LogFAQs > #986450042

willythemailboy posted...

In principle this is no different from firing teachers for calling their coworkers racial slurs.

I'd say that falls more under the umbrella of preventing personal harassment than policing their speech.

willythemailboy posted...

Religion is generally considered part of that intrinsic identity and is constitutionally protected as such. With that in mind, if one teacher believes gay marriage is an affront to God and another is posting "death to homophobes", which one is the school district legally obligated to fire?

Which of those is more likely to result in somebody dying, given equivalent exposure?

willythemailboy posted...

I think we may see that at some point. If you have the entire media class constantly calling Trump and various other Republican figures Hitler, then something happens to those figures, are they really talking about the actual Hitler or "literally Hitler"? Is the left even capable of seeing a difference?

Obvious deflection is obvious.

willythemailboy posted...

Violence requires nothing else to cause physical harm

Is it an act of violence to feed peanuts to somebody that you know is allergic to peanuts?

Is it an act of violence to secretly tamper with the seatbelt your passenger is using such that if you happen to get into an accident they're twice as likely to be killed?

Is it an act of violence to trick somebody you know is epileptic into viewing a seizure trigger?

Is it an act of violence to unleash an aggressive dog on somebody?

Is it an act of racial violence to make it illegal to suture the wounds of black people?

There are many examples of actions that have a clear causal link to harm but require an intermediary to inflict it, even without getting into overly-reductive pedantry like "it's not my fault he had enough blood pressure to bleed out after I shot him" or "I didn't kill him, the bullet did!" that are more jokes than legitimate logical exercises. To call those many of those actions "non-violent" is obviously nonsense, but when you accept that, the line becomes significantly blurrier.

Misgendering is comparable to triggering an allergy: it places the person's safety at risk due to a part of their body responding poorly to it. It's not a guarantee of harm, particularly if such exposure is relatively rare (which would technically make it more analogous to an intolerance than an allergy because that captures the dose-dependent nature, but that's beside the point), and it's the response of the victim's body that creates the harm rather than causing it directly, but there is still a clear causal link between the act and the harm. The intermediary does not change that.

The difference between violence and incitement to violence is that incitement requires somebody else to make a competent decision to cause harm, not simply that there is an intermediate between the action and the associated harm. In the vast majority of cases (at risk of appealing to authority, we'll say that refers to any case that wouldn't qualify for MAID because that's easier than spelling out exceptions), suicide is not a competent decision, and that means whatever triggered the suicide bears at least some culpability for it.