At the brand new Everglades immigration detention center that officials have dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz,” people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.
Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.
Days after Donald Trump toured it, attorneys, advocates, detainees and their relatives are speaking out about the makeshift facility, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration raced to build on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland. Detainees began arriving July 2.
One thing that really saddens me in all… this (gestures broadly at everything) is that I have no idea how to deal with people with no empathy, with people who think this is okay. I just really do not know what to say an how to say it.
I’ve been raised with empathy. I knew even before going to kindergarten that it’s more fun to share some of my toys with other kids because then we can all play together. I knew that doing nice things for others gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. I learned that helping people is GOOD.
And I just don’t know how to deal with people who have not. I don’t know how to deal with people who will put other people in cages just because they look vaguely Latino, without due process. I don’t know how to deal with people that cheer for that. I just don’t know. How the fuck do I, do we, deal with people who have no empathy whatsoever? Not a rhetorical question by the way, I hope someone can explain it to me like I’m overly sensitive empathetic five-year old…
How to deal with them?..
ARM UP
Brilliant lecture, and it points out the reasons for fundamental differences in morality, but apart from calling things by different names (vide Alligator Auschwitz in this very post), which is a great succession, it doesn’t give me much actionable advice.
Still fascinating though - them you so much for posting it here! I want to listen to/read more things by him now!
I have no idea how to deal with people with no empathy
By not engaging with them. No, I’m not going to try and “change their minds”, because I consider them to be a lost cause. I learned this years ago as a vegan.
For sake of mental health, it’s best to just move on and engage with those who are more receptive and show a shred of humanity.
That is not dealing with them. Ending up at your quote’s whole point.
Apathy to those who lack empathy is not a solution. In reality it is a tendril of the problem. The sake of mental health is not a constant, action is required if empathy is to win. How else do you constantly demonstrate for others to learn, to envy, and to bear witness?
Interact with those who deem you nothing and be more than they can. Let their hatred fester but let it be in your presence as you leave them in awe.
Music brought a black man and a Klan member together. That kinda thing happened hundreds of times.
It’s too tall an order for almost any mortal. Want to believe it’s true, though, and not impossible.
Sure, that’s definitely an option that would be healthier/easier for me personally, but can you really disengage when people in government build concentration camps and secret police force? I’m not even American or in America and it’s just overwhelming…
My point is that it is not productive to engage in people who have no empathy, because it won’t actually accomplish anything. It is a wasted effort.
It’s sort of along the lines of the Serenity Prayer. They fall under the “things I cannot change.”
You can if you’d arm up
Yeah, then what, Buffalo Bill? Shoot at what, who?
I find I have little to no choice but to withdraw from as much as possible from the world. By world I mean people, since they are 100% of the causes of the problems I can do nothing about.
Everyone knows how to deal with them. You just refuse to.
Shocking I say. Shocking that they’re not dead yet.
If Luigi Mangione can be wrongfully arrested and stand up to tyranny, we all can. I admire their spirit and resolve.
We should not tolerate this level of evil.
RFK jr will be there in a moment.
What that place needs is an armed incursion
The fact that these problems are present at the beginning stages show that this was always the intended result. Obviously none of this is shocking, but it does amaze me that they don’t even have the patience to pretend that it was ‘a good plan that went sour along the way’. Shows that if you have half of the nation fully captured then optics don’t even matter anymore.
I think what people keep overlooking about “optics” is that a mass number of people will never see this news because they only digest news through algorithmically controlled content providers that give them more of what they already believe.
The number of people going directly to traditional media outlets keeps shrinking in favor of YouTube shorts, Tiktok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram
Half of the US is very happy to punish poor brown people in this place.
They might not say it overtly but they feel that most of the people there deserve it.
They are also very happy to see the radical woke left upset about it.
Not that it matters that much because traditional media has created a “business as usual” narrative instead of calling out our plummet into fascism. Between that and the sane-washing of Trump, unless you visited very obviously leftist news sources, you wouldn’t hear about most of this.
Agreed, that’s kinda what I’m getting at. This whole term has been with the understanding that the narrative has become fully divorced from the reality. Scary times.
I’m willing to believe that it’s a mix of both malice and incompetence.
the evil is perpetrated by fucking idiots
The only reason the whole thing hasn’t immediately sunk into the Everglades is the existing structure of the airstrip.
Most of the people who died in Germany’s camps weren’t killed “on purpose.” They simply couldn’t survive the conditions, and died of disease, malnutrition, cold, and so on. This is a feature. Explicit killing “on purpose” is just the backup option if things aren’t moving quickly enough.
It’s actually a bug since they plan on using these people as slave labor.
I don’t think there is any plan to use anyone abducted as slaves.
They have a goal of reaching a population of 100,000,000. They certainly aren’t going to waste energy keeping millions of slaves in line when they want millions more deaths.
You’re thinking is incorrect. The only way their plan works is with slave labor.
They called it the “final solution” not the “first thing we’re trying”.
So this is it. In plain sight. It also tells us how it must have been 90 years ago. In plain sight. What are we going to do? I am from Germany and I have to tell you, our leaders won’t come to the rescue. They’re just taking notes.
Can’t we make use of this formidable tool, that lets us communicate all over the world and makes us recognise we’re all very much the same?
“Alligator Auschwitz”.
Now I understand why everyone keeps making the distinction.
Fuck these bastards.
Camp DeSantis
Don’t worry America, I’m sure that if you walk together some more, with some especially passive-aggressive signs, you’ll convince the regime to tear down this concentration camp! That’s how the Nazis were beaten, right?
Cruelty is the point
they are hoping a hurricane will wipe them out, so they can wash thier hands of this.
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
I’ll admit, they played this well. The swamp is not easy to get to, it’s in Florida where the people will be plenty fine with mass executions of “people who don’t belong here.”
It’s also surrounded by ocean, Alabama and Georgia.
And Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas. Generally a lot of unfriendly states.
Keep these places open for the ice agents in the future after their crimes against humanity trials
Sounds about right for Republican scum.
