This guy named Ben Palmer made an "Immigration tip line" and people call it thinking he's ICE.
He records them and shares it with the world.
What do people sound like when reporting their neighbors, coworkers, students? Are they confident they are doing a righteous good thing?
Witness the banality of evil in these sheepish suburban voices.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJnkikcrHA0
PEERTUBE option: https://kinowolnosc.pl/w/p/av2NQ5ug2M7TgJzkSvyzi6
What disturbs me is the total lack of urgency and confidence in these “reporters” as soon as Ben simply describes what they are doing “so you are reporting this person so they will be removed from the country” they put all of the responsibility on him (one caller says “isn’t that what we are doing?”)
People scoff at insects following pheromone trails but the average ant puts more thought into her next action than some of these people. “The government says report these people better do it”
I listened to the first half of this, and the caller used school resources to look up the ethnicities of the child's parents so she could report them. Don't report any data to school!
@jargoggles
Yes, so true! She was a real piece of work! 😐When she wasn’t admired for dobbing in (informing against) a couple of apparently blameless parents whose child had the ‘misfortune’ to attend the kindergarten she worked at, she identified herself as the ‘victim’… of possible sarcasm… !! Truly petty, as well as a racist bigot. ☹️
#AUSPol #ICE #petty #racist # bigotry #informants #dobbers #victim
@aeischeid @spreadthetruth @MisuseCase
I teach at a school with a bunch of grants and things and some of the brightest most neurotic kids in the city HOWEVER I have all kinds of teacher friends at all kinds of schools. Schools without nearly enough staff or supplies and lunches that someone should build a little fence around and hang up a "Superfund" sign.
I do not know any teachers like this.
@aeischeid @spreadthetruth @MisuseCase
The worst thing I ever heard a teacher say about students was this veteran NYC public school teacher in the Bronx who said "well you know they are from the crack baby generation that's why they can't concentrate"
No. They can't concentrate because they are 6th graders in a class with 32 students.
That is too many sixth graders. Have you met one? I have. Under 20 ALWAYS.
I yelled at him and he walked it back.
@spreadthetruth @MisuseCase @futurebird similar idea said a different way - zero sum -> reactionary.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:twjze4qqf6fgxz33ct52wlnl/post/3meeoju7lsc23
Lots that is grotesque here, but I think the key thing to notice is the zero-sum worldview: if we take in a 5yo immigrant, this somehow displaces or harms at 5yo American kid. There's a finite pool of "American" to distribute. A zero-sum worldview is the molten core of reactionary thinking. [contains quote post or other embedded content]
@mayintoronto @aeischeid @spreadthetruth @MisuseCase @futurebird
Imagine if classes maxed out at a dozen. That's probably where it should really stop.
@futurebird @aeischeid @spreadthetruth @MisuseCase I think it’s an entitlement response. You don’t see it where people weren’t raised with everything they wanted within reach and the idea that everything they want is *supposed* to be within their reach.
Then the corollary becomes this deep emotional response that anything that inconveniences me is WRONG and BAD and must be ELIMINATED. Even when the most basic of reality-checks would yield a counterpoint along the lines of “this is a CHILD you have OBLIGATIONS to, remove your HEAD from your ASS.”
Horrifying, horrifying 😞
It's so difficult to understand what is driving someone like this. How was it harming her life or anyone's life that the child's parents were in the same country as her?
I know there are people who think that way, it's just so difficult to understand why they think that way.
Is their life going to start being better because a 6 year old they teach doesn't have parents any more? It's inhuman to think like that.
@FediThing @futurebird It is precisely about _not_ thinking.
If you dump all inarticulate, inchoate blame for the "big fuzzy cloud of badness" in your life on someone you can other(v, t)… then you _don't_ have to think about the actual causes or the fact that the solutions to those problems might be hard and involve complex socio-economic changes.
@su_liam @ersatzmaus @FediThing @futurebird @dacig Depends on the problem.
Real problems absolutely require a systemic solution, but "I feel uncomfortable because my neighbours are different from me" is absolutely solvable with self-work.
Because the only problem there is in your own head.
@dacig @su_liam @ersatzmaus @FediThing @futurebird
What do you think collective action is made of? A bunch of individual level changes adding up. This is not an either/or thing. It's a yes, and thing.
@ersatzmaus @FediThing @futurebird
This. It is the explanation.
These people have two things in common as i see it:
1: A pathetically miniscule world view that doesn't extend beyond their tiny back yards, which breeds selfishness and chauvanism.
2: No concept of Gods infinite love; his complete inability to see superficial things that might make us look different, let alone to pick one arbitrary attribute to base his love for us on. What kind of God would be such a prick? Not mine.
Watching the rest of these videos on the same channel, they're all horrifying 😞
They're talking in such a calm bored way about wrecking innocent people's lives. They sound like they're ordering furniture or something, banality of evil is absolutely right.
i cannot watch, it would really harm my mental health.
i am glad he's doing this and making a record though.
@FediThing @futurebird It's the idea that because they're here "illegally", she thinks that they and their child are "undeserving" -- note her "taking up resources from the county" line.
She's one of those people that think that educating a child is an "expense" rather than an investment.
Or maybe we keep calling them monsters, because that's what they are. We *couldn't* be them, we *wouldn't* try to have a pre-school child deported. We shouldn't tolerate their poison amongst us.
We just have to recalibrate our intuition about how many monsters there are, is all. Just because they do normal jobs and wear a normal face doesn't mean they are us.
I've heard the cliche before, I understand it, I just reject it.
You're better than someone who wants to deport a child, or I don't know what to tell you. People who wouldn't are better than people who would.
Did something in our society make them that way? Maybe. Are the people who don't want to deport small children responsible for the ones who do, somehow? Absolutely fucking not.
They are monsters of each other's making, perhaps, not ours.
@edgeofeurope @futurebird @petealexharris the problem with that attitude is that it makes people start thinking that bad people are easy to spot, or far away. It makes them blind to what their family, friends, or neighbors do because they're obviously not monsters. People are very quick to dismiss accusations of being a nazi or fascist because they genuinely can't wrap their head around that being a possibility.
Maybe you're not susceptible to that bias but the average person sure is.
@jonoleth @edgeofeurope @futurebird
That's not what I said tho. The trouble with saying "they are like us" instead of "they act like us socially to get what they want" or "any of us could be like that" instead of "you can tell who is like that by what they support" is it makes monsters harder to spot; it denies they even really exist (or gives them space to hide behind that phrasing).
And people being quick to dismiss accusations is not, in fact, a reason to avoid accurate accusations.
@jhooper @jonoleth @edgeofeurope @futurebird
Why do you think you could choose to be like that? What would make you do such a thing? Does entertaining the idea of pointless cruelty as an option make you more or less monstrous?
Saying "I would never do that" isn't supposed to be wishful thinking about how nice a person you are, it's supposed to be a foundational moral choice. It's not like the weather or something.
@petealexharris @jhooper @jonoleth @edgeofeurope @futurebird
Why do you think you could choose to be like that? What would make you do such a thing?
I remember times I've talked to police in response to actual crimes, which I thought at the time was a justified decision, if unfortunate. Now, seeing what ICE does, and where they get their staff, has me wondering if what I did was that much different from what that kindergarten teacher did, morally speaking.
Being a good person requires continuous effort to improve yourself, to hold yourself to your own standards. Bad people get that way because it's so easy. I've taken the easy way out before, and I suspect you have, too.
If you WANT to be nothing like them, good for you! If you think you ARE nothing like them, that's most likely wrong in a very simple sense, since you live in this terrible society; and believing means you're not going to wonder so much about what separates you from them, exactly.
@futurebird I'm literally watching his videos right now.
It's crazy how much hate there are in America. The rhetoric being passed around in the United States is unreasonably close to 1939. (maybe switch Hitler out for Trump, and pick different groups to target)
@lavenderjamie @futurebird Eh, Nazis focused on homosexuals, non-whites, immigrants and disabled people too.
And it's worth pointing out that Trump's administration has already been quoted requiring Universities to provide lists of Jewish students and professors, so....
@jhooper
Damn, it's only been what, 1/4 years...
I cannot wait for a certain Orange Man to get out of a certain White House in DC.
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