Please fuck all the way off with this sniveling, hand-wringy "We just really can't know for sure" plausible deniability crock of shit you scraped off of Milo Yiannopoulos's jackboot. There is no other context in which this sign makes sense other than as a joke, and prison rape is the punchline.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer
joined 1 month ago
- is probably a lot of it. You're always the oldest you've ever been, and (as far as I know) everyone only ever experiences aging the first time. Everyone's constantly pushing into unknown age territory and no one has the benefit of comparing how they feel now to how they'll feel in the future, it's just now vs when we were younger and likely fitter.
The "If Criminal, then Bad Person" and the "If Bad Person, then any Bad Thing OK" combo are pervasive in America, across the political spectrum, and have been for a while. At least since the War on Drugs started, and almost certainly well before that. It is frightening to have a conversation with a seemingly well-meaning, moral person and have them casually joke about prisoners being tortured, raped, or killed. I don't think it's an attitude unique to America but I think the private prison industry has had a lot to do with how incredibly common the attitude is that, if someone is in prison, they must have done something wrong, and if they did something wrong, any bad thing that happens to them (forced labor, starvation, sexual assault, death) is deserved punishment. It's ghastly.
No it's not. It is unacceptable in all cases. I don't understand how otherwise principled "all humans are humans and deserve rights" people are suddenly a-OK with rape or torture if it's someone they've decided is a "bad person" without realizing they're doing the exact same thing fascists do to justify human rights violations, but it's a pathological problem. If you think it's ok for you (or anyone) to decide who is allowed to have human rights and who isn't, you're an authoritarian in denial and you will fall victim to the next authoritarian leader who agrees with you about who we're allowed to torture.
So many resources are deployed with the aim of making Americans afraid of each other and the world. This polarizes people, who get very heated and expend huge amounts of energy spitting vitriol at each other to no effect, which has the very intentional side effect of making politics so uncomfortable (and seemingly unproductive) to think or talk about that many people who can afford to do so just tune it out, which allows politicians to get away with even more heinous shit because it's what's expected of politicians anyway. It's a pretty elegant, if dismal, system :/
Poverty for me means losing access to the medicines that keep me alive, or I would be right there with you. I wish I could just be a hobbit subsistence farmer so bad but I got bills 🥲 So I keep turning the crank until another option becomes viable.
Oh lord, this one got me good ❤️
I wasn't really sure whether to post this here as it's not strictly news or politics, but it does cover US history up to the 2020 election so I hope it's close enough, and I think it's interesting enough to warrant discussion. Pretty new to Lemmy so if it's not fit for this channel LMK and I'll take it down.
The strong language is a cumulative result of other people who have made similar dismissive arguments in the past, so I can see why my response might seem disproportionate if you were just commenting off the cuff. I stand by it though. And your point about your politics is pretty relevant to this whole sordid thread: it's not just the political right who thinks it's acceptable (or even to be celebrated) that some people are subjected to rape, torture, or other grotesque violations of human dignity so long as they're "Bad People". It's a true bipartisan issue, and it's precisely the flaw in human thinking that enables people like Trump to label certain groups "Bad People" and then use the justification of "punishing the Bad People" to seize control and entrench their faction in power. Nobody ever thinks of themselves as "Bad People" so they are often on board, or at least indifferent, because 1) they are not Bad People themselves and 2) after hearing about it for so long, they've internalized that the Bad People probably deserve it.
One of the problems with downplaying or questioning "jokes" in this vein is that it pivots the conversation from "is it cool to 'joke' about someone being raped" to "was this person even really making a joke in the first place?", which allows the joke itself a pass, which normalizes the idea behind the joke because the debate itself is stifled.
This is not a joke: I and a lot of my friends and family are in considerable danger right now as a result of years of "jokes" about trans people, immigrants, "radical leftists", etc. normalizing violence. So please don't condescend to me about touching fucking grass.