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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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Having said all that “too bad the shooter missed” isn’t political, it’s condoning violence.

Seems like this principle could be stretched arbitrarily far. "I support Israel and hope they are able to achieve their military objectives in Gaza in a timely fashion" is also condoning violence.

Eh. All succinctly-stated principles can be stretched arbitrarily far. This is a good thing, because it's not that the principle ever "runs out" or stops, it's that it runs into a conflicting principle with a greater priority in the topic at hand. When "don't advocate for violence" runs into "sometimes we have to support just wars," the former principle doesn't cease to exist, and should in fact inform and temper to some extent our obedience to the latter principle.

Obviously we all obey multiple principles, and each of them takes priority in different situations. Objecting that a single stated principle can be stretched overly much is similar to an isolated demand for rigor, because it assumes/implies that the original comment advocates for following only that one single principle, meaning that the only way for the principle to be correct is if it encapsulates the sum total of morality.

Put another way, statements like "self defense is justified" and "violence is not political" do not inherently claim to solve for all possible edge cases and shouldn't be read that way.

Reciprocal violence is still violence.

Of course, my point is that no one here thinks that someone should lose their job because of tweeting something like that, even though it violates the "condoning violence" clause outlined above.

No probably not.

I suspect some may draw a distinction between condoning or advocating for specific political violence domestically and general or specific military violence by a foreign state against their forever conflict opponent.

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