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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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The Midnight Society

Sanderson: haha no no you got it all wrong

Sanderson: I don’t personally hate gay people

Sanderson: I simply support an institution that wants to kill them

Sanderson: I think they’re neat

Sanderson: if it were up to me, they wouldn’t be exterminated at all

Sanderson: but jeez, guys, who am I to tell the Mormon church it’s wrong?

Sanderson: I really don’t have any choice here other than to keep tithing them millions of dollars

Sanderson: my hands are tied

Orson Scott Card: oh yeah totally very relatable

Barker: haha that sucks, man

Sanderson: look, I know you all think I’m some sort of bogeyman for giving millions of dollars to a church that wants to kill queer people

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...

In 1930, before marrying Marietta, von Neumann was baptized into the Catholic Church.[69] Von Neumann's father, Max, had died in 1929. None of the family had converted to Christianity while Max was alive, but all did afterward.[70]

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.