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I don't like when people treat empathy as an all-or-nothing, or when they say that not having empathy makes you a bad person. I am capable of empathizing with people, but only when they think the same way I do, which means I hardly have empathy at all. For example, if something makes someone upset, I can understand their thoughts/feelings if the same thing would make me upset. Otherwise, it's like I'm looking at an alien creature. It's why I've never understood why people get offended at jokes when they know that they're jokes, or why people don't find communism as upsetting as racism, and so on. And on the rare occasion I do think I've modeled someone mentally, I usually end up being wrong.
What would you call this phenomenon? Limited empathy?
It's an instance of the overly feminized rhetoric that is taking over the distributed sense-making apparatus of the West (And some other places).
Maximizing "Empathy" is just an aspirational value among the set of many values, nothing gives it authority over good judgment, truth for its own sake, practicality, etc.
Imagine you have a set of problems that maps to a set of solutions, which has corresponding elements in a set of values and male/female coding. If all your proposed solutions are from a certain cluster and does not make use of the mapping, you know some serious bullshit is afoot. And looking at the pattern of the LACK of mapping can suggest which direction things went wrong in. In simple words, if your solution to all problems is the maximization of a female-coded value, then you are being ruled by the Tyranical Mother.
Ever wondered why so few female libertarians? Or why was fun made illegal during the 2019-sars-coronavirus-2 pandemic?
And you don't need to look far and wide for the pernicious everpresent penetration of feminized rhetoric.
Ask Reddit what should a programmer know. A majority of the answers are "people skills", "empathy", and other soft skill horseshit. Are those things really more important than design patterns and version control? Or did we just get psyop'ed into thinking that being a people pleaser is the end-all-be-all to making the world go round?
This is a good post. Thank you. We need to meme the phrase "toxic femininity" as an equal counterpart to toxic masculinity. The traits that "toxic masculinity" exists to criticize do exist, though I'd quibble with the implicit claim that they are prevalent in our culture. Toxic femininity, though..
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