Visiting the bird always makes me sadder.
I just saw an unhinged blue-splotched user advocate for hanging people to make her feel safer as a middle-class person in SF.
It's not just Florida, Texas, et al, & my heart goes out to US friends trying so hard to build better through mutual aid & robust social safety nets... while *this* kind of crap is emboldened in public discourse.
Forget trying to walk away from Omelas; just try getting people to stop dreaming up worse punishments for the child!
@MLClark I saw something similar yesterday. Someone went off the rails with imaginative revenge fantasies. No thought should start with "we should just kill all the...". Strange how steeped people get in these thoughts before they drop them casually into the feed.
@JakeA That's the worrying part: the folks who have no hesitation about sharing these thoughts. I'm sure plenty of folks think terrible things all the time - but usually there's an awareness of societal guardrails to keep them from oversharing. When folks feel comfortable to post such ideas with impunity, that says a heck of a lot more about the overall culture we've built than what exists in any one human's head.
@MLClark And the tools with which we've built that culture. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that that person's feed appears to be just the right space for such comments.
@MLClark I saw that one. Bunch of the left SFF crowd is calling her out. I went over to her profile--very much part of the pundit class calling for harsher treatment of the homeless. And..she has a Substack. My guess is that this is her means of driving up subscriptions.
I...can't even. The raw cynicism of writing that sort of clickbait to get attention for my writing. I've seen enough of this behavior from edgelord wannabes to recognize it in punditry.