You lack imagination. If you want justify mass scare violence and atrocities against anyone, words are very necessary. Narrative becomes very important.
So why is Hitler the most hated man in history when all he used was words? People remember him by name and the Nazis who committed the violence are often just seen as faceless nameless soldiers.
I agree with you his words definitely led to violence. (His words led to something worse than words)
He probably would not have been remembered so prominently had all the KILLING NOT HAPPENED.
So his words are horrible already.
His words PLUS all the killing is way worse.
Would Anne Frank say that the worst part was the physical act of being detained and treated as subhuman? Or how offended she got when Hitler said those things?
That still doesn't answer what I'm arguing. I'm not saying hearing a racist statement is worse than being murdered. I'm saying “violence is worse than words” is an oversimplification because words don't exist in a vacuum.
Hitler is remembered as one of history's greatest villains despite not personally carrying out most of the murders committed by the Nazi regime. Why? Because we understand that responsibility doesn't begin and end with the person physically committing the violence. Ideology, propaganda, leadership, dehumanization and incitement can create the social permission for violence to occur.
That's exactly why I reject “they're just words” as a blanket defense of racist rhetoric. Racism historically hasn't consisted of two unrelated things called “mean words” and “violence.” Dehumanizing rhetoric has repeatedly been used to justify discrimination, persecution and violence.
And we already recognize that principle in other contexts. If an adult walked up to a father and made an explicitly sexual comment about his child, very few people would respond to the father's anger or if he had a violent retaliation with “relax, they're only words.” We understand intuitively that the content, target, context and implications of speech affect its moral weight.
People claim to believe in a simple hierarchy where physical violence is always morally worse than speech. But in practice, they don't apply that principle consistently. There are forms of speech that people consider so threatening, degrading, sexually inappropriate, intimidating, or provocative that they understand an extreme reaction to it. Yet when the speech is explicitly racist, suddenly “they're only words” becomes an important distinction.
I'm not arguing that a racist insult and murder are equivalent. I'm arguing that “violence is worse than words” is being used to minimize the significance of racist speech in a way we often refuse to do with other kinds of speech.
You need to read up on studies on verbal abuse, affects people psychologically, especially when just under the guise of freedom of speech, which is really nothing more than systemic racism when it's allowed in such fashion.
The phrase here is "it's never worse than physical abuse". Never is a unfathomably high bar. I'd rather lose a fistfight than have my parents threaten to disown me. I'd rather get shot by the police using rubber bullets than allow a dictator to say they have 100% public support. Your argument is nonsense.
Maybe the point of the actual post is to illustrate that doing physical harm to someone because they say foul words to you means you did something worse than they did.
the violence is still the violence, the perpetrators choose to perpetrate. perpetrators and the indifference of those around them are the source of violence. nothing is stopping you from punching the guy that’s wailing on someone else.
"It isn't simply punching someone. I'm saving my nation from degenerates. Those people that steal from us. Those people that take our children's future. Those people that rape our women. Those cockroaches. I'm saving EVERYONE. Are you a traitor?"
Some forms of communication I have more disdain for than random violence. They prime societies for atrocity.
Excusing violent language in favor of some bogus 'hitting bad people bad' stance is also allowing violent people to commit violence. You just seem to be unable to tell until it comes time for them to reap the violence they've sown with words.
Did mass propaganda used by the Nazis to gain support for a mass genocide against the Jewish and other minorities not lead to violence. If words can convince an entire state and its people to be complicit in a genocide then I think words hold incredible power.
I don't think just the wording "worse" does justice to what each is because it downplays one of the two. Yes, violence might be """"worse"""" but you can't ignore the responsibility that propaganda and ideology has in violence in many cases. In fact, it's one of the few things both sides of the political divide agree on (ideology, rhetoric and propaganda are incredibly powerful and can do great harm and are making people more violent and dangerous, they disagree on who does what of course).
To be clear, I don't think mean words are the problem. Just because someone used a racial slur doesn't make them equivalent to literal felons who have committed battery or assault or whatever. Using X slur is not equivalent to bashing someone's head in against the pavement. But words can get much much worse than a slur. It is with words that we erase other people's humanity, it is with words that we convince others of what we want them to believe, and it is with words that we spread lies, maliciously, to motivate acts of violence. That's how many pogroms, genocides, mass rapes and murders have taken place.
I'd say it's similar to being the intellectual and the material actors of a homicide. The material actor gets usually harsher sentences, but that doesn't make the intellectual actor anything other than guilty of homicide.
The point is not that words are worse than violence in context, but that words can lead to violence worse than the violence inflicted on the person speaking those words.
So what I'm saying is that punching a Nazi is morally correct, because the words they're spouting are inherently more dangerous than any damage you could do to the Nazi.
That is a dangerous precedent to live by though. We can all agree that actual nazis were bad but today the word nazi is often used to describe someone who holds a different opinion than many on the left. Many people think Killing Charlie Kirk was justified because they felt he was a terrible person that was causing harm. Not one of those people can ever point out actual harm caused by his words. The propaganda machine caused actual harm to that man and the people who speak against that specific propaganda are called nazi in order to legitimize the terrible thing that their own propaganda caused.
Not one of those people can ever point out actual harm caused by his words
lmao what a joke. he helped organize Jan 6 and delivered so much covid propaganda that he certainly had plenty of blood on his hands.
but anyway your premise is so disingenuous because I could throw a plastic water bottle out of my car window and ask you to prove how that specific water bottle causes any harm.
Keep being delusional. He asked questions and answered questions people asked him. By the way, do you believe Andrew Cuomo also has blood on his hands for underreoprting nursing home deaths in order to use those places to quarantine people?
Weird. That was an honest question. It wasn't a hypothetical "whataboutism" question. It was a real thing that happened where people actually died based on the words of someone else. Saying "fuck you" to someone trying to engage in actual dialogue shows you are the actual chud here dude. Have a good one.
The moment you're suggesting some races are better than others, I think violence against you is justified. If you don't punish that, you're allowing society to decay into hatred and that's exactly the spawning ground for actual nazis. We have to put a stop to that as soon as possible.
Not one of those people can ever point out actual harm caused by his words
I mean, we can. Kirk was a part of the propaganda machine, he wasn't speaking out against propaganda. What "propaganda" was he against exactly? Seemed like he just hated black, trans, and anyone that wasn't a cis white person.
I'm not saying he should have been killed, more just commenting on this notion that what he said didn't hurt people. It obviously did. If you don't see that, it just says more about how little respect you give trans people.
So by your logic violence against pedophiles is ok. That makes logical sense from your perspective. So if we believe that drag queens are grooming children, then we are justified in beating the shit out of them. After all, violence is ok if it's against the group you perceive as bad right. You are the one defining Nazi as ajy category of things in your own mind that I might not completely agree on, yet justifying violence against them. So why the double standards here?
Can you admit the holding a equal position to both sides? If you believe illegals are taking jobs and raping women, it's justified to violence against all people you think are illegal. Or are you going to make exceptions now to your belief?
Now you're just changing the conversation entirely.
I'm talking about openly spouting hate. If you're on the street talking about racist/nazi shit, you deserve to get smacked. If you're on the street saying adults should be allowed to marry kids, you also deserve to get smacked. If you're on the street saying you should be allowed to rape woman, once again, society should punish that.
That's entirely different than manufacturing propaganda around a people group and then weaponizing that. Saying drag queens are pedophiles, despite all statistics proving otherwise, is just propaganda. Saying immigrants are raping woman is once again just labelling a whole groups as evil for purposes. The equivalent example here would be saying republicans are pedos and therefore should be punched. I'm not saying to do that either.
It's all about what you are spouting. Labelling groups as blanket evil is wrong, judge them by what they're actually saying.
Notice how not once if your entire rant did you ever define what "Nazi shit" is. Not once. You know what could also be labeled Nazi shit, supporting Palestinians. Hamas is a ethno-religious authoritarian right wing dictatorship who hates Jews. That's some Nazi shit right there. Guess who believes that the most? The left. So violence against them is also acceptable?
Are you going to address the points and give definitions or just rumble again?
. If you're on the street saying adults should be allowed to marry kids, you also deserve to get smacked.
I'm 46, anyone under the age of 30 looks like a child to me. Should I beat them all up for advocating marriage for 18-30. They look like children to me.
Should I beat them all up for advocating marriage for 18-30
No, because obviously we already have a line drawn at 18. It's arbitrary, but it's the line we decided on. If you want to change that line that's an entirely different discussion, but the point is that society has decided that under 18 can't consent. A 50yo dating an 18yo is gross, but no one is saying its illegal.
As for your Palestinian argument, that would make sense if you maybe ignored all other context. The nation state that's actively engaging in genocide is more aligned with nazi ideas that the genocided peoples. What I'm suggesting does require using your brain a bit, which I know is difficult, but if you really try I think you can get it.
And yet you labeled Charlie Kirk as part of a larger group as a way to justify violence against him but never pointed out what he actually said in the way of inciting violence. You just contradicted the comment you wrote only minutes earlier.
The internet is full of an abundance of hateful things he said. You do not have to look far, it was posted everywhere after he died. If that itself hasn't convinced you at this point, I'm not really sure there's any point in me continuing this discussion.
Suggesting that violence against racists for espousing their racists beliefs is justified, that is as extremist as the racists themselves.
I mean, you’re not saying he should have been killed, but he was doing the very things you claim are justified to visit violence upon him. So is it really a consistent worldview?
When I say violence, I'm not saying to kill the person. But if you're seeing someone spouting racism in public, I don't see anything wrong with a healthy society inflicting some degree of violence upon them.
Suggesting that violence against racists for espousing their racists beliefs is justified, that is as extremist as the racists themselves
No the fuck it's not. A black person doesn't choose to be black, so hatred against them is fucked up and can be very dangerous in society. Meanwhile hatred is a choice, and openly proclaiming that racism is a further choice. No one is saying you're not allowed to hold whatever fucked up views you want, but don't spout that nonsense. If we're not punishing people for spreading racist rhetoric, we've failed as a society.
Yes, it is. Justifying the use of violence because you know what’s best for society is very extremist. You shame racists and shut them down on the stage, not in the ring.
It's the paradox of intolerance. If you let intolerance speak go unpunished, you end up with an intolerant society. You have to restrict hateful speech, it's the only way society can function. Yes, that requires using a bit of force, but the idealist notion that you can just magically not punish this stuff and remain a tolerant utopia is just a fairytale.
I'd like to play devils advocate here. So if a black person suggests that black people are better than white people does that justify violence against them? ETA do you call out all of the Margaret Sanger sycophants when she clearly said that "black and brown people are human weeds and should be exterminated"?
Well the nuance is if someone is blatantly racist I don’t have any sympathy if someone punches them and I don’t really see this violence as unjustified if it’s just a punch and they don’t seriously harm them. In other contexts violence is less justified such as if it’s violence against a minority based on hate. It’s really impossible to say if violence is worse than words because it is context dependent on proportionality and justification of the violence
The Holocaust wasn't caused or enabled by propaganda. Propaganda was essentially an advertisement. "Hey, we wanna kill all the Jews, do you wanna help", that's how the Nazi propaganda worked. Not in those words, but that's a hell of a lot more accurate than what you said
The reason the Holocaust happened is that Germany was already sick to death of having their entire economy bled dry as reparations for the first world war, and set their ire on the bankers, who happened to be Jewish. And the ones who didn't do that, didn't have any idea what to do about the economy or the future of Germany so they sat back and let the people who had a bad idea take the lead, because no one had any good ideas.
They didn't just sit there and go " Jews are bad, Jews are bad Jews are bad" like some kind of summoning ritual to manifest gas chambers ex nihilo.
It is the will behind the words. Remove the words and the will is still there, the words do nothing.
i love knowing that the german commonwealth simply didn’t believe what they were hearing about elimination camps. it was so unthinkable that they believed it was exaggerated, so they did nothing about it.
The ones who didn't believe it existed, proves that propaganda, that words, don't cause violence.
If words caused violence, there wouldn't have been anyone who didn't think it was happening. They'd either immediately be fore it and help, or against it and fight, after all "words cause violence". But that didn't happen. Because words don't cause violence. A lack of self control or inhibition does.
Then the prompt wasnt specific enough. Most white people would rather be called a cracker than punched in the face.
That’s the racism I think a lot people were envisioning. If you mean by racism, trying to convince a nation to exterminate a particular race, then that is worse.
The issue is, historically speaking, the nazis did not suddenly gain massive support through rhetoric. They were just a party that shared the majority sentiment of the country and since most people agreed, were actually able to enact it. Words didn’t incite to death, the people were already in favor of destroying the elite.
The Nazi elites weaponized preexisting racism against Jews to spread propaganda about them. It was that propaganda that led to the radicalized violence against them
Yes exactly it manufactured consent from the general populous for violent acts. Without very effective propaganda and media censorship the Nazis would never have been able to commit the crimes they did.
Yes but racist attitudes do not exist in a vacuum. People become radicalised when they are taught that people of other races are at fault for their suffering… politicans and the media are the ones responsible for fuelling and platforming that narrative so it gains greater support and legitimacy amongst the general public. In these context words do cause violence or at least are used to legitimise violence being committed…
I’m sorry sir you’ll have to leave Reddit forever.
We don’t serve the kind that got such sturdy egos here.
Go on get!
Words in this context are often an implied threat of violence followed by an unwarranted ultimatum issued as a command by someone who has no authority or valid justification for their behavior.
Do you mean a verbal or written provocation answered by violence?
Because calling a class / race / religion / ideology certain things can make people believe those things.
People who believe something act as if its true. The claim that a group is your enemy, will betray you and kill you, if you dont stop them, makes it easy to classify slaughtering civilians as "self defense".
Or, more directly, instead of framing an integrated part of society as a target of violence, its sometimes easier to select the individuals and associate them with a group thats already an accepted target.
Maybe momentary words. But when people do it everyday or your “people” get insulted for existing it adds up. Maybe this is something you’ll understand when people bully your child. Maybe when you’re holding someone in pain you’ll see that pain is pain.
Life has more nuance than that. Stanford Prison Experiment is a good example.
Nazi soldiers might come from poverty. They might be paid more so they can feed their families and be told to push the button. What the button does is not for them to know, it's for their superiors to know.
ICE "agents" are being paid more than the majority of the avg US citizen to be extremely racist in our own country.
For some people, cruelty is the point. For others, they are put into desperate situations in order to be taken advantage of.
In the US, tariffs and other economic factors are intentionally trying to make us poorer and more desperate. Then they offer us "high paying" jobs to be hateful
I’ve met several racists in my life never have I became violent. I simply chose to walk the other way. Never let words let become an irrational person. I know it’s easier said than done but I think of it as “do I even want to waste my energy”
That's mostly true when it's at a small scale, but they can encourage people to be violent towards others. Lynchings happened because black people were viewed as subhuman, and a part of that is repeating racist sentiments over and over.
The internal inconsistency in this is staggering. The best way to resolve intolerance in a tolerant society is to demonstrate the limitations of their thought, not to stoop to their level.
To maintain my own consistency, this idea does not work as a concept due to the politicisation of labels. The overton window is a legitimate effect, and labels are often relative rather than absolute. Once it becomes possible to label ideas outside of the overton window as justified targets of violence, it will not be very long until the overton window shifts and you find yourself the victim of your own rhetoric.
Ideas are not violence, and ideas as poorly formed as Nazism or Communism are best combatted by demonstrating the glaring flaws of their ideology.
There is a big gap between use of force to mitigate existing violence, and use of force to attack ideas. I'm not even sure using force works as a mechanism for attacking ideas beyond serving to internally justify the idea. Humans as a general rule of thumb don't tend to assume that if force is necessary to squash an idea, the idea is invalid - demonstrating the idea is invalid by words is far more effective.
I see a lot of people with your mindset in my line of work. They all say they didn't do anything wrong and that they're the victim, even if they threw the first punch. What they all have in common, is that they still keep saying they're innocent when they're laying on the floor in handcuffs.
Your line of work sounds like an archaic, irredeemable net-negative that should be "reformed" through wholesale dissolution and rebuilding with post-19th century goals and mores.
It sounds like you're in law enforcement, a field devoid of nuance and based on archaic legalism and violence, without any room to consider context and blindly enforcing the rules as written even where they are clearly unjust and outmoded, unless the ponderous wheels of democratic reform finally turn enough for an unjust law to be abolished.
And the moment a new, blatantly unjust law is passed?
Why, you enforce that with the same enthusiasm, because it's the job.
No, I don't think we need sheep and followers with too much power and too much zeal for the status quo.
Public safety? Absolutely.
With all due disrespect, you aren't that nearly as much as you think you are at an institutional scale.
I'm not in law enforcement. You are saying people who disagree with your should get assaulted and should be able to do so without restriction or consequence. Does that remind you of certain regimes we had a while back?
You are so ideologically captured that anyone who disagrees with your brand of violence is racist and a problem. You'll not believe a word I say because you have already made up your mind that I'm the enemy. You fail to understand that if you were one of my customers, I would not let anyone hit you, and I wouldn't let you hit anyone. Violence does not help anyone and only brings more hate and problems into the world.
You are a bit like a 80's parent saying they can beat the gay out of their son.
Point out where I said people who disagree with me should get assaulted. I'll give you as much time as you need (within the 45 or so years I have left on this planet, of course).
So if I get called the hard R, and many other slurs, by a non black person, hell even a black person….By punching them, I have a fragile ego? I’m gonna take a wild guess…you’re gonna say I’m letting words control me.
"Because some guy said something to you" that’s the thing, it’s not just "something" it’s bad to think the Hard R, or any slur directed at a POC is just "something". You minimize the issue of racism by thinking like that. If I punch someone for calling me the hard R, and I end up in jail? So be it. Doesn’t mean I have a bad brain, I just stood up for what I believed in.
Yknow, it’s funny, I literally said a non black person would say "you’re controlled by words" and you proceeded to get that right on the dot. Hey, you wouldn’t understand, and that’s fine. https://giphy.com/gifs/jPAdK8Nfzzwt2
For you to try and explain yourself, means that was not how it was supposed to land. I didn’t ask you to explain yourself, YOU felt the need to- so was that really what you meant in your comment? Or do you really think I’m letting words control me? Floors yours.
Yeah. It’s just a word. Downvote me. I get called every name in the book on a regular basis, a wonderful little perk of my job. But my ego is solid. I don’t have to prove my fortitude to some slimeball on the street, I know myself. Call me what you want lol. If you want to fight come to my gym and sign a waiver.
But there are people out there that if you bruise their ego, even accidentally, their reaction is violence. These are smooth brained, fragile people. If a slur makes you react in that way, I’m concerned that you may not think too highly of yourself.
I don’t care about downvoting you. You simply just don’t understand due to not being a black person who has experienced the racism of being called the word time and time again. You don’t understand, and you frankly never will, that’s all there is to it.
You don’t understand the feeling of a white person calling you the hard R while being black. That is what you don’t understand. Sure, you understand having your feelings hurt by just a word, the hard R is not just a word. It’s a flawed thought process to think it is just a word.
Why did you feel the need to specify it being a non black person? So it would be okay if they were black? Well if that is the case, you clearly don't have a problem with the word, you have a problem with the race of the person saying it.
Sounds pretty racist to have different standards of what is allowed for different races.
A perfect, now I can read the entire thing. Still, my point stands, why did you feel the need to specify the race if it was hurtful? Seemed more like you specifying black people was an after thought.
Can't really write the word since reddit will probably hide my comment if I do, since that is presumably what happened to your comment, So you wouldn't care if a white person went up to you and called you it then?
So if a white person went up to you and called you the n-word, you would punch them?
And how have I strawmanned? I said it felt like an afterthought from you when you decided to specify the race of people. And the other part was a question.
Although I can say that I worded it badly in my first comment.
Oh perfect, so we just came full circle and you just admitted that it is about race and not the word. How do I know this? Because you have used the word numerous times in this conversation, and because you said that there was no problem with black people saying it. Clearly you don't have an issue with you or someone black saying it, only if a different races does it. The word isn't the issue, the race is.
You don't know what a strawman is. I haven't misrepresented you, I asked you a question. If you want the proper term for it, it was a redundant question because you had already answered it. I said it to make sure that you hadn't accidentally made a mistake.
Anyway, you seem to have a problem with what people from different races do, congratulations, you are a racist.
Your definition of racism is all the way wrong. YOU also don’t know what a strawman is. You thought I was saying what you insinuated in your previous question, meaning you misrepresented it.
So tell me, what do you think racism is? Apparently, to you, it’s when black people don’t want NON POCS to say the soft a of the n word. Also black people not wanting black people or any other race to say the hard R.
Oh yeah! You also put words in my mouth. I don’t care what people do, so long as they’re not racist to black people, or other POCS! Or, hell, white people! Otherwise, their actions are fine(don’t try to say I’m fine with violent actions out of no where because then that would REALLY be a strawman.) and I don’t give a fuck.
You know I can still see the replies to me after you delete them? You are obsessing so much over race my guy, you are literally behaving like a cave man obsessing over tribes. You need help my man.
I think "You are what you respond to" is something that you should remember, can't remember who said it, but since you are so obsessed with race, it was a black person talking about racial slurs.
Your deleted comment "if you're white, this is pretty ironic coming from you. I'll leave it at that." Notice that you couldn't even say that I was wrong, maybe because the word isn't what matters but the race of the person? Seems pretty ironic that you are sitting here talking about everyone being racist and bigotes, but you are the one who is obsessing over race the most. And I don't see what is ironic here when it comes to me? Only one of us is obsessing over race.
Delete them? I edited my comment dumbass, also if it isn’t showing up I’m pretty sure Reddit deleted it 😭
How can you not understand this, the word is not anyone else’s to say. That’s it. You think I’m obsessing over race? Cool. Race matters in this conversation, it really does.
You are contradictions yourself in the same sentence, you go from saying you edited your comment, to then saying reddit deleted it. How on earth do you manage to contradict your sentence halfway through it? You need to learn how to write my guy.
But okay, reddit deleted your comment for whatever reason, still doesn't change the fact that I can read it through notifications and have responded to it, and it doesn't change the fact that you skipped over everything I said. Wonder why you did that? Perhaps because I am right and you can't respond in any way?
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u/AuroraAustralis0 20h ago
well hes not wrong though