Тег: Violence

Freedom of speech and its limits

A call for murder, is that freedom of speech or not?
An insult, when I call someone “short” with the intention to “offend”…
1. …a person who is short,
2. … a person who is tall, is that freedom of speech?
If I engage in bullying using insults, is that freedom of speech?

Generally, is bullying a form of aggression? If one reads Svetov, for some reason he believes it is not.

анонимный вопрос

As usual, I will begin by briefly defining the terms. Aggression is the initiation of a conflict. Conflict is the presence of grievances. Aggressive violence is the initiation of a conflict through the use of violence. NAP is a legal principle according to which no one can be granted the right to unpunished aggressive violence. Freedom of speech is a legal principle according to which words do not constitute a violation of the NAP. Bullying is the public tearing apart of a tied-up animal by a pack of dogs (there are many other uses of the word “travlya,” but in the figurative sense when people “hunt” or bully other people, it refers specifically to this method of hunting/baiting). An insult is a manipulation intended to provoke the insulted person into escalating the conflict, preferably to the point of violating the NAP, in order to justify further, more serious sanctions against the insulted party.

If you agree with the proposed definitions, it should become quite obvious to you that the content of any words—be it slander, a call for murder, or even an order to commit murder—according to the principle of freedom of speech, does not violate the NAP. Nevertheless, words can easily be a form of aggression, albeit non-violent, since words can be used to initiate a conflict.

It is also easy to see that I have defined the concept of bullying vaguely, because it is not a legal term, but a purely polemical one. Nevertheless, it stems from the image of an amusement involving the tearing apart of an animal deprived of its freedom, and this is a fairly important point. As long as the object of your actions, carried out through verbal insults, can freely avoid the conflict simply by ending communication, I would not call it bullying—the factor of coercion is absent. In other words, I define bullying as systematic insults under conditions of coerced communication; that is, there is an element of aggressive violence in bullying, but not in the words, but specifically in the restriction of the freedom to leave the conflict zone.

Thus, verbal persecution in prison or in a conscript army is bullying. Similar persecution at work is not bullying, but simply a conflict. It can be ended by resigning. Persecution in school is bullying only if the persecuted person is forbidden from leaving the school.

An important point. Legal responsibility for bullying lies specifically with the one who restricts freedom, not with the one who bullies. That is, not with the dogs, but with the one who chained the bear to the post. This is exactly why responsibility for bullying in school lies with the parents, teachers, and the state: the state obliges parents to provide the child with a secondary education, teachers apply sanctions to the child for leaving school without permission, and parents deny the child the right to switch to homeschooling. Similarly, responsibility for bullying in prison lies with those who put the conflicting parties in one cell and locked them in, and for bullying in a conscript army—those who conscripted the conflicting parties into one military unit and forbade them from leaving it.

As for Svetov, he did indeed, in a conversation with Boris Kagarlitsky, get somewhat confused in the definitions of “aggression,” “violence,” “aggressive violence,” and “self-defense,” which his interlocutor caught him on, and as a result, the debate was lost. Therefore, the assumption that he was insufficiently strict with concepts in some other conversation does not seem improbable to me. Furthermore, the term “bullying” itself has no precise definition, so a specific phenomenon that someone calls bullying may either include aggressive violence or be pure non-violent aggression. Moreover, one party to a conflict may call the behavior of the other party bullying, even if it contains neither violence nor even aggression. For example, someone performs their job poorly, receives criticism regarding the actual deficiencies in response, and loses their bonus. Why would that not be a reason to position oneself as a victim of bullying?

A violation of the NAP is first and foremost not the dogs, but the chain.

When it comes to violence, only physical violence is mentioned. But various methods of psychological violence can cause physiological problems with the CNS, with the brain. If one arranges constant quarrels, doesn’t let [someone] sleep, and other “breathing into the tube.” One could say that “one can leave this,” just as one can hire security.

anonymous question

When the actions of one person cause damage suffered by another, and the evidence of damage and its assessment can be demonstrated, this is sufficient to demand compensation for damages, and it is completely irrelevant whether physical violence specifically took place.

It is another matter that damage resulting from non-violent actions is much harder to prove, which is why an external arbitrator may deny compensation for damages in such cases. This is precisely why, in the case of psychological violence, a more successful response tactic may be not a lawsuit, but, for example, retaliatory psychological violence.

Of course, when a victim of psychological violence receives such recommendations, they have reason to despair.
What can be said here? Just as it is very useful to possess a weapon and know how to use it for direct protection against physical violence—and only after successful self-defense to file lawsuits against those who survived—so too, for direct protection against psychological violence, it is useful to train the psyche and know how to use psychological weapons—and only after successful self-defense to engage in ruining the reputation of the unsuccessful abuser, if they haven’t already put their head in a noose.

If the state is destroyed, corporations will take its place, won’t they?

Anonymous question

A lot here depends on what you put into the concept of “the state.”

If we are talking about who will become the new provider of the services that the state currently provides, then yes, of course, who if not corporations would take their place. Private companies are already successfully competing with state ones in the markets of medicine, education, pension provision, the creation of technical standards, and much more—effectively any market-demanded services that the state does not explicitly usurp.

As for those functions over which the state tries to usurp a monopoly—establishing arbitrary rules in a certain territory, forcibly redistributing property, and so on—then illegal criminal groups will take the place of the state here. In essence, the state currently differs from them only by legality. It is this very crutch that I want to kick out from under it.

In this regard, many people ask: will crime increase if one of the criminal groups loses its dominant status? History tells us that it could either increase or decrease. If we destroy the state for the sake of the sacred right of barons to uncontrollably plunder villeins, then crime will increase. If we destroy the state for the sake of the sacred right of citizens to uncontrollably own property, then crime will decrease. The devil is in the details: not only the state of the environment is important, but also the ideas that guide the actions of the people living in that environment.

bad, bad corporation!