Human Life and Human Dignity Above All

Like Jesus Christ the significance of this legislation is literally first-paragraph-of-Wikipedia-level shit:

How else were Democrats supposed to “codify” effective legislation they created and signed into law? Oh, wait a moment….perhaps putting more liberals on the Supreme Court would’ve helped? Hmmmm hmmm hmmmm and whomst told everyone about the importance of the Supreme Court but subsequently got screamed at by these very same people for “scaremongering”?

The VRA was literally a law. Act means the legislative branch acted. They did a thing. They voted it into law.

I'm hearing a lot of this sort of stupidity. Sure, there's things the Democrats could have done in the past and didn't, but there's also things the Democrats built solidly and well which are now being dismantled, often in open violation of legal principles, because the US voting public let a death cult have a trifecta.

One of the most significant reasons Jews did not leave when it became increasingly obvious that staying in Germany would be a death sentence was they had nowhere to go.

Even Jews with means had trouble finding any country that would accept them.

Chiune Sugihara saved 6,000 Jewish lives by issuing visas. So Jews had someplace to go.

The MS St. Louis was turned away from America, Canada and Cuba. The 254 Jews on board were sent back to Germany and died in the Holocaust.

We Jews remember. We remember when the nations of the world did not open their doors to us.

Dehumanising even Nazis and terrorists just removes the obligation and responsibilities we all have to understand how radicalisation into violent extremism happens, how seemingly ordinary people can become convinced that mass murder is a moral course of action.

No one who becomes an extremist thinks of themselves as monstrous, they truly believe that all of their actions have a just reason and if only they could make everyone else understand, everything will be fine.

What I mean is that people take what they hate the most and turn minorities (religious minorities, racial/ethnic minorities, queer and trans folks, etc) into that thing.

If you are an American, than you have probably seen this happening a lot with trans people and immigrants. Trans people just trying to live their lives become evil deviant pedophiles, even though we should both know this isn't true. Similarly, immigrants have become criminals and illegal aliens. This is where dehumanization leads. You can see similar issues echoed across history.

OP is not calling on everyone to sympathize with nazis. OP is reminding people that dehumanization is a tool of oppression and it always always always destroys you. Not just that, the normalization of dehumanization is radioactive; it expands outward and poisons more than just it's target. It absolves you of resposiblity for how you treat those you dehumanize. It's a road that leads absolutely nowhere. There are *no* exceptions. This is not about what feels good or righteous, it's about the unrewarding dirty work of holding up the pillars of humanity.

I really need folks on the left to start considering the high likelihood that left-wing spaces are targeted by bad actors that want you to lose all of the integrity, education, and community building skills that you may otherwise have had because you are angry and terrified of the people in power. Destroying a democracy isn't just about stoking it's ugliest impulses, it's about dismantling the best impulses, and radicalizing you into abandoning the capacity for kindness. It's about training you to ignore stablizing voices or the voices of those who you hit in the crossfire.

Humanization and empathy and the willingness to sit with your feelings and try to understand people are the fundamental tools of civilization. They are the building blocks that keep society together even in the wake of a disaster or oppressive regimes. Without these tools, we are just cannibalizing ourselves.

I know it feels safer to think of those causing the most harm as monsters who exist outside of humanity. Because it means we don't have to look at this moment as a grim, humiliating reflection of the worst impulses of humanity, and the miles our society still has to go to actually dismantle exploitative, cruel systems. Justice that *lasts* does not come from purging everything with hellfire, it comes from using love and connection as a radical force for change. it comes from rebuilding education systems and social safety nets and communities.

However much it may be convenient to believe a terrible person is not human and did not arrive at doing terrible things for human reasons, they are and they did.

It’s a lie that inherently warps your perception of the world, and damages your ability to accurately understand and assess it.

If you dehumanize people who do evil things, then it becomes very easy to fall into a pattern of thinking that excuses and denies your own bad behavior. For example, if only monsters are racist, and you are not a monster, then nothing you do can be racist, even if the people impacted by your behavior are telling you otherwise.

If you dehumanize ANYONE, then it becomes very easy to excuse doing evil things to them – it’s not really evil because they’re not really human. For example, if you think that no human should be subject to torture, but Nazis aren’t human so torturing them is ok, you have now taken a stance that torture is ok sometimes.

Because the two of these together turn into a loop where you dehumanize a group of people, do terrible things to them because they’re monsters and they deserve it, and then insist what you did wasn’t that bad, because nothing you do is truly that bad, you’re not a monster, you’re a human!

The Nazis did terrible things to Jews because they saw Jews as less than human. And many Nazis thought that what they were doing was good – righteous even, because they were just getting rid of an inhuman threat to good people everywhere. I cannot stress this enough – many Nazis believed that Jews were causing legitimate suffering because they were doing evil things. So when you dehumanize a group of people and then say it’s ok to be terrible to them, even if your reason is because they’re doing bad stuff, you’re thinking like a Nazi. And you can think like a Nazi because you’re human and they were too.

The ABSOLUTE BEST Hitler diss I ever heard was on a podcast called Conspiracy Theories. One of the worst men to ever exist, right, you could find horrible things to call him all day.

You need to imagine this said with the same level of disgust as someone whose cat has just brought them something headless but still wriggling:

"A mediocre art school reject who ruined a perfectly good mustache."

FUCKING HELL, there's not enough ice in the universe known and unknown for that burn. Hitler was vain. There's an extremely dark but not entirely untrue joke that his response to not getting into art school was the worst overreaction in history.

But it also forces us to look at him as a human being. The things that would hurt him are extremely human. He liked to be perceived as a good-looking, knowledgeable, and fashionable man. He was from Bavaria, which was treated by Germany in the 1910s and 1920s much like America treats Appalachia now, and he wanted to prove he was well-educated and worldly. He loved to paint, and while his views on art were pretty stick-in-the-mud, he also loved classical artists.

And that's uncomfortable. If I tell you I know a guy, loves his wife, adores dogs and kids, doesn't smoke, barely even drinks except for a beer once in awhile, artist, really charismatic...and then I tell you I'm talking about Adolf Hitler, that's really fucking uncomfortable, isn't it? How many of those traits do you share? How many do your loved ones have in common with him?

they’re laughing. they’re playing music. they look like they’re having a wonderful day of camaraderie together.

they were also staff at Auschwitz.

sharing the following from Ari Axelrod:

This was the staff at Auschwitz. Look at their faces. They were having a great time. If this had been taken in 2026, they would've posted this picture on Instagram and tagged their friends.

The headline isn't inserting properly, so:

...But the one unfolding right now in Sudan, already the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, is especially sickening. A militia long accused of genocide has seized the major city of El Fasher and is thought to have slaughtered tens of thousands of people there in recent weeks. The atrocities were widely predicted and are the culmination of years of unremitting savagery. They were enabled by an American partner, the United Arab Emirates. Yet under both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the United States has (along with other nations) refused to take serious steps to stop the mass killing and mass rape. Here’s what happened. A Sudanese militia, the Rapid Support Forces, which is backed by the Emirates, seized El Fasher on Oct. 26, after more than two years of warnings that it would. Satellite imagery shows mass graves and burn piles indicating systematic slaughter, according to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which analyzed the satellite photos. Nathaniel Raymond, a public health scholar and the executive director of the lab, estimates that between 30,000 and 100,000 people may have been killed in six weeks, with 60,000 as a plausible midpoint. That pace of killing would be unrivaled since the Rwanda genocide of 1994, he told me, adding that the death toll in El Fasher in less than two months may be comparable to that in Gaza over two years. El Fasher, which had around a quarter-million inhabitants shortly before it was overrun by the militia, remains sealed off, so it is impossible to confirm the scale of killings. But it is widely recognized that something terrible has unfolded there in recent weeks.

The attackers posted videos of themselves executing people, and the governor of the Darfur region surrounding El Fasher, Minni Minnawi, who opposes the Rapid Support Forces, estimated that 27,000 people were killed in just the first few days. The United Nations humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, has described El Fasher as “basically a crime scene.” A senior U.N. official warned that the “mass killing,” “sexual violence on a massive scale,” “torture” and other abuses in the region indicate possible genocide. The International Rescue Committee cited estimates of 60,000 killed in El Fasher and noted that there are risks that the massacres will be repeated in another region of Sudan, Kordofan. All this has attracted little attention and no serious response. Some people have managed to flee El Fasher, and they describe killings and other atrocities. The Norwegian Refugee Council reported that some 400 children without parents arrived exhausted in the nearby town of Tawila, in many cases after days of walking across the desert. “Many witnessed extreme violence before escaping and are showing signs of acute trauma,” said Nidaa, a teacher affiliated with the Norwegian Refugee Council. “Some of the children could not speak at all when they arrived.” The new satellite imagery shows 150 clusters of human remains in El Fasher, along with five burn pits used to incinerate bodies, Raymond said. Even from space, blood stains are visible on the ground. Something just as ominous emerges in the satellite photos: an absence of people. Markets are empty and overgrown, donkey carts have mostly vanished and gathering points where people normally collect water are now deserted. A major city appears from space to be a ghost town. “If you were going to see the murder of a city, this is what it looks like,” Raymond said. The killings in El Fasher took place in the context of a civil war in Sudan that may have taken 400,000 lives since the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces began fighting each other in 2023. But three elements stand out to me as particularly horrific about El Fasher.

Imagine if politicians actually cared about the health and well-being of the people, instead of feeding corporate greed.