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0 pointsnostrademons4mo ago0 comments

Increasingly a human can't be held responsible for their decisions either.

Accountability literally means "being forced to give an account of your decisions", i.e. explain the reasons behind why you made the choices you did. The idea is that when you have a public forum of people with common values, merely being forced to explain yourself will activate mechanisms of shame, guilt, and conformism that keep people inline. Otherwise you'll face the judgment of your peers.

This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right. Or you just don't care and figure solipsism vs. the status quo is just a matter of degree.

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potato37328424mo ago

Exactly. And it's not just ICE. It's every administrative bureaucracy playing favorites. It's flagrant when it's ICE, they're snatching people off the street, that creates a lot of argument. But this workflow was honed, the messaging to the public was figured out, etc, etc, when it was "just" evil bureaucrats catering to mustache twirling evil lobbyists when making rules. Pretty easy to bury something that amounts to driving business in dense technical discussion the public is uninterested in.

Terr_4mo ago

Similarly, I like to remind people that "responsibility" isn't necessarily the same as blame or fault, it literally means a duty to respond.

thedrexster4mo ago

I'd never considered this before, thank you!

JuniperMesos4mo ago

> This mechanism breaks down when your peers don't hold common values. If nobody agrees on what right and wrong are, you just find different peers until somebody thinks that what you're doing is right.

Perhaps because your peers are recent immigrants who are culturally and linguistically foreign to you, and are physically here primarily because the place they are originally from is terrible, rather than because they are actually interested in joining your community and sharing its values.

simtel204mo ago

So you think that people who have repatriated themselves would not have any interest in adopting some or all of the values of the place they have gone to? That seems really wrong at a lot of levels, though people rarely adopt all of the values of the place they move to (whatever the circumstances).

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