Comment on Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City

• sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Oh, are you asking me, personally, for a definition of violence, just flat out, with no context?

  I’d say violence is anything that causes unnecessary suffering to a living being, or significant damage to a nonliving thing.

  What exactly do I mean by that?

  Well, its quite context dependent.

  Is burning down a Tesla dealership violent?

  Sure!

  Is a lesser act of violence in pursuit of a reduction of much, much greater violence justifiable?

  Again, context matters, but generally speaking, the world is built upon violence, people just disagree about when it is justified.

  If a man has pummeled you with hammer blows, you’d be justified in doing some violence back to him to get him to stop.

  If a cartoon supervillain has become either the most or second most poweful man in the world, he has a history of and declared intention to commit mass systemic violence against hundreds of millions of people… and burning down some of his shittily designed and built self-immolating cars stands a good chance at knocking him, his grip on the minds of idiot sycophants, and his overall level of power and influence down a peg?

  When there are no ‘legitimate’ means that will effectively do this, effectively lessen his capacity to do violence against millions?

  Well, I’d rather not keep taking the hammer blows.

  If you’ve got a more peaceful way to stop the hammering, I’d love to hear it… but my bones are breaking.

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  • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    are you asking me, personally, for a definition of violence

    No I asked for a definition that doesn’t include property damage.

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    • sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well you accused me of whataboutism, so I explained how… yeah you could see it that way if you only look at the surface, but it’s really a way of illustrating a more complex idea.

      And well, here you go again, attempting to distill everything into neat, simple little boxes.

      Twice now I quite literally explained to you how context is important in … you know, definitions, which literally are a network of syntactic associations that are context… and now you’ve selectively replied by removing all of the context I gave.

      So uh, yes, I’m glad we’ve cleared up that you are definitionally a simpleton, only insterested in very surface level, simple understandings of things.

      When the person that started this thread said ‘property damage is not violence’, they likely (I can’t read minds, but I’ve got a hunch) meant that property damage is not of the same magnitude of severity, does not or should not be judged by the same set of standards as violence against a person, that the entirety of a scenario involving violence should be considered when assessing it.

      IE, they’re using shorthand, and I attempted to unpack some of that shorthand for you.

      Sort of like how the colloquial definition of ‘theft’ generally includes shoplifting, but generally excludes wage theft by employers, despite wage theft being of considerably greater monetary magnitude than shrink loss.

      If you want ‘a definition’ of violence that doesn’t include property damage, here you go:

      Violence is any act that causes harm to a thing capable of suffering.

      Now you can point out how that’s a flawed definition, and I will redirect you to my comments on your own flawed and favored definition of terrorism from the FBI, and my own previous attempts at better defining violence, and then maybe we can have the actually interesting conversation about violence and property that you’ve thus far done your damndest to avoid.

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      • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I didn’t need any of that explained to me. I understand and agree. You’re trying to argue about things that I am not interested in arguing about.

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    • xthexder@l.sw0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      No I asked for a definition that doesn’t include property damage.

      If you read what they’re saying, they made a pretty good argument for why the definition of violence can include property damage.

      You can stick your head in the sand all you want, but only reading answers that match your opinion is a good way to go insane.

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      • Miaou@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        The initial claim was that violence does not include property damage. So our self-proclaimed anarchist contradicted themselves in two consecutive comments.

        Talk about sticking your head in the head, with reading comprehension like that y’all should go back to twitter

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      • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Brother, are you blind?

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