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The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech, have been having a meltdown for the last few days over the presence of Jesse Singal on the site. He is literally the most blocked user on the whole site. The current state of affairs is that they no longer post violent fantasies of killing him, after the moderation team indicated that they don't see a violation of terms and services in his account activity, they graduated into violent fantasies of killing him coupled with his home address attached. There's also a change.org petition for banning him, and I believe there are videos of prominent activists filming themselves signing it.
Jesse, for those of you who don't know, is a cohost of the Blocked And Reported podcast dedicated to internet drama, probably most relevant to users here as the place where Tracing Woodgrains had a brief stint. Jesse is not unlike JK Rowling in the eyes of the activists, in that he's 99% onboard with the left agenda, but has some doubts about some details of transgenderism. Even less doubts than her, in that his opinions is that some children are definitely trans, but some others will come to regret medical interventions, so caution should be exercised. And that's enough to label him as a heretical transphobe for the Bluesky users.
What was the trifecta for an effortful enough comment, event, context, personal opinion? Well, for the personal opinion, I always thought that the idea of heretics as more reviled than heathens was somewhat self-indulgent, but I'm starting to believe that idea.
Anecdotally, I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter. Mormons and Muslims may both be wrong, and in fact the Muslims may be objectively more incorrect than the Mormons - but the Mormons try to pass themselves off as Christians, and the Muslims don't. The Mormons form a kind of threat to Christian identity or Christian unity in a way that the Muslims don't.
This may just be the barberpole model of fashion again. I'm a Christian, nobody is ever going to confuse me with a Muslim, but people might confuse me with a Mormon, and so I need to more militantly ostracise Mormons in order to make the distinction clear.
Or it might just be that I experience Mormons (or Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists or whoever) as in a sense making a 'direct' attack on who I am, whereas outsiders are not doing that.
If we jump from explicit religion to pseudo-religion (I don't really consider liberalism or LGBT or progressivism to be religions, but many here do), it would not surprise me if the same dynamic is at work. A Bluesky progressive doesn't need to worry about actual conservatives because everybody on Bluesky already has very strong anti-conservative antibodies. Jesse Singal, however, like J. K. Rowling, is already a liberal and present in liberal spaces - and unless you make sure to ostracise him clearly to send a message, less aware liberals might listen to him.
Of course, this argument can only do so much, because if you look at the handful of conservatives on Bluesky, they don't do much better. Here's David French on Bluesky defending the Tennessee trans case. Look at the comments - nobody is sparing him, or going, "Oh, well, he's a conservative, he's outside the tribe, whatever." He is being predictably and brutally attacked. (Particularly amusing considering how more right-wing people on Twitter brigade him now, but I guess you can't win.)
sounds like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Well, yes, and I take the whole "heretics are more hated than infidels" observation to be the same distinction.
I wouldn't say so.
Infidels in this case are the far group but when the infidels actually are right beside you they don't become more palitable than the heretic, in fact it's the opposite. When a group of infidels become available as an outgroup rather than a fargroup it frequently forces the nearby outgroups to band together against the new outgroup. This happens on the national levels in the case of regular wars as well.
That's not quite what I'm talking about in the specific example of myself - I meet a lot more Muslims in person than I do Mormons. It's the identity claim that gets under my skin.
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