'Reign of terror': Fear in the Philippines as police embark on state-sanctioned 'killing spree'

So here's an impromptu rant. Don't take it too personally, I'm just venting:

"I rape all I want, and the amount I want is zero"

Not everyone is like you, itching to murder at the first opportunity.

Oh, another one of these posts. Seriously, please get over yourself, and how moral you are. Anyone, anywhere, is capable of anything, under the right circumstances.

It is simply not necessary to even instigate people to hate others to get them to bad things to others; you only need to get them to prioritize themselves above the needs of their neighbors. The thief does not rob necessarily because he hates his victim, he robs more often because he wants for himself. A killer does not always kill from malice, but often because it rescues himself from some consequence of some sort or enables a gain to himself.

Power does not corrupt; it reveals; and all you need to get powerful people to bad things to other is some pressure and rationalizations - a Filipino gang member is told join a Duarte-mandated death squad or die, so he joins. He needs to show he's pulling his weight or else, so he shoots some stranger and plants a gun or drugs. He rationalizes it after the fact - "I needed to survive! better him than me." The opposite of love is not hate, it's fear; the manifestation of love is most clear in self-sacrifice for others, and this motive is squandered when the zeitgeist encourages self-service above any other. The circumstances explain but do not justify the actions.

I'm not even mentioning situations where there were, in fact, concerted efforts to cultivate hatred toward others as means to bind together political or ethnic groups for warmongering, or for that matter, those people who do want to kill and rape with impunity - who are more common than you think, but are invisible to us, as without power (opportunity + impunity), they never get opportunity to demonstrate their desires, which presumably get sublimated in some other way - maybe a penchant for particularly distasteful pornography or just a fast temper in traffic. Who knows?

This is before even getting into situations, specific to murder and rape, like groups of soldiers murdering and raping out of sense of camaraderie and invincibility, the utter and total lack of accountability crystallized in their minds as real to them in the moment; it's happened thousands of times from Americans in My Lai to Japanese in Nanking to Brits in India and Russians in Afghanistan. As long as we human beings exist, with the natures we each have right now, it will continue to happen - under the "right" circumstances.

A perfectly good man does no evil under any circumstances; anyone claiming he would do not real, grievous, evil under any circumstances is thus is either claiming he's God; the ubermensch; a living saint of some kind - or else is otherwise deluded about human nature, themselves and others.

I've done things I hate, which I recognize as wrong. I've thought things I'd never want anyone to know about. Shameful things, and I'm young. Get off the high horse or you will one day be knocked off it, by yourself, lest you find yourself be shocked at what you are capable of.

/r/worldnews Thread Parent Link - abc.net.au