Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Everyone here seems to be sticking on the specific example of smoking, but let me generalize a bit: people who experience persecution and shaming for an activity they can't help but take pleasure in, tend to be very friendly—at least to those with the same "problem", but often to people with other such "problems" that have put them through the same hardships. ("Problem" in quotes, because these traits are called that by others, but almost never by the person in question.)

Which is to say: a smoker, a frequent psilocybin user, a transgendered person, a furry, and an ABDL fetishist all walk into a bar... and hang out amicably, because they've all been through shit.

(One slightly annoying thing about this, though, is that this empathy-for-outré-groups-building effect stops happening as your own group becomes less outré. Homosexuality is accepted enough today that the newest generation of gay people are growing up just as intolerant of "deviance" as everyone else.)

Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Jews, homosexuals etc have had to endure. Smoking has not been made illegal, smokers are not imprisoned, smokers are not attacked and beaten up on streets. Smokers live in the same communities as non-smokers, are friends with non-smokers, study with no-smokers, work with non-smokers, date non-smokers, marry non-smokers.

The inconveniences and at times rudeness experienced by smokers doen't constitute anything that resembles persecution.

Homosexual smoker here. Can we not do oppression olympics today?

Nobody is doing Oppression Olympics. There is zero oppression of smokers, as in absolutely none.

>Smokers have not experienced persecution. Please use this word more carefully or we dilute its meaning. The shaming of smokers has little in common with what Jews, homosexuals etc have had to endure.

And what Jews in the 40s had to endure has little to what a gay person in e.g. Idaho in the 80s and 90s had to endure, which was 100 times lighter. It's still persecution of sorts though.

We shouldn't trivialize a word, but we shouldn't leave some words just for the hardest of cases either.

I agree that there's higher level of empathy, especially when you are talking with people who are accepting of the "humans are not rational, nothing means anything" philosophy that is needed to handle things like mental disorders.

There does end up being a lot of suffering comparison when there's confrontation of biases though. "That might affect you sometimes, but my thing affects me all the time" or the like.

I bet a lot of us would not consider "discrimination through elitism" to be a real problem but have probably seen people be scoffed at for watching Big Bang Theory or something.

The Big Bang Theory is terrible and I have a god given right to hate people who watch it.

To generalise your point further generally with the experience of living away from one's home country (or, even more, one's home culture):

Aliens collect with aliens. Because of a shared experience. The shared experience is being alien.

Very specific but common example: A local telling a taxi driver a location "next to XYZ school that relocated a few years ago". That's pretty clear to a local.

However, "on the intersection of ABC and XYZ street" would be from a non-local.

Don't think of this example as in taking a taxi, or finding a place. Of the assumptions someone intimately familiar with something, assuming others are so too.

That's not true. You need to think and not, on un-thought assumption, not exclude.

this is brilliant but small nitpick it probably should be "transgender person" or "trans person" because "transgendered" has fallen out of favor for the most part

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