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Turns out half of the country just desperately wants to be on the wrong side of every issue (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/noncredibledefense@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (8 children)

You have to talk to them and admit they're human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it's like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can't trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don't have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Oh, I completely admit that they're human beings. I vehemently disagree with the "worth talking to" bit of that sentence, though. As for their pain... I don't give a flying fuck about it. These people are the root cause of an enormous amount of misery. It's possible that they aren't all cruel, but every single one of them decided that cruelty wasn't a deal breaker for them. I have zero faith that the vast majority of them will ever be redeemable.

    We saw the exact same thing after the civil war, by the way. Taking the federal boot off of their necks led to Jim Crow laws and the KKK. Talking to them didn't fix that. Reasoning with them didn't fix that.

    I think that the main point of difference between us is that you believe that all life is sacred, and should be preserved at all cost. I do not believe that.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    These people are the root cause of an enormous amount of misery.

    Not the propaganda they are fed? Or their education, pledging the flag every morning during their childhood?

    That would still not be the root cause.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Propaganda doesn't exist in a vacuum. People must make it, and people must spread it. Like spam, if there's nobody dumb enough to click on the links, the spammers will soon stop sending spam for want of profitability. The receptivity to propaganda is a necessary component for the propagation of it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don't believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.

    The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don't extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.

    But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper's Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don't think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Yeah, man. It's fucking messy, is what it is. We are sloshy bags of water and hormones feeding a mass of electrified gelatin. There's no ideal solution because there's no ideal human. We're all fucked up in so many different ways.

    I understand intimately the sense of loss that violence brings, but I also understand that violence has historically been one of the most successful strategies for resolving conflict. I'm consequently a huge fan of the John Browns and Malcolm X's of the world, and not so much the MLK Jrs and Gandhis. Gandhi thought he could dissuade Hitler from genociding a people and plunging the entire world into a war by having a polite discussion. Churchill thought it needed to be bombs, tanks, infantry, and warships. Churchill was right.

    On the other hand, I am also a huge fan of the Frederick Douglasses of the world. Courage doesn't only manifest itself on the battlefield. It also looks like petitioning the president for policy changes and reading a speech reminding everybody of why "Independence Day" isn't a universally beloved tradition.

    I don't claim to have any of the answers. I believe that people are complicated, but also that good and evil are also things that exist. For example, I think that the majority of the people who voted for the Nazi party were doing so out of economic concerns, or anger at the wave of migrants taking German & Austrian jobs, or fear that they were the butt of the rest of the world's jokes. If you'd asked any of them before they voted whether they would be cool with industrialized murder of German citizens, they'd almost certainly say no. But that's what it turned out that they voted for. Hitler didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes; he was pretty open about his intentions, even at the outset.

    The people who voted for the Nazis had a myriad of different reasons for voting the way they did, but in the end, none of that matters. They contributed to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. Many of them even took a more active role in perpetrating that evil. Artists, comedians, writers, mechanics, doctors, scientists, grocers, homemakers, attorneys; people from every walk of life. Just your ordinary, average populace. All of them fucking evil.

    The truth of the matter is, evil isn't some bald guy sitting in his volcanic lair stroking his persian cat while plotting the destruction of the world. Evil is very often banal. And that's the most insidious thing about it, in my opinion.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Having visited Berlin and Auschwitz, I agree with you. I just implore you not to take the perils of the military industrial complex required to defeat such evil lightly. Especially important is the alienation that it creates in its adherents, which prefigures additional evil. To paraphrase Einstein, our civilization will not survive the next world war.

    Since you're into Douglass, here's a snippet from across the ocean. One of our greatest poets was Petőfi, who rallied the Hungarians to revolution against the Habsburgs. He died in the war but his compatriot, Kossuth, escaped and toured America, and much was written about him in Douglass' paper.

    The parallels to today are uncanny, with a war in Crimea, a divided Europe, and an overstretched Anglo empire.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Yes; trust me when I say that the parallels to the 1930s have filled me with anxiety these past few years, and especially so in the past 4 months. Thank you for the link about Petofi; I had not heard of him.

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