We're not approaching any line. The line is already so far behind us that nobody with the power has any intention of going back to find it. https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1306024574472138754

The "line" AOC speaks of has always remained in the same place and has never moved.

We cross the line the moment we agree that it is ok to treat some people more inhumanely than others.

THAT's the line. Once we cross it, everything else is inevitable.

When a society decides that some people don't deserve humane treatment, then every subsequent discussion presumes that inhumane treatment is part of the equation and the discussion shifts to the NATURE of the inhumane treatment.

The thing is, once you've justified one form of inhumane treatment it becomes logically difficult to not justify other forms of inhumane treatment, as dissenting arguments are likely to implicate inhumane policies already justified.

This is when the "In for a penny, in for a pound" mentality takes over and the level and intensity of inhumane treatment escalates steadily.

So there's no point whatsoever in asking where the line is once inhumanity has been authorized.

There is none.

"But inhumane treatment is fine for really bad people!"

Ok. So what about SLIGHTLY better people than that? And slightly better people than THEM? And so forth?

If you can make a compelling argument for inhumane treatment of one person, then someone else can make a compelling argument for inhumane treatment for another.

The problem is that everyone who buys into the idea has a different idea of what level of "badness" warrants inhumane treatment.

Conservatives for instance have narrowed it down to "Anyone we don't like who can be argued to have resisted authority"

Whereas Liberals, being more conscientious, reserve inhumane treatment for people who have been found to have broken a law, or related to someone who has broken a law or is part of a race generally believed to habitually break the law...

(That silence you hear is a horde of liberals trying to think of a way to deny this while remembering that they've been cool with law enforcement, INS, ICE and mass incarceration for decades)

Not treating ANYONE inhumanely is a radical position.

It shouldn't be.

But it is.

And that's why we're never going to stop at some line.

Death camps and WW2-style atrocities will not faze us because we already laid down a path of justification for every single step that comes before.

Shock comes when there is sudden escalation.

Nothing is sudden about decades of steadily escalating bipartisan authoritarianism.

You are fooling yourself if you think that the news that detained migrants were being shot out back behind the prisons would mobilize America any more than genocide via pandemic or babies in prison did.

That news could break TODAY and nothing would change.

Nothing.

Promise.

This is one of my least popular threads in a month.

And I find myself wondering how much of that is because more people than we'd like to think want to hold on to their personal particular little justification for inhumanity.