Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewarrior | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Anecdotally this seems true. Dick Cheney is a hard core neo con but having daughters who were lesbian made him a lot more understanding on the issue of gay rights.

John McCain was similar but his personal experience of being a POW made him a life long advocate against torture.

There’s a famous video of Christopher Hitchens who used to believe that water boarding people was justified in some cases. He volunteered to a mock water boarding session and immediately bailed and said it changed his view on water boarding.

Anti immigrant attitudes are sometimes found among those who have the least contact with immigrants. The cities which are cosmopolitan and full of immigrants are often very pro immigration.

This feels like a very HN zeitgeist where people are just data processors who come to conclusions by analyzing data.

Language is a broken tool. There’s a difference between reading about and seeing the floor plans of the Sistine chapel and actually being there and gazing up at it.

But your examples are slightly different. In those, the person changing their mind has suffered the consequences of holding a particular opinion. Have a billionaire live on the streets for a year and he will change his opinions about homelessness, subject a bully to bullying and he might stop bullying others, an anti-feminist dad with a few daughters might become a feminist, and so on.

If John McCain only had heard about others experiences being POWs had he become a life-long advocate against torture? Probably not. This has been explored in the context of political conflicts; between Boers and coloreds in South Africa, between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, and between Israel and the Palestinians. The research indicates that merely talking to someone suffering from oppression or injustice does not change one's opinion about that oppression or injustice.

Occasionally it swings in the opposite direction. I've met immigrants who are staunchly anti-immigration.

This is an example of broken language.

Immigrants are never simply anti-immigrant, for example there might be nuance to their view as to whether it is okay to cut in line, especially if they waited the ‘legal’ way.

The vast majority of people who are "anti-immigration", and who are not immigrants themselves (or recent descendants thereof), are not "simply anti-immigrant" either. Most "immigration restrictionists" want to reduce the levels of immigration significantly compared to current levels, but very few of them want to drive it all the way down to literally zero with no exceptions whatsoever ever allowed. Also, many "immigration restrictionists" want to reduce immigration by certain groups (whom they view as "culturally alien" or "problematic"), but are quite happy for continued (or even increased) immigration by groups they like. So if it is true that "immigrants are never simply anti-immigrant", well that's true of non-immigrants too.

No, I truly mean people who are against any sort of immigration. A subset of which who say that they escaped from worse cultures and don't want the new culture to be diluted.

I agree with you, though it would have been nice if you listed a single view going the other direction ;-)

These are examples of an individual being sympathetic towards something that isn't traditionally part of their political affiliation's viewpoints. The study is about building respect between people with different political viewpoints.

Even Hitler was against employing gas warfare in WWII due to his experience with it in the Great War.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com