Comment by textgel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by textgel | Hacker News Reader

I think a major point missing in amongst the discussion so far, and one that's causing a lot of crosstalk is whether you should even be apologising at all.

For example.

Progressives are widely known for their enthusiastic use of forcing people into public apologies for perceived crimes against the faith or for not acquiescing to unreasonable demands which can then be framed as a perceived wrong. I think a lot of the kickback against apologising that we're seeing is coming from the numerous public examples of this tactic and the follow-up where any good-faith apology will be used to make a further example of the heretic.

If you are dealing with this kind of thing then the tactic of take-cover and let the storm pass seems sane (pearls before swine etc). But if you're actually dealing with a genuine person or group who you've genuinely wronged then a real apology is warranted.

One other thing I'd add; if you have wronged someone and you've apologised and made genuine efforts to make amends. While it is on the other person to decide whether or not they will accept/forgive, it is not a requirement to indefinitely debase/lower yourself in the pursuit of obtaining their forgiveness. You can make efforts up to a point but you are not required to destroy yourself until they grant it. If the situation is unsalvageable then that's what it is.

For studys sake on how this can get out of control, there are numerous examples of shitty parents holding a past wrong over a childs head indefinitely in the raised-by-narcissists subreddit which illustrate the tactic in use by malicious types there.

> if you're actually dealing with a genuine person or group who you've genuinely wronged then a real apology is warranted

A pitfall of this mentality, at least in my experience, is that people I hurt are usually much better judges of whether I hurt them than I am.

Something I learned that helped is: you can hurt someone without being wrong. "I regret that my actions had this effect on you," is a good place to start a conversation when I'm not (yet?) convinced I would have done anything differently in hindsight.

Often, simply acknowledging that someone has been hurt by my actions, and trying to understand why, has yielded far better outcomes than sticking with my judgment. Both in that they affected party feels better, and in that I get to add a new dimension to my understanding of social dynamics.

It often doesn't matter how legitimate someones' complaint is according to my personal worldview; what matters is how the affected feel.

"I'm sorry you felt that way" is considered worse than a non-apology by the current leading apology extractors.

I agree with you, but he didn't say the word "sorry".

Check out "Thank You for Arguing" by Jay Heinrichs. It covers the same basic steps, but recommends to exclude the actual apology part. It's also a great book for other reasons.

That only works of you know you are dealing with people rariobal and with good intentions. We human tend not to be thos things when acting in large groups.

It also requires the recipient to know they're coming from a sincere person with good intentions.

If that perception isn't their, it comes across as a very different message ("I'm sorry you don't have a thick enough skin")

In a normal world I would agree with you completely.

However, if you've offended some of the woke crowd then this may be worse than saying nothing at all. In your example, they would say you are rubbing salt in the wound with "I regret that my actions had this effect on you." If you aren't prepared to unambiguously denounce yourself, you may (unintentionally) make things worse.

> A pitfall of this mentality, at least in my experience, is that people I hurt are usually much better judges of whether I hurt them than I am.

It would be easier if people just talked more about their feelings even if they don't understand me. If I hurt someone and they just say something like "look I feel weird because of this and this that happened between us", then I can process and understand what went wrong. I spent some years running teams and doing management and I used 1v1s for this to really good results.

I do that and a lot of my closest friends also do that. I think people that expect you to read their feelings are the ones that are going to get hurt if they spend time around because they have unrealistic expectations. I can only feel my feelings, or get empathetic with people that have opened up to me before. I can't be apologizing all the time just in case, that's also ridiculous and even though a lot of people do it in, specially in California, I think it comes down as condescending and sometimes even egotistical.

>Something I learned that helped is: you can hurt someone without being wrong

>It often doesn't matter how legitimate someones' complaint is according to my personal worldview; what matters is how the affected feel.

I can't get behind this. Why am I responsible for the way the chemicals in someone's brain react if I say something that unintentionally hurts them? If i'm doing nothing wrong as you say and someone else is offended, or sad or hurt, that's honestly their problem.

People need to take responsibility for their feelings instead of making everyone else take responsibility for their feelings.

Why should I ever be responsible for the way someone feels unless i've done something intentionally to make them feel that way?

People's feelings are their own business, nobody else has the unintentional responsibility of random people's arbitrary feelings.

You're absolutely right about not knowing being a problem; unfortunately I'm guessing it's a bit of an art, at least with respect to the "be careful of bad-faith actors" replies you've received, or at least a heavy dose of knowing the other party.

I do however find that if I actually take time to think about what's happened, a genuine wrong that might have been caused in a rush/unthought out moment is (usually) pretty obvious when looked back on in hindsight; there's usually an "aaah shit yeah that'd piss me off too" moment.

> "I regret that my actions had this effect on you,"

That's just a variation of "I'm sorry you're so impatient" or "It's too bad you have no sense of humor.": https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Apology#Acknowledgment_of_th...

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/celebrity/people-are...

No, it isn't a variation of those two.

The two you mentioned are bad, because they implicitly shift the fault on the person on the receiving end, because they make qualifying statements about the person without addressing your own actions that led to it at all. Very similar to the badness of "I am sorry you feel that way about what I said", because it only addresses the person on the receiving end and makes it sound like there is something wrong with them.

"I regret that my actions had this effect on you" is not bad because it doesn't do that. It clearly just says that you are sorry for your actions causing such an effect, without making any qualifying statements about the person on the receiving end, leaving the possibility of your actions being wrong fully open.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I don't think this applies to the original comment. The majority of people who demand an apology aren't the victims. They're just random people on Twitter who are just looking for ways to attack people they don't like. It may have been a mistake for someone to wear a mildly racist costume on Halloween a decade ago, but there is no reason they should be expected to apologize.

> A pitfall of this mentality, at least in my experience, is that people I hurt are usually much better judges of whether I hurt them than I am.

But these people are very biased judges.

The "progressives" you're referring to aren't progressive. They're reactionary authoritarians, hijacking the ideals and preferences of whatever group they're attached to. You can find them in all forms of debased public discourse and lowbrow populism, with a history going back millennia, and uniformly distributed across the political spectrum. No-one called the Spanish Inquisition progressive.

I hold a very special loathing of anyone that weaponizes process in order to control others.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity".

This is a a good point; and one I wish I could give you a decent response to as this problem is such a big one and one that I've seen hit plenty of groups I once subscribed to, and evidently from history quite an old one too however I'm at a loss on what the correct response to the phenomenon is.

The cheap response is to whine about "no true scotsman" but I'd love to see ideas on how to prevent groups actually getting corrupted in this way; it's probably in the "how do we create world peace" level of problems but the cycle is getting very wearing!

It’s not as hard as you make it up to be, you simply have to instill values in the population which promote diversity of thought, independent thought, and recognition of moral signaling behavior.

The major problem with the left leaning political spectrum in america is a somewhat blind authoritarian “respect” for “diversity” where what counts as diverse is rather restricted and generally doesn’t include disagreement on the subject.

The key missing ability is getting people to empathize with each other and not to confuse radical ideas which one finds abhorant and moderate ideas one finds disagreeable.

A cheap way to make this much easier is to ban labels like political party, gender, etc. If you stop sorting people (and yourself) into bins it becomes a whole lot more difficult to be so polarized as you aren’t dividing the world into us and them by dealing with a new human one by one.

Tomato tomato. The members of the inquisition called themselves the inquisition, so we call them the inquisition. Today's progressives call themselves progressives so we call them progressives.

Conflating an organisation with an adjective is a fascinating category error and not one I'd previously considered working into my offerings of puns and satire. No doubt Tom Lehrer was already aware of the possibilities. Thanks for bringing this novelty to my attention!

> Progressives are widely known for their enthusiastic use of forcing people into public apologies for perceived crimes against the faith or for not acquiescing to unreasonable demands which can then be framed as a perceived wrong. I think a lot of the kickback against apologising that we're seeing is coming from the numerous public examples of this tactic and the follow-up where any good-faith apology will be used to make a further example of the heretic.

This is rarely about the apology itself, but about establishing that something wrong has happened to begin with. The fact is, a lot of pretty messed up stuff routinely happens and is simply taken as a given. The apology is simply a marker that some behavior will no longer be considered acceptable. It's hardly even a measure of accountability, unless someone is so egotistical that taking responsibility is personally harmful to them.

A common tactic seen by progressives during attacks on their victims is to hype up the crime by either making vague claims such as that they "are pretty messed up" and hoping that regular people apply their reasonable measure of "pretty messed up"; to outright lies where they equate the commited heresy with an actual real world wrong.

One charming example is this one of Morgan Freeman during the metoo saga where he was "Sexually harrassing a reporter live on TV."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4NnkHXmNEc

...and then what happened to Morgan Freeman?

I don't know anything about the alleged situation, but pretty sure he moved on with his life and is still wealthy and largely beloved.

He was okay because...

1) He was a beloved actor with a lot of public support.

2) His attempted character assassination was recorded on film and so any stories of how the victim was "traumatised" by his "sexual harassment" not only were publicly shown to be lies but they added to a more public recognition of my earlier point that progressives believe it is okay to lie about what someone has done in the interests of destroying someone they want gone.

3) His attack happened late in the metoo saga when people had been pointing out the flaws in the "believe all women" view; after the aziz answari situation failed to hold up to public scrutiny etc but before the Joe Bidden situation resulted in "believe all women" having "never happened".

Fundamentally the Morgan Freeman story demonstrates a number of things about progressive belief; their views on what constitutes sin is ridiculous in the eyes of anyone with basic common sense, they believe ends-justify-the-means and they are willing to carry out those means.

He was okay, others weren't.

He did lose his role as a spokesman for Visa, though it's impossible to say to what degree this episode was a contributing factor.

Somewhat interestingly, given the topic at hand, in the immediate aftermath of those accusations, Morgan Freeman issued an "I'm sorry if I made anyone uncomfortable" apology, which CNN used in their defense of the news clip the GP has linked. I don't really have any experience in, or opinion on, public apologies, but I thought that was an interesting thing to share.

I consider myself a progressive and honestly I think you have a point. I think it comes from a good place (it's a reaction to a history of things simply being brushed off, ignored and not addressed), but it's ultimately not a good way of dealing things.

I think the happy medium is where people are held accountable for their actions (ideally apologising for them if they really have done something wrong, which often times they have even if the response to that is overly vitriolic), and then allowed the space to make amends and move on with their lives.

With a bit of luck it does seem some of the more reasoned voices are winning out, at least in some of the areas I've seen, and rationally I know this stuff didn't appear out of thin air so time will tell but I'm hoping to see a more back-to-the-roots approach continue to grow.

> Progressives are widely known for their enthusiastic use of forcing people into public apologies for perceived crimes against the faith or for not acquiescing to unreasonable demands

"widely known"

You're interpreting your ideological position as normative and factual.

Please refer to my response at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25087153

There are striking similarities between modern progressivism/wokeness and various church clergy throughout the ages. I'm glad you made that connection.

I honestly feel it needs to be described in such terms; the idea definitely isn't my own, I remember the ah-ha moment when the internalised-misogyny/toxic-masculinity = original-sin link was pointed out to me and the more aspects of it that I look at the more it aligns.

I say this repeatedly, the west largely abandoned religion because people found the ways adherents acted towards others to be inexcusable... it was a failed attribution though because religion didn’t make people like that and getting rid of religion hasn’t gotten rid of the behaviors. We still have people praying loudly on the corners for all to see (Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.) We still have people persecuting others for their beliefs, we still have people ready to fight holy wars.

It is a very human behavior, and it is easily exploited and in an emergent way exploits itself in whatever way is convenient in any age.

It is clear to me that there are very smart people and very stupid people stoking the flames on this human vulnerability that so few people care to notice.

Progressives are widely known for things like increasing the minimum wage, expanding access to health care, or legalizing drugs. I've never heard progressives pushing for forced public apologies.

Willful blindness is a common tactic too; perhaps a psychological extension of the progressive safe-space doctrine but I couldn't be certain.

Another one that interests me greatly is the frequent use of the narcissists prayer in debate, have you ever heard it?

It goes as follows.

That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did... You deserved it.

I suppose I'll start the ball rolling. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/nov/14/rosetta-come...

AFAIK, Cortes is a Progressive[0], and a congressperson, which puts her in a position of power. She encouraged her supporters to create a list of Trump supporters so they can be denied employment in the future[1]. Jennifer Rubin, likely also a Progressive[2], said: “any [Republican] now promoting rejection of an election or calling to not to follow the will of voters or making baseless allegations of fraud should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.”

More than apologies, these two at least, are looking to punish.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez

[1] https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/aoc-activists-hint-b...

[2] https://www.wctrib.com/opinion/columns/4036749-Jennifer-Rubi...

maybe baseless allegations of fraud exceeds the domain of "So you've made a mistake"

Jennifer Rubin is not a progressive. She's a prominent (anti-Trump) conservative columnist, hired by the Washington Post as balance/provocation. Her blog is even called 'Right Turn'.

1. Her last name is Ocasio-Cortez.

2. Progressivism barely means anything. You can characterize virtually anyone who even just says anything positive about social change as progressive. Better to characterize her as a social democrat or democratic socialist, depending on your impression.

3. "Just the News" is an incredible source to list. A right-wing rag founded by the former editor-in-chief of The Washington Times. Might as well just refer to the actual tweets: https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1324807776510595078. They are about the typical denialism that follows reactionaries that did, you know, horrible things and not allowing their images to be blindly rehabilitated as public servants. Emphasis on remembering the actions of public servants, not whether someone will simply be denied employment.

4. Jennifer Rubin is a never-Trump conservative turned American establishment "centrist" (which is still a right wing position).

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