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There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you're one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.
Last week APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study[$] which found that "empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it."
The study had two parts. In the first part, Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of "affective polarization"—defined as the difference between the favorability rating they gave their political party and the rating they gave the opposing party. In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.
It gets worse. These high-empathy students were also more likely to be amused by reports that students protesting the speech had injured a bystander sympathetic to the speaker. That's right: According to this study, people prone to empathy are prone to schadenfreude.
This study is urgently important—though not because it's a paradigm shifter, shedding radically new light on our predicament. As the authors note, their findings are in many ways consistent with conclusions reached by other scholars in recent years. But the view of empathy that's emerging from this growing body of work hasn't much trickled down to the public. And public understanding of it may be critical to shifting America's political polarization into reverse somewhere between here and the abyss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 11 2019, @11:40PM (9 children)
You don't understand the definition of socialism, and thus it's not surprising that you can't differentiate it from communism or fascism.
While we're making definitions up out of thin air, Trump is a hardcore socialist for using taxpayer money to fund the military, law enforcement agencies, and handouts to the rich and corporations. In fact, under this all-encompassing definition of socialism that some people love so dearly, only hardcore anarchists aren't socialists.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:17AM (8 children)
Really?
If you think there's some different "not real socialism" definition that is widely accepted and would not include nationalization under the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or syndicalism under the Partito Nazionale Fascista then it is you that doesn't understand.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @08:24AM (7 children)
Collective ownership is communism not socialism. But we already knew using words as intended is hard for americans when we learned about their party names.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @10:03AM
Go explain that to the Oxford English Dictionary, wikipedia [wikipedia.org] ...
... and every other dictionary written in the past 100 years!
Here's the action replay:
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 12 2019, @12:55PM (5 children)
Note the definition said "state or collective". Communism is a subset of Socialism not the other way around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:06PM (4 children)
Millennials! [babylonbee.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 12 2019, @07:13PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @08:28AM
May the alt-right recruiting grounds flourish!!! /puke
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 13 2019, @09:49AM (1 child)
A satire site? Really?
https://babylonbee.com/about [babylonbee.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 13 2019, @01:49PM