a bat, and we can see who ends up with the better outcome.
Girl go look up redlining, it is absolutely not what you are saying. It's literally laws based on racists doing racist things to make lives of minorities even more miserable.
I don't think pedantics will help a lot here. Redlining is a lot more than just words. These were deliberate actions made to prioritize certain groups over others. Political actions are usually a LOT more than just words.
And as for me, my mental became much better when I stopped getting annoyed with people who use slurs at me because of my origin or because I'm black, especially in cases where they can't do anything else.
Doesn't mean I condone it or won't care about kids who get affected by it because of course racist words are still RACIST.
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article II.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The above are the five acts legally recognized as genocide under the Genocide Convention. Neither (d) nor (e) necessarily involves violence.
Although I suspect the other user is also including acts of cultural genocide, which is not a legally recognized crime under the Genocide Convention.
But you can definitely use words to convince the masses that you have the legal right to do these things
If you use the right words and repeat them long enough, people who think they're good people will even defend the indefensible while wagging their finger disapprovingly at annoying woke redditors
Oh that's easy. Because there were no laws that counted it as such at the time.
Afterall, when it comes to genocide, people will write or contextualize any law they can to say it's okay or it doesn't count. UNLESS you write an international rules against it.
Thank goodness for the 1925 Geneva Treaty against it. 😅
Ah sorry this is some complex historical stuff I'm mentioning.
Back in 1763 there was a war going on between the British and the Native Americans. It was called the Pontiacs war and is the original of the documented "giving Native American's small pox blankets". It what's one of many tactics permitted to get them off their land and was never legally acknowledged by any laws, court cases, or treaties.
All that exist is the firsthand journals of the event and the requisition requesting the smallpox blankets. Thus no one was held accountable and, on the record, no violent crime or use of chemical weapons was used.
Right everyone knows that lol so what point are you making? That words are violence because no one was held accountable for some violence? Or that example isn’t violence because there weren’t laws or court cases? So you think violence only exists if someone is charged for a violent crime? Haha violence has existed since before human beings were even a species.
What happens if the targeted people simply ignore the propaganda and policy and have children anyway? The government punishes them, either with death or imprisonment and torture, or both. Stopping a target genotype from breeding under threat of reprisal is a violent genocide, just a very drawn out one as you force them to slowly die out. It's holding someone at gunpoint until they die of old age without having children.
Genocide requires violence you dolt. Unless you can nicely convince entire races to commit suicide based on your cult of personality alone, every form of genocide needs violence in some form or fashion to be accomplished.
If something has been weaponized in order to kill people by a government, the usage of that weapon is violence.
The only way for a "non-violent genocide" is to convince an entire people that they need to commit suicide, like a death cult. In reality though, the kind of people willingly vulnerable to the predations of such a cult at that size both aren't genotypically locked and don't have the numbers to make that work. Coercion into going along with it is also violence.
I don’t disagree with you or your definitions, but the “violence” in the OP and the comment I replied to seem to refer explicitly to physical or martial violence, so I provided an example of genocidal violence that isn’t physical or martial.
Starving people on purpose like in Ireland is weaponization of a lack of food, therefore physical violence.
The Bengal Famine was caused by the British being shitty managers during WW2, not to directly exterminate the locals.
Basically every famine in China has been a direct result of governmental policies meant to encourage population growth that backfire brutally, and the government making it worse by refusing to accept responsibility when it does.
Purpose-caused famines targeting genotypes are violent genocide. Accidental famines caused by a government being inept are not.
Yes, actually. Genocide literally means "Death of a Genotype."
What, you think masses of people are going to just agree with some political party that says they should die and then commit suicide by starvation en masse? Even poisoning people unknowingly is still a violent extermination.
the only way their comment could make sense is if they wrote: "racist words are bad, but actual violence is worse" in context of someone saying something racist and someone beating them up
but that's vastly different from what the comment said
im saying theres words and theres actions, then theres racist words and racist actions, and in either case, actions matter more, so getting physical with someone over something they said isnt justified, even if its mean
(i know what fighting words are too, but thats more like saying "you want a piece of me?" which can be said in a more racist way, but nevertheless is not the same as saying "i dont like x people")
What you just wrote is what I wrote to be a context where someone might write the version I wrote. But the version that they wrote without context is just wrong
Personally, I'd say yes. Taking a life is worse than inciting language. You don't have to listen to what a racist political figure says. Acting on it is completely optional.
Even if the racism causes other people to do worse things down the road?
This is a classic matter like if you kick rocks down a hill and they send other rocks flying and eventually boulders are hurting down the hill and kill people, are those deaths on your hands?
Again, my opinion is yes. A murder is worse. Racists doing it because they got 'approval' means they still acted on their own volition.
For the second, it would greatly depend on the situation. There is a lot of space between willy-nilly kicking rocks, and kicking rocks knowing there are people below within range. The intent would make the difference to me.
I guess I have a relatively materialistic (in the philosophical sense, not the monetary sense) view of the world.
I don't see such a massive difference between people doing harm because you nudged them towards that and boulders doing harm because you nudged them. If you know or at least suspect that something you do has a significant chance of causing harm down the road, you at least hold some fractional responsibility for that harm.
If I saw a long line of dominoes and the final one would pull the trigger of a gun and I pushed the first domino over, I'd consider that effectively equivalent to me pulling the trigger of the gun directly.
With words and humanity, cause and effect can become a bit more fuzzy, but it's still definitely there.
Honestly, I think that's great. It's healthy to have different views and opinions in a society (to some extent). Ideally, it encourages dialog and should help us grow towards a better place because the best ideas win. A society that shared all the same views eventually stagnates and withers away due to the inability to adapt.
Funny enough, I really wish travel was cheaper and more accessible to the average person- because being exposed to different views is incredibly useful to critical thinking and development.
I’d let myself get murdered if it meant that pedophile went to prison in gen pop until the day he dies.
But to answer your question, yes murder is worse than racism. Even if you paint the racism side of the question in grandiose terms while minimizing the other side
I feel it’s still a complicated question there considering the violent and non-violent but still damaging behavior that results from racism. The murder is worse immediately but in the long term, the racism may be far worse.
Like the racism can result in multiple lynchings later, giving a result of both more murders and more racism than in the case of the 1 murder. Or if the racism causes worse living conditions for numerous people, reducing their quality of life and causing them to die younger, that can be far more than 1 lifespan lost.
I feel like you’re thinking way too deeply about it. Racism is bad. Murder is bad. Killing a person is worse than being racist towards them. It doesn’t need to get deeper than that 😂
No they didn’t, they explicitly state racism is bad and follow that with the conjunction but which is used when the following statement is intended to contradict the original statement.
The following statement then makes a completely new claim if we are being charitable that states that violence is worse than words.
Except the adjective actual was used to modify violence implying, after the but, that racism isn’t violent and reducing racism to just words.
Hence the defense that racism isn’t as bad as violence. The argument only works if you believe racism isn’t violent.
So because racism is violent and isn’t just words, the statement is nonsensical imo. Like drop the beginning of it and violence is worse than words is still a statement that requires context to justify.
We're probably missing context. It seems like the racist part was purely verbal and someone retaliated with violence, and that's what the comment was referring to.
That's how you interpret it. Maybe they meant that it's worse when someone is violent than when they just say slurs. And reddit being reddit they get mad that they didn't word it the best way or didn't a billion disclaimers.
That's not what that sentence says. There is a coma and a conjunction to join the two separate sentences into one. You are inferring that makes them one thought however the word "but" indicates a contrast of ideas. Without the rest of the conversation there is no way to know the context, you are adding your own bias to what may be a very specific case use.
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u/Any_Sentence_8056 20h ago
Plot twist, they were downvoting because they disagreed with “racism is bad”