 Ahoy Hoy! I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we are going to talk about everyone's favorite topic when it comes to SCP content. I'm sure absolutely no one will be annoyed by this. Social justice issues with regards to D-Class. I'm sure no one will have any objections in the comments or in the like versus dislike ratio. Anyway, I used to shy away from this kind of content, but then I learned that even when someone dislikes something, that means it's getting recommended to other people who like the things you've disliked before. The algorithm is fun like that. I was like, you know what? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if people like it or dislike it. I can just say my opinions and everything will be alright. So here's what we're going to focus on today. D-Class. So D-Class on the SCP Wiki are a very specific thing. They are prisoners generally considered to be death row inmates, though not always. There is no canon on the SCP Wiki, so it's hard to nail down exactly what we're talking about. But in most circumstances, and certainly originally, they were death row inmates who are used as essentially disposables, disposable people, and sometimes slave labor, just calling it what it is, to help contain anomalies. And the initial premise for this, and I'm going to say it very clearly, is that if your version of the SCP Foundation uses D-Class that fit that description, whether it's any prisoners at all actually, who are unpaid and quote unquote terminated at the end of the month in any way, even if it means sending them back out into the judicial system, then your version of the SCP Foundation is evil, morally bankrupt. We're going to talk about why. But first, we have to go all the way back to 2007 and 2008, when the first SCPs were being written for the SCP Wiki, and edit this Wiki that it was originally, or even all the way back to SCP 173, which SCP 173 doesn't actually directly implicate the existence of D-Class, though it does imply something of, what's the word I'm looking for? Not fully disposable employees, but employees you don't necessarily care about losing, like it's still important to try and keep them safe, but if they die, they die. And if we go back to this time period, what we will learn to discover is, and we've talked about this in the origins of the SCP Wiki and a couple other things before, but social attitudes in 2007 and 2008 were wildly different than they are today. And for a lot of people, this may be hard to believe, because believe or not, I would say that at least half of the SCP Wiki's current viewership is, and certainly at least half, I can look at my own demographics data to know this, were either too young to remember when 9-11 happened or were born after it. And that is a sobering thought for me as a 35 year old, but it's neither here nor there. I feel so old. The thing is, attitudes socially in 2007, even before, when Barack Obama was running for president, had not actually been elected yet. And George W. Bush was still currently president. Attitudes towards the difference between safety and freedom and the exchange you have to make between them were much different than I think they are today, though they're not that much different. They were certainly much, much different than they were in the late 90s and were, should say, mid to late 90s. The thing is, it's fair to say that the SCP Foundation was born out of some of the early ideas of the Patriot Act, and surveillance states, and Guantanamo Bay even, like the idea that there is some level of fucked upness that is okay if it means saving the world. And in the grand scheme of SCP fiction, that's the point. But in, I mean, heck, in real life at that time, it wasn't even about saving the world. It was just about keeping yourself and your family safe from some nebulous concept of terrorism, which most people had no direct interactions with, unless they were part of an Army National Guard troop that got called up and sent over to either the Iraqi war or the Afghanistan war. And that's another thing. I come from a time period before that. And the ideas of the world that existed before the Iraqi and Afghanistan war, people talk about them being forever wars have lasted really long times, but I'm from before they, you know, were a thing. But those attitudes towards sacrifices of safety, or I should say sacrifices of freedom for safety led to the concept of D class just as much as it led to the concepts of all the other rest of the SCP foundation. I am sure somebody was reading SCP 173 or one of the earlier SCPs and was thinking to themselves, you know what, these people who have to go into the containment chamber and wipe up the blood and feces on the floor and keep eyes on SCP 173 at all time, they can't be high level employees, because they're going to get, they're going to fail from time to time. So what are they? Well, they're disposable D class. And it comes from that sort of thing. It just a conversation happened in some chat room somewhere between some people, or even just a thought that somebody had. And that's, that's suddenly we have D class and you start to develop them. Well, what are they? Okay, well, I mean, hit, you know, disappeared people. That's another thing in the, you know, that was a serious concept. We don't even think about it as much today, although there are still plenty of conspiracy theorists to probably do. We don't think about it as much today as we did then, but Guantanamo Bay was literally a system for disappearing people, US citizens, even in some cases, where you would take a person and then they would just disappear into the system. No one knows where they are. They have no rights to an attorney. There's no way to find out where they are to, you know, check up on them. They're just gone. And this was especially true of people who are grabbed from overseas. So if you live in a system where that is in the forefront of your mind, then D class is sort of a no brainer, disappearing people out of the system. The problem is, and this is where we can full circle back to the main moral quandaries here, is that the criminal justice system in America, and let me be clear here, the SAP Foundation is not focused wholly in America, but I would say it's fair to argue that it is mostly based in the US, at least its seat of power is, and its seat of resources is. And D class being death row inmates almost certainly doubles down on that concept because the death penalty is not a thing in most Western countries anymore. There are still other Western countries outside the US that have the death penalty. That's completely fair to say, but most don't. And the ones that do usually, I would say, I would argue don't use it as nearly as often as the US does. There are probably US states that execute more people than the whole rest of the Western world, I would bet. So just individual states out of the 50 states. Texas would probably be my number one guess. So coming from a system of the US, the problems with the US justice system, which were not fully understood or recognized by the public in 2007 and 2008, the establishment of D class starts to make a little bit of sense. But any, and I've done this before when I did the examination of your wrong about D class, any deep examination of what D class are, or the US justice system that produces D class in the SCP universe would immediately inform you as to the moral implications of the problem. So slave slavery is not illegal in the United States. The point is, is that slavery was outlawed in the southern rebelling states, but wasn't actually outlawed in the north until I believe the 13th amendment was passed. And that was well after the Civil War. Let me double check what the date on that one was. Right, that was in 1865. So the in January of 1865, and it was ratified in December 6 1865. However, just because it made involuntary servitude and chattel slavery illegal doesn't mean that it was fully illegal because there is a caveat made for prisoners. And that is the source, by the way, of so much problems of so many problems today. The prison industrial complex is the problem of its own that we don't even have nearly enough time to get into. But the point is, is that slave labor is okay in prisons, regardless of if you're in there for murder, or if you're in there because, you know, you believe it or not, because you crossed the road got a jaywalking ticket and couldn't pay your fine. slave labor is fine for both of those cases. That's sort of messed up. And in the end this has been endlessly exploited to two incredible ends. But D class are a natural extension of that because D class are slave labor. Period. You're not even like, you're like, Oh, we'll let you go. You're not paying them. You're just saying, we'll let you go at the end. And then they're not even doing that in most versions of the SCP foundation. They're not even fulfilling the non payment compensation that they're offered. And so we come down to why is that morally repugnant? Why is it morally wrong? Why is the SCP foundation evil for doing this? And we can talk again all day about racial injustice and class injustice in the criminal justice system. We can talk about the problems with how plea bargains incentivize miscarriages of justice and the criminalization of mundane and non threatening things because courts don't have to spend as much resources prosecuting things. They don't have to do jury trials because they can go, well, you know, you had one ounce of marijuana on you, but we're going to go ahead and charge you with possession with the intent to distribute, which could give you up to 15 or 20 years, or you could just plea down to possession and will give you, you know, a year or a year with probation or even sometimes much worse depending on the state. So they don't have to, I mean, pull 12 taxpayers in for every case, set them down, not even 12. I mean, to get a jury trial going, you know, actually, I have to pull in a bunch of people to select from and then you select 12 different people who would just have to not be able to have full jobs while this is going on and then spend all of the resources required to actually go through the court cases. Could you imagine if every case was like that? It would, the system would not work. And these criminalizing stupid stuff, like I was reading, I was reading up a little bit on this topic. Like, was it Shreveport, Louisiana tried to make it illegal to wear sagging pants in public? Yeah, imagine if they had to go through a jury trial for that. That would not be a law. And yeah, so first of all, we got to the point where very stupid things are illegal. And that's easy to do because it hits the people who have less money. It hits people of color. So great. It's a system that is broken in so many different ways. Injustices are carried out every single day in the justice system. There is no accountability for mistakes. There's, and again, the problem is saying there's plenty of good people. You say that so that the people on the far on the fringes who don't are already in your sphere of influence can be like, oh, you know what? This guy is reasonable. He said that some of them are okay. I mean, it is fair to say some people are okay. Some people are not doing the wrong thing, but the system is intrinsically broken. So it doesn't matter. Even those people are stuck doing things that they probably either don't want to do or, but they do it. They still do it. They still live in the system and they still experience. And so this is the thing. This translates one to one to what's going on at the SCP Foundation. And this is where it all circles back on itself. People will argue reasonably even. Well, it's reasonable that they'd make this argument. The argument itself is, I don't think valid. People can argue, D-class are necessary because the SCP world, the world of the SCP Foundation specifically, is so dangerous that without D-class, the world could end. All people could die. And then what? And that is a flawed argument for a number of reasons. First of all, D-class, as they currently exist, are among the lowest effort ways of dealing with this problem. Just because the world could end if you don't get someone to go into that room, let's just use this as an example. That room over there has some sort of world-ending problem and somebody's got to go in there and they're gonna die and you gotta send them in. Just because that's true doesn't mean you need to use slave labor to do it. That is the important difference. It's not the problem. Yes, someone has to go into that room, but you get to choose who that person is and how they're compensated and how they're treated and how their family is treated and how they're treated if they manage to go in there and make it out somehow and save the world. And yes, there is plenty of room for stories of an SCP foundation that does these things, that sends a slave into that room to do that work and save the world, and to reflect on the social justice implications of that choice. But I know of almost no stories on the SCP Foundation Wiki that actually examine the wrongness of that decision, the intrinsic wrongness of the system that produces D-Class, the social injustice of the justice systems. And not just the U.S. justice systems, by the way. I know more about the U.S. justice system than I know about other Western justice system. And again, I'm specifically talking about Western in this case because, oh man, when we talk about the difference between retributive and restorative justice and a whole bunch of other things, again, way bigger topics than this video is probably capable of supporting. But regardless of that, if you're not using D-Class to examine those issues, or you have never personally never used D-Class to examine those issues, you just use them as shorthand for disposable people, there's nothing wrong with you. You're depicting an SCP Foundation that is evil because they do not have to do it that way. And that's it. I mean, we could go, again, I could go into so much more detail about the injustices and the problems of it. I think it would be better if you did some research on your own. There are plenty of sources online. I'll probably include a few links in the descriptions. It's just up that I was reading today just to refresh myself and get myself in the right mindset for this. But some of it's from the Cato Institute, which is a super libertarian group. It's funny when you read libertarian content because you can see the slightly conservative slant of it. But at the same time, they're like, I don't know if people should even be put in jail at all. But it's funny. But regardless, I'll give you some links to some reading material on this particular topic. I think it's something that people should consider when they're creating their content. Either don't include D-Class or include them in a way that, I mean, or at least establish in your own world that D-Class are not treated as slave labor, or that there's some sort of determining fact, like there's some sort of anomalous thing where every D-Class comes and are they actually guilty? Yes. All right, let's put them to work. I mean, that's bad enough, by the way, just because somebody's guilty of the crime that they are supposed to be, murders and everything. If we're talking about just death penalty cases, I think that's an argument of its own. But if you have some sort of anomalous ability to detect if somebody is guilty or not of the death penalty crime that they supposedly committed, I think you have a lot more, what's the word I'm looking for here. You have a little bit more moral leeway, but if you don't, then you're certainly sending people to death and using them as slave labor who are innocent. That's just true. And not examining that and understanding it is a serious issue for a writer, I think, personally. And yeah, I think that would be actually interesting if the SQB found it. I think that's a good way to do it. Pick out people who are guilty of murders. And then again, that still gives you some opportunities for problems. Maybe I could do a story, like actually write that story. The SQB Foundation has an intake for D-Class and they tell other people to write a story when you can do it yourself. Yeah, like the intake system for D-Class, where they actually bring you in, set you down in front of the object or person or whatever it is that can determine it and ask you to tell your story. Why did you do the thing? Was it justified? Are you good or evil? Or even just like a light that turns red or blue and says, will what happens to this person be justified by how the things that they have done in the past or not? And ooh, you could do that as like a good social commentary too. Because like, what if it starts saying yes to people who are innocent still? Like, you know, you talked in a movie theater once and the box just decides that's good enough while the movie was going. But yeah, that's good enough. You deserve to be killed horribly by you having your neck snapped. And like, use that as a reflection on the U.S. criminal justice system. I think it's like, see, that's the kinds of stories that this stuff allows you to tell, but nobody is telling those stories. Because I don't think people are considering this. It's much easier. And this is again, social understanding of how fucked up the criminal justice system is in America. It's sort of a newer thing. It's sort of a newer thing for white people. The understanding that the criminal justice system is fucked up has been understood by minorities for a very long time. But the wider like majority of Americans were just like, I mean, if you're in jail, you must have done something to deserve it. Think about all the terrible jokes people make about the things that happen to people in prison. Those are not okay things to joke about, even for prisoners, especially when you consider the fact that some of those people are indeed innocent or guilty of insignificant offenses that have been blown up into terrible things. Anyway, I think that we've gotten to the point of why it's immoral and why there are stories to be told with it, but they need to acknowledge the immorality of the core problem. And yeah, thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video and my rant on this particular topic, hit the subscribe button. And if you liked it, hit the like button. And if you didn't, hit the dislike button. I don't give a fuck which one you choose. Either way, you're telling the algorithm to send somebody my way, so I appreciate it. And yeah, leave your comments. We can discuss this in more detail in the comments. Let's open a dialogue on this particular topic. And then head on over to patreon.com forward slash D. Cimmerian and pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including actually, I don't have any I keep saying including like I've got so many above $20 and I don't like I want to say it. 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