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Comment by soraminazuki | Hacker News Reader

I still can't believe we have hundreds of years of documented history to learn from, yet human intelligence is still blinded by bigotry.

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The irony is that virtue-signalling (which your comment certainly is) is a shared identity declaration. Which is a part of the same inherent human predisposition to form groups which we call "tribalism" when we like to don't like it.

That's called the paradox of tolerance and it's not the gotcha that you think it is. If you think "mankind should overcome bigotry" is such a divisive statement that it splits people into "tribes," that reveals more about you than it does about me.

Did I even write anything about political contents of your signalling? I believe I didn't. I also didn't "reveal" anything particularly bad about you. I said that your urge to ring it is of the same social nature (aka tribal), we (humanity) have been exhibiting for all written and unwritten history, while the message itself expressing that you're above it makes it contradictory in ironic way. No matter what your signal proclaims, the process of tribal-building around it is most certainly divisive[1], with obligatory bit of outwards directed derision. So... then you reacted with suggesting I'm some sort of morally inferior outgroup voice. Which I think, proves the point you have missed.

[1] Which is not always bad. This is core mechanics of our competitive adaptiveness probably. It's just that being more aware of this gives us a chance to be better in more universal terms with other humans. Including in politics, of course.

P.S. If you felt offended, sorry! I can't say I care too much ngl, it's the internet after all, but it wasn't my intention either. I also didn't downvote you.

That others have learned a different lesson from history compared to your beliefs does not mean that they are ignorant of it.

You're projecting. I wrote a factual statement, that bigotry still exists in today's world, and you somehow took that as an assault on your values.

So what exactly is the different lesson you're referring to? Given that bigotry still exists, I can only take that lesson to mean "bigotry good."

I will stake the claim, as an engineer never having studied sociology, that in group favoritism is the (only) stable political arrangement by and large… and further, the preservation of any culture necessitates discrimination of some sort.

You've got it backwards. That's a defeatist take that results in the exact kind of misery and cruelty documented in detail throughout history. Society prospers when people look past their differences and work together to improve things. It suffers when demagogues successfully divide the public and exploit the chaos to loot the resources required to improve the lives of everyone. Making punching bags out of a group of people is sure way to create instability.

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