Stop defending tyranny.
No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
I mean, didn't Elon just finish saying that empathy is the problem?
Also,
you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy.
what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
I know. Inappropriate since this is not a military issue.
Just sayin' tho'.
> Um, what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.
This is the important part. Understanding "the root causes for the desires of your opponents" is not empathy. It's understanding something.
Empathy is a relating to anothers plight. If you only understand it then there is nothing to cause pause before using that understanding to your advantage. It's a core part manipulation and deception. If the only thing that happened with that understanding is seeing what you can get from it or that there is nothing you want there or have use for, then that doesn't really help bring two sides together.
Having the ability to relate to this understanding of another is when empathy happens. It's the empathy that gives one pause long enough to see there are other options that are not zero-sum.
> No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.
Disagree. Just because someone else can not relate -- now -- does not mean they can not later. I personally don't care for tit-for-tat games, thats simply a race to the bottom. Boundaries are the things missing here; one can have empathy for another that does not have it for them, that doesn't mean you also have to have a bleeding heart for them and let them walk all over you.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJX28l54YxE for an hour-long interview between a well-known conservative Christian and a liberal atheist exactly on the topic of the importance of having conservative Christians treating those they disagree with with empathy.
Not true, I see it constantly deployed to the not-right-wing side. Constantly and pretty much everywhere where left of center and center mix.
> It comes as no surprise that you would have never seen such messages delivered to conservatives if you don't spend a lot of time in places where this might happen.
I did read conservative writings, forums and what not. It is indeed rare in that space. Center is simply not invested in telling conservatives to have empathy as much as they are invested in promoting empathy toward conservatives.
> for the simple reason that the reaction to it tends to be bad.
I do agree that overall in aggregate it is increasingly clear it was bad advice. And the one sided application did not helped.
You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.
To have empathy with a view is not condoning it
From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.
It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.
popular vote for president
nonpartisan redistricting of every state
ranked-choice-voting everywhere
limits on corporate money in politics
end the filibuster
strictly define supreme court size, terms, and appointment rules
age limits for congress
finish reconstruction
mess with texas
there is a lot of technical debt in this project
If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.
I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.
Is that outcome really what you think is best?
For now. And, if these would-be book-banners have their way, not for long.
Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.
Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
If anything we actually have the 1st amendment to stop democracies from going too far!
A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.
The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.
I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).
edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.
>Stop defending tyranny.
I think you miss GP's point. It's not that they support such book bans or the ideology that encourages that and other anti-democratic (small 'd') nastiness. Rather it's the old saw that 'you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (balsamic vinegar excepted).'
While there are many who are callous, cruel pieces of shit, there are more who live (without their knowledge or consent -- cf. rural broadcast media landscape, online bubbles, etc.) in an "information" environment that promotes such stuff as "godly" and "American" and "freedom", when that's not even close to the truth.
Which is clear from the book bans, the ridiculous "anchor babies" trope, the Democrats are all communists and on and on and on.
Yes, folks who actively foment this stuff and cynically (or even genuinely) fight to reduce liberty need to be resisted. Strongly and loudly.
But if you adopt those folks' "othering" tactics, you devalue everyone who doesn't specifically agree with you and everything you believe as evil and unredeemable, you remove a key opportunity for education, positive experience and persuasion.
Will that work for everyone? Absolutely not. But we don't need everyone, just the ones who are honest and fair-minded. And those can certainly be those who disagree with you.
If you exclude the radical reactionaries, bigots and cynical scum who seek to profit from promoting such ideas, the majority of all of us agree about much more than we disagree.
Perhaps that's something we all should ruminate on.
And if you can’t afford to buy them, then what?
Public libraries exist to serve a public good and are not just quaint anachronistic equivalents of amazon.com
There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
As I said, their identity is such that they need to avoid engaging with these works to maintain it.
That doesn't mean that their outrage isn't genuine.
I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.
There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.
While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.
That being said...
It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.
So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.
People who are trying to harm my friends and family don't deserve any of my time and effort.
My biggest issue is not the lack of contact, it is the demonizing. Using blanket terms like "if you voted for trump your racist, homophobic, sexist, etc" when I just simply don't think that is a valid blanket statement and is really just a "feel good" statement for us to justify not hearing why they might have done something.
I do think that we are actively pushing them to be more extreme with blanket statements like this and it isn't not actually helping.
We can keep calling them names all we want but the fact is they are still voters that are enabling what we all have to deal with. Either we acknowledge that or we just keep repeating the same pattern we have been repeating since at least the 70's. A little bit of progress followed by a regression.
No, I don't. Not when the other side just openly uses lies (that they know to be lies) like "post-birth abortion" to argue their cause.
They're not discussing things in even a modicum of good faith. Saying that I have some moral imperative to engage with them as if they are is horseshit.
Absolutely. Although I'd point out that in many states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump, those on the "other side" (you know, our fellow Americans), often by large majorities, rejected abortion bans in their states after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
So it's not really as cut and dried as you make it out to be. Yes, there are absolutely those who despise the idea of the agency of women, and there are absolutely those who exploit that for monetary and political gain.
But a majority of Americans don't and even many of those who aren't on board could be persuaded to a live and let live position.
Politics is, after all, "the art of the possible." If we just demonize and "other" anyone who doesn't specifically agree with us, then nothing is possible -- only dysfunction and hate. That's not a world I want to live in.
You are refusing democratic process and arguing that media deems people unable to partake in it. This is not even Nazi ideology, this goes way, way beyond Nazism in terms of authoritarianism.
I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
Related to that though is the fact that authoritarianism has slowly become more prevalent over the past few decades, and it's easier than ever for people to get into cliques and echo chambers that never challenge their beliefs. That's resulted in a decrease in skills in truly changing people's minds about things, since in an echo chamber it's easier to just kick out anyone who disagrees, and if you're kicked out it's easier to just create your own echo chamber that espouses your belief than to convince people in the other echo chamber. This naturally leads to authoritarianism where an echo chamber believes that they're right and everyone else's incorrect opinions should be suppressed. When that community pops out of their echo chamber and tries to change everyone else's beliefs, it's only natural for people to respond with the best way they've learned how: refuse to engage.
I absolutely understand the desire not to engage with Nazis. But, ignoring Nazis is definitionally not going to do anything to fix the root of the problem
or any monarchy, or any theocracy, or any oligarchy.
I understand why you cite Nazism, or Soviet communism (or Mao Communism), but the French Revolutionary Government lasted less than 3 years, was at war with half of europe because their King decided to declare war for no reason, and had to find who fed intel to half their enemies (and even when the King's letters to his brother in law describing eastern troops movement were discovered, 10% of the parliament voted against his destitution and 40% against killing him for treachery). I'd say that they stopped the violence and decided to free all slaves once the war ended should be a point in their favor.
These are not just literary classics, they carry a specific culture forward. People whose values are threatened by that culture need to not engage with them. They do so by finding things to be offended by in the books. In many cases the offence is perfectly genuine. It is caused by cognitive dissonance, and not cynical manipulation.
That doesn't make it less frustrating. But understanding why people have trouble with these works helps build empathy for them. And empathy is necessary to present your points in a way that is persuasive to their views. Yelling in anger at them is easy. Actually changing their minds is far harder. And it does require trying to understand.