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.