This highlights the other downside of dehumanizing your enemies. If you accept the proposition that your enemies are less than human, you're also logically committed to believe that someone who is demonstrably human is not your enemy. You've allowed their human characteristics (which everyone has, since we are all actually biological human beings) to become a defense against their dedication to evil beliefs. I recently read a very interesting essay about the motivations for violence, which argued that, in almost all cases, perpetrators of violence subjectively see themselves as pursuing moral ends. They don't delight in the violence itself (they often find it repulsive or unpleasant), but they suck it up to do what they perceive to be the right thing:

https://aeon.co/essays/people-resort...odes-demand-it

One thing many Trump supporters hold on to as a moral principle is that the purpose of the United States, its highest end, is to carve out and defend a special status for "Americans" and to protect the status of that class against foreigners. This ideology can overlap with white nationalism, but it doesn't have to be racial. But it does have to exclude. "IF WE DON'T HAVE BORDERS, WE DON'T HAVE A COUNTRY." That's obvious nonsense on one level, since the U.S. did not have immigration restrictions for much of its history. But from the perspective of nationalism, it makes sense. How can the U.S. create a special status for Americans if you're letting just anyone walk in and become an American? The first step to exalting Americans is defining them, building a box around who is an American and purifying the box of non-Americans. Then the real work of making a glorious Eden just for the Americans can begin.

Once you accept that principle (and it is a principle), the rest of it follows. First, you need to improve the box. Build a wall, employ thugs to patrol it. If people try to come, you need to turn them back. But then you find that however hard you try, people keep coming and it's hard to catch them all. So you want to deter them by throwing them in jail. But then some of them are children, and there's a "horrible law" that Democrats are responsible for that says you can't jail entire families. So you jail the parents and put the kids in "foster care or whatever." Or maybe you build special internment camps just for the kids. But then you find that people go bat**** crazy when you take their little kids from them, so the kinder, gentler souls think up little tricks to make it easier on everyone. They say they are taking the kids away just for a picture or a bath, and then once they're separated on a pretext they whisk them away. Easier for everyone that way. One day, the camps are going to get too full to accept the next busload of detainees. It will be an intolerable situation for everyone, until some courageous soul takes responsibility, consults his conscience, and fixes the problem.

So that's the world we're in. The people who will commit the next great atrocity are not soulless inhuman monsters. They are people who have devoted themselves to the service of principles that just happen to be evil. If you see someone who seems like a decent, regular guy but believes in evil principles--THAT'S THE ENEMY! You're not looking for some twisted monster who delights in blood and pain, you're looking for a regular guy who thinks America should be for Americans only.

Social media is amplifying the negative and positive aspects of everything in life.

Negative experiences in the brain outweigh positive ones.

Social media effectively documents everything as well.

Now more than ever, we are constantly reminded of all the ugly corners of humankind and the world. It permeates the brain...

We feel worse now about things like police brutality because it's in our face. It's ugly. It used to be worse in 2000, worser in 1980, worserest in 1960...

We just didn't see it so we didn't think about it. At least not nearly as much as when it couldn't be conjured up and relived on a YouTube video ad infinitum.

Our actions have dehumanized the downtrodden since the dawn of time, but the effect of social media has amplified the words of dehumanization so much so that we now feel worse than ever before. It seems that cognitive dissonance is way easier to partake in when you don't see atrocity. Now we see it on every phone and computer and we slowly can't not realize we as a collective let it happen amidst our comfortable lives. Even worse, we know it and do nothing anyway. Or not enough.

That's what it feels like. But global poverty is down, crime is down, standard of living is up...We're just learning that we are way more ****ty people than we thought we were in spite of that.

The "enemy" in this post doesn't seem to understand the flaws in its own principles. Some refuse to acknowledge said flaws or vehemently deny they exist in the face of reality. How do you deal with someone like that?

Do you think this contributes to the rise in suicide rates over the last decade? Coming face to face with the general evil of us as humans?

Take their children away and throw them in internment camps?

We've seen time and time again that the right ONLY cares about things truly once it has affected them personally.

https://twitter.com/nowthisnews/stat...36896000794624

McConnell hiding was the best part.

Soulless ghouls. Every single one of them. **** this idea that dems need to be sympathetic and kowtow to these gutless ***********.

Was looking at photos and reading about the youth detention center in Texas. ... Almost 80 years the US government put Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Most people now look back on that with shame. ... 50 years from now we're going to have thousands of American citizens who remember being separated from their families and locked up as kids, and I imagine most thinking people will feel the same way about that.

I'm horrified and angry and ashamed and feel powerless to do anything about it.

Have we reached the point where a big mob of protesters needs to just tear down that place?

They'll shoot you and a big enough mob to do some effective blockade-peaceful march ain't happening in these remote places.

Humane Borders and No More Deaths are doing something along the right lines and helping individuals.

https://m.facebook.com/HumaneBordersAZ/

http://forms.nomoredeaths.org/en/

Social media is definitely contributing to this in some ways. You've got the cognitive dissonance aspect, you've got the narcissism leading to feelings of inadequacy, bullying, depression...

Social media kind of exploded over the same time period too.

Just my observations and correlation != causation obv.

I think the effect social media is having on the world is grossly understated. It has changed literally everything. Rewiring our brains. The fact that anything we do or say can be documented and revisited effectively forever gives us all pause to our behavior for the most part and to varying degrees.

And then there's society, everywhere amidst all its interaction and conflict and resolutions thereof, trying to adjust to it.

Right Wing Watch: Take A Look At Who Trump Is Meeting In The White House

I have this as the other way around; it's actually given rise to not pausing behavior. The death of the local in person community and the rise of individualism. None of the criticism will harm them in their communities because now communities are online people that agree with it instead of having to say it to people in public which they wouldn't have done.

That said, this **** isn't new, it's just making a comeback.

Had an interesting experience tonight in Nashville. Dive bar, near vanderbilt. Liberal bent. A carpenter starts talking politics and says trump has made things better for people like him. Unemployment has been rock bottom for years here. Then adds that he doesn’t have to work because of a trust fund(which I believe is true). Tells me trump will make America like 1950 again.

These people exist. Before I left he fell over drunk on his stool and we all helped him up.

which bar?

Why?

yeah you should have pissed on him while he was down there

Did anybody argue against him?

Villager

You clearing me that easily bro? Sure you aren't wolfin?

D+

I'll take it. Just wait til you see the one in the Wrestling OT thread.

https://twitter.com/Indivisible_TO/s...17234535645184