Not to mention the unspoken assumption there that the disparate and varying social causes that are tossed together under the umbrella of “liberalism” these days are all just ways to virtue signal and any lack of virtue is a sign that these causes themselves are invalid.
PFFFFFFT to that I say.
“Oh, you bleeding-heart liberals with your virtue signaling…wait, you’re not being compassionate? I’m sooo disappointed in you liberals!”
No point even engaging with that level of right-wing discourse. The only real-life virtue-signalling in this regard I see coming from the supposed “left” is actually from the Third Way zentrum, Blue Dog Dems, Useful Idiots, appeasers, and the occasional more-compassionate-than-thou attention-seeker.
Honestly I don’t think it even matters if it is true for some people. If a few particularly shallow narcissists want to espouse the same values I do for their own reasons great. People are emotional irrational beasts. They often don’t even understand their own motivations and even when they do those motivations can change on a dime. I don’t care. We either achieve a thing together or not at all and we always are going to be doing so against the wishes of some other people. I’m not trying to be superhuman. I just want a few improved social programs in my country.
Yup. Because the guy’s foolishness not only endangered himself but many others. He died by his own reprehensible behavior. So my sympathy to his widow and kids is tempered by the many families who were harmed by this guy.
Now that’s just a lie. You did exactly that in one of your responses to me that was removed.
ETA:
Be careful when trying to execute The Double-Popper’s. It’s easy to strain something.
Wow… so this melee is still happening, huh?
‘Compassion for me but none for thee’ is some one sided bullshit that can die in a fire.
And if ‘what you put in’ is greed, apathy, avarice and a complete lack of consideration for anyone who isn’t you, then don’t be surprised when others don’t give a damn when misfortune befalls you.
Trying to shame people for not ‘feeling bad’ when something bad happens to people who have behaved badly is yet another form of gaslighting, IMO; along with a heavy dose of virtue signaling.
As I see it, karma has been very busy lately and sometimes needs a helping hand.
I’ve resisted commenting in there because, as a mod, my opinions are usually assumed to be moderation positions, and I especially don’t want that here.
So instead, I’ll be explicit: On the BBS, people are entitled to their opinions. People aren’t entitled to berate others for them. If you disagree with an opinion, you can debate the opinion, but going after people who share their good-faith beliefs is a no-go, as is hoping/wishing/encouraging violence, harm, or pain on others.
Now, with that out of the way,
I have a really, really hard time with people wishing others harm, or revelling in it. But I understand it. Even here in 2020, where a Trump executive order on my visa means that, even if COVID didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have been able to go home for the holidays (something I have done every year without fail), and extreme uncertainty pre-election about whether or not I’d even be able to remain here, I can’t bring myself to wish any sort of harm on the people making these decisions.
Part of why is, like it or not, something like 25% of Americans voted in these policies. That’s 1 in 4. I can’t come into a country and say “I hate 1 in 4 of you, I hope you all come to misfortune and pain”. I’m just not wired that way. I’m also sure another reason is, despite my personal challenges in 2020, they pale in comparison to literally millions of others, and that’s why, at the same time I can’t bring myself to feel that way, I understand that so many others have it so so so much worse than I do, and I can understand why they may not feel the way I do.
Many people “lean” into their opinions as a part of their identity. It’s unfortunate that opinions “I think immigrants are fundamentally X for a country” and beliefs “I believe people have a fundamental right to seek happiness” are conflated so often, because while the former is subject to facts and consequences, beliefs usually aren’t without significantly changing who you are as a person. Yet IMHO, far too many folks treat them as equivalent. I have seen what the loss of someone you cared for can do to both your beliefs and your opinions, and I’ll bet there are literally millions of people, all over the world, who had very, very different views of the world before, and after, they lost someone to COVID-19. For many, having to endure that loss, as well as the realization that your internalized opinions-which-became-beliefs may have contributed to that loss, is a level of pain I would never wish on anyone, no matter who they are. And so I can’t find an ounce of schadenfreude or indifference to that pain. I feel for anyone who has had that experience. Full stop.
Personally, and I mean this is just for me, I’m not in the business of wishing suffering on people. For me, the goal is to remove suffering and to increase compassion. Yeah, I know “they” are the cause of much of the suffering, but I’m not in control of what “they” do and only what I do.
So I get being angry. Fuck I’m so angry at them. My mother has fought from the brink of stage 4b cancer for a cancer that has a 4% survival rate to quite possibly remission level numbers, and because of these people mishandling COVID in arkansas, I’m not able to go see her. Heck, she probably voted for some of these people. But I just can’t see myself wishing her dead. It’s not fathomable to me to make that call. And when I hear others saying things like that, all I can think is, “You should be very careful with wishes and intent like that. It has ways of giving you what you want in ways you may not want it.” I’m definitely angry at how this has been handled. But I’m also convinced that anger and hatred are poisons that hurt me, personally.
So yeah, I don’t know. I’m going to have compassion for people who are suffering, regardless of whether they ‘deserve it’ or not. And if it makes me a gullible, sheep of a person, whatever, I’m going to at least feel better about looking myself in the mirror.
I get that they wouldn’t show me that compassion. I get that they think liberals should be shot/hung/whatever. But I’m not going to play that game their way because I’m not them.
As for how other people handle it, that’s on them. My only suggestion would be to people that they be very careful what they wish for, because the world has a way of being all “monkey-pawed” when it hands out its wishes.
The way I see it, having compassion takes effort. There’s a base level of compassion everyone gets because they’re people, right?
So that I have at least some compassion for everyone is a given. But I’m not going to spend any extra effort caring about people who hate me for being a leftist, and queer and whatever else. They get the normal baseline compassion everyone else gets, usually. And then when they are massively hurt in the proccess of fucking over others, I feel disinclined to feel bad for them. They get the normal base level.
Then we have people come along and tell me I should feel like the world is ending because my enemy has hurt themselves in the process of trying to throw me and everyone else under the bus? No fuck that shit. They’re getting more than they deserve. It must feel awful for them to have lost a husband. But it also sucked for a lot of slave owning war widows in the south to have lost their husbands as well. It really sucks to be them. I still don’t feel bad they lost their slaves and plantations.
People telling me I must feel sorry for people who are functionally my enemies can go pound sand. If they want to feel bad for them, nobody’s stopping them, but don’t tell me I should feel bad because someone who at best thinks I shouldn’t exist hurt themselves.
It’s not someone else’s place to tell me to expend energy, effort and thought caring about the wellbeing of those who hate me.
I don’t view compassion as an exertion of energy, no.
“Revelling” in it is what you meant, surely?
Speaking for myself only;
I personally don’t care about ‘being nice’, when all too often “nice” equates to being subservient, passive and obediently just accepting gross inequality and the inhumane behavior of the society which I inhabit.
I have only ever genuinely wished harm upon one person, and that’s because that person endangers everyone else on the planet with their apathy ignorance and hubris. I accept the karmic consequences
That said, I will never shed a tear for the passing of anyone who actively caused as much harm as the deceased Congressman which inspired this side conversation.
And I cannot ever be “made to” feel bad about the complete lack of fucks that I give when someone who ‘sowed the wind’ ends up ‘reaping the whirlwind.’
you must not have many trumpists in your circles because some of them make anything other than eye-rolling contempt or panicked fleeing from their potential for violence and/or covid absolutely a strenuous exertion, maybe even most of them. denying covid as a hoax and encouraging knuckleheads to protest masking one day and then jumping to the first of the line for vaccinations the next.
they make compassion a sisyphean task.
You literally missed the part where I said my mother, who lives in Arkansas, and who nearly died of cancer and might still, is a Trumper. And much of my family down south is , obviously too.
But again, that’s /THEM/ and not ME. And again, I made it clear that my beliefs were mine and that other people obviously have different beliefs and have to reconcile that with their own value/moral systems.
But please, make assumptions about me.
You know what they say - Jack will flap.
as a matter of fact i literally did. i apologize for that lapse.
i based my assumption on your stated views of what compassion is not for you, i.e. that it is not is an exertion. under the circumstances i find you quite remarkable.
Thank you, but I’m just trying to hold on, and found that being angry or upset just hurts me more than I think I could handle. I just don’t have the energy to keep a ledger and maintain sanity, ya know
Do NOT start with that “all humans are inherently terrible” BS again, please.
There’s always a conscious choice to be made, and some people just choose fucking poorly.
That’s not at all what I’m trying to communicate. What I am trying to communicate, and what the blog post actually says if one were to read it, is this:
compassion is, in fact, an exertion of energy
So when someone says
I believe that to not only be untrue, but harmfully untrue.
This is another problem with the internet and human interactions at massive scale. They don’t scale. There is no such thing as “free energy”, just like there is no such thing as “endless, unlimited, unconditional compassion”.
Sorry if that was unclear in my previous post. I should have quoted the relevant parts of the blog post rather than expecting people to read it.
