How I apply (so-called) Non-Violent Communication

If any onlookers (possibly aligned with Bob, possibly not) say, "Hey, um, you might not want to say that, it carries some risk of escalating to violence", I want the culture to provide a strong answer of "No, Bob will not do that—or if he does, it proves to everyone that he's monstrous and we'll throw him in jail faster than you can say 'uncivilized'.  Civilians should act like there's no risk to speaking up, and we will do our best to make this a correct decision."

I see where you're coming from, but it doesn't actually work except for in the egregious cases and NVC highlights a more complete picture that includes the non-egregious cases. If you can't say "I think maybe we should get pizza" without Bob explicitly threatening to punch you in the face, then yes, that is a serious problem and it is crucial that Bob gets shut down.

However, there are two important points here.

One is that even if people respond in the way you prescribe, the person being threatened probably doesn't want to be punched in the face before you haul Bob off, and will likely be swayed by the threat anyway. If you try to pretend this doesn't exist, and say "Oh no, Bob isn't threatening because if he did that would be bad and we'd respond then", then Bob gets to say "Oh yeah, totally not threatening. Would be a shame if someone punched you in the face for suggesting we get pizza. Wink wink." and carry out his coercion while getting off scot free. This isn't good. In order to stop this, you have to make sure Bob feels punished for communicating the threat, even though the threat was "just words".

The second one, which gets at the heart of the issue, is that your prescribed response to Bob threatening violence is to threaten counterviolence (and in the spirit of this conversation, I'll explicitly disclaim here that I'm not saying this is "bad"). It's important that people feel free to express their values and beliefs without fearing violence for contributing to the cooperative endeavor, but "No risk to threatening violence" can't work and is the opposite of what you are trying to do with Bob "speaking up" about what he will do to anyone who suggests getting pizza.

Most real world conflicts aren't so egregious as "I will punch anyone who suggests getting pizza". Usually it's something like Adam lightly bumps into Bob, and Bob says "Watch where you're going, jerk", Adam says "Don't call me a jerk, asshole", Bob says "Call me an asshole again and see what happens", Adam says "If you touch me I'll kill you" and then eventually someone throws the first punch. Literally everything said here is said from a place of "I'm only threatening violence to suppress that guy's unjustified violence", and the "initial aggression" -- if there was any -- was simply not being careful enough not to bump into someone else. And "How careful is "careful enough?" isn't the kind of question we can agree on with enough fidelity and reliability to keep these unstable systems from flying off the rails.

The idea that "Unprovoked violence should be suppressed with zero tolerance [backed by willingness to use violence]" immediately explodes if "microaggressions" are counted as "violence", and so given that policy there's reason to push back applying the term "violent" to smaller infractions. However, that's just because it's a bad policy. Smaller levels of aggression still exist, and if you have to pretend to not see them then you de facto have infinite tolerance for anti-social behavior just below threshold, and clever Bobs will exploit this and provoke their victims into crossing the line while playing innocent. It's a pattern that comes up a lot.

The idea of NVC is to respond to threats of violence with less threat of violence, so that violent tension can fizzle out rather than going super-critial. That doesn't mean you let Bob threaten to punch people who express a liking for pizza, but it does mean that you recognize "Watch where you're going, jerk" as the first step of escalation and recognize that if you do that -- or if you respond to a line like that with "Don't call me a jerk, asshole" -- you may get punched and you will have contributed (avoidably) to that outcome.

but to call non-careful speech violent (either implicitly, or biting the bullet and making it explicit as you do) seems to imply it's your fault for making Bob punch you.  Which is kind of true in a causal sense, but not in a "blame" sense.[1]  

Seems to, yes. But that "seems" is coming from preexisting ideas about "who to blame", and NVC's whole idea is that maybe we should just do less of that in the first place.

The question is "How much do we want to avoid speaking truth so as to avoid people jumping to wrong conclusions when they combine the new truth with other false beliefs of theirs?". Sometimes we're kinda stuck choosing which falsehood for people to believe, but a lot of times we can just speak the truth, and then when people jump to the wrong conclusions, speak more truth. 

Yes, there's something "violent" about a lot of incautious communication. No, that does not call for further aggression, physical or otherwise. Quite the opposite.

Calling it provoking—"non-provoking communication"—would be somewhat better, though I'm not entirely happy with it.

Provocation isn't a bad thing in general though, and doesn't necessarily contain threat of violence. Provocation can be done playfully and cooperatively even when not playful, and is critically important whenever the truth happens to be uncomfortable to anyone involved. Heck, NVC can be quite provocative at times.

"Nonthreatening communication" would be a better fit, IMO. Or "Nonadversarial". "Collaborative communication" works too, but kinda hides what makes it different so I do like the "define by saying what it isn't" kind of name in this case.

"How To Communicate With Uncivilized People Who Are Dangerously Prone To Violence" would be ideal in this sense.

That is a great use case, heh. But that undersells the utility among people who aren't uncivilized or dangerously prone to violence, and obscures why it works with those who are.

But, for abovementioned reasons, I don't want the terminology to have any shred of implication that escalating from speech to violence is justifiable.

I guess I'm less worried about that. I'd prefer those misunderstandings have a chance to surface and be dealt with, because without that it's hard to actually convey the important insights behind NVC.
 

The term gets its name from its historical association with the nonviolence movement (Think Ghandi and MLK.) The basic concept in THAT movement is that when opposing the state or whatever, you essentially say "We wont use violence on you, even if you go as far as to use violence on us, but in doing that you forfeit all moral justification for your violence" as a way to attempt to force the authoritarian entity targeted to empathise with the protestor and recognize the humanity. 

So from that NVC attempts to do something similar with communications. Presumably in its roots in the 1960s non violence movement and rhetorical and communicative techniques used by black folk in the south to try and get government and civil officials to see black folks as equal humans. 

How this translates into a modern context separated away from that specific historical setting is another matter, but within its origin, I dont think hyperbole is quite the right term, as at that point in history black folks where very much in danger of violence, particularly in the more regresive parts of the south.  Again, outside of those contexts, its unclear as to how the term "violence" works here.

It should be noted that Marshall Rosenberg who originated the methodology was not a fan of the term as he disliked it being defined in the negative (ie "not violent", negative) and prefered terms that defined it in the positive like "compassionate communication" ("is compassionate", positive)

My understanding is that M&B is intended to be broader than that, as per:

“So it is, perhaps, noting the common deployment of such rhetorical trickeries that has led many people using the concept to speak of it in terms of a Motte and Bailey fallacy. Nevertheless, I think it is clearly worth distinguishing the Motte and Bailey Doctrine from a particular fallacious exploitation of it. For example, in some discussions using this concept for analysis a defence has been offered that since different people advance the Motte and the Bailey it is unfair to accuse them of a Motte and Bailey fallacy, or of Motte and Baileying. That would be true if the concept was a concept of a fallacy, because a single argument needs to be before us for such a criticism to be made. Different things said by different people are not fairly described as constituting a fallacy. However, when we get clear that we are speaking of a doctrine, different people who declare their adherence to that doctrine can be criticised in this way. Hence we need to distinguish the doctrine from fallacies exploiting it to expose the strategy of true believers advancing the Bailey under the cover provided by others who defend the Motte.” [bold mine]

http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2014/09/motte-and-bailey-doctrines/