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by lawn 146 days ago
Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans.

It's dehumanizing and it leads to a path where you can justify humiliating, torturing, and murdering other humans. Which is already happening with ICE.

1 comments

> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans

It’s the legally-correct term.

For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.

Genocide starts with separating people into them and us, and this process starts with words.
> Genocide starts with separating people into them and us

This is an unsubstantiated slippery slope. We can categorize people, even sort them by desirability for some purpose, without resorting to dehumanization much less genocide. (Citizenship and immigration necessitate an us-them delineation. So do team sports, families and like club memberships. Us and them are fine. Us versus them is dangerous.)

It's not enough by itself of course, but in the US it's very much a "us versus them" if you haven't noticed.