[mdszy]

Exactly. When I read,

"two main arguments: damaging a person is morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is worse than physically damaging an object."

I couldn't help but think "Yes? That's exactly correct. Who would ever think otherwise?"

[finnthehuman]

The quoted argument may be true, but it is not sufficient to argue that psychologically damaging someone is violence.

It's a bit like affirming the consequence. If we posit that (physical) violence causes damage, and that a person can be psychologically damaged, it's not a strong argument to work backwards that anything that causes damage is violence.

With that path of logic I could also say: pan-frying food causes it to become cooked, therefore pan-frying is a form of broiling.

We're talking about language so of course we can overload the word "violence" to mean more than exclusively physical acts. But without hard and fast boundaries, it becomes harder to communicate. And this article is talking about a reduction in clarity to a classification.

We can expect to find that for some number of people, their moral and legislative opinions about "violence" are strictly limited to physical acts. You may disagree with those people, and that's fine. But we can't change their opinions just by unilaterally altering the descriptive boundaries of the words they use to express their opinions.

[mdszy]

There's a really funny thing about language, it's fascinating really: All words are made up.

[naasking]

All words are made up, but all meaning is not.

[blotter_paper]

Strongly disagree.

[naasking]

1 + 1 = 2

Is the meaning of this statement independent of the symbols used? Can the meaning be found in nature, outside of our minds, or is it an artifact of our minds or language?

[blotter_paper]

I wouldn't say that being found in nature means that something is not made up. Issus coleoptratus evolved gears long before humans invented them, yet gears seem purely phenomenal -- I wouldn't expect the noumenon to have anything directly corresponding to gears in it, "gear" is just a useful concept we have that lets us categorize part of an insect or a bicycle (both of which are made up themselves, of course).

There may be discrete math in the noumenon, but I'm not convinced of that. For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics). Math is the simplest case you can make, but I don't see a compelling reason to accept it as a given.

[naasking]

So giving someone a paper cut is worse than burning down someone's store in which their life savings were invested? Come on, these issues aren't covered by such trivial sound bites.

[happytoexplain]

You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express. The article, and the parent post, both do not equate such a contrived minor injury to destroying an entire business, and you absolutely know this.

[naasking]

> You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express.

The position, as stated, is literally false which my argument by absurdity demonstrates. So what I expect, is that people attempt to make true statements, and where the truth value is contextual, then their phrasing also ought to reflect that nuance, ie. damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object.

There are no qualifiers in the original claim to reflect this nuance, and like it or not, people absolutely do believe unqalified claims until they are challenged on it. Why do you think slogans and propaganda are so effective.

[mdszy]

I'll take "things literally nobody is saying" for 500, Alex.