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Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) (stepheneb@ruby.social)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Oct-2023 06:26:38 JST Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)

There are many quotes in the news in the last couple of days that include comments like: "They are very aggressive, like animals." ...
No, that is not how animals behave. it is however sometimes how people behave. Labeling groups of people as not human has a very dark history.
Here's what Mark Twain had to say about this at the end of chapter 6 in his last unpublished work: The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3186/3186-h/3186-h.htm
In conversation about a year ago from ruby.social permalink
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1. “No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it,” and he went on talking like that. “It is like your paltry race—always lying, always claiming virtues which it hasn't got, always denying them to the higher animals, which alone possess them. No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. When a brute inflicts pain he does it innocently; it is not wrong; for him there is no such thing as wrong. And he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it—only man does that. Inspired by that mongrel Moral Sense of his! A sense whose function is to distinguish between right and wrong, with liberty to choose which of them he will do. Now what advantage can he get out of that? He is always choosing, and in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong. There shouldn't be any wrong; and without the Moral Sense there couldn't be any. And yet he is such an unreasoning creature that he is not able to perceive that the Moral Sense degrades him to the bottom layer of animated beings and is a shameful possession. Are you feeling better? Let me show you something.”
  https://cdn.masto.host/rubysocial/media_attachments/files/111/212/732/989/550/928/original/1210b21365ab6a50.png
2. Domain not in remote thumbnail source whitelist: www.gutenberg.org
  
  The Project Gutenberg Book of The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories, by Mark Twain

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