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Thanks to @TheBookOfAllan, I decided maybe Twitter slapfights about fantasy authors might not be Too Online to talk about here. I mean, let's face it, the nerd quotient here is pretty damn high. On the rare occasions I write a top-level post, it's usually about the intersection of Culture War squabbles and hobby drama. So -
First They Came for the Fantasy Authors
Brandon Sanderson, in case you don't recognize the name, is a best-selling fantasy author. In impact on the genre today, he's probably second only to George R. R. Martin. He famously finished Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, and he churns out new books at a rate that makes Stephen King look lazy.
(I have read quite a few of his books, and find them reliably entertaining, but Sanderson is a mediocre writer whose schtick is rigorously-defined magic systems and world-building, to the point that his books sometimes read like LitRPGs, and a big overarching cosmology called the "Cosmere" that unites every one of his series into his own personal MCU.)
Sanderson is also a Mormon. If you've noticed we're in the Culture War thread, you might have an inkling where this is going.
From time to time over the years, some LGBT folks have taken a run at Sanderson over his religion. In 2007 or so, he wrote a blog post offering a sort of milquetoast apologetic, basically saying he was totally cool with The Gays but he also believed in the divine revelations of his church so gay marriage is still a no-go, mmkay? He's been under continual pressure by fans to "update" his views, and he kind of has, saying he continues to "learn and grow." He's tossed a few gay and trans characters into his stories, and he's even written a FAQ: How Do You Feel About Gay Characters?. However, he remains a practicing Mormon, continues to tithe to the LDS, and has very carefully never actually walked back the belief that homosexuality is a sin.
So how has he avoided getting the Orson Scott Card/JK Rowling treatment? Well, for one thing, Sanderson is a genuinely nice guy who is affable with everyone, loves his fans, is very encouraging of new authors, and most importantly, generally avoids any kind of culture war and does not get into Twitter fights. He's got legions of defenders, and most of them accept his bland statements of tolerance and acceptance. It's pretty obvious that he does not personally dislike gay people, and I'm sure he would be thrilled if the LDS elders announced tomorrow that they just received a new revelation from God that He's totally cool with The Gays.
For most people, this is sufficient. There are people who are zealous and dogmatic about everything their church teaches, and there are those who clearly struggle sometimes with a religious doctrine that conflicts with their personal feelings. Most people recognize that everyone wrestles with cognitive dissonance, think "live and let live" is good enough, and if they like Brandon Sanderson despite disagreeing with his religious beliefs, they'll recite "no ethical consumption under capitalism" or "how to be a fan of problematic things."
Most people, but not Gretchen Felker-Martin.
Gretchen Felker-Martin is a transwoman with a single published book: Manhunt. If you wanted to create a hostile caricature of an unpleasant leftist conflict theorist who checks every stereotype, you'd have a hard time finding a better archetype. Think trans Arthur Chu with a foothold in SFF.
Manhunt is about (caveat - I haven't read it, this is what I gathered from reviews) a plague that turns all cis men into feral zombies, and in the post-apocalypse, brave stunning transfolx battle for survival against cismen and TERF hordes. (Yes, seriously.) They also harvest testicles for hormones or something, there's a ton of graphic rape and murder, and also apparently there's a throw-away line about JK Rowling being burned alive in her mansion.
Manhunt was published by Tor, which also, incidentally, publishes Brandon Sanderson.
So, a few days ago, Felker-Martin posted this tweet. (ETA: Hilariously, Twitter's new "added context by readers" feature is now defending Sanderson. I wonder how enraging that is to Felker-Martin?)
In itself, this would be hardly a skirmish in the Culture War. Trans woman doesn't like a Mormon author, wants to cancel him, writes stupid Tweet. It looks an obvious move to try to kneecap a rival, but Felker-Martin probably bit off too much to chew this time and has mostly been mocked for presuming to have some sort of gatekeeping role in deciding who SFF will "tolerate."
But - the reason I wrote this is because I've seen the Sanderson criticism take off a little bit, more than in previous attempts. His haters are really trying to give it legs. The Midnight Society, for example, is a woke satirist who is actually, pretty funny most of the time with really on-point skewerings of SFF and horror authors (except when taking obligatory swipes at JK Rowling by portraying her as a slithering snake hissing about Jewssss and transsss), and this tweet started out great (a completely deserved send-up of Sanderson's tropes) before shifting to an unsubtle signal-boost of the discourse started by Felker-Martin.
Twitter and Reddit seem to have an awful lot of "Hey, did you know Brandon Sanderson is a Mormon?" threads. (It is amazing to me that there are people who've been reading his books for years and had no idea - he does not make it a secret, and also I guessed by the end of the first Mistborn trilogy that the author was a Mormon without knowing anything about him.)
You can see all the usual arguments being recycled: "Should we cancel all Mormon/Catholic/Christian authors then?" (Felker-Martin: "Unironically, yes.") "It's just his personal belief, has nothing to do with how he treats gay people." ("But he TITHES and that means he is funding the LDS's Anti-Gay Death Camps!")
So woke fandom tried to take a scalp and overreached (this time), because while Tor is pretty darn woke, they're still not going to drop one of their biggest cash cows. Yet.
Can You Cancel a Bestseller?
Not literally, no. But can you hurt even a big name? Yes.
JK Rowling is still mega-rich, still a best-selling author, still beloved in most of the world. Yet I'm sure it does sting, even if she never says so publicly, that she and her books will never be celebrated again without an asterisk, that Harry Potter fandom tries to put her name in small print if at all, that she will never be reunited with the stars who she saw grow up and considered friends, until they were forced to denounce her. (Though in Emma Watson's case, it doesn't seem like much forcing was needed.)
They might not be able to Voldemort Brandon Sanderson, but being turned into a homophobic villain who is reviled by fandom and no longer invited to conventions would definitely hurt him. More cynically, Felker-Martin might know that Sanderson was too big a target, but that much smaller Mormon (and Catholic and Baptist, etc.) authors might be intimidated.
(Which makes me tempted to say, "Okay, now do Muslims," but there are only a handful of Muslim SFF authors I know of. The most famous is probably Gwendolyn Willow Wilson, an American Karen who converted to Islam and writes the Ms. Marvel comic book series. Saladin Ahmed wrote a few fantasy novels and also the Miles Morales Spider Man. Amal El-Mohtar is very in with the woke Hugos crowd. All of them apparently believe that Mohammad was totally cool with The Gays. It will be interesting to see if an actual tradcon Muslim ever tries to break into the industry.)
It's pretty sad that wokes are just about the only people who take religious commitments on their face (though I'm not sure if LDS doctrine specifically can be interpreted as demanding to kill all gays and queers, over basic Christianity, so it seems that what earns Mormons extra ire is having a functional Church this late into the game). Of course online wokes do it in bad faith (pun not intended), knowing well they won't ever be touched and just holding theists to task for their professed beliefs. And they succeed in wringing out apologies and clear signs of internal conflict and guilty conscience. This doesn't satisfy them, but this gives the lie to the notion that any theist beliefs which are seriously, consequentially divergent from the mainstream morality can be sustained. As a contemporary Christian, you cannot be in the world but not of it: your peers will recognize your seriousness as edgelord behavior, your children (if you find a partner) will cringe and apologize for their backward parent, and your faith will be reduced to a notional identity marker in a generation.
What goes around comes around. When, as a minority, you cast off the protective membrane of contempt for infidels, they dissolve you. The Haredim will prosper – in their unashamedly bigoted communities, under the umbrella of people bound to them by ethnic obligation. The Amish will survive as well, conditional on their continued legal recognition in the US. Everyone else...
LGBT Twitter people usually equate "wanting to kill gay or trans people" with anything that might increase the probability of suicide, i.e. social exclusion. Exterminating trans people is used in all sorts of contexts where the meaning isn't rounding up and killing them but preventing them from transitioning socially or medically. To be exceedingly generous; if a country legally banned a body modification ritual like circumcision you can see how that might be
(hyperbolically) equated with the extermination of the Jewish faith since future generations would not be able to participate in a central ritual of membership but it would be pretty different from literally rounding up and killing Jewish people.
So when I was bullied in high school, was I being exterminated? If I can identify the right victim group that I'm a part of, will I be allowed to use this kind of rhetoric?
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There are reasons that people do not think that that commandment necessarily applies today. Essentially, when you look at the laws of the Old Testament, it's traditional (and seems pretty accurate) to divide them into
Moral laws, that is, things that you morally should just do (like, "thou shalt not murder"). These are true for everyone, everywhere, always, Israelite or not.
Ceremonial laws, laws fulfilling some religious purpose, directed towards Israel as a church, so to speak. The sacrifices or the dietary laws would be considered examples of these. These wouldn't apply to everyone in the world anyway, but Christians don't have to do them anymore because Christ fulfilled them or something (I don't fully grasp the theology of what's going on here), and you see as much said in the new testament (in Galatians, Acts, Hebrews, and others). We do sort of have some analogous things, like the sacraments, but it's a lot less extensive than what applied to the Jewish people before Christ.
Judicial laws, laws for Israel as a state, like punishments and so forth. But we don't live under the government of ancient Israel. We definitely still have things like these, but not necessarily the same ones, instead having whatever the government instituted. And different times can call for different laws, because the circumstances can change. I don't see any laws concerning the internet in there, and the law about having a fence on the roof of your house isn't so good when it's no longer normal to walk on roofs of houses.
So we have to follow moral laws, but not Israel's ceremonial or judicial laws at this point, those have replacements. Not committing homosexual acts would presumably be moral (given that new testament passages still speak against it). Punishing homosexual acts with death would definitely be a judicial law, and we don't follow ancient Israel's but the USA's judicial laws (or whatever other country). Now, of course, there isn't a problem with Israel's laws, God made them, and so punishing gay sex with death is still a legitimate legal system (well, probably, unless you wanted to argue that the severity was for ceremonial reasons to some extent), but not necessarily the only legitimate one, or the best one for the people of America.
So I'm not in principle opposed to having a death penalty for gay sex, but I don't think we have any sort of need to do that either, if that makes sense, and that's not due to thinking that it's outdated or something.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not Mormon, I don't know how well this matches for them.
Some of it was also just related to cleanliness/avoiding disease (food requirements, avoiding women on their periods (blood born diseases), etc.) and I can see men lying with men as falling into that category because of the realities of anal.
There's also the whole thing about baby making and you can only continue an ethnoreligion through babies and if everyone's coupled up with the same gender, there are no babies.
Babies are a very big deal to Mormons. They have so many of them.
I think there's definitely a case for that to an extent (see, maybe, the mildew or leprosy laws), but I think that those were still integrated to some extent into the system of worship, given that lepers were supposed to present themselves to the priests, and fit into the same system of ritual uncleanness that is used for everyone else, instead of having their own thing. The highlighting of physical filth as something that's unable to be brought into the presence of God would have spiritual implications, I think. See, for an application, Isaiah 6, where, when brought into the presence of God, Isaiah reacts "Woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips…" So uncleanness is taking on, at the very least in that context, some sort of moral character, and I think there's probably a good case to be made that there's something of that sort lurking underneath the whole cleanliness system—not to say that unclean things are morally bad in themselves, but maybe that they're used to help develop a visceral reaction against filth in God's presence, in such a way that it might cause them to be more aware of moral filth—maybe, I'm not some expert on this.
But I do think there's a good point that you're making there, that the seemingly ceremonial laws aren't necessarily purely just for ceremonial purposes, but there's often some prudential reason that could be lurking behind there to an extent. But there are, of course, other examples, like against the mixing of fabrics, that it would seem pretty hard to make a case that they would be of that variety.
Given the new testament (assuming you think you can trust it—I think most of the rest of what I was saying could generally be trusted by an atheist, but this bit can't), reiterates this, it would seem that there some moral component against homosexual sex given Romans 1 and similar. It doesn't read like it's merely about cleanliness in the mind of Paul.
I wouldn't trust the baby line of argument too much, just because 1) gay people make up a relatively low proportion of the population, at least currently, and I see no reason why that would greatly differ then and 2) I don't see too much of an emphasis in the time of Moses on fertility; I can't bring to mind any reiteration of "be fruitful and multiply" or similar, so that probably wasn't the greatest of the concerns in the drafting of the laws.
Or at least, I wouldn't trust that argument too much in the case of Ancient Israel. It's possible that it could apply to modern Mormonism, I suppose, although it seems unlikely to me, who am ignorant of their culture, that that would be the largest factor.
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Pretty much nobody in the Western world except the Westboro Baptist Church calls for gays to be killed. In theory, "love the sinner, hate the sin" is what most of the traditional denominations (claim to) believe, and Mormons are probably more sincere than most about it.
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That's the thing that annoys me the most. The trans activists who shout that their enemies want to literally kill them. That they're being genocided. Tha the Trans Day of Remembrance is some sort of Holocaust memorial. When the murder rate of trans people is about the same as that for women, and the murders are often of sex workers (a profession already risky even for cis people) or might have been for other reasons (e.g. drug deals gone wrong). When they are getting more and more protection, support, laws, even the damn flag being shoehorned into the Pride flag.
"No no no if you don't tell us we're fantastic and give out puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery on the bare word of anyone who walks in and goes 'I want that' then it's genocide, literally a genocide!"
The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.
Perhaps a bit uncharitably, I personally am not convinced that suicide rates alone are worth high levels of sympathy. I suppose sometimes, but as you mention that is complicated by social contagions. Should we end euthanasia protocols to improve suicide rates? Personally not convinced. Does the fate of the Jeffrey Epsteins [citation needed] and Adolf Hitlers of this world suggest we should change government policies to make their specific lives better? No. Just no.
More to the point, I would find the whole mental illness thing more sympathetic if their wounds weren’t mostly self inflicted.
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Even the suicide rates thing is cherry-picked, though suicidality seems to be high (see the report from which the original 41% rate was taken).
There's a new survey by an LGBT youth project which bumps the rate up even higher - 45-50%. But while the headlines are all about discrimination being the driver, when you read the stories they say that even in progressive states rates are high. And that it's considered rather than "attempted" suicide:
Even in California there are high rates of suicidal ideation? Why, it's almost as if there's something going on there that's not just about transphobes... maybe there's the whole co-morbidities thing of anxiety and depression... no, that can't be it, it's down to TERFs and J.K. Rowling alone!
For comparison with the general teenage population:
So nearly twice as high for LGBT/trans teens especially if BIPOC (Alaskan natives have shockingly high rates) and poor.
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If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?
The game design perspective is an interesting lens to take to this. People are 100% in control of whether or not they threaten to kill themselves. If this yields any advantage the meta will develop to always threaten to kill yourself.
If they are suffering from a mental illness, arguably they are not 100% in control of their actions or words.
If they are suffering from a mental illness, they should get help and support. But that does not mean that they are not 'really' mentally ill, they're perfectly fine and if we don't accept that they are too a unicorn with wings we are driving them to suicide.
No, but if the treatment were that we pretended to accept them, then that is something to consider. We might still say no depending on the cost of such acceptance but to make that decision we have to know the costs and the benefits and if one of the benefits is that fewer people kills themselves then we should take that into account.
Again, that doesn't mean we must do it, because the costs might outweigh saving some lives.
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I don't like the "not in control of their actions" idea. Someone with a mental illness doesn't have an entirely separate process intruding on their thoughts - they're taking actions with the same complex network of neurological processes (that aren't understood too well), just either there's some biochemical defect (autoimmune-induced schizophrenia?), or some other social/environmental factor, causing parts of it to be slightly off. And that doesn't seem like 'loss of control'. The 'person' is still 'in control of their actions' (which really is a tautological statement), the actions are just ... bad.
... as an illustration that doesn't have that much resemblance to real mental illness, say the same kind of mental defect gives one person an obsession with collecting baseball cards and another person an obsession with eating rocks. One might say 'the person isn't in control of their actions, they have to eat rocks'. But one wouldn't say that of someone who really likes collecting baseball cards!
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If we're going to entirely remove their agency why should we take their argumentation seriously at all?
Not being 100% in control does not mean they lack all agency. For example when carrying out an assessment on patients when I used to be involved in social care, we would minimize what choices they lost. A person who would spend all their money on QVC items would have their finances handled by a social worker but they could still make all other decisions. Mental competence is generally not all or nothing in that perspective.
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Then it would follow that they can't be afforded 100% agency.
Indeed. But can anyone? Let's say being suicidally depressed gives you 70% agency. You can make most choices but in a depressive episode, society may try and override your choice to kill yourself (if it can) by treating you whether you choose to or not. It will then discharge you, offer you therapy or drugs and so on.
If dysphoria does lead to increased levels of suicide then the same response would be to..forcibly transition people whether they want it or not? Remember when we believe people do not have agency due to mental illness, we generally act to treat their illness whether they want that treatment or not at that moment.
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Unironically, I think it's valid as their interpretation of factual truth if and only if they acknowledge that they're mentally ill. Because without that acknowledgment, then they maintain agency for their actions, and their decision to commit suicide is entirely on their own moral ledger. People who aren't mentally ill can get mad that other people are making them unhappy, but crossing the rhetorical line from unhappiness to suicide is just an abusive tactic in that context.
Does it change the argument if I ( a non depressed person) say that I think depressed people are more likely to kill themselves if denied treatment?
There definitely is some kind of line where threats of suicide can be used abusively I agree, but I think in most examples like this it is being used as a guilt trip which can be (but is not necessarily) abusive. I guilt my kids into doing stuff all the time, because it is one of the social tools at our disposal. When it crosses the line into abusive is hard to define I think.
Again... this is okay if and only if we agree that depressed people are mentally ill.
If you tell your kids that you'll kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables or whatever, you'd be way over the line into abuse. If you observe to them dispassionately that you are statistically more likely to kill yourself if they don't eat their vegetables, you haven't salvaged the situation. It isn't the guilt trip that (necessarily) puts you over the line, it's threatening suicide.
Right because eating vegetables and suicide are not linked (I assume!). But depression and suicide are. If I tell them "If you don't eat your vegetables I will be disappointed you have chosen not to eat healthily" I am guilting them with a reasonable outcome on my behalf. If they were doing something that actually would increase my risk of death, then it becomes once more reasonable. Don't pretend to throw your brother off the roof, you'll give me a heart attack perhaps?
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I don’t think that jk Rowling is arguing that trans people should be denied treatment but asserting that everyone else isn’t required to acknowledge the trans person’s chosen gender. This isn’t the same thing
Agreed, but if being recognized as their new gender is part of treatment (as surgical transition as a treatment would imply) then we have a question of how much of a responsibility does society (and/or individuals within that society) have to go along with it.
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I have a few issues with this comparison. First, the thing we'd be treating is the depression, with medications and therapies designed to fix the undesirable internal state. Secondly, the state of depression treatment is, AIUI, not really where we'd like it to be in terms of scientific reliability, and that's still a much better situation that the fraught nightmare of running experiments on trans people. And third, my issue is not with "access to treatment and therapy" (for adults, at least), but with epistemic demands on other people. If a depressed person demands that we validate their belief that everyone hates them for being smarter than the rest of us, and if we fail to validate that belief they might kill themselves... that is toxic AF. That's emotional blackmail. That's either despicably insincere, or something to have that person committed over. The worst response would be enabling that person in their toxic, abusive behavior.
If someone is suicidal, there are ways to seek help that aren't virulently anti-social, and empathy is not a blank check.
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Wasn't there some controversy about SSRIs being no better then a placebo recently?
Anyway, if you make good on your threat, there's no contradiction between the two.
Note they aren't saying they will kill themselves but that other non-medicated depressives will due to still being depressed.
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Also hypocritical given all of the left-media's critiques of things like 13 Reasons Why for encouraging a suicide contagion amongst kids by framing it as this grand operatic act.
Meanwhile, activists across the spectrum are actively placing this idea in the heads of vulnerable teens* and parents as a way to either emotionally blackmail the latter or convince the former their position is even more fragile (so they can do the emotional blackmailing themselves or be alienated from their parents).
Of course, if and when a kid does kill themselves and cites this as a reason it'll be plastered everywhere like Matthew Sheppard with calls for "life-saving care" and it'll be years before anyone dares to do any counter fact-checking, let alone suggest the media is had any role to play.
From a moral perspective this situation has nothing to recommend it. From a strategic vantage? Brilliant.
* Lots of comorbidities with "trans" stuff.
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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:
"republicans literally want us [transgender people] dead."
"Conservatives have been trying to cull us [disabled people] forever. They hate us and literally want us dead." (nb: commenter is probably referring to the Conservative Party of Canada, rather than little-c conservatives)
"Colorado is currently examining a case about a wedding website designer that refuses to serve gay customers. Yet they get mad we won't serve ppl that literally want us dead." (in reference to a news story about a Virginia restaurant cancelling the reservation of a conservative Christian advocacy group)
"Terfs, while awful, are nowhere near as bad as the american right who literally want us [transgender people] dead. England is bad but nowhere near as bad as america for this."
"They [conservatives] literally want us [liberals?] dead, and I would not be at all surprised if the Rs go ahead and do an old-fashioned purge of their political enemies in the next 5 years."
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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think if you could look into people's hearts, a lot of people want to kill a lot of people.
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You can clarify with ‘like, actually’.
Yes of course the old way was better.
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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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