There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?
>There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
People like to blame these sort of situations on leadership and systems, but every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
Even if you agree with the general motivations and principles behind these, do you not have the humanity to realize the absurdity and cruelness of what is being done in some of these examples? No special accommodation can be made to get the kid with cancer their medicine while they are in custody?
I genuinely don't know how those questions can be answered any other way than "cruelty is the point" and if that is your response, I don't know how you sleep at night.
> every individual involved in this is making a personal choice to let this happen.
To be fair, you and I are involved. I'm on vacation in Mexico. You're presumably also doing something comfortable. We've had, in the span of days, a judge arrested in her court room and multiple U.S. citizens--children, no less---illegally detained and deported.
It's blowing my mind to say this. But the right is clearly using violence as a political tactic. That means there is not only legitimacy, but necessity, in the opposition to begin deploying violence as a political tactic as well. (By this I mean disrupting infrastructure, interfering with law enforcement, disrupting lawmaking, et cetera. Break their cars. Hack their systems. Block their streets and maybe cause damage to their buildings. Under no circumstances do I mean causing physical harm to anyone.)
ICE "abruptly terminated" a phone call with the detained mother "when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number". The brown shirts [1] are here.
This is mental. Game you seen the amount of illegal stuff the current administration have done that results in zero arrests? There is bad faith and then there is this argument. As if the role of law is even being remotely adhered to by the current regime.
Things are moving closer and closer to a civil war. Occupying and destroying government property is where the military get called in. Shots will be fired and that will be the flame that ignites the powder keg. A lot of children will die, and even more will grow up in an endless cycle of death.
If people of the past would have followed that argument, we would not have seen the declaration of human rights of the French Revolution, not have had the civil war, slaves might still be slaves. Hitler’s successors would reign Europe.
Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
When it come to Hitler people will generally approve of political assassinations and infanticide if it would have meant that Hitler were killed before world war 2. Any benefit that society would have gain if those methods would had been established as the norm would however be dwarfed from the negatives. Sometimes bad methods make things initially better, but long term has terrible consequences.
As a minor historical perspective. The French Revolution is know in Europe as one of the bloodiest period in France under the name of Reign of Terror, and ended with Napoleon who then initiated the Napoleonic Wars, which is also know as one of the biggest war in Europe.
> Sometimes good people have to do what is necessary, even when it means to make things worse initially.
> No, are we in such a moment now? I don’t know, but that’s the problem, right? You never know at the time.
The other problem is that literal Hitler thought the exact same thing, which is why Mein Kampf got written in a prison.
I wonder if the people four years ago chanting to hang Trump's VP (for accepting having lost the election) also thought they were in the right…
(Not that it matters either way if those people are "mistake theory" (power) rather than "conflict theory" (truth), because I expect all clothes to eventually be worn by various conflict theorists).
Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
> Why is it that this mantra is only ever employed to discourage opposition, but never to explain the logical consequence of violence employed by the government?
Every individual involved in this is doing it because there is something to be gained. The system is basically saying “the more you deport, the more numbers you generate, the more funding you get and the less I will check what you do with it”. We can blame the individuals sure, but if they keep getting showered with money for doing the wrong thing, of course the system has a big responsibility. Why should the people involved not do this if they are being explicitly encouraged by their employer to do it?
Based on some interactions I have had with CBP and ICE in the past as a legal immigrant, I'm confident that many of those people aren't doing it because of any sort of monetary gain or career advancement, but simply because it gives them an outlet to realize their sadistic tendencies.
And because is tolerated and even encouraged, these jobs attract exactly those kinds of people. Which is how you end up with an organization with an internal culture that revels in human suffering.
The assumption of "good intentions" is not really warranted at this point. This movement is mainly driven by people who feel they have been marginalized by our society, and they want to lash out and see other people get hurt, period.
Regardless of the ways they have been marginalized, and how much marginalization they have done to themselves by failing to engage with the complexity of the world and following malicious leaders instead, this is where we are at. We need to stare this bare reality in the face lest the supporters, enablers, and fence-sitters continue soothing themselves with rationalizations.
> This movement is mainly driven by people who feel they have been marginalized by our society, and they want to lash out and see other people get hurt,
Yes. This.
This is what drives facism: It is not your fault you feel bad, it's them, over there
This is why it is so important to "cuddle a facist".
Facism feeds on violence, showing love and compassion to those whom you disagree with robs fascism of its oxygen
Not all of those adults have good intentions. In fact, situation happened because of adults who have bad intentions, managed to execute them and are happy about the result.
And they have been giving benefit of the doubt too many times already. At this point, it is absurd to pretend there are good intentions in the core of this.
C-f "metastatic cancer"—1
There's a poor child that's being withheld access to their medication and to their oncologists, and the adults in the room—adults in uniforms, adults with guns, adults in suits and adults in black robes—all of these adults are doing their adult things with their adult words, and the sum total of all that is the child still is without their cancer medicine.
What good can we be, if *this* result is the sum total of our good intentions?