Zero-Sum Empathy : AskFeminists

>It seems to me that there is an assumption that any attention paid towards men takes it away from women or vice versa and that is just not how empathy works.

I mean this is sorta true. I get OOP's point but this is not the best framing.

Whenever someone talks about gender issues in general, just tell them that they are not focusing on the really important issue of our time: Shrimp welfare.

Dave Chappelle had a special were he spoke out against comparitive suffering years ago. Progs ignored everything he said because he made jokes about their sacred cow. In general it's funny how after several decades of making persona non grata out of everyone who failed their purity tests, they are slowly coming to the exact same realizations as the people they tried to destroy.

Olivia_VRex 18 points 1 day ago

I wish it worked that way, but irl there is empathy fatigue, and most folks feel they can only advocate for specific groups of people ... or only care about a limited number of issues.

There was even a study where researchers had two classrooms, and one group received a talk about white privilege and the struggles of the black community, while other group received a different talk. Afterwards, the students who heard about white privilege were less likely to sympathize with poor whites. Somehow, the idea of unfairness in the world didn't increase overall empathy, it just shifted some mental accounting of who is worthy vs. unworthy of help.

the distribution of any limited resource will always be zero-sum - and although positive sentiment is not a finite good, time, attention, and funding certainly are.

thoughts and prayers may be free, but studies, initiatives, and policies are not. "empathy", as it is expressed on the societal level, is a zero-sum game.

Empathy isn't real but if it was it would be zero-sum because everything is either zero-sum or negative-sum

You know for as often as women talk about how we could crush their skulls with our bare hands, they sure seem to forget sometimes that we could crush their skulls with our bare hands.

Snapshots:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/1ih2d4j/zerosum_empathy/:

• undelete.pullpush.io

• ghostarchive.org

• archive.org

• archive.ph (click to archive)