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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It suggests that my solution, “house the homeless” should be discarded because it is not a perfect solution, which would be filling my house up with strangers. The goal is to make me say, “oh, I’m not willing to do that, so we should do nothing instead.”

    This may be a mixture of a bunch of different arguments. There is the anti-Nimby argument which calls out Nimbys who want an end to homelessness but vote against the construction of housing for them in their neighbourhoods. “Why don’t you house homeless people in your house?” is a much more extreme, unreasonable, and therefore less efficacious version of that idea.

    There is also the more general argument (from the right) that government shouldn’t be in the business of housing the homeless. The above line then proceeds by saying that your unwillingness to invite homeless people into your house is an indication that your solution to the problem is to get other people to solve the problem for you. This may also incorporate the anti-Nimby line by further claiming that what you really want is an “out of sight, out of mind” solution to homelessness.


  • Empathy isn’t a feeling that happens to you, it’s a skill you practice.

    Everyone knows about common human emotions. What you don’t know about a stranger is when they have those emotions and when they don’t. What most people think they’re doing when they say they’re being empathetic is engaging in projection. They’re imagining themselves in that situation and assuming the other person is feeling the same way they are.

    Do I even have to tell you how often that’s wrong? Many, many people think another person is angry when they are angry and they project their anger onto the other person. It totally baffles them!



  • There are degrees of empathy! It’s a skill! A poker player may have enough empathy with you to be able to predict what you’re going to do based on the cards and the stakes. But they don’t know how you’ll react to a new pair of wool socks for Christmas from your aunt, the way your mom might.

    To know how a person will respond to a situation is to know something about that person. That is empathy. But many people can be in a marriage for decades without ever learning how their partner responds to every situation. In many cases this leads to divorce.

    Now, in that light you should see why I find it absurd when people claim to have empathy for everyone in the world. That’s like claiming to have Counselor Troi’s Betazoid powers. No one knows every person on earth, never mind knowing them as well as their own sister.

    To take one person as an example: Vladimir Putin. Intelligence agencies, military commanders, world leaders, analysts, and journalists everywhere spend enormous amounts of effort trying to understand how Putin thinks because human lives are on the line. Yet many of these people failed to predict some of the major actions he has undertaken because they don’t really understand how he feels, nor how many Russians feel. That is a huge failure of empathy brought about by a lack of experience and cultural understanding.