Some Days the Internet is a Hopeful Place

[moon_custafer]

Ta-Nehisi Coates on Compassion - I've seen a couple of links to this, mostly from Making Light, and it's the sort of thing I'd like to see more of on the internet. Not only is the article itself always-timely, but all the comments are worth reading.

Comments

[crankydon.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

VERY well written. I'm very impressed by his understanding of his own righteousness. That's a level of introspection you hardly ever see. Also, as you say, you hardly ever see a comment stream that good either.

Still, for my part, I often feel that empathy is overrated because of an instrumentation problem. You're empathising with your impression of someone and that might not be as much of of them as you think: there might be quite a bit of you projected in there. Hence, I would prefer Sarek of Vulcan's primary question "How can I help you?" to Jesus' primary exclamation "I love you!": as nifty as that exclamation is.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

But I think asking "how can I help you" is bound up in empathy - it means that you not only want to offer help, but that you realize the person's specific needs may differ from your own and therefore you'd better try to find out what they are.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I'd call that either sympathy (not just for the Devil, you know!) or compassion.

On another note, I seem to have pressed the wrong button while making my original comment and LJ gave me an account linked to my google blogspot account without telling me what it was doing. I don't like the idea of these systems swapping my stuff around so I deleted the LJ account. However, the imbeciles won't let me do that: they insist on having the account hang around for 30 days in a ghostly state that stops me from using my openID. Looks like my original comment will disappear in 30 days too.

-Don