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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

Using speech to call for violence against someone is intermediated by the minds and bodies of listeners, who have their own free will, their own intelligence, and their own responsibility.

In U.S. law we have the "imminent lawless action" test from Brandenburg v. Ohio as one of the main tests for whether speech can be regulated because of its likelihood of successfully encouraging others to break the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

Even when speech fails the Brandenburg test, it is still not literally considered a form of violence, but something else like incitement (or sometimes part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise or something).

All of those legal discussions are pretty much expressly about not conflating speech with violence, even if speech sometimes has a role in encouraging people to commit violence.

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I'm arguing a cultural perspective.

Edit:

Law uses language in a way that is different from how laypeople use it. I am not concerned that I would be unable to convince a judge that it's violence because I know it's the judge's job to think of violence as having a specific, narrow, unchanging (except under certain circumstances) meaning. Outside that context, violence can take the form of speech.

I see it as a great sign of maturity and civilization that we can make a firm distinction between words and violence. To me, the judge's "job" you mention is part of that.

This distinction could be something that has to be actively learned (like, maybe most people in human history would have instinctively resorted to physical violence over an insult). But if so, actively learning it is a great thing.

> I see it as a great sign of maturity and civilization that we can make a firm distinction between words and violence.

I see it as a great sign of maturity and civilization that we can understand the dangers of speech without minimizing and dismissing them.

Distinguishing speech from violence is not to dismiss the potential for speech to cause hurt feelings.

> hurt feelings

This is an example of how the violence of speech is often minimized and dismissed. Causing hurt feelings is violence, particularly doing so intentionally.

I did not dismiss speech’s potential to cause hurt feelings, I acknowledged and affirmed it. It is not to be taken lightly. Yet, we need an effective demarcation between speech and physical action, where resorting to physical action is deemed even more severe than words. So which one do you propose?

> So which one do you propose?

I've used an example in this thread: "physical violence". That shit ain't hard, just stop saying speech can't be violence when it obviously can be.

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