Basaku wrote:And as much as one would like to remain fair and open about the other side's POV, it gets secondary when one of the 'sides' is overwhelmingly responsible for most of attack tactics of this kind. That's the #1 issue that needs to be discussed/dealt with right now.
I think the #1 issue is that people are being lumped into groups unnecessarily, discussing them as if they're homogeneous groups, and refusing to have actual level-headed conversations about these things with actual members of the other groups. It's easy, and ironic, to just scapegoat an entire ideology/value system just because some people who may or may not have allegiance to it did some bad shit.
How do we know that one "side" is "overwhelmingly responsible" for anything? What makes someone part of a "side"? What is each "side" characterized by? What about the people who undoubtedly agree with both "sides" on different things? Where do they fall? How do we know what the attackers believe in? Are they conversing about it? Do we have reasons to believe that what they're saying they believe is sincere? Do we know that people doing the attacking are indeed those with a certain ideology? How do we test and control for potential false flagging? Can we test and measure to verify the percentage of people on each "side" doing the attacking? What counts as "attacking"?
If one group is saying "it's about ethics", and some people are doing some unethical shit, then their claim of allegiance to "that group which is self-proclaimed to be for ethics" would appear dubious to me. "Aha! it's
not about ethics at all, is it!?" is far from the reasonable conclusion to draw from that, I think. You would have to dig, prod, and come to understand what the actual values of the movement/ideology are, before you can even consider labeling bad actions as characteristic of it.
This has the same pitfalls of blaming "the Christian side" for the actions of the WBC, or "the Muslim side" for any violent acts of militant Islamism. It's intellectually lazy, and only exacerbates intergroup animosity and hostility.
That being said, people being attacked is indeed a problem. People shouldn't attack other people. The more empathetic people are, the less likely they are to attack one another. One of the best ways to empathize with someone with whom you disagree is to understand their reasoning, their values, and why they're doing what they're doing. The better you understand someone, the more like a rational and moral agent they appear. And if you're at odds with a party of rational and moral people, then you're more likely to identify with them, the more similar you'll see them as being to you, and thus the less likely you are to attack them in spite of disagreements. Lumping people under a single banner, demonizing their position as just plain characteristically "evil", and treating them as thus irrational only serves to diminish empathy. That's why people need to be conversing about these things, so that the two sides are seen by one another as perfectly rational and human.
MrWalnut4 is right though. Not exactly Dragon Ball territory anymore. Sorry for continuing to derail.