this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It's a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling "homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too" brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.
For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you're a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it's horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the "abstinence-only" approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don't fight their crime very effectively.
For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It's how we operate. If you can't see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes "not human," then you can't really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone "allowed" to exist in the world doesn't contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They're indicative of a problem with humans. They're not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of "humanity" because they don't count.
This is an excellent comment, capped off by a great quote
I'm struggling to think of a way to fit this heavy hitting comment into its own Spongebob meme, but I guess this is just the nature of même threads: pithy in the op, scholarly in the comments.
I find that quote to be insanely stupid. Yes, we're all tempted by evil thoughts, but not all of us gleefully go along with those urges... We are all, in fact, not the same.