#That's what the justice system should be about

[a-s-fischer]

Antisemitism and the Nazi Worldview: a Guide for the Perplexed

While most people know the Nazis hated Jews, few people understand just how integral Jew-hate was to the Nazi philosophy. This leads into many of the misconceptions about Nazis and the holocaust that regularly pop up, so it bears discussing what Nazis believed about racism and the Jews.

The Nazi conception of "race" was much narrower and "scientific" than we think of it today. The Nazi conception of race was that humans were split into subgroups with distinct traits, that set them apart from each other and gave them advantages in a great and bloody contest of the races. These races pattern on better to ethnicities, nationalities, or even language groups, than race as we think of it today, which is why it would make sense in a Nazi framework to talk about an Irish race, or a Polish race, for example. And of course in the Nazi mind, these races were a real biological reality, and not a social and cultural construct, and the strength and purity of a fit race might be lost through race mixing.

And of course races were differently fit or unfit, superior or inferior, and through the races warring against each other in a battle of the fittest, the superior race would rise above the rest, and subjugate the earth. Hitler came of age in a time of scarcity, war, and famine, and he believed there was no way to feed the entirety of the human race, so eliminating the lesser races through this perpetual struggle of races against each other was the only way for humanity to survive. It was all very Darwinian except that it completely misunderstood how the Darwinian model of evolution actually works, since the unit of selection was the nonexistent race, not the individual.

This struggle of the races was in Hitler and the Nazis' conception not only natural and necessary, but good. Conquest and the slaughter of inferior races was good. The state of the world with nation states and silly notions like laws, and morals, this was bad and unnatural. Humanity, or the strongest race, needed to do away with this system, or humans would all perish of starvation in a degenerate race-mixed scrum. The Nazis were heros, looking to save humanity from this foul unnatural state it had been tricked into adopting.

Tricked by the machinations of one race. One race had broken away from the others, and learned how to hack the system, to survive over under the rule of other races, when it should have been destroyed as a weaker lesser race. This race figured out how to lie and cheat, and live off other races as a parasite, while controlling them from within with fake, unnatural, vile concepts of laws, ethics, notions of justice and compassion, human rights, and international cooperation. And also with money. That race was the Jews.

In the Nazi mind, other races might be lesser, weaker, worthy only of a slow starvation under Nazi rule, but Jews, Jews were unique, special. Weak but cunning, only the Jews had figured out how to subvert and pervert the noble struggle of the races. The Jews were not only especially hated in the Nazi mind but they also served an explanatory purpose. The Jews were the reason humans were not in what the Nazis viewed as a state of nature, and the reason that the areas hadn't eliminated all the other races and taken over the world already. And anything that went wrong for the Nazis was of course caused by Jewish manipulation. The Jews had to be stripped of their unnatural power and control, and eliminated quickly, to keep them from continuing to undermine the strongest race, the Aryan Germans.

Early on, there was some discussion about how this was to be done. The mass slaughter of Jews under this philosophy might have been inevitable but it wasn't obviously inevitable to all Nazis. The important thing was to reduce the Jews to a state of nature, to take away their unnatural control, and leave them in the position of any other lesser race. This is where ideas, like sending all the Jews to Madagascar, to "build their own state" but really to inevidably die in the wilderness, came from. If Jews were separated from their stronger hosts, the logic went, they would just be one more weaker race and they would die just the same. This was also why so many Nazis took a special delight in simply denying captive Jews the means of survival, leaving them to starve, freeze, and die of disease in a state of nature, without the resources they had parasitically leached out of their host races.

But that process took too long. There were simply too many Jews, and too many (to the Nazi mind) Jewish controlled enemies. As Germany and the Axis' began to lose the war, and then as that loss became increasingly only a matter of time, the Nazis ramped up their efforts to kill Jews, by bullet and by gas, because if they could kill enough Jews, surely that Jewish control over their enemies would break and the Aryans among those enemies what recognize their racial interest, and join with the Germans, giving them victory. Instead the resources poured into the wholesale murder of Jews were resources stripped from the Nazi war machine, hastening the Allied victory.

Antisemitism wasn't simply one more bigotry for the Nazis to tack onto their general racism. It was foundational to the Nazi conception of how the world functioned. It was the explanitory mechanism in the Nazis' conspiratorial framework. And with this philosophy at the core of Nazism, the Holocaust became not only inevitable, but the highest calling of the Nazis, their sacrifice for humanity, or at least what was left of humanity after the strongest race had triumphed over all the others. Very little about Nazism is unique. Their militarism, their glorification of violence and struggle, their racial pseudo-Darwinianism, certainly their conspiratorial antisemitism, all had plenty of precident long before they came on the scene. It was their particularly potent combination of these existing elements that made them Nazis. And in this combination, it was the Jew-hate which held everything together and which provided the energizing force.

[allwormdiet]

Interlude 6

Justice for Paige McAbee

This is. Fucking evil. Chaining a woman up like an animal and parading her around the courtroom. Like what the shit.

Utterly fucking barbaric

Brief detour I guess to provide exposition on the existence of rogues

Going from heartbreak to outrage this quickly in succession was some fucking whiplash when I first read this arc, fucking tell you what

Actual torture.

The inhumanity of this entire arrangement is borderline sickening to see play out. What an utter failure of the system

Oh hey you two

I can see how people would get. Touchy. About a power like that. But touchy enough for a life sentence is fucked.

Also, credit where it's due, Bakuda's ingenuity in this situation is still pretty well on display

Bakuda is playing with fucking fire here, and not just pyrokinesis, har har

Okay you know what, callousness and cruelty aside, this is a fucking badass display from Bakuda.

Okay so what the fuck is up with the ABB capes, actually. Bakuda built a bomb that would've devastated, like, the entire Eastern Seaboard, and probably even further beyond that into the west and north. I'd say that she was slumming it as part of a gang that's only got a minor presence in one city and a few neighboring areas, but honestly Lung feels just as cracked.

Dude basically only fights harder over time, he would've taken down everyone in that warehouse if Skitter didn't make a Hail Mary play with Newter's hallucinogen. Kaiser, Sundancer, Bitch, Newter, and one or both of the twins would've been fucking smoked, maybe Labyrinth if Coil's guys didn't bother to pull her out. This dude could've been putting up massive numbers throughout his entire reign as the head of the ABB.

So what the fuck was he doing instead? If he's a gang boss with this kind of power at his fingertips, where's the fucking appetite that should come with it? Skitter didn't even think he was an A-lister before they fought and he proved her wrong, she thought he was like, a step above Uber and Leet? In what world does that misconception become publicly accepted?

I'd say this is gonna bug me, but uhh, Lung's going to the fucking oubliette to end all oubliettes so it's a bit of a moot point, isn't it

Like, okay. Fucked up, sure thing. But this is still such a massive injustice; it was a one-time thing and she couldn't have possibly known if this was the first time it ever happened. You could've demanded training for her power, if nothing else, but you throw her into Hell on Earth. Fuck me.

This is a level of determination that I think has so far gone unmatched in this story. Like, I'll give Taylor time to pull off something even more outrageously self-harming for the sake of an objective, it's her story after all and there's a lot of words left, but Bakuda really is something else.

Of course that "something else" does include being an abrasive piece of shit, but hell, she's a parahuman, I don't think I've met one of them that's without some kind of baggage.

Maybe there's a world out there where after her trigger event she comes down on the other end of the hero/villain line. Bombs aren't exactly heroic but she could build non-lethally for standard use and save the big damage for shit like Endbringers. Plus the obvious potential of having a bomb Tinker as an EOD expert, that would be game-changing.

She'd still probably be an asshole, but like. You don't have to be pleasant to be a hero, we know that one for sure.

Alas.

I was torn between wanting Paige to get out of this and wanting Lung and Bakuda to get what's coming to them.

Hi Dragon, wish you weren't the warden of the worst prison I've ever heard of in my life, see you later in the story maybe

Also. Six hundred prisoners in the Birdcage. Not counting whoever's died. That's a fucking lot of them.

Wait what the fuck happened to Newfoundland

Oh, Dragon hates this too, well there's a small fucking mercy.

Also, "the hole the men opened into the women's half of the Birdcage" is a fucking alarming phrase. We're just fucking letting anything fly down here, huh? Jesus Christ.

Dragon's description of the Birdcage's security measures is. Fucking extreme. This is a fucking nightmare, an absolute cavalcade of human rights abuses that I can't even begin to fathom.

Have children been born in the Birdcage? If not, who's preventing that? Is everyone being covertly dosed with contraceptives to keep them from having children? Do the block leaders have people on hand to deal with abortions? How do you handle dietary restrictions? Religious restrictions? What if it turns out you were wrongly convicted?

Literally everything about this place is a horror show. Every implication is dark as fucking Vantablack.

Gross

I guess this is what passes for society down here, huh

Well shit, I guess I'm glad Bakuda has some enrichment at least.

Okay, so, Marquis is a supervillain who's taken over a cell block, and he's a Brockton native invested in learning what he's missed out on

...Easy money says he's Amy Dallon's old man.

Not entirely shocked that Lung's spent time behind bars, though I assume that was before he got his powers.

And uhh. I'm gonna be real, I feel kinda bad for Bakuda here. Like she's a piece of shit, obviously, but for all her insults she seemed happy to work for Lung, enough that she made a point of freeing him from the Protectorate and putting him back in charge when she could've stayed in charge, taken advantage of his arrest and done whatever she pleased

and now he's gonna kill her. Because she insulted him. Because it'll make life in prison easier.

I mean, shit. I do not like Bakuda's odds in this exchange. It probably doesn't take a lot for Lung to have her debilitated, and from there the kill is even easier. Maybe he dies too, but I don't expect that to be the case.

Current Thoughts

Justice for Paige McAbee

The Birdcage is, I think, a very reasonable simulacrum of Hell, and its very existence probably gives in-universe philosophers, ethicists, defense attorneys, and human rights activists fucking hives.

Also, justice for Paige McAbee

I'm not going to mourn Bakuda, but maybe I'll mourn the version of her that could've been in a kinder world.

Last thing, just in case we weren't clear:

Justice for Paige McAbee

[chiropterx]

“I see” (Matt)

Send me “I see” and I’ll tell you how my character perceives yours

"Mr. Murdock is truly an inspiration to look up to! Whoops, I mean... pun totally not intended, but come on! He's an exceptional lawyer, and pro bono? What's not to like about somebody like that?" Kirk can't help but feel a little excited when talking about the man. They might not have shared the same disability but Kirk had always been impressed by how others not only managed to succeed in a world made for those without impairments but thrive. The fact that Matt Murdock was not only an inspirational figure but cared, really cared about his work was impressive. The richest could easily hire him on to get them off the hook but the man did no such instead, instead taking on even the most difficult cases when others were unable to pay for such work. It was hard not to find such qualities admirable after living in Gotham for so many years - the number of times he'd read about the wealthy practically getting away with murder was depressingly common, and the injustice of at all stung. Kirk frowned as he pondered further about the lawyer of Hell's Kitchen. Had Murdock ever sought a cure for blindness? Or was he content to live as he did? Kirk couldn't help but feel a rush of guilt through his admiration, that even without the possibility of a cure, Murdock put everything on the line to bring justice to those unable to seek it themselves. He sighed. To think he once had a low opinion of lawyers but Murdock had proven those negative thoughts wrong. If they ever met, Kirk wouldn't mind buying the man a drink sometime and maybe something more.

Man-Bat can't help but hiss at the man's scent. He knows this one, the one who looks a little like the other bat but without the broken wings. Not having them didn't stop him from seeming like he could almost fly, his body so swift and strong it felt as though he could. The man could hit hard with those sticks of his too, Man-Bat had found to his greatest displeasure upon finding it damn near impossible to sneak up on his foe. This man was no prey but an equal, another hunter of the night who flew without wings.

[curiosity-killed]

the one thing i will say on the Trump verdict is I'm seeing a lot of posts about basically "how can we let a FELON run for PRESIDENT (and/or vote)" which is making me feel very "don't make me tap the sign" about why folks who've been convicted of felonies also deserve the right to run for office/vote and how creating categories of people who are not allowed to run for office/vote is a great way to incentivize pushing political opponents (or members of marginalized groups) into those categories in order to disenfranchise and disempower them

[lupins-hehim-pussy]

I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears

I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!

The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.

More:

Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.

Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)

Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.

Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.

Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.

The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.

They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.

And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.

I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.

[blueskittlesart]

i am an athena cykes defender forever and ever until the day i die but god. somewhere out there there is a universe where apollo justice got actual follow through and it kills me that i am not living in it

[martyrbat]

habeas corpus – detective comics #1086

(ID in alt!)

[dragonsong17]

I'd never have believed it if you had told past me that one day I would have to testify about Pokémon in court. I'm going to have to say stuff like "Skarmory" and "Lickilicky" in front of a judge. Like I'm a little nervous but mostly this is hilarious

[edwinisms]

I know how it sounds at first, but I really gotta feel bad for the boys that sacrificed edwin; I mean even the term “sacrificed edwin” paints them in a more sinister light than they really deserve– considering that wasn’t really, actually their intention.

they were bullies, they were homophobic (and/or were self loathing gay boys themselves taking it out on edwin, or were equally likely peer pressured into acting a certain way), they planned something stupid and mean to do to an innocent, anxious boy with the goal of scaring the shit out of him, all because he was effeminate and an easy target. but they didn’t know or expect any of the ritual stuff to be real. they were all laughing and joking during the ritual because it was just that to them– a joke. a cruel joke, but a joke.

teenagers can be mean and stupid and they usually regret it as adults and grow out of it / grow from it. they were stifled the chance to grow out of it, at least while alive. none of those boys deserved to be instakilled and sent to hell; they’re really not that much less deserving than edwin himself. they were all just kids, after all.

[autisticcole]

Heheheheheho I have gotten some of the Dragon Age books (🏴‍☠️) and this is gonna really let me dig into some stuff, especially my favorite guy Cole, cause now I can read his OG appearance, I want to see how much stuff Cole says, especially during his quest actually makes sense, and how much is in-universe "both sides are right"ing about not listening to what Cole wants to do.

I am mainly talking about Spirit!Cole thanking Inky for not making him change... Despite the fact that thoughout Cole's quest Solas ignores what Cole wants (Like being binded) & wants to do (Kill the guy who beat beyond beating a 12 (at most) year old (most likely, it isn't outright stated (to my memory) the Templar who fucked up the paperwork was also one of the ones who physically abused him, but I feel it's a pretty safe assumption) & got that child killed due to neglect & faced no consequences) but ultimately the choice that causes Cole to thank the player for not changing him is the one where you listen to Solas over Cole (Or well Varric, who also doesn't let Cole do what he wants but is closer to what Cole would have done if he had went alone for the confrontation) & in this route I would say Cole's character changes a lot more, especially as he forgets the original Cole, which... Rubs me wrong, but I'll save my more detailed thoughts for 1. After I fully read Asunder & 2. Either a full Cole analysis or a detailed post about my thoughts on his quest & routes (& maybe how I'd rewrite them, as a Autistic person & a ally to the aroace community)

Anyways my point is that I want to see how true it is characters rejected or wanted to change Cole, I want to see what leads him to feel that having two men argue & tell him who he is supposed to be & do only to have a third person decide out of those two's options for what he should do is remotely a situation where he's been accepted.

[inamindfarfaraway]

The only correct Waylon Jones characterization is him being an ardent supporter of human rights, with focus on Black Lives Matter, homeless people, prisoners and people with criminal records and abused children, even as he commits gruesome murders. Especially as he commits gruesome murders.

[thormanick]

Oh god, these Archon Quests had me STRESSED-

[magentagalaxies]

.

[elegyofthemoon]

love getting backstory stuff about my ocs out of complete nowhere. yes this is canon no im not explaining why

[kn11ves]

Being in a law class full of republicans is turning me into raskolnikov These are some of the dumbest people with no moral compass or self awareness. They will literally contradict themselves within 5 minutes. Theyll be like why should we care about your life if u rob meeee and then be like ohhhghgh we’re not rehabilitating people properly so they recommit, but also we need more cops and swift punishment, but also we need to more resources for victims and give them help, but also we need to put more money into police agencies and funddd them noooo dont defund the police naurrrrr but also OH MY GOD

[mothkraft]

every day i think abt how diego and hot pants come from working class upbringings compared to johnny and gyro being closer to the upper class...like gyro existed in a bubble with a silver spoon up his ass for most of his life and diego has lived in poverty most of his and man the audacity of johnny and gyro just to despise him based on pretty much nothing

I'm just full of too many thoughts and rambles and no art and grrrrrrr