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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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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?

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