and agree that it will probably strike a chord with the people who you describe.

That being said, those people are still ignorant. I contend that accepting violence in this more subtle, cerebral form is a fundamental error made by "progressives" (and indeed all other humans) in their arguments. Violence divides people by nature. It pits one person against another. It begs for an equally violent response from the target of the original attack, then a response from the initiator, and on and on into perpetuity. The question should be: How is it that people can not see the futility of this course of action and inevitably go on waring with each other?

IMO we are talking about a basic, negative human impulse which has become all the more dangerous as our species and its technology has evolved. It is evident to me that all violence is negative. The scale of the violence makes no difference, except in our perception of it. For example, show anyone a picture of an Iraqi child with his arms blown off and body burned from an errant US bomb and they will say that it is negative. But this overt, physical violence did not come from out of nowhere. It began as intellectual violence in the form of greed, nationalism, hegemonic foreign policy, religious intolerance, ect. I'm not saying that all intellectual violence will blossom into physical violence, but ALL physical violence grows out of intellectual violence.

I don't think we can give ourselves a free pass on this subtle violence and call ourselves progressive.