"Fuck you" has so many different tones, and is so ubiquitous. It can be playful, jocular, intense, deadly serious, all over the place. Fuck you is not, by default, a personal attack, imo.
It's also almost certainly culturally different on different coasts, online, in person, etc. A tweet is like, nothing.
It's really, really not. Fuck you has a huge range of meaning. Carlin built several comedy bits around the word Fuck specifically because it was used colloquially so many ways.
Did he took some person, in audience or otherwise public and built entire bit around saying "Fuck you" addressing that person?
Carlin's sketches (at least ones that come to my mind, as I really loved to watch Carlin about 10-7 years ago) is irrelevant. When Carlin said "fuck you" he was speaking about phrase, not to someone in particular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDqaOLThPg4
There could be different Carlin bits that I don't know about, and I'm sure that he said a lot of fuck yous to all presidents at a time in same way as op did to DoD guy, but no, I don't buy your comment saying that Carlin's fuck you and screenshot from the post are same things. Especially given what followed.
Very rough analogy, just to illustrate the point and how I see your arguing (as, at this time, I'm already believe that you're arguing in bad faith). You cannot say: "this guy is not guilty in a murder, as murders are happening in nature all the time. Dragonflies are killing flies, birds killing dragonflies, humans killing birds, humans killing humans, ergo no one is guilty, those are just facts"
I do believe I'm at least attempting good faith here, I just do not find "fuck you" as a tweet, even levelled against me, to be particularly aggressive. Especially such a short message.
I'm likely more terminally online, more cynical, or more desensitized, but I see the two word "fuck you" to be such low effort that it doesn't even rise to the level of notice.
Like, an insult that specifically called out my behaviors or appearance or something and said fuck you? That feels meaningful, that's personal. But like, autocompleting two words flippantly into a tweet is like... Nothing?
But could you accept that other people can take that differently, especially if those people represent paying customers and getting such message from people who represent a vendor?
I have had a different life from you. I've been homeless, I've been wealthy, I've lived in many cultures and communities from suburbs to communes. I've worked tech I've worked as day labor moving soil by hand. I guarantee you that language (and especially the use of curse words), varies wildly.
I have lived in many countries and had a wide variety of jobs and life situations as well. You are not impressing anyone with your knowledge about cultural nuance, everybody knows that any sentence can be interpreted in many different ways. And everybody that argues in good faith also knows that saying "fuck you" on Twitter, to someone that you don't have any rapport with, is going to be interpreted as an insult.
I disagree, I think of tweets as nothing - air, fluff, someone expressing themselves without thinking. If someone tweets fuck you at me I'm not insulted, it's such a low effort post why would it ever even be parsed by me into anything meaningful?
It's like being insulted because someone farted at the hotel you were staying at. It's of so little consequence it cannot possibly be an insult.
It's incredible to see HN lose their minds because someone sent a two word tweet with a curse word in it, lol. A tweet.
You're not even wrong, but the problem is that when you post on Twitter, any and all context and nuance is immediately lost and all that's left is a string of ASCII spelling out "fuck you".
That's fair, but also, Twitter culture is definitely it's own culture, and I've largely seen quickly slammed out "fuck you"s to be emotionally equivalent to the rolling eyes emoji or the "wanking" hand gesture.
