All good! Thanks for chatting, I suspect we are in more or less the same spot looking at slightly different aspects of the thing.
Elliot
@1t2ls.bsky.social
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gym selfies and poetry 🏳️🌈 NYC same handle on tiktok #lunchpoems
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Dying. How did this happen.
Well okayyyy
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Even at its most awful, there’s usually complexity to the human moral picture, except in the most pathological cases.
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But part of that empathy is realizing that mixed in with the absolute evil of liquidating other humans, subsuming one’s identity to a totalizing ideology, etc., are desires that are in some part good, human, sometimes even retaining an echo or shred of nobility.
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It’s uncomfortable because it puts us readers in a place of moral empathy with people who did monstrous, evil things. It’s much more comfortable to leave them as an unfathomable demonic mystery. But if we fail to empathize with them, we fail to see the potentiality for such monstrosity in ourselves.
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I read part of a good monograph recently on the way holocaust narratives have chosen to portray perpetrators over the past sixty years. And one of the themes the author identifies was how uncomfortable it is for authors to show their readers the motivations and internal states of these people.
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Do you walk around and assume that everyone you meet is a murderous asshole? I hope not. It makes just as little sense to walk the pages of history with that mindset.
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While I agree with you, I still think it’s inaccurate and unhelpful to characterize “our” ancestors as broadly evil people driven by malice.
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It would be cool if someone did some investigative journalism into big media outlets, their writers, editors, and producers, what their socio-economic backgrounds and ideologies are. Not to expose any conspiracies or nonsense like that, just to make clear what the intrinsic biases of this class are.
The UK media will defend you on their front pages if you encourage people to set fire to hotels full of asylum seekers, or if you encourage violence against women because some trans women might get hurt but they will call for your imprisonment if you protest genocide or the destruction of the planet
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But characterizing the whole that way would be much like looking at consumerist america today and say that people in general are driven by a desire to enslave migrant children and asian factory workers. The way these evils work is a lot subtler for most people.
