promethea.incorporated

sdhs-rationalist:

sinesalvatorem:

This article is absolutely horrific.

21-year-old Otto Warmbier, another man from Ohio who last week was convicted of subversion for stealing a propaganda banner in North Korea, and sentenced to 15 years hard labor. […] my mother’s callous reaction to Micahel Fay’s sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.

It goes on to talk about how acting recklessly in North Korea is a side effect of having been raised in the US with white privilege and says that, effectively, he deserves whatever he gets.

No! Bad! WTF is wrong with you?Are we so stuck in a crab bucket mentality that, when oppressive power comes down on an arbitrary member of the out group, we have to celebrate it?

Coming from a country filled with citizens who lambaste black victims of state sanctioned violence by telling us that if we obey the law, we wouldn’t have to face the consequences, Warmbier should’ve listened. […] And if Eric Garner is to be blamed for his own death for selling loose cigarettes or if Sandra Bland is dead because she failed to signal when changing lanes, then Otto Warmbier is now facing a decade and a half of hard labor because he lacked both good judgment and respect for the national autonomy of a country which has made its hatred for and vendetta against America unequivocally clear.

Yep, nothing but crabs in a bucket. “A member of your tribe has to suffer the arbitrariness of state violence, because members of my tribe do, too!” Eric Garner shouldn’t have been killed. That was terrible. Nobody should be treated so despicably by a “justice” system.

But that fucking means ‘nobody’. The world isn’t made a better place by “balancing out” the suffering of one group of people with the suffering of another. It isn’t improved by an attitude that laughs gleefully whenever Those People come to harm.

And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.

And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.

I think this is the most #endorsed statement anybody has ever made to me about sj.