I suspect we feel the same way about the actual harms of care denial, i.e. they’re unacceptable, immoral/unethical, cause unnecessary suffering and death, are tragic and horrific, and reforms are required.
But we disagree about the use of language. Many people reduce complexities to the most extreme word they can think of. It’s very popular these days to call many things “violent”.
The issue is that this kind of reductionism makes people stop taking the word seriously, and by proxy the people using it. In my opinion, this ultimately hurts the underlying message.
> To constrain violence to physicality is to ignore and minimize the myriad creative ways we've concocted as a society to inflict harm
This is fallacious and untrue. There is no reason to believe that using precise/accurate (and no less expressive) language is synonymous with ignoring harms. To reiterate the point above, overloading language is far more likely to cause this problem because at some point people have no idea what the word means to the person using it.
I consider myself “woke” by the original definition and spirit of the word. But you’d get 10 different answers about what that actually means these days.
The looser these definitions become, the less able we are to communicate effectively and this is one of the many ingredients driving increased polarization and the feeling that we exist in separate realities.