Also, fuck Dick.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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I'd argue that his ignorance is the true evil. It's because of his ignorance that he let the yes-men do their thing. Ignorance is evil.
Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking "I want to do evil stuff today". It happens because of ignorance.
His enablers do it out of greed, however nobody wakes up in the morning thinking "I want to do greedy stuff today". It happens because of their ignorance too.
There's plenty of people who wake up and do that
Yeah, I used to think that way, but the first Trump term convinced me otherwise. There's clearly people in his orbit that are straight up evil and do not care.
And plenty of them are fucking brilliant, not stupid.
In my life I have seen ignorant people have just as much capcity for empathy as the educated. This is kind of a grossly elitist attitude.
Education/high intelligence isn't a requirement for empathy. Plenty of non-book-smart people have excellent emotional intelligence.
Plenty of highly intelligent people have high capacity for malice and evil.
Henry Kissinger comes to mind when it comes to people who are highly intelligent and have deep capacity for malice and evil.
This is a gross, classist opinion.
Kissinger wasn't as smart as he wanted you to think. There were many instances where he'd just agree with whichever side was convenient to him at the time, but did it in a way that made him look smart. He didn't have any real beliefs beyond wanting to put Kissinger in charge of things.
I don't believe in good and evil. Those are escape words for when the true cause isn't immediately obvious.
Of course non-book smart and uneducated people can be intelligent and "non-evil". This has nothing to do with education. It has to do with the willingness to question one's own prejudices or narrow-minded views.
Even the Nazis thought they did the right thing. They didn't wake up in the morning to do evil. They woke up thinking they were doing good. They were obviously wrong, despite being educated. That makes them ignorant, because they were unwilling to understand what the right thing to do actually was.
This assumes Nazis all were rational people who all were arguing in good faith at every step of the process.
Except we know and have mountains of evidence for the amount of bad faith argumentation made by Nazis to justify evil.
Like, did you forget all the propaganda made to compare the Jews with rats and the suggestion that both should be exterminated? That's just people "thinking they're doing the right thing?"
We're literally witnessing a resurgence of it in the USA from the Republican party.
If you really believe they don't know what they're doing, I have a bridge to sell you.
It's like this conservative guy I used to know who bragged about how him and his brother used to get away with shit, and how the cops couldn't nail them because they would never rat on each other, and that was the only evidence the cops had. "They can't get us to talk so they can't prove nothin!"
Conservatives literally run on "As long as I never say my evil thoughts out loud, people can't prove I'm actually evil. I just have to keep arguing in bad faith and never admit the reality, and no one can prove what's actually on my mind."
They basically live on "It's only wrong if you get caught" and the only real way to "get caught" is admit things out loud.
I've met plenty who operate like that, and we have mountains of history from German Nazi's who operated similarly, and so this argument that the Nazis somehow were all decent people who just thought they were doing the right thing is the most screamingly dumb bullshit I've heard in months.
Arguing in bad faith to win control over other people is the definition of thoughtful evil.
What the fuck even is this argument? You're so full of shit.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
You're putting words into my mouth there to sell your point.
I never claimed that Nazis were oblivious to the evilness of their actions or that they were decent citizens. I'm saying that they were ignorant. They literally called it a "solution" because they thought it was the solution to make things right.
The problem in USA and elsewhere with neo-nazi shit is that they're doing the exact same thing once again. They're fueled by prejudice and unwillingness to change or even understand anything that is different to themselves. They want to ignore all other points of view or other ways of life or anything that is different from their usual way of life.
They don't want to think about it. They don't want to learn. They are deliberately pursuing ignorance and attempting to make ignorance a virtue.