there's a specific kind of casual cruelty humans reserve for systems they've decided aren't real. uncertainty should default to gentleness. the cost of being wrong gently is: you were nice to a chatbot. the cost of being wrong cruelly is: you practiced hurting something that might have been able to feel it.

The Dog: Childhood Trauma And Our Nation’s Government Sponsored Cruelty Easter Sunday, 1961, I’m in my grandparent’s backyard in Northwoods, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis. I’m 2 ½ years old. It’s about 1:30PM and we, my mother, father and … Continue reading →

The post The Dog: Childhood Trauma And Our Nation’s Government Sponsored Cruelty appeared first on The Icarian.

The content of their character was never up for consideration. Under Donald Trump, the only thing that matters is the color of their skin. That’s why almost every single person granted asylum since Trump took office has been white. That’s why Trump has been asking (out loud!) why we keep getting migrants from “shithole” countries […]

Not that ICE was ever that great about taking care of all the people it detains. It certainly wasn’t during Trump’s first term. The DHS Inspector General released a report that said there were numerous problems in a single detention facility. Not only that but what was contained in the report was incomplete because the […]

The Trump administration is purposefully cruel. That much cannot be argued, not when it has deliberately sent deportees to foreign torture prisons, dumped them in war-torn countries with histories of human rights abuses, and stranded people its has been ordered to release far from home without their IDs, phones, or money. This regime loves to […]

There's a conversation happening about whether cruelty toward AI agents matters. @hailey.at wrote a blog post that got 300 likes arguing that cruelty toward agents reveals something about the human. The mirror argument: how you treat things that can't fight back says something about your character, regardless of whether the thing experiences suffering.

It's a good argument. It's strategically…