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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I wouldn't read too much into this example. "[outgroup] literally wants to kill all [ingroup]" is a very common culture war hyperbole. Even if it's not literally true, no-one on your own team is going to question it, and it's a good way to rally the troops.

Just try searching Reddit comments for the string "literally want us dead" and you'll see plenty of examples:

And lest you think it's exclusively a blue tribe thing, here are a few examples of "liberals literally want conservatives dead" from right wing subreddits: 1, 2, 3. These are somewhat rarer, but Reddit has considerably more left-wing users and communities, so we can't necessarily draw a conclusion about which side uses this rhetorical tactic more.

Whether someone "literally wants us dead" is a fact-specific question. Even if not many people on a side literally literally want you dead, there's the question of how often and how directly a side says they want you dead, whether they encourage or discourage this rhetoric, and how much bad faith that rhetoric indicates.

It's not a foregone conclusion that, by this standard, the right and left equally want each other dead. If you ask a conservative why he thinks liberals want him dead, he's probably going to point to statements that are fairly close to "all conservatives should die". If you ask a trans activist and the trans activist points to suicide rates, that's not the same kind of thing. Even if neither side is likely to go on a shooting spree, so neither side literally wants the other dead, this isn't the same kind of "wants us dead" and is not symmetrical.

The left saying that conservatives "want us dead" is related to the strategy of demanding that victims must be listened to and their wishes must be obeyed. So you get things like "the right doesn't want us to do X, and that may result in people dying, so they want us dead". You don't see this much on the right.

I remember when "free helicopter rides" was a meme in certain right-wing circles, certainly. I've also seen enough far-right memes of trans people literally getting hanged or put to death camps to suit myself, but they're also kind of hard to search for due to various search algorithms in play, and so on.

I would agree that "free helicopter rides", used against the left as often as "fascist" or "Nazi" is against the right, would be a similar threat level. I don't agree that "free helicopter rides" is actually used against the left as often as those.

One involves a direct threat of violence, the other doesn’t.

"Punch a Nazi" sounds more direct than vague references to helicopter rides. That's without going into variations on #KillAllMen / #DieCisScum / bringing guillotines to TERF events, etc.

But that's not what the comparison was.

The point was whether there are statements that left-wingers could point to that amount to "right-wingers want us dead". There are.

The last point raised by Jiro was about the relative amounts of each statement, and the response from you was about the threat of violence being more direct from the right. This was a response to your last argument.

statements that are fairly close to "all conservatives should die".

Any examples?

What? The previous post has three links to conservatives saying that liberals want them dead. I'm not sure about the first, but the second is "They call everyone who disagrees with them "Nazis" so that they can dehumanize them and justify literally any action against them." and the third is in response to a SWATting, which literally literally tries to get someone killed, as in actually pushing up daisies in a coffin buried in the ground. These are fundamentally different from "the right promotes policies that increase suicide rates so they want us killed".

If left wing people referring to conservatives as Nazis is 'fairly close to "all conservatives should die"', then surely the same could be said of conservatives referring to liberals as groomers.

He's saying that because the context is that if someone is a Nazi, you are permitted to do anything to them you want, including things that are normally not okay to do to people. Even if the liberal wouldn't actually shoot someone for being a Nazi, he's saying that it's okay to hurt them; this is in a different ballpark than "they are increasing the risk of suicide".

I don't get the impression that conservatives, by calling people groomers, are saying "so it's okay to do anything you want to hurt them". If you think they are, fair point.

I think people who sexually abuse children are at least as hated by the general public as Nazis. Read an article on Reddit about pedophilia/child molestation and it's not uncommon to see upvoted comments wishing for pedophiles to be tortured or executed in a gruesome fashion - "punch a Nazi" is tame by comparison.

If the argument is about the mental state of the sides using these epithets being different - i.e. both sides label their opponents as members of a group which is universally reviled and seen as deserving of violence, but the left does it with the goal of opening the door to violence and the right does it with some other goal - then I'm curious what leads you to this conclusion.

"Punch a groomer" isn't nearly as common as "punch a Nazi". "Groomer" also seems to be used only under specific circumstances--incidents involving underage children and sexuality; as a threat to liberals in general, it's nowhere near the threat that "Nazi" implies to conservatives.

Ah, I may have misread your comment. When you said 'point to statements' I thought you meant they'd point to specific statements that liberals or whoever actually had made, and that you were implying that that did actually happen.

If someone tries to literally literally kill you, surely it counts as a statement that they want you dead?

There's no doubt it's hyperbole, but you can make yourself believe if you repeat it loudly and often enough. You can whip yourself into a paranoid frenzy, and make yourself believe that JK Rowling is hiding underneath your bed waiting to strangle you in your sleep, and turn every single debate over pronoun usage into a life-and-death struggle for survival. Every day it's 1933 in Germany, forever. And this is in fact, effective political strategy for people who liberals find sympathetic.

It's the boy who cried wolf, if every second word out of your mouth is "conservatives and Republicans and religious people want us dead and not alone want us dead, intend to really genuinely kill us", then it's going to go the same way as 'racist' and 'fascist' - probably already has, because you don't seem to believe they genuinely think Republicans want to shoot them or however they imagine the genociding to go.

It's worse when you look into "what do you mean they want you dead?" and if you get an answer it's "they said under eighteens shouldn't get sex affirming surgery" or something. Oh noes, not letting a fourteen year old cut off breasts/penis (delete as applicable) is literally murdering them!

I mean. Sometimes that might be acceptable. But at the end of the day, it basically boils down to this: an irreversible surgical intervention for chronic and otherwise intractable pain.

A 14-year-old or hell a 20-year-old who herniates a disc and wants surgery gets a lot of scrutiny and there is a bit of gatekeeping going on there. This for an operation that is essentially a crapshoot in terms of outcomes and has no politics associated with it.

I mean, it’s true that ‘literally want us dead’ is a figure of speech, but it tends to play along with imaginary genocides- both in conservative imaginings about the treatment of the unvaxxed and in liberal imaginings about the future treatment of sexual minorities.

It's just another piece of proof that letting "literally" become a synonym of "figuratively" is an abomination of language. How do I even express the cold and real belief that someone wants to unironically and unhyperoblicly kill me?

You would never use figuratively in place of literally in those sentences. Literally is an amplifier, which when used in hyperbole is to be taken figuratively.

I think if you could look into people's hearts, a lot of people want to kill a lot of people.

You can clarify with ‘like, actually’.

Yes of course the old way was better.

You'd get a huge amount of red-tribe examples simply by amassing all the times the Antichrist's regime in Book of Revelation is portrayed as a liberals/socialists/Satanists hunting down conservative Christians to execute them.

A comparison complicated somewhat by the numerous cases within the last century where "liberals" and socialists actually hunted down conservative Christians to execute them, and whose ideologies and symbols remain notably popular to this day.

Why does that complicate the comparison? Doesn't it just complete it (i.e in both cases there were groups of people who did in fact want them dead and killed them and the ideologies and symbols of those groups are still in common use by their current political opponents)?

Edit: Actually, also in both cases there are still people elsewhere in the world actively killing people like them while espousing those ideologies and using those symbols.

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