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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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You can't empathize with anyone unless you can see them face to face? That seems worrying.
I think a lot of people empathize without meeting people, witness y'know, the mass complaints and protests about Palestine. I don't think that many folks have actually been to the Gaza strip.
We see videos coming out of the Gaza strip. Maybe "face-to-face" was overstating it, but we really do need to be able to see and hear people to make them real in our minds. We struggle to empathize with random strings of text on a screen.
You can still do it if you try, but when you're "debating" people the relationship is inherently antagonistic. People usually aren't going to try to empathize with the enemy, they're going to try to win. That's why debating on the internet does not work.
Watch, you'll now keep arguing with me because I can't convince you of anything, because I'm an NPC in the posting RPG. Your goal here isn't to listen to anything I have to say or trust that I have literal decades of experience arguing on the internet at this point, your goal is to defeat me and gain upvotes. I'm not real, I'm just something getting in your way.
That's a wild assumption. If I cared about upvotes, I have trouble imagining an approach more destined to fail than arguing for MAGA on Lemmy.
I also don't think everything has to be a debate. I love those and am always happy for it but really, just getting MAGA folks to interact with people whom they wouldn't otherwise is healthy. I think more good and possibly understanding our shared humanity comes of sharing memes or common interests.
Similarly, if we see the news or the things that are animating them, it's helpful. (A trivial example from years ago but that opened my eyes, I was pretty on the "cancel culture is a stupid made up complaint" and then while reading the National Review, they referenced "so you've been publicly shamed" which broke my heart when I read it. Then my opinion changed a bit.)
Yelling at people on the internet is rarely actually debating and even less often convincing.
Edit: ahhh, sorry, I'm on a phone and see I've got a note about you. I'll end this here.
Have a good day!