There's a weird psychological loophole surrounding the idea of victimization. Stop. First, I'm not blaming anyone for anything in particular; a dress is not a yes, spousal abuse is never justified, etc. Taking your shit out on another person or group of people is fucked up. We all know this, which makes it all the more disappointing that we aren't past it by now.
Ideals notwithstanding some people are still prone to being fucked up for whatever reason, and when they are we get victims and a curious phenomenon occurs. Our capacity for critical reasoning goes a bit short-bus. People who sympathize with the victim or are in some way invested in their plight tend to forget that the victim is in point of fact a person, with all the virtues, vices and individual personality of a person. This happens when groups are victimized as well. A certain degree of airbrushing happens to public opinion of that group. It happens on the other side too, and in weird ways.
When news breaks about someone being subject to fuckedupitude people who have a vested interest in some aspect of the assailant tend to just mindlessly hate the victim. If you ever want to lose all hope and faith in humanity read some of the shit that gets said when members of a local sports team rape the fuck out of someone and get busted for it. It completely circumvents their reasoning; its like political extremism, this is my side, so anything my side does is justified and noble. Whoever you sympathize with can do no wrong, and that's where my problem comes in. I'm not apologizing for anything, not making any accusations, but sometimes victims can be dicks, and the fact that they are victims shouldn't erase that fact. Should we give victims leeway as they recover, sure. They've been through something fucked up. But anytime you fail outright to hold someone accountable, especially for something unrelated to the source of your sympathy, you fail everyone in that situation.
This whole topic came about to me in regards to the situation in Israel and Palestine recently. By recently I of course refer to the last 60 years, give or take a decade. Now don't get me wrong, everyone in charge in that situation is all fuckered. The Israeli government seems pretty intent on straight up genocide and a lot of the resistance forces (Hamas, the PLO, probably others that I haven't heard of) seem to pretty casually aim to aggravate any given situation. Hell, both sides seem to have a horrifically cavalier attitude towards slaughtering civilians. Now admittedly, there is a certain amount of fucking psychotic, apocalyptic, fanaticism spinning the justification of this shit; people who believe that people being cunts in a certain region has a direct influence on the end of the world, but those people are fucking idiots at best and we should stop letting them go out without a helmet, much less determine policy. No, to me the bigger problem seems to be one of irrational sympathies. The Holocaust (and its subsequent denial by those lacking a fore-brain) has everyone overly sensitive about criticizing Israel; which makes the people who sympathize with Palestine cleave together ever harder under the history of Israeli abuses.
I don't claim to have any definitive solutions, but I think if we ever want to be able to grow beyond this mouth-foaming tribalism we need to work out how to examine our feelings about victimization instead of just shrieking like the terrified apes we claim to be better than.
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