this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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Not ok, but less bad if the victim is a petulant rapist.
No it's not. It is unacceptable in all cases. I don't understand how otherwise principled "all humans are humans and deserve rights" people are suddenly a-OK with rape or torture if it's someone they've decided is a "bad person" without realizing they're doing the exact same thing fascists do to justify human rights violations, but it's a pathological problem. If you think it's ok for you (or anyone) to decide who is allowed to have human rights and who isn't, you're an authoritarian in denial and you will fall victim to the next authoritarian leader who agrees with you about who we're allowed to torture.
I never said it was acceptable. OK is a synonym for acceptable, I said less bad, which it can be while, still being unacceptable.
What I mean is, it's not less bad because it's not two distinct phenomena. Whether or not someone is guilty of a heinous crime has nothing to do with whether or not they're entitled to some basic human rights. Human rights are not treats that are allocated by an authority for good behavior and revoked if you do something naughty. If you contend that everyone has certain rights, as I do, they have to be universal and irrevocable, no matter what.
The reason they have to be irrevocable is because once you concede that they may be revoked, you now have the problem of who has the power to revoke them. You can either decide to revoke them yourself (vigilantism) or grant that power to someone else (authoritarianism). And while I am no expert in history, I feel confident in my belief that granting this authority to anyone is a recipe for disaster. The only other option, then, is to assert that even the worst possible person must still be afforded basic human rights, no matter what, and go from there. Anything less than that and you're sliding down the slippery slope toward dictatorship.