Honestly it's really fucking scary how quickly people, ESPECIALLY leftists, start supporting loss of human rights when it's aimed at someone they don't like, how quickly leftists specifically start supporting things like state violence when it's convenient for them.
Police brutality is unacceptable. . . unless it's against a mass shooter. Life sentences are inhumane. . . unless they're given to abusers. Death sentences shouldn't be an option at all. . . unless the person on trial is a rapist.
Solitary confinement, abuse from authority figures, denial of legal representation, rushed trials, etc all become totally fine the moment they're aimed at someone we've decided is an acceptable victim, someone deserving of losing their basic human rights.
When you bring into question whether a person deserves basic human rights, no matter how terrible that person is, that is the moment you've declared that everyone's basic rights are conditional.
And believe me, you might think you're "justified" in declaring that x group should be suffering, but so everyone else is telling themselves the exact same thing when they take rights away from people of color and trans people and everyone that's slightly inconvenient to the status quo.
i saw a post recently that made the argument that the question is less whether a person deserves to die, and more whether the government deserves the right to execute them, and i think that logic really applies here
regardless of whether a person deserves brutality, or a life sentence, or death, someone must be given the right to administer that punishment
and nobody should ever be given that kind of dominion over another person, ever. nobody deserves it, and nobody can be trusted with it
When you bring into question whether a person deserves basic human rights, no matter how terrible that person is, that is the moment you’ve declared that everyone’s basic rights are conditional.
There are NO exceptions. Everyone gets human rights. Everyone. Everyone has a right to autonomy, dignity, safety, and wellness. Everyone, no matter what they have done. The minute you deny someone their basic human rights you have become the abuser.
And I say this as someone whose human rights have been violated all which way and who has Survived a lot of abuse. While it is cathartic to fantasise about my abusers coming to harm, and while I do not plan on forgiving any of them, I don’t feel they have ‘earned’ abuse, death, or torture in real life. Nobody deserves to have their livelihood, their dignity, their autonomy, or their safety and health taken away from them, for any reason. The minute you say there are Acceptable Reasons is when you doom all of us. I’m gonna leave this with my favourite quote by a famous fighter of censorship, but it applies to this situation too:
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.”
―H.L. Mencken
