aramis87
@aramis87@fedia.io
- Comment on During the lead up to the Holocaust did the N... regime just kidnap people who they even thought were Jews? Kind of like ICE is doing to citizens today? 2 days ago:
[cont]
And when one of their slaves became too ill or malnourished to work, there was a seemingly unending stream of other slaves to replace them.
End comments:
I don't think I made it clear in my previous comment (and it's up against the character limit, so I'm not going to go back and try to edit), that the camps inside Germany itself generally were intended as labor camps, with extermination as an eventual side-effect of the existing and incoming prisoners; and the camps outside Germany - particularly those in Poland - were established as extermination camps, with slave labor as a minor byproduct.
Also, my comment is obviously a vast, vast simplification of a process that developed over years.
And having finished my comment, I realize I went way beyond your original question, but IMO the slow development of oppression and extermination, as well as focusing beyond the Jewish people to the other six million who were murdered in the camps, is also of value. It's why we need to focus on the groups currently being targeted by the government - not only immigrants and the trans community, but the LGBT+ community in general, the homeless, the disabled, etc. And yes, even the Democrats - the anti-Democrat language and propaganda being pumped out by the more extreme "news" channels and influencers is very similar to type of language that tends to precede civilian uprisings and ethnic cleansing against other segments of their population - see the massacres in Kosovo or Rwanda as an example.
- Comment on During the lead up to the Holocaust did the N... regime just kidnap people who they even thought were Jews? Kind of like ICE is doing to citizens today? 2 days ago:
When Hitler took power in 1933, he didn't actually start with the Jews, & they weren't kidnapped off the streets. The first concentration camp was at Dachau, & the first prisoners were political enemies - trade unionists (union organizers and members), Socialists & Communists. [Conveniently, not only were these groups Hitler's political enemies, each was a group used to working with it's own large membership to accomplish their goals; by imprisoning these people, Hitler not only neutered the political opposition, but he struck a heavy blow against civilian resistance as well.] Originally, they were simply arrested & disappeared, but yes, eventually the Gestapo became increasingly aggressive & did plain kidnappings.
Dachau was originally intended as a prison camp, but it needed to be expanded very quickly to accommodate all the newly arriving prisoners, & the ever-efficient Nazis (remember, they came to power because of the onerous penalties inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles, - the world was in the Great Depression, so the government really couldn't afford to spend any money) decided the best way to build out the camp was to not-spend much money doing that. Instead of hiring outside workers (who might also bring out word of conditions in the camp, be inclined to transmit messages/contraband in & out of the camp, & potentially hear messages of solidarity from union workers), they decided to have the prisoners build out the camp instead. And why pay the prisoners, when they should be glad to be getting their lodging & food provided for them? The camps were destined to become slave labor camps.
Some companies, still in the throes of the Depression, & with some portion of their workforce now inside the camps & no immediate candidates to replace them, asked the German government if they could hire workers from the camps. The government agreed. The companies got cheap labor & stopped struggling in the Depression, the government got the money to spend on governing, & life improved for those outside the camps - you just had to ignore the camps & slaves themselves. And over time, other industrial-scale companies that didn't have skilled workers in the camps turned to hiring other workers from the camps; if they didn't they couldn't compete in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, having neutered the political opposition, the Nazis started turning to "undesirables". Even here, the immediate targets weren't the Jews; the next targets were gypsies (Roma & Sinti), gay men, & Jehovah's Witnesses, all of whom were thought to be "soiling" German civil society. Lesser targets who didn't always end up in the camps included immigrants & the homeless; & later targets also included people with mental /physical disabilities, & in some cases just abnormalities (ie, dwarves).
Please note that I'm not saying that the Jews weren't being targeted by the government & civilians, just that in the early days of the Hitler regime, those actions were a series of increasingly restrictive laws & increasingly-frequent/severe stochastic attacks encouraged by the government. However, Jews originally weren't interned in the camps to the scale they were imprisoned later on; they were "encouraged" to emigrate. The major turning point against the German Jews is generally accepted as Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass), in 1938, five years after Hitler took power.
Remember that, in the 1930's, the majority of formal political & economic organizing was done by men, so the majority of the original prisoners were also men. The government did imprison women & children, but not originally at the scale later seen, so the imprisoned women & children were a necessary burden to "cleanse" German society. It was only after Germany started World War II by invading Poland (1939), that things turned dire.
In the newly-occupied territories, yes, the occupying forces kidnapped & killed/imprisoned those suspected of being enemies of the Germans, or just against what Germans thought their society approved of. They established camps for those they targeted in occupied territories, & forced occupied Jews into ghettoes, which were eventually "liquidated" either directly (mass killings) or indirectly (the people in the ghettoes sent to camps).
The camps became a problem. Established quickly, there were too many people to properly feed or care for. Medical attention was essentially non-existent. Conditions in the camps meant that diseases periodically ripped through the populations there. Since the Germans determined to imprison everyone in their target groups, that included young children, the very old & infirm, the chronically ill, etc. The camps became crowded, with a noticable percentage of people who simply couldn't work to "earn their keep". In merciless fascist logic, it was more "efficient" to kill those people and direct whatever meagre resources they were willing to allot to the camps to go their slave laborers.
- Comment on Nearly 50% of Gen Z Say They’re Too Burnt Out to Work 2 weeks ago:
They're not paying a living wage, they expect you to be available when they want you and to go away when they don't, and they give you hideous workloads. They rob you of dignity, cheat you money, and deprive you of benefits. "No one wants to work anymore." Fucking bullshit.
- Comment on Can a person who is a convicted felon/ rapist even get nominated for the Nobel Peace Price? Extra points if you can ELI5 that. 3 weeks ago:
It's the reason a felon can take office in the government. Otherwise, it would be easy to "convict" someone you considered a threat.
- Comment on Does free healthcare access increase or decrease the need for medical personnel overall? 3 weeks ago:
There was a study years ago about putting up Jersey walls on parts of US interstate highways, to see if they increased or decreased the number and severity of accidents. The conclusion was that it increased the number of minor accidents, and decreased the number of serious accidents.
My guess is that universal healthcare would be the same: increasing the number of minor visits and (by noticing and addressing issues before they became serious) decreasing the number of serious visits.
- Comment on US Bureau of Prisons moves to end union protections for its workers - 35,000 employees stripped of union rights 5 weeks ago:
First they came for the trade unionists, for they are organized and used to working together to oppose capitalists and therefore are a threat to fascists.
- Comment on McDonald’s CEO is grappling with a ‘two-tier economy’ as he slashes prices on value meals—and signals backing for a minimum wage increase 1 month ago:
Psst, hey, got a handy hint for you: you can actually raise wages at your business without it being mandated by minimum wage laws.
- Comment on Imgur's Community Is In Full Revolt Against Its Owner 2 months ago:
I'm trying out a few, though I'll have more time to explore them and figure out what I like and don't like over the weekend.
I've signed up for discuit, and am looking back at tumblr, which I'd left for a while but still has good community.
I've signed up for imgpile, but there's some problem with the confirmation; I don't know if that's on me or them. And I've joined the waiting list for imgcat. I looked at imgchest. but there's too many ads and some AI stuff, so I'm skipping that for now.
I've added in a couple discord channels (Ellie and BSV); even if I don't think discord is a good replacement for imgur, it'll let me follow things for a while.
I'm not sure what to do with with two cat accounts I followed on imgur (KittensForDays and SigridRides); both post on YouTube went other social media, but I didn't use yt much, nor other social media, so ....
- Comment on My writing laptop just died 2 months ago:
Ask your friends and family as well. Someone has an old laptop/desktop from school or an old job stuck in a closet. A lot of people give up when their machines become too slow, but they don't bother with basic maintenance to see if that will speed it up: virus checks, uninstalling un-needed programs, clearing caches, defragging the hard drive, etc. I have one friend ditched a PC because it ran too slowly and when I checked it out they had two antivirus programs competing with each other, making it impossible to do anything else. Other people take the fact that the battery or charging cable died as a signal to get a replacement.
- Comment on My writing laptop just died 2 months ago:
Ask your friends if they have an old laptop (or desktop, if that's acceptable) lying around. It's surprising how much old tech people have stuck away in their closets these days
- Comment on What's going on with imgur right now? 2 months ago:
The people who created imgur sold it to MediaLab. ML had been struggling with bills in general, and they lost a couple lawsuits regarding content. In a completely unrelated move, they banned NSFW content, fired the community moderators and local development teams and replaced them with AI and overseas workers, resulting in unequal rules enforcement and broken infrastructure. Videos wouldn't upload, wouldn't play, or freeze partway through. Uploads would disappear without notice. A barely-nsfw post would be deleted and the user warned, while other more NSFW posts made it to the front page. Etc, etc. In short, there's been a lot of simmering discontent with the platform for a while now.
So, you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that's been circulating for a few years now? Back when that first came out, naturally some people posted it to imgur - and the content teams deleted the posts and warned the users, who promptly posted screenshots of the warnings, causing even more users to upload Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. They got deleted/warned, pretty much just causing a cascade of Nazi-punching content, until literally the entire popular feed was just Nazis getting punched.
Well, later last week, notifications failed on imgur for some reason - no notifications when you got a reply, or your post reached the front page or got an award, or the people you were following posted something - just dead silence. We were patient, but it started to annoy people. A couple people uploaded images complaining about the lack of notifications, only to have their posts deleted or hidden and in a couple cases they got warned. And it's pretty much spiralled exactly like the punching Nazis meme: notifications remained down, posts complaining about it got taken down, posts complaining about MediaLab's censorship got taken down, and then the entire front page became this.
Notifications are back on now, though they seem less frequent than normal, and new content is starting to reach the front page but users are still pissed. There have been repeated discussions about moving elsewhere, but no consensus has emerged yet. PixelFed doesn't scratch the same itch, a bunch of people moved to discord but others don't want to, some people just disappeared or stopped posting. And that's where we are, as of this morning.
- Comment on Kids 1 year ago:
A time traveler's survival guide. The vertical green bars are the only times in Earth's history with enough oxygen to breathe (hypoxia) and low enough to avoid oxygen toxicity (hyperoxia):
- Comment on Elon Musk moves X out of San Francisco. City leaders shrug. 1 year ago:
Last month Musk said that he has had “enough of dodging gangs of violent drug addicts just to get in and out of the building.”
Are the roving gangs of violent drug addicts in the room with us now? Or do they go to a different school?
- Comment on Elon Musk moves X out of San Francisco. City leaders shrug. 1 year ago:
Imagine hating your own daughter that much. We need more people like Tennant, less people like Musk and Rowling.
- Comment on UPS has started charging for pickups even if you have a prepaid label 1 year ago:
UPS, not USPS.
- Comment on When diarrhea hits so hard u need to hold on 1 year ago:
The top handle is for someone stepping into or out of the tub. The lower handle is for someone trying to stand from a shower chair, or pulling themselves up from the floor.
- Comment on Are there any good casual/low-stress mobile games that aren't filled with microtransactions? 1 year ago:
I'm seconding Simon Tatham's puzzle collection, Nonograms Katana, and Stardew Valley, all of which are in regular rotation and fill different niches in my soul.
- Comment on Young Women Are Fleeing Organized Religion. This Was Predictable. 1 year ago:
“The crackdown on women [...] also stems from growing anxieties many evangelicals have about what they see as swiftly changing norms around gender and sexuality in America.”
"Swiftly changing"? This stuff changed in the 70's!
- Comment on Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped Return to Office would make staff quit 1 year ago:
I had a friend who made a point of "needing" to go into the office an average of one day every week during the pandemic. His logic was that, if his job could be done entirely from the comfort of his living room in the suburbs, eventually the bosses would realize that it could also be done entirely from the comfort of someone else's living room in the Philippines or India.
