Empathy and dumb bastards

I’m plagiarizing Umair Haque! A little bit. I never thought I would.

My entire life I’ve advocated for empathy. I consider myself an empathetic person. I could never accept dismissing or degrading a person, let alone millions of people, based on their political views. In fact, I’m convinced that the likes of Hilary Clinton make a terrible mistake and lose elections when they label their opponents “deplorables”. That’s just arrogant.

75 million people voted for Trump. I estimate that 100 million Russian people support Putin. They are many decent people in these groups. Educated, kind, also empathetic. You can’t dismiss them all as dumb or evil.

On Russia. I said it many times: even if you accept election fraud in Russia, even if you rationalize (propaganda) this level of support, even if you question the polls (people fear expressing their true opinion), I personally believe that most Russians support Putin and everything that comes with him — that includes Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. In Russia’s big cities the numbers are different but the overall support can easily be seventy plus percent. Blame me all you want for relying on anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence it is: I know too many people in Russia who are happy with Putin; some of my relatives support him passionately; the vast majority of my parents’ friends and connections support him. My parents are in Russia (well, my Mom is no longer but she left just recently).