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Cake day: August 10th, 2025

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  • PhilipTheBucket@piefed.socialto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonereminder rule
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    12 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


  • My parents owned a cat who loved to go on walks with them, but would complain loudly if the walk was too long, and demand to return to the house when she was done walking. It was such a problem that they started shutting the cat in the house when they wanted to walk, and so she would hide outside and follow them secretly until they were too far along with the walk to bring her back to the house and continue without her, and then trot up and join them on the walk. Then shortly she would complain that the walk was too long and she wanted to go back now.

    We love her


  • “Oh, this is dangerous. If this goes wrong my spine is going to crush like a tinkertoy. … … Well… shit. There’s no other way to do it really. Okay, I hope it goes okay.”

    Turned out fine. In retrospect, I was young and dumb. I worked with some guys who’d gotten fucked up, just a couple, usually they gave them work in the office if they wanted it since their bodies didn’t work right anymore. OSHA’s a good thing.