Careful here… while I agree with your anger, you’re using the same language used to dehumanize vulnerable populations. Everyone, including horrible people like Steven Miller, deserve basic human dignity. They deserve fairness, due process, and every human right. But unrepentant fascists don’t deserve our attention, our sympathy, forgiveness, or reprieve from justice (repentant ones are more complex and not addressed here).
To treat them as less than human is to risk becoming like them. When you fight monsters, you must take extra care to avoid becoming a monster yourself, after all.
There’s this thing they do. Basic schoolyard bully shit. Accusing someone else of the thing you’re gonna do, so when you do it, the victim sounds like theyre just copying you.
I’ve read neitzsche, by the way. There’s a lot of nuance to what that part actually means. Just quoting it to excuse the libshit you already believed (or think you do) is kind of missing the entire point of that philosophy.
Fully agree with you, and touché on the glib use of the quote. I wasn’t trying to invoke the full depth of Nietzsche. I’m merely cautioning against crossing the line between condemning disgusting actions and labeling the people themselves as disgusting. I’m appealing to humility and humanity: a recognition that we aren’t inherently “better” than the worst of them. In order to be different from them, we have to act differently.
We don’t have to agree, we don’t have to sympathize, but failing to see their humanity no matter how unconscionable their actions blurs the line between us and them, and that’s a line I prefer to keep as clear as possible.
I am curious what you see in my comment that is “libshit”, though. I don’t personally see how the invocation of human rights and dignity is liberalism by any reading.
Sorry for the wall of text, but so often your position is espoused by reactionary bigots who think being born the right species is inherently virtuous, that there’s a fundamental mystical essential ‘humanness’ to give us some baseline value, and that nothing else could ever deserve those considerations, and call me a monster for considering fucking nuance, or the ways i am, as a human, capable of sucking. It’s uncannily close to fascism and i can get somewhat emotional about it.
Have you actually read fascist thinkers? Autodehumanization is often a conscious aspiration.
And as someone who gives a shit about animals who arent human, who read too many sci novels as a kid:
Human and person ate not synonyms. ‘Human’ is dtrictly a biological thing. Useful for medicine, organ compatibility, etc. There’s some fundamental psychology you can assume, and be mostly right most of the time, but since humans are so fucking versatile/volatile/plastic, odds are it will almost never be 100% accurate.
Personhood is another matter altogether. I think the most depressing thing about llmbros and the last decade’s acute rise of fascism is looking at all the things i treasure and see as special about people, then looking for them in my fellow humans, and so often just finding nothing. Being unable to build/revive/attach any.
If you’re not going to flesh out and define your idea past ‘vibes’, do not ask me to respect it. That is lib shit.
you aren’t better than the worst piece of shit.
Yes i am. I worked for this. I sacrificed a pretty substantial inheritance for a shot at being a good person. More than an inheritance. And i worked for it, too.
I don’t know if i exactly hit the mark. But i spent a looooong time trying to figure out how to do that. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to figure out how to do that. I got a better than average humanities education as a kid, but i gave myself an exceptional one, and learned practical skills besides, as i came into adulthood. I applied that. I applied that to myself and to the world around me, and I’ve allowed those i loved or respected to do the same. I have never stopped growing never stopped learning. I suffered and risked for this knowledge, for these aspirations. I patched and reinforced by bones with it-literally, in some cases.
How fucking dare you tell me some fascist piece of shit that’s spent its entire life trying to be a mindless object, trying to erase all capacity and knowledge from itself until it’s nothing but obedience and reflex, is as good as me. That fucking lib shit is an insult to both its efforts and my own. I worked for my dignity, the hypothetical fascist cast its dignity off. We are not alike, fuck you for saying so.
I wont eat octopus. That was a person, a person was killed for that meal. Not necessarily a kind of person i have much understanding of. It’s an alien mind, but it was almost certainly a person in ways that matter, and eating them by choice when you have other options is vile, even if their capture/farming/death was free of suffering, which it almost certainly was not. I’ll think less of you if you would.
If you’ll eat octopus by choice, then tell me a fascist is a person, your opinion is not worth hearing; you’re just some human-chauvanist piece of shit who’s never looked in a mirror.
Careful here… while I agree with your anger, you’re using the same language used to dehumanize vulnerable populations. Everyone, including horrible people like Steven Miller, deserve basic human dignity. They deserve fairness, due process, and every human right. But unrepentant fascists don’t deserve our attention, our sympathy, forgiveness, or reprieve from justice (repentant ones are more complex and not addressed here).
To treat them as less than human is to risk becoming like them. When you fight monsters, you must take extra care to avoid becoming a monster yourself, after all.
There’s this thing they do. Basic schoolyard bully shit. Accusing someone else of the thing you’re gonna do, so when you do it, the victim sounds like theyre just copying you.
I’ve read neitzsche, by the way. There’s a lot of nuance to what that part actually means. Just quoting it to excuse the libshit you already believed (or think you do) is kind of missing the entire point of that philosophy.
Fully agree with you, and touché on the glib use of the quote. I wasn’t trying to invoke the full depth of Nietzsche. I’m merely cautioning against crossing the line between condemning disgusting actions and labeling the people themselves as disgusting. I’m appealing to humility and humanity: a recognition that we aren’t inherently “better” than the worst of them. In order to be different from them, we have to act differently.
We don’t have to agree, we don’t have to sympathize, but failing to see their humanity no matter how unconscionable their actions blurs the line between us and them, and that’s a line I prefer to keep as clear as possible.
I am curious what you see in my comment that is “libshit”, though. I don’t personally see how the invocation of human rights and dignity is liberalism by any reading.
Sorry for the wall of text, but so often your position is espoused by reactionary bigots who think being born the right species is inherently virtuous, that there’s a fundamental mystical essential ‘humanness’ to give us some baseline value, and that nothing else could ever deserve those considerations, and call me a monster for considering fucking nuance, or the ways i am, as a human, capable of sucking. It’s uncannily close to fascism and i can get somewhat emotional about it.
Have you actually read fascist thinkers? Autodehumanization is often a conscious aspiration.
And as someone who gives a shit about animals who arent human, who read too many sci novels as a kid:
Human and person ate not synonyms. ‘Human’ is dtrictly a biological thing. Useful for medicine, organ compatibility, etc. There’s some fundamental psychology you can assume, and be mostly right most of the time, but since humans are so fucking versatile/volatile/plastic, odds are it will almost never be 100% accurate.
Personhood is another matter altogether. I think the most depressing thing about llmbros and the last decade’s acute rise of fascism is looking at all the things i treasure and see as special about people, then looking for them in my fellow humans, and so often just finding nothing. Being unable to build/revive/attach any.
If you’re not going to flesh out and define your idea past ‘vibes’, do not ask me to respect it. That is lib shit.
Yes i am. I worked for this. I sacrificed a pretty substantial inheritance for a shot at being a good person. More than an inheritance. And i worked for it, too.
I don’t know if i exactly hit the mark. But i spent a looooong time trying to figure out how to do that. I spent a long time trying to figure out how to figure out how to do that. I got a better than average humanities education as a kid, but i gave myself an exceptional one, and learned practical skills besides, as i came into adulthood. I applied that. I applied that to myself and to the world around me, and I’ve allowed those i loved or respected to do the same. I have never stopped growing never stopped learning. I suffered and risked for this knowledge, for these aspirations. I patched and reinforced by bones with it-literally, in some cases.
How fucking dare you tell me some fascist piece of shit that’s spent its entire life trying to be a mindless object, trying to erase all capacity and knowledge from itself until it’s nothing but obedience and reflex, is as good as me. That fucking lib shit is an insult to both its efforts and my own. I worked for my dignity, the hypothetical fascist cast its dignity off. We are not alike, fuck you for saying so.
I wont eat octopus. That was a person, a person was killed for that meal. Not necessarily a kind of person i have much understanding of. It’s an alien mind, but it was almost certainly a person in ways that matter, and eating them by choice when you have other options is vile, even if their capture/farming/death was free of suffering, which it almost certainly was not. I’ll think less of you if you would.
If you’ll eat octopus by choice, then tell me a fascist is a person, your opinion is not worth hearing; you’re just some human-chauvanist piece of shit who’s never looked in a mirror.