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Oh Yeah

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  • It's also the removal of responsibility

    I can't remember where I read it but it came from the administrators of the Nuremberg Trials and their dealings with Nazi criminals they were interviewing and trying to prosecute.

    Basically ... most people everywhere have a degree of empathy for the things that are happening around them and to other people. There are psychopaths that really don't care what they do to other people but they are not the norm.

    Instead many people can more easily justify doing things to other people if they can remove their responsibility.

    • A leader, administrator or politician can remove their responsibility by saying that they asked for something to be done but they didn't do the thing because someone else carried out the order - so it is the underlings responsibility because they followed the order.
    • A follower or low level participant can remove their responsibility by saying that they were just following orders - they aren't responsible because they were told to do these things.

    Both groups want to believe that they had no responsibility and so they aren't to blame.

    It's always been like that and it's still happening now

    • A follower or low level participant can remove their responsibility by saying that they were just following orders - they aren’t responsible because they were told to do these things.

      I think this one is the one they're using more and more in their favor. Young 18 year old National Guardsman aren't as likely to fight back and wouldn't know what to do if they did. Who would represent them? How would their family be treated. They have their entire life ahead of them, are they sabotaging it?

      For the rest of us, how would we survive without jobs? Who would pay for the lawyer?

      It's a great thing that the bigger the protest, the more likely for change.

      Don’t believe the doubters: protest still has power

      Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

      There are, of course, many ethical reasons to use nonviolent strategies. But compelling research by Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, confirms that civil disobedience is not only the moral choice; it is also the most powerful way of shaping world politics – by a long way.

      Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

      Working with Maria Stephan, a researcher at the ICNC, Chenoweth performed an extensive review of the literature on civil resistance and social movements from 1900 to 2006 – a data set then corroborated with other experts in the field. They primarily considered attempts to bring about regime change. A movement was considered a success if it fully achieved its goals both within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities. A regime change resulting from foreign military intervention would not be considered a success, for instance. A campaign was considered violent, meanwhile, if it involved bombings, kidnappings, the destruction of infrastructure – or any other physical harm to people or property.

      Source in article from 2019

    • It's the same reason it's so easy for people to ignore the horrors of animal AG. They're not the ones doing it, so naturally it's easier to ignore and rationalise

  • This is why dehumanization is always part of fascist propaganda. You can't remove empathy completely from most people, but you can make them see a group as less than them and the empathatic response will be reduced. That's why the left uses terms like undocumented immigrants versus illegal aliens. Calling them 'illegals' is a key step for generating the capacity in people to murder them en masse.

    • Whenever I hear the term "alien" for an immigrant I know that person to be extremely racist.

  • The definition of empathy: "the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation"

    Yes. By definition, if you are able to feel empathy - I.e., if you can put yourself in another person's shoes - you wouldn't behave like any sycophant in the world, from Trump and his hateful MAGA's, to Putin, to Netanyahu, to Musk, and each and every single agent of chaos and unchecked greed attempting to mess around with mankind as if they were self-proclaimed messiahs and not the representation of humanity's own cancer cells.

    His observations were correct and can be applied to many situations and places worldwide. We are held back by hate and lack of empathy. We are unable to learn from the mistakes of our ancestors.

  • This is just me speaking from a contemporary point of view. Maybe part of the equation is a struggle to have a comfortable life and then seeing a limited sample of others who are better off whether through a combination of hard work and good luck, or see some people gaming the system with impunity. A lot of arguments I hear about those sympathetic to conservative talking points often have anecdotal experiences of seeing people abuse welfare or allegedly not pay taxes because they're undocumented workers.

    "Why should I support those illegals when my tax dollars go to help them when they don't pay tax themselves?"

    "I've seen people who can't speak English buy steak and lobster with food stamps."

    This resentment can then grow from continuous exposure to biased media portraying some bad actors burning or looting in protests. At that point it doesn't matter what actually caused the protests, because they've generalized all those people to be thugs undeserving of being listened to. After that, minorities are seen as a nuisance that must be rid of at all costs. It doesn't matter if they're documented or not, they must be bad because the police are arresting and hurting them.

    I don't have a good way to defuse their anger. They are right that some people in the minority act like criminals. They don't want to separate the good from the bad and just want to get rid of everyone whom the media and those in their echo chamber say are causing trouble.

78 comments