The article in question in case someone wants to read it. I found the tweet so outrageous I had to source it to make sure I had the facts right before complaining.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjva9m/afp-autistic-13-year-old-child-terrorism
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
731 points (97.0% liked)
Leftism
2139 readers
1 users here now
Our goal is to be the one stop shop for leftism here at lemmy.world! We welcome anyone with beliefs ranging from SocDemocracy to Anarchism to post, discuss, and interact with our community. We are a democratic community, and as such, welcome metaposts that seek to amend the rules through consensus. Post articles, videos, questions, analysis and more. As long as it's leftist, it's welcome here!
Rules:
- Absolutely no fascism, right wing extremism, genocide denial, etc.
- Unconditional support of authoritarians will not be tolerated
- Good faith discussion about ideologies is encouraged, but no sectarianism
- No brocialism/sexism
- No ableism
- No TERFs/ anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric
- No racism
- No trolling
- No insults, dunking, or personal attacks
- No posting of misinformation, disinformation, or fake news
- Mods have final say
Posting Expectations:
- Comics/memes/shitposts/propaganda are only allowed on weekends
- Try to avoid liberalism unless discussing electoral politics. Even then, try to focus on tactical agreement towards leftist goals
- Only one meta post seeking consensus per person per day
- Posts about a particular ideology are ok, but remember the rules above
- Remember that there is no “right way” to implement leftist theory. This rule does not prevent academic criticism.
- Try to avoid extremely sensitive topics unless approaching them with appropriate care for intersectionality. Use your best judgement, and be prepared to provide respectable sources when having these discussions. Wikipedia is not an acceptable source in these cases.
- Post titles must be meaningful and relevant, except on weekends
Sister Communities:
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Solarpunk memes [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Thank you for providing a source. I'd pin your comment if I could.
Jesus Christ. I was hoping it was just overhyped and the reality wasn't quite so heinous, but the title isn't clickbait at all.
As an autistic adult, some of us are extremely easy to manipulate because they cant imagine people being subversive. You dont even have to have a low IQ for that.
Not all autistic people, but several I have known (including in my family) have definitely been way too trusting of people, unfortunately.
As I said, some. I‘m rather trusting myself and have paid dearly for it.
Perhaps you aren’t naive, but rather willing to risk being burnt, in trade for a life of trust.
Is it actually the case you got blindsided, or did you consider the betrayal as a possible outcome but decided to proceed anyway, and instead of explaining to people that you were open to the risk, did you just decide it was easier to play-act as a naive person?
As an autistic adult, what I’ve found is that I don’t lack any of the guile necessary to recognize antisocial behavior.
It’s that I resist that awareness.
Not so much that it never crosses my mind, but rather that when it comes there’s another part of me rejecting it.
All I had to do in order to stop being so naive, is to simply allow the non-naive part of myself to speak up. I didn’t have to develop it.
It was like I had this security team giving me security briefings each day, and I had just been tossing them in the shredder without a glance. I didn’t have to hire a security team. I already had a really good one in place. I just had to stop ignoring what they were saying.
In fact, I learned that much of my “childish naivete” was actually just a sort of character I’d been playing while trying to fit in when I was younger.
Wow that's even worse than the picture made it sound. The parents reached out to the police as part of a program to get help for their son. Then the police realized he was susceptible to being radicalized and targeted him as a result.
That's be like if you called an anti-smoking quit line and they were like "this guy's got an addictive personality, let's set up an elaborate scheme to get him hooked on crack so we can arrest him for possession."
what the actual fuck. isn't this borderline entrapment? how is this legal in any way possible?? actual police actually grooming a literal child, just to arrest him for doing the things they literally groomed him to do! holy shit this is unbelievable
Entrapment only happens to people who can afford good lawyers.
It's totally entrapment.
The victims usually don't have the capacity to mount a sufficient legal defense.
In you remember Kellyanne Conway's Bowling Green Massacre the incident that was based on was similar. FBI gaslighted three refugee inmigrants in order to get them to aid and abet a fictional terror plot so they could be charged with terrorism, so that FBI could assert it was stopping terrorism.
FBI creates a dozen such cases every year, specifically targetting vulnerable people with mental health problems or who are clinically retarded. They end up with really long prison sentences.
FYI this took place in Australia.
That's SOP for a large percentage of FBI terrorism investigations that DON'T begin after an attack.
Whenever you read "FBI foiled plot", dig into it and you'll probably find similar behavior, or a CI who intentionally molded the terrorist for them.
That's literally the definition of entrapment.
This is literal child abuse. Really how does any FBI agent or supervisor think this is a desirable outcome? What kind of people are they?
This took place in Australia.
Oh thanks! At least the judge basically dismissed the case. Probably wouldn't have happened in the US.
But their excuses are insane. "Yeah this 13 year old kid with an IQ of 70... there was nothing anyone could have done differently!". I suspect this is more motivated by bullying or abelism, basically a type of fascism to shit on mentally sick people.
The crazy thing to me is the superior officer who signed off on it said he would do it again. That countermeasures haven't been working. He still thinks he was right and did a good thing
The breakdown of morality begins when they agree to enforce drug laws.
Drug laws violate human rights. People whose job it is to put on a uniform and enforce those laws, start every day with a cognitive dissonance between these two statements:
- Adults should be free to do as they see fit so long as they don’t hurt others
- My paycheck depends on me preventing adults from using drugs
There are only two ways to resolve that cognitive dissonance:
- Quit your job as a cop and find a job that adheres to “right livelihood”
- Disintegrate your conception of human rights into “anything goes so long as the paperwork supports it”
This means 100% of the people involved in drug enforcement are either monsters already or they’re moral cowards on the downhill slide to becoming monster.
Anyone with integrity either quits, or makes so much trouble they get fired. Those who work in cooperation with the evil system can only do so by systematically weeding goodness out their own character.
Adults should be free to do as they see fit so long as they don’t hurt others
The "primitive morality" that arises out of human tribes and game theory is one of cooperation / competition. Tit for tat and all that. So anything you do that hurts the overall productivity of the tribe is "hurting" the tribe. They see junkies as unproductive, exploiting charity or prone to crime.
Of course I'm not subscribing to that, but there is another interesting connection: The kid is autistic or a "retard" in their eyes, and bullying I believe comes from an evolved social behavior to "weed out the weak". Fascism codifies this as "natural order".
This is speculation but might explain the internal rationalization of the cops.
Our cops in Russia have been doing that for years as well. They groom whole groups of teens like that. Absolutely mental.
Create a problem, then be the solution
Humans have a state that is driven to hurt people. When a person who’s not a psychopath finds their self in that state, their first move is to find justifications for the damage they want to do. That’s how non-psychopaths indulge in the urge to hurt people.
Law enforcement, by being a profession that involves hurting people for the right reasons, lends itself very easily to providing justification for hurting people for the wrong reasons.
Thanks, this is an interesting explanation. Do you mean sadism? Or something slightly different, a need to see justice done, like "justice porn"? Or something like wanting to see some kind of order in the world through violence?
I think there is a very primitive drive in humans who want to "remove the weak link" and drive out the village idiot or "retard". An ugly reproductive strategy that helped the tribe to stay stronger which explains some impulses for bullying. This is of course unscientific speculation.
But I can imagine that impulse might have played a role to go after this autistic child.
Quick correction: This took place in Australia, not the United States or one of its territories.
Cops need to gather intelligence from a kid with an IQ of 70. When I want to be more intelligent I gather information from people who are smarter than me too!
“How do you do it bro?”
“Well, my mind might be limited but I’m also good, so people help me”
“What is this good you speak of? Is that your word for legal?”
I'm sorry, I seem to lack the base, stupid cruelty to comprehend this. I'm more fluent in intentful, intelligent cruelty.
What is the purpose...the...the end goal of making a kid do an illegal he wasn't previously planning to do and arresting him for doing it?
To justify their pay.
He was already interested in ISIS and showing concerning behaviors. But, instead of trying to talk him back from the edge, they encouraged him to jump. Not as bad as completely starting him down the terrorism path, but not much better.
To hurt. the fucking. kid.
That was the point. The world makes more sense when you acknowledge the existence of evil.
It makes even more sense when you realize 90% of evil is committed by people who think of themselves as good, people who refuse to acknowledge their shadow and hence become its puppet.
The only person at the senate inquiry into this that had any balls was Greens Senator David Shoebridge. Got his mic cut off for politely telling a cop to basically go fuck himself.
This is why I always put the Greens first on my ballot, in both state & federal and for both upper & lower houses. They’re the only viable leftist party in Australia imo.
Literally half the plot of 1984.
Wouldn't be the first time this has happened, albeit not against someone who was autistic.
Kinda different but
spoilers for the whole first season of this podcast I link to below
Around 2020-21, there was a racial justice protester in Denver who probably suffered a brain injury from a police rubber bullet (got knocked out at a protest and felt weird ever since, but doctors are expensive so who knows), who later got baited into making a straw purchase by an undercover FBI operative who (among other things) had a history of violent crimes and sexual assaults and was paid thousands of dollars by the FBI for his work
That's not grooming, that is the definition of entrapment. Like, if you look it up in a law textbook it could use that as an example.
Unfortunately, courts only consider it entrapment if someone is forced to do it. Such as "do this or we send you to prison for something else." Coercing someone to do something out of their own apparent 'free will' gets them off the entrapment hook.
That doesn't sound right. But what do I know?
damn, the parents should have gone to healthcare professional, not cops.
This is pure incompetence. They should have been able to do it in less than 48 hours.