Being empathetic is a weakness?
Outrage is definitely a weakness.
I'm afraid I'm not following your logic. Care to explain further?
Basically, if I can get you to react with misogyny, I have a level of control over you.
"Trolling" is about power. People do it because being able to push somebodies emotions one direction or another lets them play with that person like a marionette. Making people upset is a power trip for trolls.
It would not suprise me if many (not most by any means, but many) trolls are in fact psychopaths who are 'practicing' in a way. Running low-risk experiments on how to control people.
The solution is not to innoculate yourself against emotional response. Trust, but verify. Be emotional and empathetic, but do your homework and don't be a sucker.
Such an approach would allow yourself to empathize with the targets of bigotry without exposing yourself to the hypothetical psychopathic affirmative action boogeyman. And I am far more afraid of decades of social justice being undone by the normalization of bigoted attitudes in society than I am of a few scheming manipulative social justice warriors.
Hey there, privilege.
"4chan just doesn't care about your feels."
Which is precisely why it's predominantly white males.
I see this kind of "shock" throughout the techy mainstreamy politcally correct communities. It seems to me that the people that take issue with bigotry are themselves somehow weak through some kind of insecurity manifesting itself as a desire to fix this perceived "injustice". Because, you know, muh feels.
4chan just doesn't care about your feels. It's funny to say this (see how I am distancing myself from 4chan to add validity to my argument?); but I do think more communities could learn something from 4chan in this aspect.
On a related note; I saw that outrage thread linking in the 4chan post about this black chick getting some dude fired and what not about a non-PC joke at a conference. Then, in the HN thread [1], to my pleasure, at least the top comments were mostly absent of the typical reddity/facebook etc. white knighting "This is why women arent in tech!" nonsense.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5391667