You ought to educate yourself on the difference between the general and the universal. A society can have serious ideological, legal, and social problems without those issues reflecting on the people or their culture.

I think this is too sophisticated an argument for someone like you, though, so I won’t waste any further time on you. You think everything in black and white terms, ready to pounce on anyone you think is the other team. Good day!

Nope. I’m not racist, and fuck you for even suggesting it!

You’re doing the same shit people do to defend the government of Israel! Accusing anyone who criticizes the country of being an anti-Semite.

It’s nothing to do with race and everything to do with ideology. I have close friends whose parents survived the cultural revolution. They would tell you the same thing.

China is the place where, if someone hits you with their car by accident, they’ll stop and run you over to finish you off, in order to avoid paying your family for caring for you and your injuries.

Oh yes, I’m a firm believer that democracy is bad, and people know this intuitively but they forget because they’re taught to reflexively support democracy and criticize everything else.

People love to trash capitalism on Lemmy but praise socialism and democracy. When it comes to which t shirt style I get to wear, I vastly prefer capitalism. If that were a democratic choice we’d all be wearing the same t shirt!

Call it whatever you want, empathy is part of the process. When people fear terrorist attacks, they’re empathizing with the victims. They’re literally imagining themselves in that situation and that is what produces their fear response. Exploitation of fear is exploitation of empathy, by definition.

For whatever reason, people can’t seem to muster up the same empathy for victims of a car crash.

Because empathy doesn’t scale.

Empathy works great when you live in a small village and everyone knows each other. It breaks down completely when you get to a city where almost everyone you see is always a stranger.

You can take the most caring person you know who is always happy to help out or offer a shoulder to cry on. Put them onto a crowded subway with the unkempt, the unruly, people with untreated mental illnesses talking out loud or yelling, and they’ll feel threatened and keep their head down.

Generally it doesn’t even have to be anywhere near that extreme. Most people don’t want random people talking to them, even without any aggression involved. Now there are some rare people who feel comfortable engaging those situations but most people absolutely do not. The other side of the coin is that (when watching disasters on the news or whatever) people don’t feel empathy for statistics at all, they need to see a face to empathize with.

Lastly, I will say that empathy does guide public decision making more than it should in a lot of cases. People will engage in stranger danger moral panics or support the “war on terrorism” much more readily than they’ll support attempts to curtail car accident deaths, despite the latter killing far more than the former two combined.