Infinite Forgiveness
Lifted from the comments, some thoughts on empathy – or more specifically, ostentatious pseudo-empathy, as practised by so many of Our Progressive Betters. It began with a discussion of this lady here, a triumphant, practised shoplifter, and other, likeminded beings whose proximity might not be desired:
Woman who filmed herself shoplifting from a store and paying only for two small items received over 23,000 likes and more than 1,000 comments cheering her on.
So when chain stores start shutting down and activists cry “racism,” just show them this video. pic.twitter.com/MknZYQyeQI
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) July 5, 2025
And Chow Bag’s subsequent comment,
The words vile beast did spring to mind. And if you wanted to radically lower your estimation of the human species, she’d be the gal to call. Likewise, I would guess, much of her social media audience, the ones applauding her habits, her predation, and clicking like.
As Wanye Burkett has often illustrated, despising such creatures, wishing them gone and bricked up in a dungeon, is not a result of some failure of empathy, as many progressives would have us believe, but of precisely the opposite. One can understand their feelings, their assumptions, their monstrously selfish worldview, and find it all degenerate, worthy only of disgust. In fact, the more you try to imagine yourself in a similar situation and how you might behave, the more alien and repugnant their behaviour is likely to seem.
Understanding the mental states of others, their motives and assumptions, insofar as one can, doesn’t necessarily result in positive feelings towards them, or identification with them, or lead to a default forgiveness and willingness to excuse their behaviour. Simply put, if your “empathy” results in you being endlessly forgiving, endlessly accommodating, over and over again, then you’re almost certainly doing it wrong.
Or not doing it at all.
In the comments, Nikw211 added,
Indeed. Yet progressives, despite their claims, seem uniquely bad at it. To a degree one might regard as surreal.
And which in turn may explain the progressive dislike, often vehement dislike, of the reality series Cops, mentioned here, which revealed just how different minds can be, and which made the mentality of the criminals – the patterns of malevolence and selfishness – impossible to miss. Thereby making pretentious sympathy and indulgence much more difficult to muster.
If an illustration of progressive empathy is needed, we should perhaps revisit burglary victim and Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan. A woman whose mental processes are oddly convoluted and, shall we say, not entirely convincing:
Readers may also wish to ponder the implicit conceit that the burglars… are the real victims and should therefore be spared any meaningful consequence of their own chosen actions, their own sociopathy. Because, apparently, one should sympathise with the people breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff. In one’s own car.
Perhaps these are skills only available to Guardian columnists.
Readers will also note Ms Spargo-Ryan’s expressed priorities – her preference for being seen by her peers as a “beautiful person,” aglow with progressive empathy and understanding, over the wellbeing of her law-abiding neighbours and other nearby residents, the people being targeted and violated by the same criminal gang that she excuses with great, if weird, enthusiasm. Neighbours and nearby residents to whom no such empathy is extended.
Likewise, as illustrated in subsequent comments, our Guardian columnist’s zeal in blocking and disdaining those who dared to demur from her affectations – and her claim that I, your gracious host, was much worse, much more scary, than the feral creatures who broke into her home in the middle of the night, and into the homes of her neighbours, while brandishing carving knives.
Because I suggested that her infinite forgiveness may not be entirely realistic, or indeed moral.
If another example of progressive empathy and its consequences is required, this one, via Mr Muldoon, seems suitably vivid.
And very much related, this trilogy of posts, which includes scenes that may challenge the progressive empathy reflex and make such affectations harder to sustain.
Should you wish to express encouragement, there are tip jar buttons below.
That.
Also related, this and this.
Again, I’m guessing that such details, and the vivid statistics, will not elicit much in the way of warm feelings for the people concerned.
currently reading “civilization” by Niall ferguson. he examines why it was that civilization arose in the west and not elsewhere. it shows how easy it would have been for the world to be still stuck in the middle ages. no computers no meds. it is rather a miracle and we should treasure it. Even more dramatic, the rise from the invention of agriculture took 10000 years. These people who hate civilization are sick.
A lot of vile beasts out there. I don’t want any of them near me.
Well, again, if empathy is supposed to make you imagine yourself in that role, with that perspective, and to walk in their shoes, and to imagine what it might take to make a person that kind of creature, then the answers might well include being a conscienceless narcissist, a catastrophic failure of a human being.
Someone you’d wish to avoid.
The answers, I think, would not be conveniently limited to those that would entail forgiveness or indulgence of some kind.
I follow a YouTuber called hoe_math in which he talks about the usual manosphere stuff. But in this video, he also talks about the impact on society when it becomes too feminized or too masculine. It even comes with a quote from Saladin
https://youtu.be/CN_BDrVjWvU
Think of how someone this ‘entitled’ would treat others during times of crisis, like for example during a famine. Their attitude would be along the lines of ‘I’m going to get mine and the hell with everybody else’. It would be ugly.
This is not the kind of behavior that should be encouraged. And this is not the kind of person who should be celebrated. This is the kind of person that prisons were built for.
True. But also he touches on, weaves in and out of sort of, the bigger factor of tight knit communities. There have been decades now of our society, from the “Greatest Generation” on down, engaged in the destruction of tight knit communities and tight knit relationships by sending our (supposedly) best and brightest away, often very far away, to colleges and universities virtually guaranteeing the breakup of relationships. Not just male/female relationships but also the tight bond formed between young men in pursuit of sport or knowledge or work or whatever and even young women in whatever the hell it is they care about regarding each other.
Acceptable distance: An oceanic trench, bound for the subduction zone.
Band name?
Absolutely.
And don’t get me started on the ghetto nails.
Speaking of utterly insane malice: German “green” arson attacks on railroads:
More here.
This kind of anti-social pathology isn’t new. The people who are career criminals like this broad, whether the result of upbringing or bad brain, just think differently than the normies. Other People to them are not real people. They are just ‘means’ to whatever urge-in-the-now gurgles in their gut. Is she a Valjean stealing a loaf of bread for a starving daughter? No, she’s a parasite out to put “money on her card” (EBT I’m sure) … then shoplifts junk food. She’s got a cell phone, spends hundreds of dollars on hair/makeup/nails but the people who produce all those goods and services are just suckers.
This is why I loathe general government benefits. What used to have guard rails of “we will help emergency situations so no child or senior or disabled person goes hungry” has become a blank check to any “gimme what I want NOW” sloth who demands it.
I forgive that some normies feel no one would put themselves through the humiliation of applying for welfare if they didn’t need it, but they are thinking from their own POV of shame at taking what you don’t need. These creatures not only have no personal shame, but they are also proud to prey on others at the first opportunity.
I’ve read tens of thousands of police reports. These people are NOT ‘normal’.
[ Slides crumpled bin liner to Darleen. ]
On the house.
We are objects in their world.
The flipside of progressive empathy, witless gasping.
Normal homo sapiens have a pretty good theory of mind for the stranger from the other side of the hill. They assume that, just like themselves with respect to their own tribe, the stranger likes being a member of his own tribe, prefers to assemble with fellow tribe members, wants his tribe to control some territory as its own home, and believes in his own tribe’s gods. This theory of mind tells your tribe how to provoke a fight if you really want one, or how to avoid a fight, and since the other tribe is assumed to have the same theory of mind, it tells you when they’re looking for a fight.
Our system creates a new white man who’s required to dislike his own people, to prefer to assemble with racial strangers, and to wish that his own people should feel no more at home in their historical countries than anyone whose parents turned up in 2005. Any white man naive or brave enough to express that he wants to be with his own people in their own place finds that these normal human sentiments are put through the Nurembergizer, to the witless gasping that Wayne Burkett describes.
Normal sentiments of belonging, religion, territoriality expressed by non-whites on the other hand are put through a distorting lens that demotes or eliminates tribes and gods. In your ancestors’ theory of mind, a Muslim woman wearing a head covering in a mixed neighborhood is expressing sincere belief in God and marking a territory for her own people, and if enough people mark the territory in that way, a mixed neighborhood becomes a Muslim neighborhood. In the theory of mind that whites are now required to operate with, we’re supposed to see it for example as an individualist feminist woman taking control of her sexuality, or as colorful self-expression adding to the variety and pageantry of the street, but otherwise of no consequence.
My middle son is in prison for murder–a crime he committed at age 17. He is lower IQ, on the spectrum, and was heavily using cannabis at the time. None of this excuses him–I provide these details to give you context.
Subsequent to his arrest, I tried to inhabit his mind–to grasp why he had made the choice he did. He isn’t stupid–just not bright. So it wasn’t a failure to understand consequences.
He seemed to have a movie in his head in which he was the star–a sort of combination of an old-fashioned Western and Dexter. I don’t know how to explain it well because I can’t get all the way there in this effort to “be” him. But I can affirm that it wasn’t the mental internal narrative of a normal, non-criminal person.
Layered on top, of course, were the effects of being lower IQ–poor impulse control, over-estimation of one’s abilities, underestimation of others’ abilities.
What saddens me even most is that 10 years later, what I can only think of as a sort of madness has left him. But his life is horribly constricted now–as it should be–and those of us on the outside, those who love him and those who suffered from their beloved’s death, are still suffering.
This event made clear to me that the mind of another is a foreign country.
This should be good:
All Things Re-Considered: Analyzing the Ideological Capture of NPR
Oh my, my deepest sympathies, for you, your family, and the victim’s loved ones.
I won’t say “may your wounds be healed”, because some wounds leave scars, but may they become more bearable as time goes by.
I sometimes run into attempts to explain criminality solely in terms of low intelligence and impulsivity, but that leaves out personality differences such as described here.
Speaking of criminal mentalities….
Would it be OK to shoot people who let their smoke detectors keep chirping the “battery low” signal?
It all started with ZERO TOLERANCE “anti-bullying” policies in our schools. These were intended to protect kids who “identified” as LGBTQueer … or just oddballs who got picked-on as is human nature. But then, EVERYONE … with any beef, grief, or belief DEMANDED they be “celebrated”. They said; “you to do you” … unless THEY didn’t like what that was … and then they demanded you become more fore-give-ing to THEM
BTW … speaking of misplaced … or rather -strategically placed compassion … from the new Americano Pope … he spoke of the suffering children of Gaza … without a single condemnation of Hamas stealing the food and shooting anyone who refused them.
ALL of his compassion should have been directed toward the IDF who are doing the 21st century equivalent of ‘the greatest generation’ … the IDF is ridding the world of Hitler writ large … radical murderous terrorist Islam.
My filipino friend (native ancestry there, spoke tagalog (sp?) but went to college) just got back from visiting the philipines. He said the negritos there that he saw (black, short like pygmies) were still mostly naked but had made enough progress to build mud huts near the road and a few had gone to college. He said they do not hold jobs but instead still hunt in the jungle and sell some jungle products to outsiders. In 2025…
Progressives wanted cops to wear bodycams right up until the bodycams showed everyone what criminals are like.
I remember first stumbling across the series in the 90s and the impact of seeing, quite vividly, just how different the mindset of the habitual criminal is. For the well-behaved, it can be quite shocking, something close to surreal. A kind of alarming farce. Cops and Live PD, and the YouTube channels of police bodycam footage, certainly dispel the fiction that the average lawbreaker is just like you, only somehow more oppressed.
As noted here, the progressive empathy reflex seems to recognise no upper limit, no point at which it becomes grotesque and absurd. Such that those gripped by this weird fiction, often children of the elite, will scream and howl in defence of a sociopath who, given the smallest excuse, would stab them to death without compunction:
Such is wokeness.
I used to personally know people who exhibited that hatred. Used to, because not only was there limited value in spending time with fools, but also because it became impossible to ignore the fact that they also hated me.
It is increasingly clear that liberals are indeed evil.
Tweet deleted. Damn!
You know, you could analogize this to domestic abuse, where the victim always makes excuses for violent behavior, but that would not be accurate.
At least with domestic violence, you often have the abuser making insincere apologies and false promises to change their behavior. These people are completely without remorse for their criminal activities.
I know, I know. I should’ve taken a screengrab for posterity. It was, I think, quite funny, albeit inadvertently.
Ms Spargo-Ryan was much more willing to express a vehement dislike of me, what with me being a man and everything, than of the knife-wielding ferals who broke into her home, robbed her, and left her terrorised. She seemed to think it was somehow improper of me to parse her public outpourings and to note the contradictions, as if only flattering replies are permitted, not corrections, or questions, or relevant statistics.
Apparently, I was “intense.”
But I suppose that’s the thing. If your worldview is premised on error and deception, on things that are obviously incoherent and untrue, then you may get quite prickly when those dishonesties are poked at, even in fairly measured terms.
There’s a reactiveness, a sort of twitchy displacement.
Maybe if you had shared the hump fat with her she wouldn’t have responded so badly.
Who am I kidding?
Windows 10 and later make this easier with Right-Click-Take Screenshot.
A near universal attitude among leftists.
[ Grunting, winching, sounds of tip jar being lifted onto bar. ]
Slight adjustment.
I’ll agree if you mean “project their evil onto others”.
I’ll insist that liberals are evil, based on their eagerness to do evil.
Strength training!
Many moons ago, while house-hunting, I encountered a decoration in a family room: a heavy clear plastic sphere, open at the top. About 30″ diameter. FULL of coins.
Thing probably weighed 300 pounds. (No doubt exceeding the floor’s weight limit.)
My agent just sighed and said, “I wish people wouldn’t do that.Always causes a problem.”