Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

I feel like right now is a good time for a little educational thread about death threats, and in a broader sense, that weird little game abusers so love to play, making mountains out of molehills while pointing at actual mountains and labeling them as molehills.

Let's start off

with what is actually considered to be a death threat in the legal sense, something most people don't have a clue about as very few people have ever seriously been sent one.

A death threat as relayed by law enforcement types, is a clearly expressed statement that one party plans

to kill another party, specifying a time place and means by which they intend to do so.

There are enough specific components to that you'd figure it would never come up, and like I said, it rarely ever actually does. Usually, it'll be in the context of some kind of coercion.

Like, "if I don't have the bearer bonds in my account by midnight tonight, the snipers trained on your home will begin to eliminate your family one by one." That's a pretty clear cut death threat. Past that, every so often you really do get someone so obsessed with a murderous

fantasy they actually will contact the target of it and just start going into all the details, accidentally slipping into that rare ground where just maybe law enforcement types might actually be bothered to try and prevent a murder for a change.

I know this because I'm one of

the few people who actually has had the experience of dealing with the latter, but generally speaking, it's safe to assume anyone talking about "getting death threats" means something else.

Some of those other things are also pretty damn serious, of course. If you aren't a cop,

someone explaining to you how they plan to slowly gut you with a fishing knife is enough of a death threat that you can call it that even without them adding they plan to do this on your front lawn next Tuesday and nobody's likely to nitpick whether that counts.

Another one I've

had the misfortune of experiencing first hand is when someone is just straight up laying out their plan to bring about the end of your life, but doing so somewhere they don't actually expect you to catch wind of it, because that kinda tends to make the plan a lot less effective.

Since I know you're curious, it was some small group of nazi punks in a really shady corner of the internet holding a little meeting to see if between them they had enough money and information to hire a hitman to track me down and shoot me, and while it's obvious they didn't as

I'm still here to relay the story, that was a real hell of a thing to run across in the middle of some unrelated detective work, and I sure as hell had reason enough to take it seriously that my life was interrupted for a good chunk of time.

But again, usually if you see someone

talking about "receiving death threats" they're actually being incredibly disingenuous about some random stranger who didn't like them saying something like "drop dead" or "kill yourself" or maybe "I hope you die."

Now, all of those are rude things to say to someone, and it's

possible that someone might be dealing with a hell of a lot of people saying such things as part of a harassment campaign, which is a non-trivial concept, but in no way do any of these give anyone actual cause to believe the speaker has intentions to actually murder them, and it

is therefore completely disingenuous to refer to them as such, and also massively insulting to those of us who actually have to deal with the real thing. And of course, as is a standard right-wing tactic, watering down the meaning of the very serious term is often the whole point

There's also some related concepts in here worth discussing, which tend to come up when people want to get the impact of sending death threats and/or actually bringing about someone's death.

Doxxing is one I think people are generally familiar with (and, of course, another that

dangerous people enjoy watering down by shouting it about things that decidedly do not count). The real deal is when you take a big ol' pile of private personal information about someone and share it, either to that person, in a way that clearly sends the same message as a formal

death threat, but omitting the bit where you actually threaten murder, or shared in a setting where it's very clear you are making this information available as a public service to anyone who might be inclined to kill or otherwise visit harm about a person but might not know how

to go about hunting them down. Remember my little anecdote about the hitman hiring brainstorming session? Hopefully you can see how if someone present for that actually knew my name and address, I might not be here to ramble about it years down the road.

And then of course we

have just about the most impactful way to place a person's life in danger while maintaining enough plausible deniability to avoid legal trouble over it, stochastic terrorism. This dictionary entry is actually quite handy for explaining this one- dictionary.com/e/what-is-stoc…

"The public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted."

You may be familiar with this if you have ever seen a bigot speak in public. Lies about immigrants sneaking into

a country with any sort of nefarious intent? Stochastic terrorism. Lies about how violent certain minorities are? Stochastic terrorism. Lies about trans women being big burly men with violent intent sneaking into places? Stochastic terrorism.

Maybe you've heard some variation on

"we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children?" Stochastic terrorism. Also "the 14 words." The uh... big ol' organizational slogan used by the nazis to justify all the things nazis do. So, VERY EFFECTIVE stochastic terrorism.

And there's a variation

there that goes "because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the earth."

Kinda feel that one's worth bringing up since all 4 of the examples above are kinda dancing around this scaremongering about foreigners/minorities/trans women raping our precious white

women. Which, again, is just a fantastic thing to imply about anyone if you want some random unhinged person to murder them and then be able to smugly shrug and note that you didn't actually ask anyone to murder anyone.

Anyway the reason I'm sitting here spelling all this out is

that I've been seeing a whole hell of a lot of talk and sloganeering lately from a certain hate group defending all the transphobia they throw out there as "defending women" (or defending one particular woman who is famous for writing some children's books), and I would like to

firstly make sure everyone is very very clear on the fact that that's 100% no doubt about it a dog whistle shorthand for that 14 words crap where they're "not saying" it sure would be great if some people would murder all the trans women before they can go around raping our women

with a lot of winks and nods and also when such people try for the extra plausible deniability of talking about how they receive "rape and death threats" from "TRAs" they are more likely thinking "technically I'm not lying because there's been at least one time I shouted horrific

things at someone until they responded with 'drop dead' or 'suck my dick' and literally everyone not part of our weird crusade is some sort of extremist defender of trans women."

And this isn't just speculation on my part. They get real specific with those sorts of claims often

enough that you can often find whatever response they provoked out of the specific person they're smearing and it's always like "get in the sea" or "blow me" or something innocuous like that.