That's only true if you use a definition of "violence" which is so far outside the accepted definition as to make conversation impossible. Farming and mining are in no way violence unless you resort to idiosyncratic definitions.
I guess if you limit “violence” to violence against humans only? I’ve always thought that violence was applicable to animals and plants as well, so I guess we differ there.
Intentional harm that causes death is firmly in the violence category, imho.
the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy is pretty much the accepted definition, afaik
I’m not thinking of violence as some kind of universal bad thing though, it’s part of the natural world.
Huh. I don’t think in my experience that the term violence is seldom applied to things outside of humans, and IME the terms economic violence and social violence, emotional violence, and many others are common parlance. Perhaps we come from different cultures. At any rate, given the definition I find in several dictionaries I think my point stands. I will concede that coercion, exploitation, or extortion might be better descriptors.
The term violence, when applied in any context, is applied in context. With a scope and meaning determined as much by tacitly accepted scope as it is by lexicon.
So, to all of your questions— “no”. You are wrong, on all counts, because you are using language itself to set a scene where it has no right, attempting to have a meaning context-free applied to one contextual—- but only when it suits you. That isn’t conversation or discussion— it’s performative, and so you cannot be correct where there is no correctness to be had, only performance.
You are right, some people are stretching that word a lot.
I don’t think that’s changed how most people interpret the word. More of a weakening of its meaning often with an activist or persuasive bent.
Toxic is another word similarly getting stretched and watered down by some.
> Farming is violence.
This would definitely fall into the stretched / watered down pattern.
I don’t think the other strong words you are using are any different in this context.
I am not saying you don’t have a point, but over dramatizing can make it hard to relate to, when people are being expected to accept a level of verbal shrillness that isn’t necessary to make a point.
Humanity is certainly damaging a lot of ecosystems, not by any single farmer, but in aggregate. Change is normal, but we are driving it faster than nature can keep up with. It is a problem.
But outside of poetic or proselytizing use, violence usually means inflicting intentional harm, not a problem of conflict between reasonable local tradeoffs (creating food being a positive use of land) vs. the global impact that needs to be balanced too.
That's only true if you use a definition of "violence" which is so far outside the accepted definition as to make conversation impossible. Farming and mining are in no way violence unless you resort to idiosyncratic definitions.