People harm themselves. that's the action. thats the violence.
I can go online and say manga sucks. Somewhere, some kid is going to get very, very angry. He/she might even do something very irrational.
People who wish to equate words with violence do so solely to justify responding to words with violence. The goal here is to make it acceptable to kill you for what you say.
You have to admit there is a very significant difference between going online and saying manga sucks and participating in an organized and targeted harassment of a particular person.
I know why you are making that analogy: you are seeking to find a simple demarcation between physical violence and words. But it's clear in both the law and regular life that words and violence are highly intertwined and difficult to separate. This is why courts and trials exist. One person shooting another person is a simple fact. But what if the other person told them they were going to kill them? What if the other person had subjected them to years of physical abuse? What if the other person had subjected them to years of emotional abuse? None of these erase the act of the shooting, but they do contextualize it and change the law's assessment of what needs to happen.
It's also a big stretch to think that most people who equate words with violence are trying to justify doing violence. They are trying to foreground that words do indeed cause violence: either by inciting other people to physical violence or, as the GP has said, people do violence to themselves. Peoples' bodies do have harmful stress responses to being repeatedly berated and placed in an environment of emotional adversity. Those who place people in those situations are culpable, even if they did not put hands on those people.
It's not a stretch at all. They want to punish words as if they were violence, i.e. put people in prison, send armed men to arrest them forcibly, etc. That's at the very least. This is openly stated, "some words should be illegal" is 1000% a sanction on violence against people for the words they speak.
In your examples, you get it right at the end: we seek to contextualize actions and use peoples words as evidence of context. It is the context of the acts that matter, not the words said.
Right, and zoomers would probably broadly agree with that, but almost everyone else doesn't, so it's very contentious. "Sticks and stones" liberals still basically control the world, at least until we start dying off in 30 years or so.
