This very forum is moderated by a person who openly conflates words and violence.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45203452
All: if you can't respond in a non-violent way, please don't post until you can.
By non-violent I mean not celebrating violence nor excusing it, but also more than that: I mean metabolizing the violence you feel in yourself, until you no longer need to express it aggressively.
I never felt irritated nor angry about Charlie’s public execution. Perplexed, definitely not surprised. But this statement from Dan had irritated me.
Words aren’t violence. Speech won’t shoot you in the neck in front of your wife and stream it live.
We have perfectly functioning terms for other concepts, we don’t need to Equality everything. When we do that nothing will mean anything, and we’ll soon find ourselves imprisoning or executing those we disagree with. Oops, too fucking late!
I agree that this is weird, but in dang's defense, "non-violent communication" is a commonplace term, and has its roots in the nonviolent peace movement. Like there's entire books written about it etc. It's a terrible word choice, I agree wholeheartedly, but given how widespread a concept it is at this point I don't think you can blame people who use it for that. It's like, "WhatsApp" is a terrible app name but I don't cringe when my mum says its name.
It's actually a pretty useful tool. I wish it was called "compassionate communication" or something like that though.
Oh wow seems like the guy who invented it hates the term too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Alter...
This very forum is moderated by a person who openly conflates words and violence.
Wow, that explains so much insanity from this otherwise excellent forum. "Respond in a non-violent way" is insane!
I read it as:
Dan is a moderator on a forum and his goal is to maintain a level of civil discourse rather than an aggressive style of communication. It's a very specific definition of "violence" for a specific context and perhaps there's room for clearer terminology.