Dehumanization of groups from a position of power is bad.
Dehumanization of bad powerful individuals to make it emotionally easier to take them down may be necessary.
I don’t believe in evil, but I do believe in consequences.
Yeah but here’s the thing:
A good amount of people use the race of a wrongdoer to justify the dehumination and collective guilt of everyone said group. Look at how people justify the murder of Jews by pointing to Netanyahu. Look at how Islamic Terrorists justified the murder of Westerners by pointing to the crimes of America. Look at how many people justify the murder of Muslims by pointing to 9/11 or Rotherham. Look at how Terfs justify the dehumanization and extermination of transgender people, or even gender variants in general, by pointing to cases involving transgender people.
It does not prevent the collectivisation of crimes to justify the dehumanization of groups and people. It is still a slippery slope that leads to fascism.
A good amount of people use the race of a wrongdoer to justify the dehumination and collective guilt of everyone said group.
Its a good thing I’m not advocating for that.
Look at how people justify the murder of Jews by pointing to Netanyahu. Look at how Islamic Terrorists justified the murder of Westerners by pointing to the crimes of America. Look at how many people justify the murder of Muslims by pointing to 9/11 or Rotherham. Look at how Terfs justify the dehumanization and extermination of transgender people, or even gender variants in general, by pointing to cases involving transgender people.
These are all in-group out-group dynamics. They have nothing to do with the fact that people point at specific bad powerful individuals. In fact its often the other way around, people will often hate/love a leader more depending on whether they’re perceived to be in any specific group.
It does not prevent the collectivisation of crimes to justify the dehumanization of groups and people. It is still a slippery slope that leads to fascism.
I am specifically advocating only to make it easier to pull the trigger on powerful people doing massive harm. More harm comes from letting a powerful person live if they’re active in doing harm. Anything that makes it easier to take down harmful powerful people in aggregate results in a net good.
Luigi Mangione is innocent of murder. The dead CEO is guilty of mass murder and intended to continue. The new CEO taking his place is also likely someone that should be luigi’d, as are the current stockholders.
Let me explain it this way:
I burnt out at work and lost my job a little while back, I moved in with my mother on south padre island.
This island is only half a mile wide but the rent on the ocean side is a little bit more than rent on the bayside.
As a joke I’ve decided that makes me better than bayside people. I’ve decided people who live on the other side of the one road are poorly educated troglodytes and they smell like the gross bay over there.
Obviously it’s a joke but it illustrates how arbitrary dehumanizing can be.
I do understand you’re point that it can make it easier for some people to do what needs to be done… but I’d argue if you need to dehumanize then you shouldn’t be doing part of the job. It’s bad for your mental health.
I don’t need to dehumanize bad humans to fight them. If you do then perhaps the physical fight isn’t the best place for you. There’s plenty of logistic works and none physical roles you can slide into. Leave the violence to people who can say “look, you’re human but you’re in the way of improving this world.… I have to get you out of the way now…” best to leave that job to people who don’t have to mentally justify it with “it’s only fine because they weren’t really people” no… they were people but what needed to be done still needs to be done.
I don’t agree. Dehumanizing even one evil individual takes away from the severity of their bad deeds.
OK, but I care about material consequence. Not the emotional catharsis of moral judgement.
The world could be made a better place if so many people weren’t trained into reflexive, voluntary disarmament masquerading as moral high ground. Actual morals involve bringing those prowling “low” to justice
Absolutely. Though I want to clarify my take on justice. If an injustice is required to make the world better, happier, safer, freer, I’m in favor of it. I’m not looking to bring punishment to bad people.
For instance, I don’t want a certain racist rapist fascist idiot to suffer, I want him to stop causing suffering. If that means a quick and painless death, or being put into a peaceful vegetative state, or simply being removed from office and somehow made culturally/politically irrelevant, I will take it.
Now, would I personally enjoy seeing him suffer? Yes, but that’s not really the important bit.
Billionaires are subhuman and don’t deserve to exist.
I seriously hate this debate for the sole reason that FAR too many people take, “don’t dehumanize” to mean, “you cannot do ‘bad’ things to ‘bad’ people, period.” That is a fucking STUPID position to hold, and again, far too many people view, “do not dehumanize” to mean, “you would become a Nazi if you said punching Nazis is good.”
Yes, we must remember every human is a human. Good job with the tautological obvious facts of reality! We must also remember many humans betray humanity and do not deserve honor or respect. Sometimes, they don’t even deserve life.
It is wholly about how you judge someone else and over what criteria, not about some mystical concept of togetherness. “Dehumanize” is far too generic of a term to create absolute rules with like this. It’s just difficult to communicate an exact interpretation with. (see: the many interpretations people are assuming in the rest of the comments)
Look up the trial of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.
For what he did, there would have been every justification to shoot him in the head and leave his body in a ditch on the side of the road. But instead, we put him on trial, and we got the following statements out of the guy:
My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the ‘Third Reich’ for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.
…and (in a letter to his wife before his execution):
Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct.
…and (in the same letter, to his children):
Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself, responsibly. Don’t accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true… The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn’t dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me. … In all your undertakings, don’t just let your mind speak, but listen above all to the voice in your heart.
We wouldn’t have any of that if we had treated Höss like an animal, rather than a human being.
I’m curious though, what value do these statements have?
There is a separable argument about whether we should have due process vs vigilante justice and I think due process is better. Vigilante “justice” is hard to call justice at all.
With due process though he could have been tried and convicted and executed without being allowed to make these statements. The argument you seem to make is that the statements themself are valuable and meaningful.
I mean I’m certainly not looking to the commandant of Auschwitz for any mora guidance, what that person thinks is of little value to me.
His statements are, at the very least, important to those closest to him. He spent his life as a monster, poisoning the thoughts and beliefs of his family and friends. He was able to recognize his errors and given the chance to explain himself.
Humans don’t exists in vacuums. We all make ripples in the lives of those around us. If he was executed without the chance to recognize his errors and apologize to his family they might have viewed him as a martyr and continued his mission.
There’s also something to be said about his words imposing future generations. There are still those alive today who believe in the mission of those European fascists. Perhaps reading his words of regret will change their minds even just a small amount.
Yes. I never said to treat them like a rabid dog coming at you. (unless they are coming at you, of course)
Like I said, it’s about how you judge someone (such as a proper trial vs flippant execution) and on what criteria.
The main thrust of my point is: Policing language while there are people out there gleefully murdering children and rigging the economy so that more suffer for their gains is pathetic pedantry and only a practice of self-fellatio at best, and running interference for these despicable monsters at worst.
Some people do, in fact, deserve to be called absolute trash monsters for betraying humanity, and do, in fact, deserve to be treated differently. Permanent incarceration (if they are the irredeemable type) after due process is still treating someone differently.
Except it’s not pedantry. It’s an extremely serious issue. Dehumanization makes it easy to forget who the enemy truly is. It makes it easy to lose face, justify the ones you know as “one of the good ones”, just because you see they’re human. It makes it easy for that hatred to get redirected onto people who should not be part of your hatred by manipulative 3rd parties.
It’s not language policing, it’s an important thing to keep in mind so you do not become what you hate.
People need to see everyone is human so they don’t think the atrocities are only as such because they are the target(see Israel – I’m not saying that you should let people off for the horrors they do).
It’s only difficult if ones’ memory is as pathetic as a goldfish, forgetting who threw the first punch over what reasoning.
And people’s memories are. Hence, important
Yeah… Sadly I can only agree with that!
Also: “sociopath/psychopath/narcissist” etc. is not just another name for a horrible person.
human monsters are still human. if you want to defeat human evil you need to acknowledge and address it for what it is, not disavow it. you won’t “no true scotsman” your way to defeating fascism.
So many times I have said this to be met with “hurr durr but you can’t empathize or let fascists off easy” by people just repeatedly missing the point
Dehumanizing AI is a good thing.
You can’t dehumanize what was never human to begin with.
Which, kind of drags the entire thing from the meta level down to the object level. There were cases of dehumanization in not-that-ancient history where the dehumanizers explicitly claimed the victims are not humans. American slavery is one example. The Holocaust is another. MAGAs (still) won’t claim explicitly that the minorities they dehumanize are not human. If we stay at the meta level, wouldn’t that make them worse that than slavers and actual Nazis who can say they are not dehumanizing because their victims were never human to being with?
It shouldn’t.
We humanize lots of non-human things all the time. Pets, animals used as meat, 1 month old fetuses, fictional characters, religious figures, etc.
It is as human to humanize as it is to dehumanize because it’s in our nature to attempt to define what is and isn’t us.
When you attribute value to a being because you see humanity in it, you are making a value statement that a being has worth because it has humanity, not because it has life which is precious.
Ultimately, dehumanizing ourselves is how we can extend our compassion to other beings. When we accept that we are no more alive than pigs are, we accept that pigs, too, are living being with their own thoughts, subjective experience, and suffering.
You can absolutely dehumanize things that were never human, because what it means to be human is neither universal nor static. AI is human to people who don’t understand how LLMs work. There’s a thought experiment called Roco’s basilisk (trigger warning as it can induce anxiety) that entirely banks on people’s tendency to humanize AI. You can argue that people are dumb and just don’t understand that that’s not how AI works, but how something works often has no bearing on how it is perceived by people.
More people than ever are asking what it means to be human in the face of something that almost communicates like one. We are not dehumanizing AI because of it’s race, gender, or color, because that is not clearly defined in AI. We’re dehumanizing AI because we are asking what it means to be human outside of superficial context.
I mean… I get your point, but AI is literally not human.
A valid observation at the object level - but not at the meta level. That is - the reason why it’s okay to dehumanize AI but not okay to dehumanize <minority> is that your claim that “AI is not human” is correct while our hypothetical racist’s claim that “<minority> are not human” is incorrect - and not because of some general principle like the one in the meme.
I agree, though to “dehumanize” someone has many meanings to many different people. To many, even calling some people despicable garbage is beyond the pale.
I think the whole debate is stupid. Most agree some people deserve at least permanent incarceration; a fate worse than death depending on ones’ beliefs of an afterlife. Policing language over feefees when there are people out there gleefully murdering children is pedantic self-fellatio and completely and utterly misses the point.
Also policing language over feelings leads to the worst abusers figuring out how to play the system and getting other people policed for there fee fees.
The bullies play victim.
The Measure of a Man does a far better job of going into this than I can, but suffice to say, what package someone is wrapped in shouldn’t be the arbiter of what qualifies as a person. Does this apply to AI in its current form? I’d say no, but does it apply to whales, octopuses, pigs, possible aliens, possible AI implementations in the future? That’s a little trickier.
You can’t dehumanise things that are nowhere near human. How did you interpret this post in order to arrive at this comment??
I hate AI especially how they try to make it “humanlike” but how did this topic even come up?
Just don’t use AI gen while you’re doing it.
Please cool it with the clankphobia. ChatGpt, Claude and Gemini are as human as you or me they just live on the wire instead of inside a skull.
To say that Hitler wasn’t human is to pretend that no human could ever do the same, making way for another human to step up and do the same.
Accepting that Hitler was human means putting processes in place to prevent another human from doing the same.
And to take it a step further: recognize that everyone in Nazi Germany was human. Humans built the gas chambers and the crematoriums. Humans designed the walkways to the gas chambers to look like a normal pathway to a shower facility so the victims wouldn’t panic, as they had at earlier tests.
Humans architected the whole damn thing. Not just a few. It was thousands of people working throughout the Nazi regime. To fully acknowledge their humanity is to recognize that all of us (given a bad enough set of circumstances) are capable of participating in horrific crimes. When dehumanization is widespread and brutality is normalized, we suppress or even lose our moral centre.
Some people find this fact so horribly unpleasant to contemplate that they go to great lengths to deny it. They must have been monsters, psychopaths, deviants. No, what was wrong was that they were in the throes of ideology. Recognize for yourself the seductive and dangerous power of ideology.
everyone in Nazi Germany was human
So is every MAGA. In exactly the same way.
When we are serious about fixing America, we will have a credible program of de-Nazification
It’s why I prefer AI to humans.
Username checks out
“AI” is nothing more than a tool built by humans and is therefore liable to spit out the same dehumanizing and cruel sentiments that were fed into it. It’s not objective or intelligent. It’s an algorithm that can be manipulated by the people that made it. Just look at Grok suddenly talking about being “mecha hitler”
Yeah, it managed to hurt my feelings once, despite having no attachments to it whatsoever.
prefer AI to humans
What are you, a clank-lover?
I just hate them slightly less
Hmmm a very fair take tbh.
Ding ding ding ding
He WAS human. Then he chose to abandon it. He could choose to recover it, but it would be hard to convince anyone of your moral changes.
Any human could do what he did and abandon humanity, but no human could do the things he did and remain human.
Nah. Phrase it as he gave up or betrayed his humanity. He IS, factually and inalliably still a human. That doesn’t mean he deserves to be treated as some rando off the street.
Personally I think more murder would solve a lot of our problems but you do you.
Just saying imagine how much better the world would be if the guy who shot Trump didnt miss
As much as I would like to believe that, I doubt it though. Trump isn’t the mastermind behind these plans, he is merely a puppet. Puppets are easily replaceable.
Calling Trump just a puppet is an overreach. He personally had boosting effect on the entire world right wing parties with his rethoric and charisma. With the personality cult working as the primary motivator for the right wing voters, I doubt that fascists could prop up anyone nearly as effective as Trump for that role. He IS sort of like their messiah that comes once in a century.
I also toy with the thought that if there was any kind of propaganda ruling class would like you to believe and would try hard to influence you into believing, it would be something along the lines of the sentiment that violently removing them would be for some reason ineffectual. As opposed to playing the game THEY designed, mantain and oversee and trying to vote them out or use some sort of peaceful process to limit their power. That’s also contrasted by their insistance that they deserve to rule because they are in some way special, or whatever elitist argument people believing in meritocracy use. I do get the sentiment that removing figureheads might not do anything, as something that is somehow well known and estabilished, but, I mean, french royality sure did eat that cake. That train of thought might be something we’ve been implanted with, since logic doesn’t necessarily follow.
That is why you keep killing
Dehumanization, tribalism, racism, religious intolerance.
Name a more iconic, perfidious quartet.
What’s wrong with religious intolerance? Of someome can choose religion, I can mock them
If they’re not harming anyone, leave them the fuck alone. You’re still discriminating even if it’s their choice.
They typically spread a mind virus that destroys whole countries, like how women in some places are keept wrapped up permanently, and killed for disobeying their husbands. It’s a flaw one chooses to have, and spread.
If they keept their beliefs to themselves, it would be fine. But they are teaching people anti-science!
you sound like fox news. think more, be better.
I did. The basis for people’s beliefs in something is basically just “others told me so”, “This book of anectodal evidence says so”, “I was high”, “I’m afraid not to”, and finally: “It’s shit odds, but I’m afraid of dying”.
Meanwhile, people are refusing vaccines, letting their babies die of preventable causes, waging Crusades and Jihads, and setting science backwards.
If we could just get rid of religion
All dehumanizers are sub-literate neaderthals
sub-literate neaderthals
HugeNerd
Pleased to meet you… hope you’ve guessed my name
They are dehumanizing people right now, as we speak. It has to stop. One way or another.
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
People speak out. It’s not silence but silent. The zone is flooded to drown those voices. The tragedy is that people don’t know whom they can trust.
What about dehumanizing billionaires and cops?
Humanity is inalienable. The most wretched, hateful human you can imagine cannot become un-human.
Think of it like calling a turd on a pedestal art. It doesn’t mean it’s good art, or even that you shouldn’t bag it up and throw it out.
Same thing.
Still human. Being human has nothing to do with being a good human.
It’s the paradox of tolerance but with violence this time.
But THE ENTIRE POINT of the paradox of tolerance is that the intolerant cannot be tolerated. That means either we understand we have to do bad things to certain other humans, or OP is straight up fucking wrong depending on what they mean by, “dehumanizing”.
You can be intolerant and violent without being dehumanizing. You can still punch a Nazi and resist fascists without dehumanizing. This whole argument has got me confused. It’s not even an argument.
Hell, you can still be a bad person without dehumanizing.
I agree. Though far, far too many people think “don’t dehumanize” means you cannot even call them despicable trash, let alone condemn them to death.
If a mean word is too far, you’ve already lost.
Or dehumanizing fascists? Though that Venn diagram is nearly circular.
You can recognise them as human and still kill them.
Or you can recognize them as human and do your best to educate and help them to be good neighbors
The morality of “Just Kill Them” belongs in pre-Enlightenment religious texts, not in modern civil society.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 King James Version
18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:
19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;
20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.
21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die
Yeah yeah, ofc, first with the trying to help them. Obviously. But I’m imagining some Nazis at the gates type scenario beyond that.
No sense in wasting that time, effort and risk to futilely attempt to teach, when they ignored all their potential epiphanies and actively hunt, harm and kill people instead.
But why though?
Because they are human.
Even subhuman scum have human rights.
He’s talking about dehumanizing people. Not animals.
You can’t dehumanize a billionaire because billionaires aren’t human.
I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It’s a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling “homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too” brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.
For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you’re a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it’s horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the “abstinence-only” approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don’t fight their crime very effectively.
For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It’s how we operate. If you can’t see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes “not human,” then you can’t really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone “allowed” to exist in the world doesn’t contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They’re indicative of a problem with humans. They’re not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of “humanity” because they don’t count.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” -Solzhenitsyn
This is an excellent comment, capped off by a great quote
I find that quote to be insanely stupid. Yes, we’re all tempted by evil thoughts, but not all of us gleefully go along with those urges… We are all, in fact, not the same.
I’m struggling to think of a way to fit this heavy hitting comment into its own Spongebob meme, but I guess this is just the nature of même threads: pithy in the op, scholarly in the comments.
The antidote is class consciousness and solidarity. Some may think that this just replaces one enemy with another, but fascists blame the powerless, while my side blames the powerful.
I think our side should put more focus on the structures. If a system e.g. let’s Taylor Swift fly around in a private jet and even rewards her with more money from concerts and increased brand value, I can obviously still blame her (because she didn’t have to do it). But if I want things to change, I need to change the system.
But how do you change a system in which everyone capable of changing the system won’t do it because they would lose power?
Replace those who wouldn’t change the system, by force. Some guillotines can do the job.
The small guys are capable of changing the system by organising. We greatly outnumber them.
But the big guys have the propaganda machine on their side and the channels for distribution.
So organizing seems to be the solution in an ideal world. But we don’t live in an ideal world.
Organizing is always the solution. Ideal world or not, how could you possibly change structures as an individual. Of course it is an uphill battle, but it’s still a battle we have to fight.
I’m not saying that organizing isn’t part of the solution. I’m saying, in this world, getting organized to a degree that it would help is near impossible.
France, of all countries, taught it can be done.
Never doubt the people who discovered snails make fine cuisine.
better to try and fail than not try at all
Gotta try.
in this world, getting organized to a degree that it would help is near impossible.
Relevant user name ;)
Go talk to all the pet play enthusiasts
The secret ingredient is consent
slowly raises paw
Mammal, mammal
Mammal, mammal
Their names are called
They raise a paw
The bat, the cat
Dolphin and dog
Koala bear and hogCRANKING MAH HOGGG AROOOO
Woof c:
Miauuuuuu :3
right? i’ve got a footstool who would disagree with this
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
was going to say :3
