When I piped up, I noticed some people were eager to make my advocacy for the effectiveness of nonviolence into an absolutist position denying that violence is ever effective, justified, etc., or claiming nonviolence always works, neither of which is something I said or would say. That is, they wanted to turn my “nonviolence is often effective” into “it always works and the other thing never works and I’m against it,” which is to turn a strategy (“nonviolence can work”) into a rigid rule (“it always works”) and an ideology (“and violence is always wrong”). That way lies demagoguery and also detachment from reality and the all-too-common phenomenon of ferocious opposition to what someone didn’t really say.