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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32824 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.

It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).

I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.

Priors say about 99% fake, because real life crazies very rarely go through enough effort to actually print out that stuff and bring it to someone's door. In the very rare case they do show up in person, it's usually to do the deed, not to threaten. I don't know who that is so evaluating "she wrote it" vs. "random leftist wrote it to draw attention and stir shit" is impossible. On raw priors I'd probably favor the latter. Almost certainly we'll never know who wrote it, yet it will be repeatedly used as if it was established that "right wing extremists" did.

Eh. Death threats is definitely something far-right and neo-nazi groups have a history of doing, and you can sort of see why. Even if in reality the threats are empty, they can be quite troubling to the victim without the perpetrator having to do much or put themselves at much risk.

Almost certainly we'll never know who wrote it, yet it will be repeatedly used as if it was established that "right wing extremists" did

No it won't. 99.9% of people have no idea this happened and never will. It hasn't just dropped out of the news cycle, it never entered it. It only seems to have appeared in a few online pieces (like the MailOnline which churns out quickly put together stories basically constantly), and while there is a short BBC article if you want to find it you have to navigate to the UK page, then go to local news, look up London, and even then it appears very far down alongside such top news as 'foam pool appears near HS2 works'.

Death threats is definitely something far-right and neo-nazi groups have a history of doing

Online? Sure. Personally nailing printed out threats to someone's door? I don't remember many such cases - and given that each of them gets a lot of publicity - if there would be a lot of it, I think I'd notice.

Oh I did mean in real life; there was a C4 Dispatches documentary about Combat 18 from a while ago and they frequently sent threats (usually phone messages but close enough, and in some cases it was written) quite similar to this.

Phone messages is online before there was online. Anybody can leave a phone message from their basement, it's very low effort. When I was very young and very stupid, we did some phone pranks. It's literally the easiest thing ever. Sending anonymous letters is more effort, but not by much (that's how they did it before everybody had telephones, I imagine). Printing this out and travelling to somebody's home to nail it at their door is significantly more effort.

Yeah but it's a bit different to online because it's harder to get hold of a random person's phone number (these were ordinary people, one was a holocaust survivor who gave a talk at a local school). And some were in person also.

Yeah but it's a bit different to online because it's harder to get hold of a random person's phone number

No, it really isn't.

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