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
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.
myrmepropagandist
Rob van Kan🔻
Pete Alex Harris🦡🕸️🌲/∞🪐∫
jonoleth
Jhooper
some kind of orange shape