Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Why do you need the caveat? “You’re worth less than a cockroach” is more straightforward, a stronger sentiment, and still not a True Threat. I’m not seeing what the extra cruft adds.
You will never avoid social risks. Thinking you can avoid them, if only you pick the right plausibly-deniable phrases, is a classic blunder. Our cultural immune system will recognize it as “smug,” “masturbatory,” or even “smarmy.”
Any message which achieves your goal will be obvious to people other than the intended targets. I recommend dropping the whole plan and loving thy neighbor.
"you are worth less than a cockroach" would be safer, but less effective in my view. For one thing, it is more formulaic, and for that reason less "powerful" in the same way that dead metaphors are less powerful than live metaphors: readers of such sentences immediately take cognitive shortcuts to get at the underlying sense, so they no longer evoke vivid mental imagery in the mind.
Secondly, the version with the extra cruft explicitly brings in the concept of death, and therefore can come across as more threatening, whereas "You’re worth less than a cockroach" does not.
You are right that social risks are unavoidable, and perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned it as a desideratum. The point is not to "dog whistle" (to have one message for the intended recipient, and a different one for everyone else). The point is rather to have the hateful and/or violent intent behind the message be transparent to everyone involved, yet the message be couched in language that allows for the highest degree of gloat-worthy plausible deniability, leaving B with as little recourse as possible. Given that these two properties pull in different directions, I'm interested to know whether there's any way to strike the best balance as it were.
"Less effective" at what? would seem to be the key question here.
Who is this person to you that you not only care enough to hate them, but care enough about what they think of you that you need them them to know that you hate them?
If @netstack's advice to "love thy nieghbor" curdles in your throat, instead ask yourself what would Don Draper say?
There is no particular person I have in mind (although I don't mind if people assume otherwise). The question is mostly technical, an intellectual exercise. If you want to know the real motivation behind me asking the question, it's largely this: that I believe that free speech laws should not outlaw "true threats" (i.e. people should be legally permitted to threaten each other with death, as long as they don't practice what they preach, so to speak) because if I'm right, it's trivially easy for a would-be issuer of a "true threat" to reword his message so that, while the overall psychological impact on the recipient would be nearly the same, the language used has near perfect plausible deniability.
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It strikes me that these are two entirely different things here. I have read, in newspapers and magazines, respectable journalists express complete and utter disdain for certain public figures they disliked, including turns of phrase just as bad as your cockroach example, without fear that said public figures would have them arrested. And it wasn't just Trump, this was in the pre-2016 era.
But violent intent, the idea that you yourself wish to commit actual interpersonal harm to B, that's another matter. Are you, in fact, hoping to make this person believe that you're going to come over and beat the shit out of them, but in a way that's plausibly deniable enough that they won't be able to take any legal action against you?
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While variety is the spice of life, I find the phrasing too cumbersome.
“Gloat-worthy plausible deniability” is a bad heuristic. It sounds like a good idea, but I guarantee you, it does the opposite of what you want, making it easier to dismiss out of hand. Don’t write for yourself; write for your audience.
Or don’t write at all. I don’t know why writing better hate mail is so appealing to you, but I am willing to bet it’s not worth the trouble.
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