this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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United States | News & Politics
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This kind of thing makes me go into denial. I hate my country, but this absolutely cannot be real. It's horrible clickbait, or propaganda supporting my existing beliefs about how inhumane it is here.
I struggle to imagine someone administering a needle for an innocent man to die, rather than quitting on the spot. I struggle to imagine someone certifying paperwork to appove this to happen. But I am entirely incapable of imagining the number of human cogs that would need to be similarly compliant for this to be followed through to completion. I am not interested in trying to imagine. This story is fiction because admitting otherwise will break what's left of my sanity.
You can show me horrors and get me to admit and speak of them as reality, but you can't get me to believe them.
A stunning number of people in the links of that chain could've stopped it, and none of them cared to risk their employment over it.
I've seen it said that if you live in the US, you can ask yourself a question: "If you lived in Nazi Germany, what would you have done to oppose that state?"
The answer: You're doing it right now. Nazi Germany's leaders explicitly stated that its model of colonialism and expansionism in eastern europe, eugenics practices, and its racial state, were all based on the US model, which nearly successfully carried out everything Nazi Germany failed to do: eviction and genocide of its indigenous inhabitants, stealing a continent, and erecting a white-supremacist state on top of it.
The Innocence project is real and they do incredible work. They rarely take cases that don't have new DNA evidence due to the difficulty in overturning a conviction. They could probably use your financial support.
–The site which we don't speak of had a mainstream news article to this story monday night explaining that the state was already refusing to grant a stay of execution even with prosecuting attornies new doubts.
Arendt is one of the more overrated authors in America short of the founders, but she has a point about how, when you are removed from the brutal nature of the violence, you can just sort of shuffle it into your day-to-day activities. Sure, you can certify the paperwork, it's just letters on a screen. Hell, you can even administer the needle, as it's not your job to concern yourself with his innocence or guilt, it's your job to use this specific set of injections to kill him in a visually benign way. Separating arbiters from brutalizing and brutalizers from arbitration makes the flagrant injustice much more palatable to both parties.
Fantastic one-line explanation, I don't think I've thought about this before but now that you've said it it feels like something obvious that I really should have understood already.
it happens fairly often here. the u.s. is the most evil entity in the known universe
I've come to realize that a significant portion of people just think other people should die and that's fair and they're OK with being the ones to do it.
I saw an Instagram reel the other day of someone in the military describing the best way to decide who to kill and who not to as you storm a civilian building, plus the latest Behind the Bastards about Yarvin's affect on JD Vance and their belief that violence / killing and enforced poverty / slavery is not only a necessary but desirable method of governmental change - not as a reaction to oppression but as administrative.
Read a book by a Navy SEAL who was in Afghanistan. He said if they were wearing black Reeboks they were fighters, shoot to kill on sight.
I'm betting he was right! But Jesus, using that as a hard criteria to execute someone?!
It has always been this way. Particularly because there are people and groups who actively materially benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery and oppression of other people and groups within the social organization of our societies. The enforced poverty/slavery will never stop without sufficient and sufficiently organized, centralized, disciplined violence to overcome those who actively benefit from the enforced poverty/slavery by means of the same; and then maintaining that authority over the exploiters until their interest and strength are no more.
It's the same reason why there's never been a "peaceful bloodless decolonization." Why would the colonizer ever willingly permit that? They would be, from a standpoint of their own material interest as a societal class, complete morons to do so and make such a willing choice. Which is why (and this is historically borne out) they must be not given a choice by an organized militant anti-colonial resistance. This is also why the "authoritarianism" criticism of the doctrine and practice of revolutionary groups like Castro's revolutionaries or Lenin's Bolsheviks is laughable; the liberal peanut gallery can only have that criticism because they succeeded and survived to be criticized; having overcome the oppressors who, in the event of the revolutionaries' failure (historically borne out in how every failed revolution played out including the previous ones in those countries); would show the truth of themselves as 1000x more vicious, having honed that capability for 100x longer.
Look up any countries' "Red Terror" in history, then look up their corresponding "White Terror." You will see [wiki:NSFW images if you click on them]. Or read about any decolonization struggle. Like in Algeria, where every uprising that killed 10 Frenchmen resulted in a colonial reprisal with hundreds of butchered Algerians.
We live in a material reality with material interests which are enforced by people who will use your pacifism as a means to exploit you easier, and kill you easier if you even are seen as inconvenient or 'in the way' of those interests, let alone if you resist and struggle against them. And that argument has been happening since Marx and Engels' time in the framework of materialism; and was exactly the realm of rationale behind the policy of terror with the Jacobins before that in the French Revolution; from which many later revolutionaries took lessons and learned from the mistakes and refined within their contemporary material conditions and circumstances.