Desensitizing, brutalizing. Yesterday, I read a DU post about a story

[niyad]

Last edited Sat Dec 6, 2025, 12:44 PM - Edit history (1)

from the Rome of gladiators and christians and lions ( post 14 helpfully provided the link). The person in the story was apparently a kind and decent person who abhored violence and bloodlust. Friends persuaded him to go to the arena with them. Although originally appalled and horrified, he soon becomes just as bloodthirsty as the rest.

Lawrence O'Donnell made a similar point in talking about showing the video of that second strike on the fishing boat. He said that one of the purposes of showing that over and over again was to get people into the same bloodthirsty, murderous mindset as pete and donnie and the rest (paraphrasing here). Deliberate programming and manipulation to desensitize us to the further horrors they are practically slavering to unleash. Of course, many are already there, they want the rest of us there also.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. It's from an excellent op-ed by Phil Klay.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/opinion/trump-boat-strikes.html

https://archive.ph/78Dib

When Trump administration officials post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison, I often think of a story St. Augustine told in his “Confessions.”

In the fourth century A.D., a young man named Alypius arrived in Rome to study law. He was a decent sort. He knew the people at the center of the empire delighted in cruel gladiatorial games, and he promised himself he would not go. Eventually, though, his fellow students dragged him to a match. At first, the crowd appalled Alypius. “The entire place seethed with the most monstrous delight in the cruelty,” Augustine wrote, and Alypius kept his eyes shut, refusing to look at the evil around him.

But then a man fell in combat, a great roar came from the crowd and curiosity forced open Alypius’s eyes. He was “struck in the soul by a wound graver than the gladiator in his body.” He saw the blood, and he drank in savagery. Riveted, “he imbibed madness.” Soon, Augustine said, he became “a fit companion for those who had brought him.”

There are many reasons to object to the policies that the Trump administration’s videos and memes showcase. Yet the images themselves also inflict wounds, of the kind that Alypius suffered when he raised his eyelids. The president inhabits a position of moral leadership. When the president and his officials sell their policies, they’re selling a version of what it means to be an American — what should evoke our love and our hate, our disgust and our delight. If all governments rest on opinion, as James Madison thought, then it is this moral shaping of the electorate that gives the president his freedom of action, and that we will still have to reckon with once he is gone.

[niyad]

3. Thank you! I looked, but couldn't find it again.

[Beartracks]

16. Trumpism is more than just Trump.

[yellow dahlia]

21. Thanks for sharing.

[Turbineguy]

2. That shit has been going on for ages.

When I went to see "Jaws" when it came out, the theater smelled of vomit. After watching the film I realized how correct that person's reaction was.

[dlk]

4. As has been frequently said on DU

The cruelty is the point. This is murder for sport and entertainment, not unlike snuff films, and is horrifying beyond all reason.

[Walleye]

10. Yes, I agree. They showed all the snuff films.

But when it came to the films of them fucking up and attacking helpless unarmed people in the water, we haven’t seen that one

[LisaM]

5. This is why I don't understand why people like violent movies.

I hate them and even get resentful when a preview pops into my viewing, usually on TV, but now at the movie theatre, too. They used to cater the previews to the movie we were watching but now we have to see everything (as a loose example, I went to see "Barbie", but still had to see a preview for 'Oppenheimer", which I was trying my best to avoid).

This reminds me of a book someone gave my partner for Christmas years ago, called "Sex Life in Ancient Rome". It was from one of his sisters, and they clearly had shopped only by title and hadn't looked at the contents. I started reading it and had to put it down, because it was like the scene described above. The people in the crowd were actually experiencing orgasms from watching other people get killed. It was a horrible, if revealing book.

I know people who would rather their kids be exposed to violence in movies rather than sexual situations, which floors me.

It's easy to blame Hegseth and he is a horrible person, but we as a culture seem to worship violence, at least in our movies and in our video games too. This is just business as usual. Can people watching even differentiate from this and what the entertainment industry exposes us to on a constant basis?

[surfered]

6. Especially if you dehumanize them by labeling them "terrorists."

[Walleye]

11. Narco-terrorists "criminal illegal aliens." surprised they haven't thought up another hateful adjective to put in there

We expect this from right wing Trumpers. But why do other people have to imitate them and use the same language? These are supposed to be terrorists, but I’m not terrified of them. They aren’t gonna hurt me.

[Timeflyer]

7. Authoritarians have to change public perspectives on the use of violence, tell them it's for the good of the nation.

It's the authoritarian playbook/Project 2025 BS, normalizing the use of force and violence to destroy institutions that resist the aims of extremists.

[LoisB]

8. Maybe this is why IT is always referring to people he doesn't like as "animals". The same as

during slavery when humans were categorized the same as livestock. I would like to think that most of us wouldn't treat an animal the way they want to treat other humans and would not become desensitized to the suffering of others.

[Six117]

9. There are a lot of us who will never be desensitized

to any of it. If anything, we're tragically optimistic that one day justice will be done.

[hay rick]

12. The discussion frame has gone from illegal war to war crime to double tap.

"Finishing the job" is offered as a reasonable adult point of view. The constant repetition turns these murders into just another video game. They don't have to convince everybody that these murders are necessary, just enough to make it seem respectable.

[malaise]

13. I remember some of the debates here on DU about violent video games

Although we have had movies for a very long time, I firmly believed and still believe that some of these games hastened desensitization and continue to desensitize violence.

[Kid Berwyn]

15. High School Shooters

Inspired by something telling them it’s OK to solve problems with AR-15s.

Hate filled “Lone Wolves” going cross country to kill Peopke in DC, NYC, etc etc etc.

[Kid Berwyn]

14. Worked on 9-11

Replay jets crashing into WTC.
We’re at WAR!
Replay jets crashing into WTC.
We’re at WAR!
Replay jets crashing into WTC.
We’re at WAR!
Replay jets crashing into WTC.
We’re at WAR!
Replay jets crashing into WTC.

Then…

We’re at WAR!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!
Saddam did it!

Then, to boost support…

Saddam did it!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!
WMD!

ETA: the missing thread

What Trump Is Really Doing With His Boat Strikes

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=20849508

[niyad]

17. I watched that whole progression with increasing horror and revulsion,

seeing exactly what they were doing. Nothing we were doing protesting it had any effect.

Thank you for the link. For some reason, I missed that OP when I was looking. Going to bookmark it now.

[malthaussen]

19. At the time, I said to myself "Pearl Harbor reference in 1...2...3..."

I barely got to "3" before every pundit on TV was yapping "Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor!" To which the 9/11 strikes bore no resemblance at all.

-- Mal

[malthaussen]

18. In "Woman of the Year," Kate Hepburn's character becomes a baseball fanatic...

... after Spencer Tracy's character takes her to a ball game. I love that movie for many reasons, and that's one of them.

Which is to say that the idea that one may become acclimated to something one once disdained or disliked is certainly legitimate.

Friend of mine is referring to these videos as "Trump's snuff flicks." As she's an Evangelical Christian of the real sort (not the White Supremacist jingo sort), I'm kind of astonished she even knows what those are.

-- Mal

[aggiesal]

20. Napoleon ..