rhetorical shorthand insults that are useful for negative propaganda
Honestly never thought of the insults as actually useful, just people wanting to vent aggression. “Hateful fascist” has meaning and depending on context, it might make me investigate the person being called such to see if that checks out, or even totally dismiss them. It tells me about the other person’s views. “Inhuman reptile” gets thrown in the trash immediately. And stuff about someone being ugly, that’s a reason for me to not hire you as a model or take your advice on how to look good. Not a reason to join the side against you. A lot of it really just looks like aggression. This stuff is mostly useful for evaluating “how popular is this side and how much can I expect to be personally attacked for it if I publicly side with them?”
I’m also neurodivergent. So perhaps in this case what’s effective on others might not work on me. I also have a history of getting emotional and hating any “not nice” behavior even if it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of legitimate awful behavior the other side does. I end up recognizing and siding against the ocean of awfulness, but still get very upset at “not nice” behavior against them that seems to serve zero purpose to actually stop them. And this kind of insulting definitely flags as “not nice” regardless of its ends. Unlike violence in self-defense against someone trying to punch you, I can’t think of when this would become a necessary evil. But again, it’s through the lens of my own experiences, where this kind of talk immediately gets tossed out.
EDIT after we seem to have finished discussion, just saw a relevant thought somewhere else online (old Reddit comment of mine that I was in the process of deleting) that seemed very relevant to this conversation. Adding it for any onlookers.
Some of the insults could be taken as conditional acceptance for minorities. If you stay in line, your identity is valid, if you step out your identity is now unacceptable. I’m thinking things like misgendering an awful trans person. The point is probably just to hurt that person and show disapproval for their legitimately harmful actions, but it could probably make other trans people wonder if the person doing the misgendering is actually a trans ally, or if they don’t actually accept trans people but keep their mouth shut around pleasant people and now they’re going mask off now that their target is someone they don’t care about. Keeping your mouth shut around pleasant people is still better than always being visibly unaccepting, but I imagine seeing a person misgender a bad trans person could shake the faith of trans people in just how much support they have. After all, we don’t misgender horrible cis people.
Same deal with insulting based on stuff we are fighting against. Do you really accept us neurodivergent, us less-than-conventionally-attractive and it’s just a propaganda tactic, or do you not accept us but choose to hold your tongue in most situations? How much real support do we have? If you dislike us, will we get the same identity-based insults that we see online towards people like Zuckerberg or do you just reserve that for big public figures and murderers? Is your acceptance of our demographic/identity conditional on your personal feelings towards us?
