At the brand new Everglades immigration detention center that officials have dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz,” people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.

Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.

Days after Donald Trump toured it, attorneys, advocates, detainees and their relatives are speaking out about the makeshift facility, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration raced to build on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland. Detainees began arriving July 2.

  • ssillyssadass@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Don’t worry America, I’m sure that if you walk together some more, with some especially passive-aggressive signs, you’ll convince the regime to tear down this concentration camp! That’s how the Nazis were beaten, right?

  • doctortofu@piefed.social
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    14 hours ago

    One thing that really saddens me in all… this (gestures broadly at everything) is that I have no idea how to deal with people with no empathy, with people who think this is okay. I just really do not know what to say an how to say it.

    I’ve been raised with empathy. I knew even before going to kindergarten that it’s more fun to share some of my toys with other kids because then we can all play together. I knew that doing nice things for others gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. I learned that helping people is GOOD.

    And I just don’t know how to deal with people who have not. I don’t know how to deal with people who will put other people in cages just because they look vaguely Latino, without due process. I don’t know how to deal with people that cheer for that. I just don’t know. How the fuck do I, do we, deal with people who have no empathy whatsoever? Not a rhetorical question by the way, I hope someone can explain it to me like I’m overly sensitive empathetic five-year old…

    • HugeNerd@lemmy.ca
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      11 hours ago

      I find I have little to no choice but to withdraw from as much as possible from the world. By world I mean people, since they are 100% of the causes of the problems I can do nothing about.

    • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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      14 hours ago

      I have no idea how to deal with people with no empathy

      By not engaging with them. No, I’m not going to try and “change their minds”, because I consider them to be a lost cause. I learned this years ago as a vegan.

      For sake of mental health, it’s best to just move on and engage with those who are more receptive and show a shred of humanity.

      • doctortofu@piefed.social
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        14 hours ago

        Sure, that’s definitely an option that would be healthier/easier for me personally, but can you really disengage when people in government build concentration camps and secret police force? I’m not even American or in America and it’s just overwhelming…

        • EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com
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          14 hours ago

          My point is that it is not productive to engage in people who have no empathy, because it won’t actually accomplish anything. It is a wasted effort.

          It’s sort of along the lines of the Serenity Prayer. They fall under the “things I cannot change.”

      • doctortofu@piefed.social
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        12 hours ago

        Brilliant lecture, and it points out the reasons for fundamental differences in morality, but apart from calling things by different names (vide Alligator Auschwitz in this very post), which is a great succession, it doesn’t give me much actionable advice.

        Still fascinating though - them you so much for posting it here! I want to listen to/read more things by him now!

  • Gates9@sh.itjust.works
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    13 hours ago

    This reminds me of the fact that Desantis was in the room watching people torture prisoners at Guantanamo

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    13 hours ago

    Americans: “Best we can do is one large-ish peaceful protest a couple months ago. Ah well, we tried everything, and we’re all out of ideas.”

    Thousands of kids died for Americans’ right to bear arms and yet when the Gestapo jumps out of an unmarked van to kidnap their neighbor the most the average American can manage is to duck and film a TikTok. Absolute disgrace of a country.

    “American ideals”? All bark, no bite. You’ll spend billions making horny patriotic Hollywood movies about how Great and Free you are, but a couple masked bitch-ass Nazi shows up to round up the brown people and the whole neighborhood is suddenly like pwease don’t huwt me mistaw officaw, wight this way, also pwease fuck my wife.

    Your country disgusts me. Not so much because 30 % of y’all are actual Nazis. But because virtually everyone else is a complete coward about it.

      • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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        12 hours ago

        Actual protest. Not just walking around with a sign.

        • Organize
        • Create civil disturbances. Obstruct roads
        • Dump manure, garbage, sand to block their activities
        • Team up to form walls of people to block ICE or police
        • Organize
        • Sabotage their vehicles and equipment to prevent them kidnapping people

        But most importantly, organize.

        Any of those will be more productive than mocking someone on the internet as a “tough guy” for wanting to improve things. You’d just sit there content with yourself thinking nothing could be done while fascism comes for you.

        • BassTurd@lemmy.world
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          10 hours ago

          I didn’t say nothing could be done. I’m just tired of people saying, “just fix it” like it’s that easy. The comment I replied to had no substance other than, fuck Americans.

          All of what you said is happening all over. Someone shot at ICE agents the other day. People are trying to push back against the kidnappings. There’s an app that people are using to log and track ICE locations. There are protests frequently.

          There are things happening, but the media is not on the side of the people and either don’t cover it or spin it.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        13 hours ago
        1. More protesting, yesterday. The “no kings” protest would have been half-decent if they were a start, but as a one-off thing it is more than pathetic.
        2. Political organization parallel to the neutered DNC to push the envelope beyond mildly worded letters and twitter clapbacks.
        3. When the feds come to perform violent unconstitutional acts in your neighborhood, there is a proper response other than “shut the blinds and cower in fear”. Unfortunately the moderators of this instance will delete my message if I propose it.
        • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          There was a “code blue” in Oklahoma and Texas today because someone shot a cop at a detention facility. People are doing shit, the media isn’t covering it.

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    17 hours ago

    The fact that these problems are present at the beginning stages show that this was always the intended result. Obviously none of this is shocking, but it does amaze me that they don’t even have the patience to pretend that it was ‘a good plan that went sour along the way’. Shows that if you have half of the nation fully captured then optics don’t even matter anymore.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      16 hours ago

      I think what people keep overlooking about “optics” is that a mass number of people will never see this news because they only digest news through algorithmically controlled content providers that give them more of what they already believe.

      The number of people going directly to traditional media outlets keeps shrinking in favor of YouTube shorts, Tiktok, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram

      • null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 hours ago

        Half of the US is very happy to punish poor brown people in this place.

        They might not say it overtly but they feel that most of the people there deserve it.

        They are also very happy to see the radical woke left upset about it.

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        15 hours ago

        Not that it matters that much because traditional media has created a “business as usual” narrative instead of calling out our plummet into fascism. Between that and the sane-washing of Trump, unless you visited very obviously leftist news sources, you wouldn’t hear about most of this.

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        15 hours ago

        Agreed, that’s kinda what I’m getting at. This whole term has been with the understanding that the narrative has become fully divorced from the reality. Scary times.

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    16 hours ago

    So this is it. In plain sight. It also tells us how it must have been 90 years ago. In plain sight. What are we going to do? I am from Germany and I have to tell you, our leaders won’t come to the rescue. They’re just taking notes.

    Can’t we make use of this formidable tool, that lets us communicate all over the world and makes us recognise we’re all very much the same?

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    17 hours ago

    Most of the people who died in Germany’s camps weren’t killed “on purpose.” They simply couldn’t survive the conditions, and died of disease, malnutrition, cold, and so on. This is a feature. Explicit killing “on purpose” is just the backup option if things aren’t moving quickly enough.

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        13 hours ago

        I don’t think there is any plan to use anyone abducted as slaves.

        They have a goal of reaching a population of 100,000,000. They certainly aren’t going to waste energy keeping millions of slaves in line when they want millions more deaths.

  • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
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    14 hours ago

    I’ll admit, they played this well. The swamp is not easy to get to, it’s in Florida where the people will be plenty fine with mass executions of “people who don’t belong here.”

    It’s also surrounded by ocean, Alabama and Georgia.

    And Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas. Generally a lot of unfriendly states.