Your life sounds terrible and I’m sorry. I’m very confused since you didn’t seem to claim any of the terrible things in your life have anything to do with racism. I’m not even sure if you’re a racial minority or not, but you don’t seem to relate the problems to race in any case, and I assume your mother is the same race as you? So I’m not sure why you think my post is justifying all the terrible things in your life.

All I can think of is that maybe you’re interpreting it as something like “nobody’s really evil, they’re all just misunderstood nice people”. I don’t think this is true at all, and I never said anything like it.

For example, one of the examples I gave was Eric, the greedy restaurant owner who will do anything to make a profit. I gave the example of Eric keeping minorities out of his restaurant, but if Eric were to overwork and abuse his employees, or cut hygiene to the point where people got food poisoning, or spread fake rumors about his competitors, all of those would be well within the sort of thing I would expect a greedy restaurant owner to do.

My point isn’t that Eric might be a great guy deep down, my point is “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference”. Eric doesn’t poison his customers because he has a goal of poisoning them, he poisons them because he has a goal of getting money and doesn’t care if they’re poisoned one way or the other. He’s not an other-suffering-maximizer, he’s a self-money-maximizer who doesn’t care at all about other people’s suffering. This isn’t saying he’s not evil, it’s saying this is what evil *means*.

Likewise, if Eric discriminates against black people, my first guess is that he wants money or something, discriminating helps him make money, and he just doesn’t care about black people enough to not discriminate against them. “Not caring about other people and being willing to hurt them whenever it’s convenient” seems like a pretty good definition of evil.

None of this means Eric’s customers shouldn’t be angry at him. He’s an evil person, he’s deliberately poisoned them in order to make a buck, if anger is ever justified it’s probably justified here. But if someone’s trying to prevent this from happening again, they might want to know that if they can make poisoning people less profitable, Eric will stop doing it. And if they just keep trying to convince him of how nice and likeable the restaurant customers are, this will be totally useless.

I don’t know anything about your life. Maybe all of the people being abusive to you are doing it because they hate you in particular, even if they get nothing out of it. But in most of my experience with abusers, it’s because they do get something out of it, at least psychologically if nothing else. Part of my job as a psychiatrist is to try to figure out what’s causing abusers to abuse, and then see if that cause can be stopped. For example, if an abuser’s abusing somebody because they feel powerless and abusing people makes them feel powerful, it’s to get to the root of what makes them feel powerless and see if there are ways to address that feeling.

This is the job of psychiatrists, and not of victims. Victims have no job except to deal as best they can. If it’s helpful for you to hate your abusers, go for it.

Just don’t take it out on unrelated people, ie me.

I’m not even sure if you’re a racial minority or not, but you don’t seem to relate the problems to race in any case, and I assume your mother is the same race as you? So I’m not sure why you think my post is justifying all the terrible things in your life.

Because abuse/bullying has similar causes and effects. Racism is a particular manifestation but it doesn’t change things so much that I can’t empathize or realize we all have similar suffering.

Is it really so different if I get abused/bullied because I’m poor, another person gets mistreated because they’re black, still another gets mistreated because they’re socially awkward?

In school I had kids of different races and sexes in my group of “kids who were bullied” because we were all bullied similarly despite perhaps the specific reasons being invoked for the bullying.

In my jobs I noticed that all of my coworkers had similar tales of woe caused by their low wages despite all of us being a variety of different sexes, ethnicities, religions, and so on.

When listening to kids dealing with parental abuse we all had similar tales of what we dealt with, differing in severity rather than based on what demographic we were.

I live in public housing devoted to elderly and disabled people. I see and listen to their struggles which again don’t really differ hugely based on demographics outside of “elderly and disabled”.

I empathize with BLM because I’m a white person who’s been mistreated by police and seen other white people mistreated by police.

Etc.

But if someone’s trying to prevent this from happening again, they might want to know that if they can make poisoning people less profitable, Eric will stop doing it.

And I appreciate that as a tactic.

But you’re still sitting there and shaming people if they feel like they’re being asked to care about the wallet of someone poisoning them while that person is getting no obligation to, y’know, not poison others.

Or people being poisoned asked to wait and wait and wait and wait for the person to finally maybe stop poisoning them all while, you know, still putting up passively with being poisoned.

I also can’t help but wonder “What happens if it turns out you can’t make poisoning people less profitable? Do we just have to shut up and go away and put up with being poisoned?”

For example, if an abuser’s abusing somebody because they feel powerless and abusing people makes them feel powerful, it’s to get to the root of what makes them feel powerless and see if there are ways to address that feeling.

But why doesn’t anyone ever address “how does the person being abused feel”?

Nobody seems to care how black people feel about being called thugs or shot by police. Nobody seems to care about how poor people feel about being called lazy or having their ability to survive taken away. Nobody seems to care about how Muslims feel about being called terrorists. Or how transpeople feel about being called predators and having their ability to do something as simple as use a bathroom taken away. Etc.

Or well, that’s not true. The people being hurt and the liberals you’re lecturing to be nicer and more understanding care.

But the people hurting them don’t care. Because nothing is ever done to make them care. Since any time liberals do anything that might force the people doing the hurting to care, folks like you admonish us to be nicer and more understanding. Even though the people doing the hurting have no obligation to be nicer and more understanding to us.

This whole “be nice and understand” is an incredibly one-way street. Why is that? Why shouldn’t I be mad that it’s a one-way street?

Just don’t take it out on unrelated people, ie me.

You sat there and wrote an article saying how abused people have to learn how to make nice and be more understanding to the people who abused them, even though those abusers are never once obligated to be nice and more understanding to the people they’re abusing. The fact that you’re speaking on a societal scale doesn’t change the fact that that’s what you’re doing. How are you unrelated to the topic?

Further, you sicced your white knight army on me which means I’ve been having large number of notes from multiple people showing up to respond to without the privileged benefit of having my own army or anybody at all to help or support my end of things. I don’t think you get to complain if I spend a tiny few notes your way calling you out on things.

I agree everything has similar causes. That is the whole point of my post. There is no point in talking about “racism” as distinct from all the other things that cause people to abuse people of the same race. People are just generally horrible, and sometimes it happens to people because of their race. This is the whole point of my post.

>>But you’re still sitting there and shaming people if they feel like they’re being asked to care about the wallet of someone poisoning them while that person is getting no obligation to, y’know, not poison others.

I’m not shaming anyone. The people I am *criticizing*, which I think is different, are pundits and Twitterati and everyone else who tries to interpret broad social trends and decide to exclude things from national discourse. I specifically say the sentence “I’m not saying that minorities should never be able to complain about racism”, because of long experience that anyone saying anything at all will be rounded off to that. I don’t know how to be clearer.

>> I also can’t help but wonder “What happens if it turns out you can’t make poisoning people less profitable? Do we just have to shut up and go away and put up with being poisoned?”

To quote the post, “If such people existed and made up a substantial portion of the population, liberalism becomes impossible, and we should go back to just using violence to enforce our will on the people who disagree with us.” I’m trying to argue that in some cases, there are options that are worth considering before killing the bastards.

>> Nobody seems to care how black people feel about being called thugs or shot by police.

…this is an incredibly weird definition of “nobody”. My whole point is that since *everyone* cares about this, we should try to do things that actually help this problem, instead of not helping it. To stick to your example, we know that racism isn’t responsible for this - blacks get shot at the same per-encounter rate as everyone else, and are more likely to be shot by black cops than white cops. Solutions like giving cops implicit bias tests and training them in diversity awareness have been proven not to work. What works is lowering the number of encounters, especially of black people, so that a constant per-encounter killing rate results in fewer deaths. We can do this by eg lowering the number of traffic stops. I think this is pretty consistent with what I’m saying.

>> But the people hurting them don’t care. Because nothing is ever done to make them care. Since any time liberals do anything that might force the people doing the hurting to care, folks like you admonish us to be nicer and more understanding. Even though the people doing the hurting have no obligation to be nicer and more understanding to us.

The problem with “victims can do whatever they want in order to destroy bullies” is that everyone thinks they’re a victim, especially bullies. I can’t tell you how many domestic abusers say this sort of thing: “You’re telling me I should just sit back and put up with it when she talks to me like that!?”

There’s this unfortunate tension between the Inside View and the Outside View. On the Inside View, I know I’m right and that my enemies really are bad people who need to be dealt with violently. On the Outside View, read any Klan pamphlet, and you see them saying “The black people are trying to destroy our civilization; we have to defend ourselves”, and then you get kind of uncomfortable with all this “Well, if they’re oppressing you, of course you have to kill them, it’s rude to ask you to think about it a little first.” I agree that dealing with the Klansmen involve also putting unfortunate demands on innocent victims, but I’m not sure how to prevent that except sayind “Do this, unless you’re one of the actually good people”, in which case no one will do it.

I think this is much less true in individual personal relationships, because people have society as a sanity check and so they usually have communal ideas like “abuse” to work with. I think it’s dangerous on a society-wide level precisely because society doesn’t have anything else to check its work with.

>> This whole “be nice and understand” is an incredibly one-way street. Why is that? Why shouldn’t I be mad that it’s a one-way street?

I don’t think it is. During this (short) conversation, you’ve accused me of “being gross”, “bitching and whining”, “telling innocents to passively roll over and accept being treated like dirt”, wanting bullying victims to “play fucking pattycake with their abuser”, of “sitting there and shaming people”, “siccing a white knight army on you” (by responding to a post in which you @d me), being incompetent and evil in my profession, et cetera. I don’t think I’ve ever said an unkind word to you. All I did was write a blog post saying people should try to understand other people better. The reason I’m still talking to you at all is that I assume underneath all the nastiness and abuse, you have a point. But it sure as heck seems to be a one-way street in your favor right now.

I’m not just saying this to be mean. I would describe this conversation as “you bullying me”, though obviously in a minimal way in the grand scale of things and compared to other forms of bullying. It’s possible I’m wrong, but if so, the fact that I’m wrong underscores my point that from the inside it’s hard for people to tell who’s bullying whom. I am sure you think that you’re just being a perfectly reasonable person, but the whole point of my post is that almost all meanness is done by people who think they’re being perfectly reasonable people and who think they’re just trying to protect themselves and maybe show a little well-deserved righteous anger.

>> I don’t think you get to complain if I spend a tiny few notes your way calling you out on things.

I feel like you’re saying you can be as mean to me as you want and I am not allowed to object or defend myself. I decline to continue the conversation on those terms. I think this is consistent with what I’ve been saying about accepting there’s a reason for people being hurtful, but still trying to prevent it / get away from it when it happens. I’ll read your replies so that it doesn’t look like I’m claiming the last word. If you want to talk about this in private, my address is scott@shireroth.org