No, they really are. And forgetting that makes us part of the disease instead of part of the cure.
Dehumanization is one of our most dangerous traits, sometimes we’re even subtly offended when asked to try to humanize somebody we don’t think we’re supposed to. That’s wrong.
Even Baby Hitler was adorable.
i hope it was an actual rape crisis centre and not a pro-life subtle nagging centre, we have those in droves in Ireland.
You fool! His memories are admissable as evidence!
I believe they left the stuff outside with a shopping cart, rather than breaking in again.
I recall that at some point Sonic Youth had a van stolen and returned to them after they asked for help getting their instruments back. I think this actually happened.
I seem to recall reading about that here. Nope, it was over at <a href=“http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=sonic%20youth’s%20van%20stolen&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CCoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpitchfork.com%2Fnews%2F47906-sonic-youth-recover-stolen-guitars-after-13-years%2F&ei=FvkEUvqGGaPq2AWo34C4Cg&usg=AFQjCNFrAkR0Ya6VlPLeThs4taQqyW779g&bvm=bv.50500085,d.aWc"target=”_blank">Pitchfork.
Stanislaw Lem has that covered in The Upside Down Evolution, a short story that basically predicts the current evolution of militaries into (eventually) non-human automata where the life expectancy of an actual human in war is about 0.5 seconds.
Since we’ve been talking about Star Trek here and other websites lately, even though Nemesis was bad, that was one of the main messages of the movie. Shinzon was a clone of Picard but became a monster when raised under totally different conditions.
The movie is bad, but Shinzon (played by Tom Hardy) giving his history is a powerful scene. Honestly, I’ll watch this one once in a while just because Tom Hardy and Patrick Stewart played off each other so well.
Me too. I remember thinking, when I first saw Nemesis, that it was a pretty weak Star Trek film, but that I was going to have to look up the guy who played Shinzon. I was happy when he hit the big time.
Police Officers should transcend humanity.
They should be paid a million a year and each have the power and the inclination borne of their training to walk into banks and the lobbies of lobbyists and arrest those fuckers.
If it’s a bad idea for them to do this, surely that should be clearly stated in some kind of a charter somewhere.
“Justice for all, except the rich and powerful, the influential and the lawyered up, the canny manipulator of the media or any of their relatives or friends or business partners or extended acquaintances borne of a financial transaction.”
Just us. hehe.
Yes.
However it was, ironically, his human side which was forged from cold steel.
Sounds about right. I remember reading somewhere about some guy who played a “virtual navy” game with enthusiasts, but he ended up bending the spirit of the rules so that his navy was made of a bunch of tiny kamikaze ships and started beating everyone. They weren’t thrilled, as this wasn’t really what they had in mind; and I think they just left lol.
Once we get this coopernation thing off the ground, I’ll make sure you have a shot at being a Teddy Bear Herder!
Glitch’s statement is about how police are trained to view the world not about the police themselves. That is a MAJOR difference. Police dehumanize criminals, Glitch isn’t dehumanizing police, merely accurately observing their all too human behavior…imho.
You did it too!
SOME individual policemen dehumanize criminals, of course. But ‘police’ encompasses far too many individuals for that sort of blanket statement to be anything other than a little risky. And categorizing a whole group like that does a huge disservice to quite a few of them, who are decent and sometimes awesome human beings who have real lives, just like ours.
I know there are some policemen who’ve demonstrated horrible behavior, but the moment we give somebody a negative association because of a group they belong to that’s not definitively valid, we set us all up for failure.
I’m not saying it’s not a very common, socially acceptable trait in our culture. I’m saying it’s a very bad trait and the moment we try to impose any sort of will on a dehumanized group is the moment we become assholes ourselves.
oh, I get the point you are trying to make, but you are missing the bigger point and the one i was making. You are conflating stereotyping with dehumanizing, you are confusing two very very different concepts alas.
…of course we are all individuals, duh. every police officer has free will to act how they choose within the confines of their required guidelines, and there is a vast spectrum that varies individual to individual, i agree to that 100% and never stated any different. Unfortunately in the states, they are trained to dehumanize criminals because it makes their enforcement easier. That is one of the joys of living in the country with the highest incarceration rate of any first world country, a true police state. Other countries such as Canada have the opposite sort of training and are a completely scenario. it isn’t a function of the job itself, or the people themselves, but rather their training. hopefully that clears things up for you.
Actually, I’m pointing out that the human trait of stereotyping is a necessary component to dehumanizing, when you have strong emotions on a topic, it’s far more responsible to fight stereotyping as well, as that’s how our brains work.
The moment you have any sort of passionate thought (especially negative) about a group of people is the moment we need to fight to humanize or to acknowledge that our passion reduces our ability to see or implement anything useful.
If we don’t, we end up in the exact mess we’re in.
I know that what you’re describing is socially acceptable and common, and people don’t generally question it. I’m saying that it’s a fundamental flaw in our nature and if we’re not CONSTANTLY on top if it then we are guaranteed to fuck things up royally.
except it isn’t. dehumanizing isn’t just the candy coated “hurt feelings” variety you describe, in reality it is much much worse. dehumanizing an individual does not require any sort of sterotyping whatsoever.
you are also missing the above point that observing an aspect of a groups official training is very different then stereotyping any specific individual. you are talking about the vague dehumanizing of a general group of people, the discussion is about dehumanizing specific individuals, this is a very very different action.
to clarify, making a blanket statement about criminals is a very different action then dehumanizing individual criminals. they are not even close to the same thing. apples and oranges.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on this bit, we may just be seeing different levels of scale.
I’ll point out that I may be the unusual one here, as I FIRMLY believe that the moment we’re thinking outside our monkeyspheres we’ve got to be amazingly careful the moment we even talk about interfering with the lives of others, this is an atypical view and I know I go against the grain, but I do believe very strongly that trying to live such large lives and even CARING about all these people is one of the roots of many of society’s ills.
Mr. Wong says it better, I’d argue that we also have a sort of ‘proxysphere’ which can be used positively if we’re well trained. I have however met almost zero adults (self included) who I think haven’t been largely broken already. Six year olds get it though, they haven’t been ruined yet.
Hush now. That guy’s the next POTUS.
