this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
312 points (99.4% liked)
Not The Onion
21122 readers
955 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
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
Ok, I've said this before and I will say it again. If you want to find someone who has a drive to do something they shouldn't you look for the jobs that allow them to do so without much oversight/consequence or where it is actively incentivised. Are you a profit driven sociopath? Corporate management/executive will treat you just right. Wish to do violence to people, maybe specifically brown people? The police and the military got you covered. Want to diddle kids? The implicit permission and authority of the priesthood, teacher, school admin/boardmember gets you a ton of access and assumed innocence.
That does not mean that every person who works in corporate is a sociopath, that wvey soldier is a violent racist, and that every priest is a pedophile. But if you ARE a sociopath, violent racist, or pedophile, you can see how those jobs might appeal to you and so you are certainly going to find more of those kinds of people in those professions than elsewhere.
The problem is how the institutions deal with it. If they try to cover it up, the whole institution is complicit.
Take the Boy Scouts for example. It's an organization dealing almost exclusively with children, so of course pedophiles will be attracted to it.
Does that mean that all about leaders are pedophiles? Of course not. But the fact that the BSA swept it under the rug to save face means you can't be sure anything will be done if there's one in your troop.
It's in the institutions best interest to cover it up. It is not in their interest to be transparent.
Institutions, made of people, are just like people, in that they pursue their self-interest first and foremost. Morality, the law, and all that is ultimately secondary.
And the self-interest primarily for orgs, like most people, is to protect their image at all costs, including the cost of allowing abusers to continue to be into them, as long as it isn't publicly visible and it's plausibly deniable.
This, exactly. I work as a baby seal clubber, and some of my colleagues definitely have questionable motives for doing the job.
Jokes aside. Obviously, not all of these jobs require nefarious motives or deplorable personalities to attract people to those roles. Teachers, for example, are more likely to be people that have a commendable desire to care for and mold young minds. But I defy you to talk to show me a single person that didn't have a direct encounter with or know of persistent rumors of one or more teachers at their schools that were, at minimum, creepy.
Soldiers can just be poor kids without real prospects sold on hero propaganda without actual malice. But there are none-to-few soldiers with a bloodlust searching for an excuse.