That's fine. You don't have to go down infinite meta-levels of empathy.
You can just treat nazis like scum, and jerks like jerks. As long as you treat other people well and with compassion, you would still be behaving far better and more positively than how those who would make those supposedly "harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments" are.
And you just choose who you consider "people" and who you consider "scum". It's like that old joke about Linux being user-friendly, it's just very picky about who it considers a user.
That position is shit, though.
Yes. That's necessary too. Did you rather treat everybody as an undifferentiated fog? Compassion is not about bending over backwards for jerks.
It's a problem when you're different from the Nazis only by virtue of "but I'm a good guy".
Being empathetic (take it from someone that believes they're an hyper empath) means understanding that if I were born in the 1910s in Germany and maybe blond and blue eyed, I could have probably been a big Adolf fan, but I was not, so current me believes fascists in general should get punched in the face indiscriminately and with extreme prejudice.
Having black-and-white thinking, of "I would never do that", like you seem to do, is proof itself of lack of empathy.
No, it's the opposite. I wouldn't treat anyone as an Untermensch because I'm convinced that the difference between me and them is a few throws of the dice. If you divide the world into "people worthy of empathy (by virtue of the dice showing X)" and "sub-humans to be treated like scum and vermin (by virtue of the dice showing Y)", you're completely sharing their worldview, you just randomly weren't born into their shoes and you don't agree with them on what the dice should show, but that's it.
That's not to say you should tolerate Nazis, but to not feel any empathy for them, and to not treat them as humans? Yeah, good luck on that road.
"Sure I tortured prisoners and waterboarded them ... but they were insurgents, and I'm a good guy, so it's all cool if I do it. Had they done the same to me though, wow, what a crime against humanity" has a super weird vibe to me. But it works, and Abu Ghraib documented neatly, how happy people can be while they torture others, if you tell them they're the good guys and that it's okay, because the others aren't really human.
Yeah, it's kind of like how Nazis killed people, and anti-Nazis killed people too.
So from that aspect they'd be the same. Besides, both sides also breathed, drank beer, and tied their shoes.
But the anti-nazis killed Nazis, not just anybody that they fancied for power, and they did it for freedom, and they didn't base it on innate characteristics (like being a Jew, or gypsie, or gay) but on bad behavior (like having occupied half of Europe, and burned people) and on stopping aggression.
So, yeah, there's that.
First, getting vaccinated is indeed not just about your own protection but also about empathy.
Second, actual empathetic people don’t suddenly lose all their empathy and go into “got mine fuck you” mode the moment something doesn’t go their way.
First, there's history.
Second, the POTUS himself - self proclaimed enemy of divisiveness - yapped "pandemic of the unvaccinated." Which was a lie. A lie for which he has yet to acknowledge, let alone apologize for.
The point is, people with an appreciation for history, and a willingness to exert their God given rights were being manipulated and maligned. That's not cool. That's not unifying.
To see it as trivial and harmless says more about you buying into the ruse than anything else.
History is clear my friend...be careful what you wish for, especially when your government is making big promises that hinge on your convenience and someone else's loss of liberty.
For example, NY state requires that children attending daycare or school be vaccinated against a range of pathogens.
I don't know what you're envisioning happening with mandatory SARS-CoV-2 vaccination, or why you consider it a "ruse." A "ruse" for what, exactly?
I don't think mandatory vaccination equals anyone's "loss of liberty." I don't think there's a right to not be vaccinated. It's a critical public health measure that brings huge benefits to society, and which imposes virtually no burden on the individual.
Rewind and remember all that was promised with the vaccinations. The effectiveness. The long term safety (without *any* such testing). Remember the comparisons to other historic vaccinations by professionals well aware the mRNA technology was new and relatively untested. The Covid jab !== The Polio jab. Not even close.
Remember how masks were required. Then remember the news that most masks are ineffective because the virus is smaller that what the masks can stop? How did we not know that? Why do some continue to push masks, even the ones that are effectively useless?
Remember the guy (i.e., Biden) who talked down the divisiveness of others then shamelessly said, "It's a pandemic of the unvaccinated" forcing an unnecessary wedge between the citizens. For what? To get a jab that does perform as promised? To wear "government sanctioned" masks that don't do anything?
For the record, being someone's guinea pig is not liberty. Being someone's political chew toy is not liberty. You can think what you want about public health and the mRNA jabs but don't confuse your confidence with liberty.
The fact that many reasonable and intelligent people such as yourself have forgotten so many important details can only be explained by...a ruse. But that ok, just be sure to carry your Covid papers / Covid passport and you'll be safe.
> The effectiveness.
The vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease and death, which was always their primary goal. If you go back and read the vaccine trial procedures on clinicaltrials.gov, you'll see that their "primary endpoint" was prevention of serious disease, and that preventing infection was viewed as the cherry on top - it wasn't the primary endpoint, and the trials weren't designed to test for infection. The fact that the mRNA vaccines protected so well against infection with the original strain was just an added bonus.
> The long term safety (without any such testing).
There was extremely rigorous safety testing. They followed tens of thousands of people for months. The "long term" aspect you're bringing up is unscientific. Based on the modern scientific understanding of the immune system, the types of long-term side-effects that anti-vaxxers posit are not possible, and there is no known example of such a side effect ever occurring with any vaccine. Vaccine side-effects always show up within a few months at most, and there was extensive testing to look for such side-effects.
> The Covid jab !== The Polio jab. Not even close.
You're right, but not in Ruhe way you think. The mRNA CoVID vaccines are far safer than the widely used oral polio vaccine.
> don't confuse your confidence with liberty
I don't agree with you on the definition of "liberty." I view the "liberty" to not get vaccinated as similar to the "liberty" to not wear a seatbelt or to buy a car without airbags.
> But that ok, just be sure to carry your Covid papers / Covid passport and you'll be safe.
If you travel around the world, you'll find that much more than just CoVID vaccination is required.
And your lack of understanding this is a lack of empathy BTW. You don't care what reason somebody has to deny the vaccine. You are (for whatever reason) convinced that it is the right thing to do and want to force it on all others (mandate).
At the start of the pandemic we are told it's no big deal. Then a few weeks later it's a massive deal. At first masks don't work so don't rush out and buy them. Then masks are mandatory in all public places. We then put society on hold for about a year. Finally we have an experimental drug that helps you be protected from the virus. YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! Don't want it? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You already had COVID and recovered? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG! You had a legitimate medical reaction to a previous vaccine? YOU MUST TAKE THE DRUG!
That process broke the trust of a significant amount of people. Why trust the establishment when they change their minds all the time and demand demand demand? If they do all these things in the name of empathy, empathy shouldn't be the base principle.
The actual reasons are self preservation and slowing down a pandemic. And when people don’t care about the latter, that is an easy tell that yeah they have zero empathy.
Especially since your actions do absolutely nothing to advance that goal you likely just made up now. If the governments have learned anything, it's that mandates need to be quicker and stronger, with much more stringent penalties for the dodgers.
So yeah... thanks for nothing.
There’s people who were forced to sell their homes, lost their jobs, and can’t move back to the place they grew up right here on American soil - in layman’s terms, I’m out of f’s to give.
I understand that some people have an irrational fear of the vaccine, and I can even try to empathize with them to that extent. However, it still is very difficult to understand the level of opposition to something which is so simple (just two painless injections, each taking seconds to administer) and so overwhelmingly positive (a 90+% reduction in the chance of serious disease, in exchange for a vanishingly small risk).
Public health messaging in the US was terrible, but US public health agencies were extremely cautious with the vaccines. If they hadn't cared about testing the vaccines, the vaccines could have been rolled out by mid-2020. After all, the vaccines were formulated all the way back in January 2020, pretty much as soon as the viral RNA sequence was published. I think it's sad that people have the impression that the vaccines were not thoroughly tested, because they were actually subjected to an extremely high level of scrutiny. They weren't approved until full-scale phase-3 trials with tens of thousands of participants had shown that the risk of severe side-effects was minuscule (i.e., as low as in other approved, safe vaccines).
The vaccine saved on the order of a million lives in the US. It's one of the most unambiguously positive things developed by humankind. That's why the strident opposition is so difficult to understand - it points to something very wrong in society.
I prefer that strategy rather than have an environment of "gatekeepers".
Great observation.
I wouldn't go that far. The signal to noise ratio is worse than it used to be, but there's still nothing else like HN and there are still a lot of interesting technical conversations to observe or to be had. I continue to learn more here than anywhere else. I'll cope with putting in a bit more effort mentally filtering out the unproductive conversations.
yes there is, lobste.rs is exactly HN but with a lot more selective membership and hence better comments.
which is fine, if that's what you want, but, as a daily reader of both, they aren't even close to being the same thing
If only the rest of us could be as moral and empathetic as you, I'm sure the world would soon be holding hands and singing kumbaya in a gigantic, human circle.
From my focus on emotions and conflict over the last 10 years, I'd say many people actually think they're bad people (or at least that they might be). I think one of the hardest things is to defend our own good intentions and I've found that as I get better at doing it for myself, I tend to also defend the good intentions of others.
A colleague a few years ago went as far as to suggest that this is how you ended up with nazis.
I hope with ubiquitous communications now that we tell these people that no it’s not acceptable to behave like this! Compassion should be awarded.
Below average empathy is pervasive and a pretty common human characteristic, like being tall or having curly hair.
To empower those folk is how you end up with nazis, which is the point.
Your colleague does appear to have done a lot of reflection and/or reading ( feel free to ask him to contact me if he finds the stuff on my profile of interest). Most people just think Hitler=evil as the sole contibuting factor to the holocast, but I say that it's people around him, who did not have the conscience or who ignored it, that lead to his rise. There are a fair number of potential 'hitlers' around us, but it's primarily people around those dysfunctional individuals that keep them in check.
There are two types: the ignorant and the complicit. The complicit are who you have to worry about. It was seen as a means to an end and was without compassion or care of others just the personal gain of rank or power.
Ask an American active in tech-orientated social media about it, they'll invariably say "Oh, well of course that doesn't affect people like me".
Until they want to go to a restaurant, but it's been shut down because the owners couldn't get it in their head that they should pay more than minimum wage and no one wants to work for that. Or the restaurant is open, with employees who cannot afford to stay home even though they are contagious, and the tech people get sick. Or their boss wants to shrink the workforce by 10-50% and so they make it undesirable to be there to avoid paying severance.
And it has to be them, not people in the same position.
But it's only some Americans who think like that. Too broad a brush doesn't work.
There's an Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace [0] that I think is relevant. HN (and even at this point broader programmer "culture") is a "fruit of the poison tree" in a sense - the philosophy of individualism and "greed is good" runs deep.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Watched_Over_by_Machines_o...
Reading them, so am I. There is no sign of empathy: that understanding of another individual, the ability to put oneself in someone else's shoes, that is fundamental to a healthy society and (IMO) personal integrity.
I read a comment a few years ago that no-one thinks of themselves as a bad person. To yourself, you are always okay. Yet lacking as you phrase it 'human decency', or for me, 'empathy', as so clearly illustrated in those harsh, inhuman, uncaring, comments that show no concern nor understanding of the person, the human, the feeling caring uprooted emotion-bearing trouble-striving human at the center of this...
I don't know. I feel like quite a few people in this post need to question themselves.