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Comment by labster | Hacker News Reader

The internet is a terrible safety valve to vent at, because it's too easy to pretend what you say doesn't have consequences. One tweet by a dude having a bad day can help normalize stereotyping to 50 people. And there's always that other guy who takes things too far.

I know that people might intend Twitter or blogs to be for friends, but it's mass media nonetheless.

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See, philosophically stereotyping doesn't have to be a "bad thing". When I went to school there we "polack" jokes, blond/e jokes, yo mamma jokes, etc. They were not "mean" or meant to denigrate people. They were ways to "break the ice" as it were. But nowadays people are super sensitive, unless it's a majority or almost majority population, or it has power, unless it has power but it's also seen as being singled out by another more powerful player... it's become tragically political.

I know some foreign parents who have a preference for their home country and will tell their kids that <some thing> from their home country is better than <same thing> from neighboring but "rival" country. In a way this is stereotyping --but I'm seeing you say these parents should not talk to their kids about having some favoritism to their home country because this kind of connection building can "stereotype" the people from their (ancestral) neighboring country.

Sure, that kind of stereotyping by parents teaching their children to be bigots is probably harmful overall! Harmful neighbor country rivalries last centuries, probably because of just this kind of reinforcement. Then every now and then you get a Kosovo or a holocaust.

I think those are misattributions. Civil wars break out both among same ethnic groups as well as different ethnic groups.

Wars can then force people to see other stereotypes as characteristics of bad things. Kind of like the caricatures of Nazis and Japanese Imperialists. When Japan went into Nanking, they didn't need some psychological trick to enable them to go on their campaign any more than the US or USSR needed psychological tricks to bomb Dresden or East Berlin.

> They were not "mean" or meant to denigrate people.

I don’t know how things were where you lived, but where I grew up, those types of jokes were definitely meant to be mean and hurtful. I speak from experience when I say that the repeated mental abuse from peers taken as a child can have long term effects on one’s psyche.

The old tradition of mammals to kick one in the group - usually the social weakest- to feed him to the wulfs. By now we are the wulfs - and still they kick.

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