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I don't get it.

So here's the thing, as I see it.

Ultimately we need to tolerate everyone. Everybody is entitled to the same rights and protections. (Ideally, this would include food, shelter, safety, family, access to important media, access to sports events...all the things we find important, but I digress).

The problem is, everyone (seriously everyone ) thinks that someone should be excluded. Popular examples are people who commit heinous crimes: child predators, rampage killers, serial killers, and far right interests will typically use them to set precedent that some people need to be shot, or locked up in abusive conditions, or subject to excessive searches, or not allowed to speak, or whatever, and then those precedents are expanded to include anyone they can associate with them, and the next thing you know, liberals are rumored to have a child-trafficking sex ring in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. Also women don't have the right to vote because fetuses are more persons than their mothers are.

But we're not even there yet: Only recently has the LGBT+ community decided that trans folk and enbies are people too, and deserve to march in the regular pride parade (rather than their own side-mini-parade). This is one of the reasons the far right is attacking the trans community, because they're easy prey and the militants expect little resistance from the mainstream.

Another example: Even here on Lemmy, discussions of furries leads to suggestions and arguments that all furries are furverts into yiffing, when most of them just like adventures and dramas featuring anthros that might be other than Disney and Warner Bros. Looney Tunes. Observe also, rumors from the right wing about liberal schools providing litterboxes for catgirl children.

So yes, the problem of othering is epidemic. When it comes to people who actually committed crimes, we still can't help ourselves but just dump them in the (squallid, abusive, sometimes for-profit) prison industrial complex figuring they deserve the soap jokes featuring Bubba, but they too deserve real protections as per the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. They too deserve to be treated humanely, and when we don't we find that those guilty of possession (of cannabis for medical purposes) also get imprisoned in squalid abusive conditions, as do women seeking abortions.

It helps to think of those who committed terrible crimes as broken like a toaster, rather than evil like a Disney villain. And if you're happy to wish them eaten by hyenas, then yeah, eventually those who are insufficiently patriotic and loyal to Dear Leader (or is just no longer useful now) will also end up in the hyena pit at dinnertime. Granted, some of our super-antisocial citizens are beyond our current capacity for treatment, but then our response should be to R&D more effective treatments, and in the meantime, keep them well and preserve their rights as much as possible, as if they're disabled in the brain, not as if they're self-aware monsters.

This is incredibly hard to do, and as the 2024 general election shows, the general population is easy to convince to just let the hyenas -- or in this case the leopards -- eat the faces of the marginalized, and risk that the leopards might still be hungry once there are only mainstream faces left to eat.

And that's to say, I know the society I want, but I have only a small fraction of the clues of how to get there. And I'm not sure there are enough of us who want that same society. 🎶 You might say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one... 🎵

And I'm not even sure human society could get there from here before we run out of water and the climate crisis turns into a giant population correction (featuring not just famine, but war, natural disasters, Mad Max and cannibalism; It's going to be a big mess).