James Tatsch was not charged with any crime. But when he was found unresponsive in an isolation cell at the Alcorn County Jail on Jan. 17, he had been locked up for 12 days. He died at the local hospital.

Tatsch was waiting for mental health treatment through Mississippi’s involuntary commitment process. Every year, hundreds of people going through the process are detained in county jails for days or weeks at a time while they wait for evaluations, hearings and treatment. They are generally treated like criminal defendants and receive little or no mental health care while jailed.

Mississippi Today and ProPublica previously reported that since 2006, at least 14 people have died after being jailed during this process. Tatsch, who was 48 years old, is at least the 15th. No one in the state keeps track of how often people die while jailed for this reason. The news organizations identified the deaths through lawsuits, news clips and Mississippi Bureau of Investigation reports. MBI investigates in-custody deaths only at the request of the local sheriff or district attorney.

  • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Conservatives are not able to see others as humans. Empathy is simply not a conservative trait. As such, conservatives should never be considered appropriate choices for leadership positions. The result is always oppression and death. Always. This has been true throughout human history.

    These innocent people were killed by conservatives just being conservatives.

        • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          “I refuse to understand that in the political mainstream of American shorthand liberal generally refers to the center and left of the political spectrum as Republicans have made themselves such a massive threat to democracy that Progressives, Centrists, and Leftists (actual leftists, not the white highschool and college kid bougeyviks who see everyone else as expendable if it means anyone to the right of Pol Pot are made to surrender to the intellectual superiority in which they remain ever euphoric) are forced to share the same political apparatus for risk of the spoiler effect.”

            • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              It does in America. Any suggestions it doesn’t are predicated on “bErNiE wOuLd Be A cEnTrIsT iN hUnGaRy!” type idiocy, or on the fact that Europeans use it to refer to what Americans call libertarian.

              Either way, it’s based on Eurocentrism.

              • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                5 months ago

                Liberals in America are just right wing anti-communists, they’re not leftists at all. As for Bernie, social-democracy is the moderate wing of fascism and that’s why he supports Biden’s genocide.

                • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  “Social Democracy is the moderate wing of fascism.”

                  Pure bougeyvik nonse. Quite literally too, the line originates with the Bolsheviks because nordic socialist parties split with the internationale on letting Stalin boss everyone around.

                  You’re parroting anti-leftist talking points spawned out of a temper tantrum thrown by the guy who got caught with his pants down in WWII because he still thought he was negotiating with the axis to join in exchange for Bulgaria and Turkey.

                  I’d ask how it feels to be a useful idiot but the .ml lets us all know that you think the one college class you took for your minor in “read theory” makes you smarter than everyone else, particularly that working class you claim to be an ally with while actively talking over them about what their interests are.

                  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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                    5 months ago

                    Currently I’m reading the Jakarta Method, actually. I try to do at least one book a month.

                    Also, Stalin was completely right and that’s why European social democracies are having a resurgence of fascist parties. Also, again, social democrats in America supporting genocide. Liberals are liberals, the reason leftists are excluded is because we don’t count and aren’t allowed to be part of society or politics.

                • prole@sh.itjust.works
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                  5 months ago

                  social-democracy is the moderate wing of fascism

                  Lol. I guess if your goal is to muddy the waters and confuse people about the definitions of words, then well done.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Conservatives are not able to see others as humans.

      I’m not so sure. In fact, I don’t think they would enjoy being so cruel if they didn’t think they were doing it to other humans.

      They just see most humans as lesser humans.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          5 months ago

          Calvinism tells you/shows you everything.

          Calvinism started with what sounds like reasonable religious philosophy. If God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, then God surely knows the end of history and whose souls will be saved and whose won’t be saved.

          The original notion was closer to a piece of philosophy produced by preists who studied the Bible extensively, who likely assumed that as mere humans, they could not know the mind of God.

          When this philosophy was passed to the commoner, however, the commoners decided it meant they could tell who was going to hell and who wasn’t, since it was already pre-determined, right?

          At no point did anyone stop and yell “Blaspheme! It is blaspheme to claim to know the mind of God, a thing that is unknowable!” No, people just decided they could figure out who was going to hell and fuck what God thinks anyway.

          It’s the same thing, it really comes down to something as simple as tribalism. They want a protected in-group but they also need an out-group to attack. It’s helpful to have a vague and nebulous enemy so any time someone wrongs you, you can instantly accuse them of being part of the shadow groups out to get you. It really prevents you from ever having to think about your own behavior much or at all, and focuses everything on a shadowy group or figure (Satan!) that they cannot even prove is there.

          Is it any wonder most of these people are religious, specifically Christian, already? It’s like this kind of shit is baked into the religion.

          • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            It’s pretty well baked into 2/4 of the Abrahamic religions. I don’t know how Judaism is actually practiced well enough to claim that it’s baked into Judaism.

    • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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      It’s not that empathy isn’t a conservative trait, the range is the issue.

      You can see it in how all the “pro gay” and “pro stem cell” conservatives in the US are ones who had a family member come out as queer or who contracted an illness which could be treated via stem cells.

      It’s like they never quite got object permanence down pat. They can only believe queer folks are people if they see one themselves, they can only understand a moral abortion when they or one of their family members needs one, they only believe in welfare when its coming to their community, because they know that their community ain’t mis-usin’ it.

      Obviously some of it is down to just plain ol’ bigotry, but a lot of it comes from the fact that these people can’t empathize with what they haven’t ever seen in person.

      It’s like the mirror test but for screens, liberals, progressives, and leftists are able to recognize through a screen that the person on the other side is a real person with a real life experience that can really be related to even if only a little bit. A conservative in the modern day is someone who’s just incapable of that, or even worse, someone who is capable of it but has opportunistically chosen to ignore it.

      A proper rural political campaign has to bring these issues to these folks front and center, you’re not gonna make progress in small town America unless you campaign on the theory of EXTREMELY visual learning, you need black historians telling the story of Tulsa at town hall meetings, you need queer rights advocates telling the story about how their parents disowned them for being queer, you need folks who have had abortions and people who never would but understand that it isn’t their place to stop others to explain their experiences and journeys.

      Most importantly you need to pay these folks a kings ransom because every single one of them is gonna need to be equipped with the patience of fucking Solomon to bring these issues to where conservatives will be able to see it and really have a chance to empathize with, and that’s gonna involve a lot of answering very stupid and insensitive questions, and also dealing with people looking for a fight so they can keep villainizing over everyone else who might be able to get their grok on for these people.

    • doingless@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I’ve been detained and unlawfully searched dozens of times but the worst offenders are cops in major cities. 95% of my terrible cop experiences were in Democrat run cities. Authoritarianism runs strong on the left.

      • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Authoritarianism is a notoriously conservative trait. It is not a trait of progressives. I think you know that and are engaging in bad faith with a suspicious personal anecdote.

        • doingless@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Right authoritarianism is fascism, that’s the definition. But left authoritarianism is a very, very real thing. And many people who claim to be libertarian leftists still want authorities to enforce their ideals. Back when I used to shitpost on Reddit political compass memes a couple years ago we used to call them watermelons - green on the outside but red on the inside. There are anarchist leftists for sure, I’m not saying it’s everybody. Those people are mostly pretty cool to me but authoritarian neolibs can eat a bag of dicks.

          • Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            I hear you! I offer my position that neoliberals are conservatives. They have more tact and are more open to slight progress to attract votes, but they are still just conservatives who serve only corporations and billionaires to enrich themselves.

            I also offer my position that the right spends a great deal of time re-defining words to use as weapons against the left. They will insist that authoritarianism and fascism are both leftist ideologies. Don’t give them even an inch. For example, they have spent decades calling all communism a left-wing construct. It is not.

            There are some left-wing flavors of communism, but current Chinese communism and the old Soviet (Marxist-Leninist) communists are both extremely right-wing and conservative, even by their own definitions. Don’t let tankies (conservatives pretending to be leftists with conservative viewpoints) redefine words. Push back and make them look stupid. Wikipedia will absolutely back you up on these points if angry leftists like me aren’t around to jump in.

      • joel_feila@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Well just becauar a democrat runs a city does not mean the cops are Democrats. The mayor doesn’t get to hire each cop or fire and replace the whole force.