this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2026
602 points (99.0% liked)
AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND
2654 readers
196 users here now
This is a page for anything that's amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
♦ ♦ ♦
RULES
❶ Each player gets six cards, except the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven.
❷ Posts, comments, and participants must be amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound.
❸ This page uses Reverse Lemmy-Points™, or 'bad karma'. Please downvote all posts and comments.
❹ Posts, comments, and participants that are not amusing, interesting, outrageous, or profound will be removed.
❺ This is a non-smoking page. If you must smoke, please click away and come back later.
❻ Don't be a dick.
Please also abide by the instance rules.
♦ ♦ ♦
Can't get enough? Visit my blog.
♦ ♦ ♦
Please consider donating to Lemmy and Lemmy.World.
$5 a month is all they ask — an absurdly low price for a Lemmyverse of news, education, entertainment, and silly memes.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It’s exactly this rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes the other that got us here.
Humans can be misguided and become really really shitty people. But labeling anyone evil is just lazy and won’t help make anything better. It just fuels the fire of this downward spiral.
At least that’s my thoughts.
I'll cordially disagree. Calling someone an orangutan or a cockroach is dehumanizing, but lots of humans are evil. It's just an adjective, often accurate. Let's have no fear of accurate adjectives.
Comparing people to non-humans is dehumanizing, accurately pointing out the evil in someone's actions (or heart depending on how full-throatedly they support those in power committing evil acts) is not.
Calling the Nazi scum parasites or cockroaches would be dehumanizing. Saying these Nazi fucks are evil because they willingly murder people in cold blood to further a political agenda and instill terror in the hearts of the citizenry is not. One literally compares them to an invasive species, the other is a moral judgement on what they choose to do.
I kinda agree that the label puts fuel on the fire, but it really is impossible to ignore at this point, the sheer amount of people with no heart or empathy in contrast with my own naivety of the goodness of humans. Great environment for nihilism and depression.
Yeh I’m with you. We might well be past the point where people can still come together. I also feel quite discouraged that things have escalated to this. But I’m still trying to keep a few of my principles and a bit of my humanity. I don’t believe there’s evil, its a term for scaring children or riling up people against each other in contexts like religion or other groups. It’s just circumstances and humans who are not fit to deal with them in a healthy way.
That's an argument I've made many times, and on an abstract level, I'd still say that. If I'd written the original post I might've chosen a different word, just cuz saying 'evil' seems a bit rude and I'm a nice guy. On the other hand, the opposition is trying to stomp us into submission, and they're willing to kill about it and then call the dead terrorists, and I can't work up a good head of quibble or hesitation about calling that evil.
Guess my supply of Minnesota nice is running low. But I'd still buy you a beer.
It’s not about being nice for me. More about how humanity could grow out of this cycle. Be better prepared when the storm is over.
Do I think this needs to be stopped? Most definitely. Do I think we will learn anything from it? Probably not. Or way too little.
But like I said. This just might not be the time anymore to have the luxury being more nuanced.
I’d buy you one in return.
Trump is being accused by a named victim of the worst crimes in humanity. Maybe you should be sat down to watch what they’ve done. Some people are sadistic twisted pieces of shit. Our president is one of them.
Isn't not calling "evil" something you genuinely perceive as evil just helping it normalize & incorporate it into society (and you are not doing your individual duty)?
Like, that's how democratic (even anarchic) stuff works in order to move onwards together - ppl/everyone has to voice their opinion & ppl/everyone has to listen?
Not voicing (or not being able to voice) your opinions is bad.
Being attacked for that opinion is also bad.
Being marginalised for your opinion if it clashes with a significantly bigger group (and it's on an important subject to begin with) is just how living in & working with a society works ("deviants" in it's neural sense).
If the above was true, you wouldn't have eg that kind of wealth concentration that can lead to an extreme minority influencing what the majority has to do.
Also - a conflict isn't an attack, it's how you through debate move onwards (sides taking about conflicting views until all is thought out & out in the open so everyone can hold an informed view/vote/opinion/behaviour). Not voicing your opinions to avoid "conflict" is just not moving forward.
Ppl telling you to avoid conflict just want to silence your influence.
I‘m sure our opinions don’t differ too much, I’m totally with you on many things.
What I’m trying to get at is that we end up with 2 groups of people who call each other evil. Because that’s what using these labels boils things down to. And whoever is stronger will come out on top and claim they righteously defeated the evil others. There no discourse to be had, there’s no nuance. Only hate. Which as we can see is also very easy to weaponize.
Well then say the words. These people are raping and killing children and selling them to each other. I best see you say those words every time you mention them. If evil is too abstract then repeat their crimes every time you speak of them.
Absolutely. I find that much more productive than the catchall evil.
Yup it's essentialist crap an the failure of hope to assume "being evil" is a trait people can have. You gotta find out what makes humans do or accept things that are bad. If you think people can be good, you gotta find put why they aren't at a given moment. This is called materialism and our only way out.
Fascists aren't people.
No, they absolutely are. That's a big part of the problem
Nah, the moment you think of them as people, they win. They're not people. They're a cancer we need to excise and need to stop being squeamish about the surgery.
You can only beat cancer by completely and violently destroying it.
They're not some aliens who dropped here from space, that would make fighting against them so much easier. They're your neighbors, your coworkers, that random lady in the street corner; people who are choosing to be evil, not some monsters under the bed. Fighting against something isn't very effective if you aren't even realistic what you're up against
All I hear is excuses.
Excuses for what? Denying people are people and can be evil is a stupid way to fight fascism, since it's is happening because people are evil
They're not people, they're nazis. We already went over this please try to keep up.
Ah, so you're just not understanding my point, sorry. Let me try again: Trialing and hanging was the way to handle nazis, sure. But even then they were still people, and that makes what they did so much worse. If we forget common people are capable of horrid things, we overlook why those things were done, and will fail in preventing them from happening again. It's better to remember even the most vile pieces of shit doing the most horrible acts imaginable are still people, so we don't become them, and need hanging too.
I don't need to believe nazis are people to not do nazi shit.
Treating nazis as if they were people is how you get nazis all over the place. You don't put cancerous tumors on trial. You excise and demolish that shit no questions asked. You cut it off and throw it in the biological refuse bin and then incinerate it.
Let's stop pretending nazis are people. They're not. If they were people, they wouldn't be nazis in the first place.
This weird ass belief that nazis somehow are people is what gives them credibility and validity. It's how you end up with a nazi infestation. Let's move that Overton window. Let's make it normal to talk about how nazis need to be punched in the face. Then there will be nothing stopping us from punching nazis in the face.
And I don't need to pretend people aren't capable of horrible things to hate and condemn them. If you need to dehumanize fascist to oppose them, you do you, but I'll still consider that a step towards becoming one, which I wouldn't want anyone to take. If we fully give up on the principles we are trying to defend, it beats the whole purpose.
On that we agree. I'd much rather have fists on fascists faces than hands patting their heads
You can't dehumanize what isn't human in the first place.
I don't know what's happened to you, but I do hope you'll find a better outlet for your anger than posting fantasies of excessive violence online. Nevertheless, have a good day!