But as a POC, I point out that America has a long tradition of taking children to witness lynchings, and the children would cheer. Or to beat foxes to death with sticks.

I don't think it’s as simple as “people don’t have emppathy when death is abstract and indirect.” Lots of people don’t have empathy when they’re socially conditioned to believe a certain type of person is a subhuman.

Today, we have police suffocating citizens and murdering adolescents, and there’s a certain type of person who cheers this, provided the victims are member sof a class deemed “subhuman."

I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.

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I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.

We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.

If we were sitting side-by-side in the Warsaw Ghetto, I might agree with you intellectually, but nevertheless my immediate concern would be for the localized cruelty.

I very much disagree that pointing out a particularly virulent strain of cruelty is motivated by the desire to hope that the problem can be solved permanently.

When you’re one of the people with a target on your back, your immediate concern is with the cruelty you are threatened with and/or experiencing.

Under those circumstances, your motivation is to “think globally, but act locally.”

It would be the same dynamic if, for example, I was a woman experiencing misogyny on some social media site. True, misogyny is in a lot of places and has been present for a very long time.

But nevertheless, my immediate concern would be reducing it in the place where I’m experiencing it. If I called someone out for their behaviour, would I accept “Well, lots of people are misogynists, always have been, always will be, so why are you pointing at me” as an answer?

I think not.

The more abstract you make a thing, the harder it is to alleviate your suffering from a thing. Which is exactly why people who don’t want to fix a problem always try to make it as abstract and general as possible.

so you're right and I hope you don't let the wilfully ignorant discourage you.

This is certainly true, but it's also the case that history, culture and ideology influence the behaviours of geographically-close groups of people over the medium-long term.

I'm optimistic that it will decrease over time, because frankly it has been, if you look at history. I mean, I remember reading up on the "bog bodies" and they figured out that pretty much the whole lot of them died quite brutal deaths.

I'd like to think as a culture we're not so much like that anymore, but it certainly persists in certain ways and places.

Some people reading this might think I am exaggerating, but if you hear my father in law rant about democrats you would be shocked.

Minorities are by and large generally more culturally conservative than the majority of the West. The only difference is the approach to communalism versus individualism, but the American conservative affinity towards individualism is largely a classical liberal idea. Minority communities are not blind to that, several aspects of progressive politics are incompatible and the media hasn't changed their mind. For instance, the gay and black community is very splintered, and progressives have been able to manage that. Left-wing literature and academia acknowledge this as well. Add influences of the Vietnam War, and you will get a vastly conservative community.

However, party politics in America do not subscribe to a consistent frame of ideologies. As cultures began compounding over the past 60 years, identity is the mainstream approach for appealing to bases. The parties have chosen a side.

A majority of minority voters have weighed the cost-benefits of choosing between their conservative principles or a stronger representation of their people, and found one side more accommodating. Quite literally, the biggest downfall to the advancement of conservative ideals in America is probably one specific party's refusal to appeal towards minority communities. It was true before Trump, Trump only exposed this reality of the Republican base. There could have been a conservative revolution.

One final point. Asians has had to deal with issues of systemic and structural discrimination from both sides of the aisle. The issues go far broader than higher standards of university admission. Very little to do with their affinity towards specific ideologies.

>I do not believe for a moment that witnessing the murders would change their minds, because even as video circulates showing the murder happening, they continue to cheer.

Social conditioning is a way to reinforce the abstraction over the reality though. I come from a right wing family and have seen it several times, not to mention how often it's reflected in memes criticizing the right: they change their minds when it happens to them. Cheney and his gay daughter is a prime example. Being part of a mob and watching another part do something bad to still another (perceived) mob feels more like theater than reality.

>I also don’t think we can conflate this with arguments about “people you disagree with.” We’re not talking about people sitting down and debating free love or long hair.

It's not conflating, it's reality. Those people can vote. They go to work. They are cops. They are doctors. They are school teachers. If you choose not to engage them as thinking people, how do you plan to change their minds? If you don't plan to change their minds, then what's the plan?

>We’re talking about people who believe that other people are literally a disease infecting society that should be exterminated as quickly as possible, preferably in such a way that it sends a message to others.

Are we? Knowing tons of very right wing people, I don't really see anyone happy about the kinds of deaths you're referring to. I see people defending police, giving them (perhaps too much) benefit of the doubt, and at times ignoring wrong doing, but that's a long way from a lynch mob. Not to say it's in good taste, but I think you're stretching a lack of sympathy, or perhaps willful ignorance at the extreme, to be the same as hate. From my perspective some people are just more concerned with law and order than fairness, and it's because they aren't on the losing end, not because they're malicious.

Maybe this has a tendency to happen in larger group-think situations. Those bloodthirsty individuals weren't at Kent State, they didn't experience any of this first hand, but they were part of a group that was, on some level, afraid of the students, and hated what they represented. They lashed out based on group-think.

I blame the scale of our politics for this. The federal government should not be able to start a war without a referendum and a super-majority. Instead of real democracy and "power to the people" everything is becoming a federal issue, covered by a couple dozen national media companies, with everyone in a country of 330 million people lining up behind a thousand career politicians and talking heads, funded by the rich and multinational corporations. So much group-think. No less in the 1960s, I assume.

Everyone may then be shocked when someone actually goes and does it, but it seems to me like a predictable result of dehumanizing your rivals rather than just what naturally happens when smart people with different values and information disagree with each other.