Things others do you don't understand.

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Wow. I need them too and losing a friend over that seems harsh. I haven't ever been able to understand the fuss over it either. It's a huge section of stores, so there must be a lot of people who need them.

Cruelty as sport. That is, putting people down or otherwise making them feel like crap so as to as to "earn points." (not talking about friends razzing each other)

Also don't understand the people who observe such stuff and go along with it so that cruelty does in fact result in increased/better status for the person doing it, and lowered status for the target.

Why every human society seems to have various strata of "disposable people," and why it's so hard for some people to "empathize" with those they see as beneath them.

What I believe to be the case:

People empathize and identify with power. People want to have power and do not want to be powerless, this makes it difficult for them to identify with people who have less power. I think that such people actually make them uncomfortable, and they resolve the cognitive dissonance caused by this lack of empathy and compassion by blaming people for not having as much or more power as they do. Like somehow it's their fault for having disabilities, for being poor, for being in some other way, marginalized in society. To most people, those with less power could pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be more productive. They tend to forget that they themselves are not at the top either, and while they may be better off those bootstraps aren't doing them any good, you know? But as long as they can be better than someone else, they must be doing something right.

The American Dream codifies this, makes it the thing to aspire to: Climb to success on your comrades' backs, and then exploit them from the top.

I think that's true, and that that serves to keep everyone locked in to where they are. Sort of a self-imposed tyranny by self-imposed divide-and-conquer.

I think it also intentionally discourages people from straying off the 'proper' path or outside their proper role in society: "that is what will happen to you." So, oppression of such people is actually part of their 'purpose' of their class. Like a rancher hanging dead coyote hides on his fence as a warning to the others.

There was a case last year of a woman who was sent to a jail, and due to some paperwork error, was mistakenly assumed to be a transsexual. So, she was locked up with men and was assaulted as one would imagine.

Most of articles about that were saying, "what an awful mistake. We must make sure that a mistake like that never happens again." -- which completely misses the point that if you are a trans woman and are sent to that jail, you will be locked up with men. So, the implication is: if trannies get assaulted that's ok; if a normal woman is treated the same way then that's an awful thing. Few seemed to see that.

Yes. I could go on a lot more about this, and oppression is definitely a word I would use (and have) to talk about this. And this goes in multiple ways, too - because most people are oppressed in some way, but not in every way, there's usually some excuse to look down on most other people, and the power in question is not an absolute but a relative thing, depending on situation and context. So that's exactly the divide and conquer you're talking about.



I did hear about this, and yes that was a disturbing element, that people are okay with this happening to some women just because of their circumstances. But totally predictable when the entire system is set up to say "it's okay for terrible things to happen to people like this, because are they even really people at all?" Which is total BS, of course, everyone's people and no one deserves to have that happen to them.