It is true even if as a matter of fact people categorized as mentally ill tend to suffer more and would suffer more in most imaginable societies, since it's predictable that genuine disease would both be categorized and actually overlap with merely marginal types of mind.

But no one fully consciously believes that because we usually let them out after a few years or decades, in conditions where they are more likely to commit crime than if they were never imprisoned in the first place. No one is actually made safer by any of this. It's just neurosis and vengefulness.

Always lurking in these discussions is the frankly childish belief that violent criminals are necessarily inhuman monsters, which they aren't, and even if they were it would be prudent (and merciful) to simply kill them rather than torture them for decades on end.

Look if I was a serial killer I would rather be killed in pre-emptive self-defense than be imprisoned for life. That is a mercy. Much of prison is just clearly a rationalized sublimation of worse-than-death sadism.

It's a bizarre, psychopathic humiliation ritual where they attempt to gaslight people into thinking they're not being harassed as they continue doing just that. The fragile leftoid ego cannot endure the prospect that they are capable of anti-social behavior.

granted there will (or already is) in a sense a world-rending apocalypse, it just won't be as exciting or glamorous as some think it will be. and maybe im doing the goomba fallacy but these are often the same people who scoff at transhumanists for having a religious faith in technology.

it's all just secularized religious impulses, either the belief in world-rending apocalypse, complete with a great flood, or the belief in salvation through extremist politics. I prefer actual religion tbh.

Technocratic practices are of course irrational, inefficient, prone to magical thinking, etc. They represent the nadir of rationalization but that doesn't per se make them rational at all. E.g. the technocrat is blind to the negative psychic effects of their enterprise, and externalizes them.

You can't understand global fascism without understanding, yes, the alienating aspects of modernity in general, but especially the alienating and frankly dehumanizing aspects of Rule By Experts. It is an infrastructure built for cattle rather than people, and even cattle shouldn't suffer through it.

That would be the core disagreement then. I definitely do not think mass public opinion is that dependent on/epiphenomenal
of power, or that mass public opinion unfailingly serves the interests of power. At best it's like riding a bull.