Hi, I’m Derin! I write things.

"The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.

Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think you’re subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, it’s absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If you’re a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."

-David Graeber, Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank

Teeth weak as fuck why can't you be like bones

Bones: with time I will mend this fracture stronger then ever. You were wise to put your faith in me.

Teeth: auuggh pleeasseee get this granule of sugar awaaayy from meee I am MELTING and BURNING nnnNNOOO you are cleaning me TOO HARD;! aaaiughh my fucking enamellll one billion cavities for you!!! Your sins against me are PERMANENT you SICK BITCH

This is because teeth is skin more than it is bones

Your right but also please do not say it that way.

If you ground up sugary mush with your bones several times every day and then left them sitting in bacteria-filled warm goo then they probably wouldn’t do great either

Help I need assistance carrying my three hundred kilogram set of screwdriver bits

So good value for 12 bucks you reckon

I thought it was fairly normal to feel empathy for bad people.

I thought it was common, even.

But after my Elon/Grimes post... now I'm wondering if I was mistaken about that.

I wrote a post about Trump being traumatized after his assassination attempt and a post about his poor adaptation to aging. I expressed sympathy for him in both cases. But I still maintain my white hot hatred of him and wish for him to face consequences.

Elon was abused by his father. Some of the stories are incredibly tragic. Hearing those stories triggers an involuntary response in my emotional systems that I can't stop no matter how much I despise present-day Elon. I also wonder if that abuse never occurred maybe we wouldn't be dealing with this current clusterfuck.

I have never held so much anger towards a single person as I do my brother. But I also see him as a victim of abuse. I know he was once a really good person and he was slowly corrupted. I feel sorry for him. I mourn the amazing person he used to be. And I still love him.

But that doesn't make me any less angry.

I honestly think it's incredibly important for us to understand the people who are bastards who seek to ruin lives. Hitler as a kid wanted to care for his mom who was dying of cancer. Understanding that pain and even relating to it is important for us to not lose the value that they are human. Making them into monsters puts to much space between reality. And he deserved what he got, if not more.

They can be an enemy you want to see destroyed. That you do not want any positivity towards. I think what happens here is that sometimes understanding the tragedies an absolutely right bastard has experienced; threatens their "righteousness of anger." I, personally, do not think because I have context around another person's life it invalidates my own hatred of them. For some though that flexibility is difficult to come to terms with so they lash out.

if you have any empathy for these people ur literally compliant in what they’re doing. i don’t care that they had a “shitty home life” and they just need a hug from their dad to feel all better. they’re sick horrible people who are willing to DESTROY AND END the lives of thousands to add another dollar to their billions

I want to start by saying this was incredibly hurtful.

I really think you need to read what I wrote again because you grossly misunderstood it. Especially the "hatred" and "consequences" part. I can tell you for certain I am still wishing that bullet didn't just graze Trump's ear.

The absolute gall to tell people they aren't allowed to have emotional responses. How do I stop an involuntary emotion? What magic technique do you have because I'd love to end my depression and anxiety right now.

Errol Musk raised a stepdaughter, then impregnated her, and then married her. He literally drove his current wife to preschool and she called him "Dad".

Here is a recent quote from him.

Imagine being raised by that.

This awful person created another awful person. It's tragic. It's sad. And it makes me feel bad.

Understanding the reason someone turned into a monster is useful. This tells me we need to do a better job of protecting children or else we are going to keep making new Elons.

it’s useful, and it’s good to understand, but it’s also important not to humanize these people when they won’t hesitate a single moment to destroy thousands of lives

I think most of us can agree that evil is born from trauma and the road to hell is paved with good intentions. But the reason we call it evil is that at no moment and in no way it should be justified by our society and collective conscious as

And as cruel as that sounds, there are important reasons for this. It because evil won’t hesitate to dismantle said society, conscious and it’s values from within

This is also called the tolerance paradox. It’s an important observation that was born from the aftermath of WW2

Some things should be dehumanized and given no tolerance, to keep them from spreading

It's possible we are working off different definitions of "humanize" but I think there is nothing more human than stupidity, ignorance, and hurting others. Elon is just a human. He is fueled by trauma and ketamine abuse and is lashing out at the world. He desperately wanted people to like him but wasn't willing to put in the work to be remotely likable. Plenty of people overcome their trauma and make the effort to defy their poor upbringing. Elon made a different choice. And he is responsible for that choice. No awful childhood can justify his actions.

I see the lack of humanization as a much larger problem for conservatives. They have taken away Elon and Trump's status as human beings and elevated them to gods. Elon is an infallible Tech Jesus capable of bending all machines to his will. And Trump is the Grand Business Genius who thinks 90 steps ahead and is playing 8D chess to save our country from immigrants and people with pronouns.

I wish people from that side would humanize them more and see they are flawed, pathetic, and despicable. They are squishy sacks of meat like the rest of us.

I will never excuse their actions or decisions. I consider them well beyond redemption. And I wish every day they never existed.

This is probably a semantic debate. I think we are all on the same page that these people suck and need to go right fucking now.

I actually don't think this is a semantic debate, I think that Frogman is right and "it's important not to humanize people who won't hesitate to (effectively) kill people" is, no shit, protofascist ideology.

No matter how awful, how violent, how genocidal, how "evil" someone is, you have to remember that people are human. You have to treat them as humans, as rational actors who are doing things that they believe will achieve their goals, that their goals are founded in a desire to see *their* version of a better world and not out of some abstract demonic drive to be evil.

The second to last poster is fundamentally understanding the paradox of tolerance in a way that would almost be funny if it wasn't so fucking dangerous. One of the attitudes that you absolutely cannot tolerate if you want the world to be a better place is the dehumanizing of you enemies.

You can't do this because it's saying "there is a version of the world in which it is correct to treat some people as other-than-human, and the rules that apply to humans (the right to a fair trial, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, etc.) do not apply to those people."

And that means you're saying there are conditions in which people *can* lose those rights and that's where the whole thing starts. "People who hurt children don't deserve rights/kill all pedophiles > the LGBTQIAs are trying to recruit your kids > queers are all pedophiles because they want to recruit and destroy your kids > trans people don't deserve rights." "Terrorists don't deserve rights > all Arabs are terrorists > you can't do war crimes against a population with no civilians > gazans as young as 4 are hamas > it's not a war crime to bomb a hospital it's a legitimate attack against a terrorist stronghold." "Criminals have violated the law and don't deserve the same rights as the rest of us > crossing the border without permission from our government is a crime > all undocumented migrants are criminals > it's okay to separate criminals from their families and put them in cages and offshore prisons"

Elon Musk is a shitty, shitty person but by dehumanizing him, by refusing to recognize that he is just as human (with dreams, hopes, trauma, longing, love, fear, and family) as you are, you are trying to differentiate him from you. You are trying to say "that's not human. That's not like me, I'm not like that, that's a monster and monsters don't deserve to be treated like people."

And people who think that way are very good at finding monsters. Maybe the monsters who don't deserve rights are all the Republicans in congress. Maybe the monsters are all the pardoned J6ers. Maybe the monsters are all republicans generally. Maybe it's everyone who *tolerates* republicans so it's everyone in red states. And that's how you get people saying "they fucking deserved it" after the Texas freeze the same way people are saying "they fucking deserved it" after the LA fires. "Suck it up, that's what happens when you vote for [my political opponents], you deserve what's coming to you because you're all monsters."

The worst person you can think of, the most genocidal dictator, the most vile racist supporter of apartheid, the most prolific murderer - these are all humans, they are not special, they are not unique, and you would do well to remember it because you're not special either. It's imperishable to recognize the humanity of those people because to do so is to recognize that NOT being like that is a choice. YOU could become like them. YOU could do some great harm in the name of your best vision of the future.

Look around at the world right now. Look at the online crackdowns on queer expression, on trans joy. Do you know how we got to a place where it's easy to ban and hide and silence trans women in the name of "content violations"? It's because of a bill meant to protect children from being sexually abused. "Of course I support SESTA/FOSTA, I'm not a monster like those pervert freaks, nobody has to tolerate sex on their platforms" - one of the major, major tools that is being used to silence, isolate, and harass queer people online was voted in by Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.

We have to recognize the humanity of the people who do awful things because it is a vital reminder that we, humans, maybe even good people, can easily do awful things ourselves.

Anyway. Absolutely bugfuck insane that "it's important not to humanize bad people" is a take that people will say out loud in 2025.

There are people who are decrying the attack on USAID who have loudly and proudly said that Florida doesn't deserve hurricane relief because of its abortion ban. "Florida doesn't care about women so I don't care about Florida." Great! Cool! That's the exact same logic used by Trump to withdraw from the WHO.

it's important to humanize all humans. it's important to humanize all people. it's important to humanize your enemies. it's important to humanize those you hate, despise and feel sick from the thought of belonging to the same species as. because you do in fact still belong to the same species and it is important for the reality in your head to sync up with the reality you actually live in

"I don't understand why you're taking the fact that I directly insulted you so personally" is really an emotion that knows no political, racial or gender boundaries.

Dog

#this is probably not true based on the fact only like tmz are ‘reporting’ on it#but girl get off twitter and call cps. what.

well for one, https://people.com/grimes-pleads-with-elon-musk-to-stop-ignoring-her-about-their-child-medical-crisis-11683855

the tweets were deleted, but are real.

secondly, I say this with kindness, what do you think cps is going to do to Elon Musk??? She is saying very plainly she's tweeting this because no other avenue to contact him has worked. cps can hardly handle a normal case, they aren't gonna do anything to one of the most powerful men in the world, even if they found just cause, which they might not, because custody law is fucked.

Every week I have less and less confidence in Reghabi. Mate you're doing brain surgery in a non-sterile household basement and you're not even in scrubs.

I don't care if you're not cutting bits out those internal tissues were WAY too exposed for safety.

Ambient bacteria is actually vital to the reintegration process.

That needle just had nutrient broth in it

'what remains of edith finch' is such a haunting story but like, the part that's the most harrowing to me is that the stories we see of their deaths are always, always filtered through edie. she's the one who makes the shrines, she's the one who leaves out diaries and poems and comics. and like, the actual deaths could be so far removed from what we know. there could be clues that have been eroded by time or clues put there on purpose. and like. just. even after death edie orchestrates (to some extent) all these deaths like one huge fantastical story. and the reality is they were just people. all of them were just people and they were just children with deaths that are only as true as we believe them to be.

People always laugh at the scene about the shark rolling down the hill in Molly’s plot, and how it’s so absurd ( which it is tbf ) but the imagery of a fish out of water always gives me the imagery of breathless- suffocation.

All I can think of when I see that scene is Molly likely laying alone in the dark of her room, choking on her own vomit after getting sick from trying to stop the hunger pains. Helpless as a fish out of water.

I also thinking about how all the animals she eats in that hallucination are female, and nearly all of them are mothers ( mother bird, mother rabbit ) and I’m wondering if that was intended to pre present her resentment for her mother for doing that to her.

It definitely adds to the unsettling feeling of how romanticized all the deaths are in this game but it’s so jarring to think about the reality of them. It’s just a lot of kids dying alone in some of the most painful, prolonged ways possible.