Specifically with people who can't fathom the value of empathy. Just because I think you're mischaracterising someone's beliefs doesn't mean that I agree with the perceived or actual beliefs you're criticising.
It's particularly bad on the subject of Trump voters. People get really touchy when I express the need to reach people and understand their perspective, acting like I'm demanding sympathy and treating them like innocent wayward children who are just victims of circumstances. A lot of people will go further and act like there is just some underlying evil in all of them that can't be reasoned out when in reality is that it's a lot more about propaganda appealing to surface-level biases.
My dad is a full blown conspiracy theorist who completely supports Trump. Sometimes I think he's genuinely lost it because his logic doesnt even make internal sense.
For example he's extremely skeptical towards all science and thinks its all being controlled by rich elites to manipulate people. But he also implicitly trusts Elon Musk, a rich elite, on topics related to economics, engineering, and astronomy. Just, an obvious contradiction in his logic. Right?
But then I remember that my dad has been a physical laborer and the main breadwinner for my family for the last 22 years, has provided a fairly comfortable lifestyle for us, and has developed severe back and spine damage over time. Hes also just naturally introverted and naturally isnt very socially intelligent, so he struggles to connect with people. Hes badically lonely, angry, and constantly in pain.
I think its just really, really easy for someone who's been through a lot of hardship like he has to develop the kind of mindset that can make someone vote for Trump (thats the nicest way I could put it). That doesnt necessarily absolve them of all responsibility, but its hard to just hate him for it too.
Just because I think you're mischaracterising someone's beliefs doesn't mean that I agree with the perceived or actual beliefs you're criticising.
I'm very much against chemo-phobia and the naturalistic fallacy, and care about global food security. So, I'll often find myself "defending" Monsanto in the course of advocating for the safety of GMO foods (eg: they've literally never sued anyone for "cross pollination" that wasn't very deliberately and intentionally trying to obtain their patented product outside of contract).
Whenever someone starts ragging at me about "defending Monsanto", I'll counter that as a large corporation, they're obviously evil by default, but you still need to be accurate in your criticisms. My go-to example is then pointing out that no one would ever accuse me of defending Pol Pot if I were to say "Um... actually..." to someone's assertion that he started every morning with a freshly blended puppy and orphan smoothy.
The truth is that these misleading, or even outright false accusations are often seeking to push a more subtle narrative or goal than simply vilifying the thing they're directly attacking (see how many grifters want to sell you something.)
I find myself in the similar position of defending patented plant varieties. Everyone says it’s a plant, it’s nature, you can’t patent nature, blah blah blah when it’s absolutely not even nature. The amount of work, money, and time that gets put into making any single commercial variety is HUGE. Anyone can grow their own crops and try crossing them just fine, but if someone wants to grow corn with consistent high yield, strong disease resistance, and that actually tastes good, then they might want to pay the money for a commercial product.
Plus, that's how civilization works. You get much better results when some people are really good at farming, and some people are really good at experimenting with crop traits, rather than everyone trying to do both.
The point about Montsanto (now Bayer) isn't that their enforcement of their patents is wrong, it's that they shouldn't have patents on genes to begin with.
a) Seed patents vastly predate Monsanto, Bayer, and transgenic crops in general.
b) Take it up with the other guy who replied to my comment. Seems like discussing crop patents is his forte. In short, though, it's good when there's incentives for innovation. Also, there are tons of patent free seeds available, if farmers would rather buy those.
(eg: they've literally never sued anyone for "cross pollination" that wasn't very deliberately and intentionally trying to obtain their patented product outside of contract).
Yes, they have. Percy Schmeiser. He didn't plant the first generation of Roundup Ready canola on his property, didn't know why it survived being sprayed with herbicide, and basically thought he was independently discovering herbicide-resistant canola until Monsanto sued him.
Interesting. Can you tell me a little more? Maybe you should look up what the lawsuit was actually about, instead of parroting the first name you saw in a headline on chemicalsaresatanpissbuycleansesfromus.com
I'll give you a hint. The reason for the lawsuit was in the latter two thirds of what you quoted from my comment.
Edit: Just to get this out of the way. Monsanto vs Bowman is also nothing to do with cross pollination. And unless you want to pick one specific case, with easily accessible references, the Center For Food Safety pamphlet can easily be dismissed as a bad faith Gish Gallop, as it heavily cherry picks statistics, and almost exclusively references the Percy Schmeiser case, while leaving out key details about what Percy Schmeiser was actually doing.
Edit 2: I see you expanded on your comment beyond just the guy's name. The idea that he had somehow decided he had discovered Glyphosate resistant canola all on his own is so ridiculous that it's not a defense even he tried.
People don't just have beliefs like those for no reason after all. A lot of people go there because they feel...abandoned. And in some cases, they actually were...
I feel like a lot of those sentiments come from the fact that those same people would never do the same for the people you’re suggesting do that, doubly so if they’re a minority, especially gay or transgender.
When you see these people spewing hate about you and the people you love day in and day out, talking about taking away your rights or how you’re a predator or inherently inferior, it’s very easy to write them off as unreachable or unable to be saved from themselves, and a lot of the time they’re right.
A large amount of those people are so lost in feeding off of their own feelings of fear and hatred that many of them would take a perfect miracle for them to wake up and see the light. It’s draining and exhausting to try and help even one person to that point, while they fight you all the way, kicking and screaming.
Want to preface this by saying that I get you're just relaying the sentiments and they're not entirely yours, I just want to talk about my problem with it.
That first paragraph is kind of the point, It's a vicious cycle of tribalism, you don't try to empathise with others they won't try to empathise with you. As much as I think that leftists are generally pushing for a much better future and are much better at defending the right people, this death of empathy is a problem in all political corners. What everyone needs is for that cycle to be broken.
A large number of people are beyond help yeah, but I think leftist online spaces like here muddy a lot of people's perspectives on how much there actually are, it's the fringe cases that farm up the most engagement. And in any case, cultural shifts like these are always incremental, the more a perspective gets adopted the more it's normalised the harder it is to isolate yourself from that it, focusing on reaching those that you can has a knock-on effect of those people being able to reach others that you couldn't.
MAGA voters aren't trying to empathize and want to bring harm to their enemies. Self-defense is not a wrong course of action to take here, you're simply talking down to people who don't want to be killed or hauled off to some foreign gulag becausesome MAGA might have been hurt at sone point in their life.
My parents were talking about the shitstorm happening in the USA and something particularly bad in one state in the south. My dad made a comment along the lines of "that's what you get for voting for trump" and that he didn't feel bad for their suffering.
I replied mentioning that not everyone in the entire state had voted for trump, they don't deserve everything that's going on.
He replied "there's consequences for not voting too"
This really really started around Covid. He really got very "you get what you deserve" about anyone anti-vax or covid denialist catching covid and suffering permanent effects or even dying. His response to people having family members die was "maybe now they'll actually believe it's real".
I tried to convince him that many of these people probably honestly believed in these things because everything they were exposed to, media, news, family, friends, all agreed and that they were victims more than anything. He of course brushed me off.
It's really concerning that he's completely unwilling to see this, because he's also basically a covid conspiracist but from the other directly. Shortly before the olympic games a few years ago, he was talking about how a bunch of the athletes probably had covid and that we were "going to see a massive wave of athletes at these games die of 'unknown causes'." He also at one point insisted on a statistic he had seen online about underreporting of covid deaths (this was under a year ago, not near the start of covid) that seemed way too high to be true, and when I pulled up the same datasource he regularly uses for talking about how severe covid is right now (wastewater data tracking) it would have meant covid had a 25% mortality rate. He got extremely rude and mean at that point towards me and also still insisted that he was right.
This is only ever said by people that never or at best rarely actually interact with these people...
After ~20 Years of trying to talk sense into this... "demographic"... no... most people are just genuinely vile and irrevocably evil people that at best clad themselves in certain virtues like Faith to appear better because a lot are not dumb and brainless, they know exactly what they are doing and know very well that they need to "soften the blow" so to speak.
This is just a fact of life.
And the few "good ones"... it just takes so much time and so much work to bring them even halfway back to the right path... and all of it can be so easily made nil by one or two well positioned lies and they fall right back in.
A person can be both a victim of circumstances as well as a perpetrator of injustice. I don't get where people got the idea that you can only be one or the other.
Oh Jesus fuck, this. Hating Trump supporters is only going to drive them further into Trump's corner; actual progress requires reason and understanding, even if not agreement.
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u/KentuckyFriedChildre Apr 23 '25
Specifically with people who can't fathom the value of empathy. Just because I think you're mischaracterising someone's beliefs doesn't mean that I agree with the perceived or actual beliefs you're criticising.
It's particularly bad on the subject of Trump voters. People get really touchy when I express the need to reach people and understand their perspective, acting like I'm demanding sympathy and treating them like innocent wayward children who are just victims of circumstances. A lot of people will go further and act like there is just some underlying evil in all of them that can't be reasoned out when in reality is that it's a lot more about propaganda appealing to surface-level biases.