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reminder rule (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago by Stamets@lemmy.world to c/onehundredninetysix
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[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 49 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I seriously hate this debate for the sole reason that FAR too many people take, "don't dehumanize" to mean, "you cannot do 'bad' things to 'bad' people, period." That is a fucking STUPID position to hold, and again, far too many people view, "do not dehumanize" to mean, "you would become a Nazi if you said punching Nazis is good."

Yes, we must remember every human is a human. Good job with the tautological obvious facts of reality! We must also remember many humans betray humanity and do not deserve honor or respect. Sometimes, they don't even deserve life.

It is wholly about how you judge someone else and over what criteria, not about some mystical concept of togetherness. "Dehumanize" is far too generic of a term to create absolute rules with like this. It's just difficult to communicate an exact interpretation with. (see: the many interpretations people are assuming in the rest of the comments)

[-] GraniteM@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago

Look up the trial of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz.

For what he did, there would have been every justification to shoot him in the head and leave his body in a ditch on the side of the road. But instead, we put him on trial, and we got the following statements out of the guy:

My conscience compels me to make the following declaration. In the solitude of my prison cell, I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity. As Commandant of Auschwitz, I was responsible for carrying out part of the cruel plans of the 'Third Reich' for human destruction. In so doing I have inflicted terrible wounds on humanity. I caused unspeakable suffering for the Polish people in particular. I am to pay for this with my life. May the Lord God forgive one day what I have done. I ask the Polish people for forgiveness. In Polish prisons I experienced for the first time what human kindness is. Despite all that has happened I have experienced humane treatment which I could never have expected, and which has deeply shamed me. May the facts which are now coming out about the horrible crimes against humanity make the repetition of such cruel acts impossible for all time.

...and (in a letter to his wife before his execution):

Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct.

...and (in the same letter, to his children):

Keep your good heart. Become a person who lets himself be guided primarily by warmth and humanity. Learn to think and judge for yourself, responsibly. Don't accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true... The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn't dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me. ... In all your undertakings, don't just let your mind speak, but listen above all to the voice in your heart.

We wouldn't have any of that if we had treated Höss like an animal, rather than a human being.

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yes. I never said to treat them like a rabid dog coming at you. (unless they are coming at you, of course)

Like I said, it's about how you judge someone (such as a proper trial vs flippant execution) and on what criteria.

The main thrust of my point is: Policing language while there are people out there gleefully murdering children and rigging the economy so that more suffer for their gains is pathetic pedantry and only a practice of self-fellatio at best, and running interference for these despicable monsters at worst.

Some people do, in fact, deserve to be called absolute trash monsters for betraying humanity, and do, in fact, deserve to be treated differently. Permanent incarceration (if they are the irredeemable type) after due process is still treating someone differently.

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[-] 18107@aussie.zone 138 points 5 days ago

To say that Hitler wasn't human is to pretend that no human could ever do the same, making way for another human to step up and do the same.

Accepting that Hitler was human means putting processes in place to prevent another human from doing the same.

[-] chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 55 points 5 days ago

And to take it a step further: recognize that everyone in Nazi Germany was human. Humans built the gas chambers and the crematoriums. Humans designed the walkways to the gas chambers to look like a normal pathway to a shower facility so the victims wouldn’t panic, as they had at earlier tests.

Humans architected the whole damn thing. Not just a few. It was thousands of people working throughout the Nazi regime. To fully acknowledge their humanity is to recognize that all of us (given a bad enough set of circumstances) are capable of participating in horrific crimes. When dehumanization is widespread and brutality is normalized, we suppress or even lose our moral centre.

Some people find this fact so horribly unpleasant to contemplate that they go to great lengths to deny it. They must have been monsters, psychopaths, deviants. No, what was wrong was that they were in the throes of ideology. Recognize for yourself the seductive and dangerous power of ideology.

[-] nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

everyone in Nazi Germany was human

So is every MAGA. In exactly the same way.

When we are serious about fixing America, we will have a credible program of de-Nazification

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[-] Stamets@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago

Ding ding ding ding

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[-] hungryphrog 18 points 4 days ago

Also: "sociopath/psychopath/narcissist" etc. is not just another name for a horrible person.

[-] Rachelhazideas@lemmy.world 25 points 5 days ago

Dehumanizing AI is a good thing.

[-] AeonFelis@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago

You can't dehumanize what was never human to begin with.

Which, kind of drags the entire thing from the meta level down to the object level. There were cases of dehumanization in not-that-ancient history where the dehumanizers explicitly claimed the victims are not humans. American slavery is one example. The Holocaust is another. MAGAs (still) won't claim explicitly that the minorities they dehumanize are not human. If we stay at the meta level, wouldn't that make them worse that than slavers and actual Nazis who can say they are not dehumanizing because their victims were never human to being with?

It shouldn't.

[-] Rachelhazideas@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

We humanize lots of non-human things all the time. Pets, animals used as meat, 1 month old fetuses, fictional characters, religious figures, etc.

It is as human to humanize as it is to dehumanize because it's in our nature to attempt to define what is and isn't us.

When you attribute value to a being because you see humanity in it, you are making a value statement that a being has worth because it has humanity, not because it has life which is precious.

Ultimately, dehumanizing ourselves is how we can extend our compassion to other beings. When we accept that we are no more alive than pigs are, we accept that pigs, too, are living being with their own thoughts, subjective experience, and suffering.

You can absolutely dehumanize things that were never human, because what it means to be human is neither universal nor static. AI is human to people who don't understand how LLMs work. There's a thought experiment called Roco's basilisk (trigger warning as it can induce anxiety) that entirely banks on people's tendency to humanize AI. You can argue that people are dumb and just don't understand that that's not how AI works, but how something works often has no bearing on how it is perceived by people.

More people than ever are asking what it means to be human in the face of something that almost communicates like one. We are not dehumanizing AI because of it's race, gender, or color, because that is not clearly defined in AI. We're dehumanizing AI because we are asking what it means to be human outside of superficial context.

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[-] PhilipTheBucket@piefed.social 65 points 5 days ago

I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It's a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling "homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too" brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.

For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you're a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it's horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the "abstinence-only" approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don't fight their crime very effectively.

For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It's how we operate. If you can't see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes "not human," then you can't really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone "allowed" to exist in the world doesn't contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They're indicative of a problem with humans. They're not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of "humanity" because they don't count.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Solzhenitsyn

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[-] als 65 points 5 days ago

Go talk to all the pet play enthusiasts

[-] germanatlas 45 points 5 days ago

The secret ingredient is consent

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[-] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 30 points 5 days ago

The antidote is class consciousness and solidarity. Some may think that this just replaces one enemy with another, but fascists blame the powerless, while my side blames the powerful.

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[-] Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 45 points 5 days ago

Kinda gross how obvious it is that some people don’t actually believe that certain actions are bad because they inherently violate personhood or your moral beliefs, but because they were done to them. And that the real desirable thing is to use it against The Enemy, not to eliminate it altogether.

[-] SnotFlickerman 38 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I have sympathy for the position. It's easy to get frustrated by an "enemy" who is already dehumanizing you and wishes to remove you from society for existing openly as you are. It can be damn hard to not sink to the same level of thinking... but it's part of why we had trials at Nuremberg and we took the time to treat the monsters with the human dignity they deserved and would deny to others. We didn't just hang them all by their necks because we knew they were Nazis and that was enough, they were given trials because holy fuck it matters. (There is a valid argument to be made that we didn't have enough trials for enough Nazis) Further, it helped solidify our understanding of fascism and what leads to fascism... a lack of empathy. If we allow ourselves to completely lose our empathy for those who strike against us (especially those who are uneducated and have essentially been tricked and deceived into their positions, which are the majority) we will eventually become just as monstrous as them.

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[-] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 18 points 5 days ago

What about dehumanizing billionaires and cops?

[-] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 15 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Humanity is inalienable. The most wretched, hateful human you can imagine cannot become un-human.

Think of it like calling a turd on a pedestal art. It doesn't mean it's good art, or even that you shouldn't bag it up and throw it out.

Same thing.

[-] dontbelievethis@sh.itjust.works 13 points 5 days ago

It's the paradox of tolerance but with violence this time.

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[-] hungryphrog 6 points 4 days ago

Still human. Being human has nothing to do with being a good human.

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[-] nymnympseudonym@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago

Dehumanization, tribalism, racism, religious intolerance.

Name a more iconic, perfidious quartet.

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[-] HalfSalesman@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

Dehumanization of groups from a position of power is bad.

Dehumanization of bad powerful individuals to make it emotionally easier to take them down may be necessary.

I don't believe in evil, but I do believe in consequences.

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[-] CubitOom@infosec.pub 31 points 5 days ago

Meanwhile, C level executives at companies that fund fascists and genocide:

Mountainhead (2025)

[-] Star 21 points 5 days ago

I agree! I've been trying to brainstorm how one can sort of effectively do the opposite of those dehumanizing incel memes.

We really need some viral empathy.

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[-] chocosoldier 6 points 4 days ago

human monsters are still human. if you want to defeat human evil you need to acknowledge and address it for what it is, not disavow it. you won't "no true scotsman" your way to defeating fascism.

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[-] Donkter@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago

All dehumanizers are sub-literate neaderthals

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[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

They are dehumanizing people right now, as we speak. It has to stop. One way or another.

The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people. -- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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[-] Brutticus@midwest.social 9 points 5 days ago

Notable exception: "Not men. Fascists."

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[-] Lux 16 points 5 days ago

Yes, this includes the group of people that you want to dehumanize as well. Humanity isn't something you can take away, it's an inherent aspect of a species. You can say "fascists aren't human", or "pigs aren't mammals" and they are equally false statements.

[-] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 15 points 5 days ago

Exactly. We don't punch Nazis because they're not people. Cats aren't people and we don't punch them. We punch Nazis because they're Nazis.

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[-] ristoril_zip@lemmy.zip 3 points 4 days ago

Billionaires are subhuman and don't deserve to exist.

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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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