thinkercharmercoderfarmer

the garden variety eugenicist shitheel kind. I always hope it's just an edgy kid who got on the wrong forums and craves the attention, but they're also doing pro-russia FUD, so there's a small but depressingly real chance that this is their job.

Are you inviting me to a money fight? I do love those. Let's both put in ludicrous bids on some AI company and fight over ownership to pump it's value in the market, I haven't done one of those in months. Winner buys the next yacht we sink in the Bermuda Triangle to appease the Elder Ones, Respect upon their Unknowable Names. If only the poor knew how hard we worked to prevent this puny planet from being eaten by elder demons, they would be grateful.

Question: would I have to give up my exploitative companies that fuel my bid to become the first King of Internet? Because that's kind of a dealbreaker for me.

LMAO I came in to the comments to ask "why are you even on social media then?" and I did not expect the answer to be "to advocate for eugenics"

People often respond to me this way, assuming naivete. That if I come to fully understand the depths of suffering well enough the blinders will fall away and I will understand, finally, that cruelty is the only just response to cruelty. I have seen enough of the depravity of humanity firsthand to understand the feeling of helpless rage, and I know firsthand how just it feels to give payback in kind. But I don't think setting the bar of acceptable behavior to whoever does the worst thing is a wise solution. And I think if you see evil and your response is to match it with like, you must then consider yourself evil. I don't want to be evil even if it feels just in the moment. I've tried it and it feels shitty. I like my way better.

What I mean is, it's not less bad because it's not two distinct phenomena. Whether or not someone is guilty of a heinous crime has nothing to do with whether or not they're entitled to some basic human rights. Human rights are not treats that are allocated by an authority for good behavior and revoked if you do something naughty. If you contend that everyone has certain rights, as I do, they have to be universal and irrevocable, no matter what.

The reason they have to be irrevocable is because once you concede that they may be revoked, you now have the problem of who has the power to revoke them. You can either decide to revoke them yourself (vigilantism) or grant that power to someone else (authoritarianism). And while I am no expert in history, I feel confident in my belief that granting this authority to anyone is a recipe for disaster. The only other option, then, is to assert that even the worst possible person must still be afforded basic human rights, no matter what, and go from there. Anything less than that and you're sliding down the slippery slope toward dictatorship.

I don't think it's useful to classify people into good and evil. I think the exercise of power is a vice and some people get addicted to it. Causing other people to suffer (and getting away with it) is an exercise of power, and it's one of the most accessible ones, because there's always someone you can hurt if you look around. Children, homeless people, criminals, or anyone else deemed unworthy of protection by the more powerful. I reckon some people may be more susceptible to it the same way some people are more susceptible to alcohol addiction, but it's complicated and there's a lot I don't know about how abuse of power compares to abuse of alcohol. But classifying them as evil is a thought terminating cliche: they do bad things because they're bad people, simple as that. I think thinking about other people that way lets us self-justify a lot of horrific shit in the name of punishing bad people.

This is apparently a hot take with this crowd but I think you are entitled to basic human rights even if you've committed a crime.

The strong language is a cumulative result of other people who have made similar dismissive arguments in the past, so I can see why my response might seem disproportionate if you were just commenting off the cuff. I stand by it though. And your point about your politics is pretty relevant to this whole sordid thread: it's not just the political right who thinks it's acceptable (or even to be celebrated) that some people are subjected to rape, torture, or other grotesque violations of human dignity so long as they're "Bad People". It's a true bipartisan issue, and it's precisely the flaw in human thinking that enables people like Trump to label certain groups "Bad People" and then use the justification of "punishing the Bad People" to seize control and entrench their faction in power. Nobody ever thinks of themselves as "Bad People" so they are often on board, or at least indifferent, because 1) they are not Bad People themselves and 2) after hearing about it for so long, they've internalized that the Bad People probably deserve it.

One of the problems with downplaying or questioning "jokes" in this vein is that it pivots the conversation from "is it cool to 'joke' about someone being raped" to "was this person even really making a joke in the first place?", which allows the joke itself a pass, which normalizes the idea behind the joke because the debate itself is stifled.

This is not a joke: I and a lot of my friends and family are in considerable danger right now as a result of years of "jokes" about trans people, immigrants, "radical leftists", etc. normalizing violence. So please don't condescend to me about touching fucking grass.

Please fuck all the way off with this sniveling, hand-wringy "We just really can't know for sure" plausible deniability crock of shit you scraped off of Milo Yiannopoulos's jackboot. There is no other context in which this sign makes sense other than as a joke, and prison rape is the punchline.

3. is probably a lot of it. You're always the oldest you've ever been, and (as far as I know) everyone only ever experiences aging the first time. Everyone's constantly pushing into unknown age territory and no one has the benefit of comparing how they feel now to how they'll feel in the future, it's just now vs when we were younger and likely fitter.

The "If Criminal, then Bad Person" and the "If Bad Person, then any Bad Thing OK" combo are pervasive in America, across the political spectrum, and have been for a while. At least since the War on Drugs started, and almost certainly well before that. It is frightening to have a conversation with a seemingly well-meaning, moral person and have them casually joke about prisoners being tortured, raped, or killed. I don't think it's an attitude unique to America but I think the private prison industry has had a lot to do with how incredibly common the attitude is that, if someone is in prison, they must have done something wrong, and if they did something wrong, any bad thing that happens to them (forced labor, starvation, sexual assault, death) is deserved punishment. It's ghastly.