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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

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To me, it's disheartening to see this sort of knee-jerk reaction to the grandparent posting (and to see that post be down-voted). What btilly wrote is not a defense, it's reasonable and, more importantly, practical advice in combating tyranny. Moreover, IMO, if you actually want to reduce or put an end to tyranny, you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy. Empathy is not agreement, it's not sympathy, it is understanding. Screaming at others that they're bad people will not change anything. If anything, IMO, it causes them to dig their heels and makes change harder.

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>> you need to understand the root causes for the desires of your opponents. That's empathy.

> Um, what we used to call that in the Marines, was "intel". Not "empathy". And that designation of the information you outlined made us surprisingly effective at combating opponents.

This is the important part. Understanding "the root causes for the desires of your opponents" is not empathy. It's understanding something.

Empathy is a relating to anothers plight. If you only understand it then there is nothing to cause pause before using that understanding to your advantage. It's a core part manipulation and deception. If the only thing that happened with that understanding is seeing what you can get from it or that there is nothing you want there or have use for, then that doesn't really help bring two sides together.

Having the ability to relate to this understanding of another is when empathy happens. It's the empathy that gives one pause long enough to see there are other options that are not zero-sum.

> No need to have empathy for anyone who doesn't have empathy for others.

Disagree. Just because someone else can not relate -- now -- does not mean they can not later. I personally don't care for tit-for-tat games, thats simply a race to the bottom. Boundaries are the things missing here; one can have empathy for another that does not have it for them, that doesn't mean you also have to have a bleeding heart for them and let them walk all over you.

You can have radical empathy with somebody while standing against and fighting every single thing they stand for. Indeed empathy /helps/ you fight better, because you can begin to fight root causes rather than fighting symptoms, and help people heal rather than just shouting them down.

You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.

To have empathy with a view is not condoning it

Indeed. But demanding empathy as the only valid a counter-strategy is, which is what the GP was doing. Appeasement doesn't work if your opponent isn't following the rulebook.

From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.

Correct: but giving them a thousand timeouts doesn't help, if you still need to give the thousand-and-first. It mitigates the immediate problem, but it also ties up your resources. Eliminating the problem at its root, if that's possible, is a more effective strategy: if we can take away the ability for the real bad actors to get loyal followers, by learning how to change those followers' minds, they won't have anywhere near as much power.

Exactly. The distal cause is that the Compromise of 1877 halted an unfinished Reconstruction. What I'm calling for is simple - the natural and final conclusion of Reconstruction. It might be 148 years late, but it's the antidote to the disease.

damn. fucking. straight. pussyfooting with racist traitors has kept us paying for the original sin of slavery into another goddamn century.

popular vote for president

nonpartisan redistricting of every state

ranked-choice-voting everywhere

limits on corporate money in politics

end the filibuster

strictly define supreme court size, terms, and appointment rules

age limits for congress

finish reconstruction

mess with texas

there is a lot of technical debt in this project

The sort of understanding the GP is promoting doesn't have to be used empathetically.

It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.

We live in a democracy. In a democracy, you don't get to deny people the vote simply because you view them as children. And, sadly, these "children" have around half the votes.

If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.

I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.

Is that outcome really what you think is best?

> a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success

A great salesperson I learned from would often say something like "don't fight the resistance, join the resistance" with the implication that one must see through the other party's eyes before you can have a chance to really affect them. One must make them feel heard and understood rather than fought against.

We live in a democracy. If the majority does something stupid, you have to convince them to stop doing that stupid thing. This means understanding how they came to do the stupid thing to begin with.

he's proposing that outrage is not the best way to oppose them - that we can be more clever and effective by knowing the enemy

But the GP didn't even identify the enemy correctly, so all that effort would be wasted. The people they're describing are mere tools, only required because of the existing democratic processes in the country. The enemy are the (insert your favourite label here) at the top of the media and political landscape pulling the strings. And I guarantee you, they aren't quite so bothered by the imagery in those books as they are bothered by freedom of thought in general. They are bothered by people that dare to speak truth to power. They are not bothered by appeasement strategies such as we people trying to understand the other people they've pitted against us.

No, I've identified the enemy perfectly well.

The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.

I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.

I understand where you're coming from. But I also think that you're wasting a lot of effort in talking to those useful fools while they're still drinking from the social media and faux news firehose. And that's by design -- you are meant to expend your energy on that asymmetric (and in my view unwinnable) battle, so that you leave the actual policymakers alone.

(sidenote: I said "tools", as in they're disposable means to an end. I'm not sure if you called them fools because you misread my comment or you switched to that term to try and placate me).

edit: actually, I think that my sidenote goes to the core of our disagreement. In your view, there are 77M battles to fight and if you manage to win just a few percent of those to your side, things can be stopped. In my view, 95% of those voters no longer matter. The party is now in power and has full control over all branches of government and media. There is no way they will relinquish power over such a minor technical detail as an election. They only need a few million jackboots to maintain the status quo, the rest is disposable.

>Did the people pursuing these bans consider having empathy with the people who value these books, and try to understand why they value them?

>Stop defending tyranny.

I think you miss GP's point. It's not that they support such book bans or the ideology that encourages that and other anti-democratic (small 'd') nastiness. Rather it's the old saw that 'you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar (balsamic vinegar excepted).'

While there are many who are callous, cruel pieces of shit, there are more who live (without their knowledge or consent -- cf. rural broadcast media landscape, online bubbles, etc.) in an "information" environment that promotes such stuff as "godly" and "American" and "freedom", when that's not even close to the truth.

Which is clear from the book bans, the ridiculous "anchor babies" trope, the Democrats are all communists and on and on and on.

Yes, folks who actively foment this stuff and cynically (or even genuinely) fight to reduce liberty need to be resisted. Strongly and loudly.

But if you adopt those folks' "othering" tactics, you devalue everyone who doesn't specifically agree with you and everything you believe as evil and unredeemable, you remove a key opportunity for education, positive experience and persuasion.

Will that work for everyone? Absolutely not. But we don't need everyone, just the ones who are honest and fair-minded. And those can certainly be those who disagree with you.

If you exclude the radical reactionaries, bigots and cynical scum who seek to profit from promoting such ideas, the majority of all of us agree about much more than we disagree.

Perhaps that's something we all should ruminate on.

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