Or is that a kind of "telling me what I mean" ...?
/jordan
I had a feeling you would say that, but I don't think it is. Saying I think what you said is wrong is not the same as saying that what you said was imposing an inaccurate interpretation on what someone else said. I suppose, to be precise, the latter could be considered a special case of the former.
When in your second post in this thread you asked rhetorically whether street crime was worse than corporate crime (and I admit I'm stuffing way too much into those two summary terms), it struck me at first as an instance of an argument that seldom gets anywhere. But as I read on, I saw that you were really saying that to focus on one kind of violence was a way of ignoring other kinds, and naturally, I agree with that.
The stuff about "liberals" worrying too much about other people's behavior, while accurate as far as it goes, is not quite fair. Most people of whatever convictions are too concerned with other people's behavior---and in a way similar to what you describe about favoring one kind of violence over another, this serves to keep them from worrying enough about their own behavior.
I do think the state assuming a monopoly on violence probably was at that stage an advance over the war of each against each, but violence remains a problem (and it takes many forms, some unacknowledged as such, I agree). Someone once said about the Golden Rule, "It represents the most advanced statement of ethics we have come up with---alas!" Violence still seems to many people indispensable as a means of social change---alas! Its continued use looks to me like the continued use of fossil fuels: alternatives have not quite become as ready to hand, and so many people prefer to carry on as if the old ways were not a dire existential threat to us all.