Barack Obama Urges Young Men To Befriend Gay People Who Can Help Teach Them 'Empathy And Kindness'

I don’t like the headline, but the actual quotes from Obama aren’t bad. The headline makes it sound like it’s gay people’s job to teach homophobes to not be homophobic.

When I was a kid, a lesbian couple came to my birthday party, gave me a hammer and a book about raising chickens, and let me visit the llamas on their farm. Absolutely made a difference for my perspective on stuff.

Yeah, having a diverse friend group certainly helps someone have a broader worldview. Hard to hate trans people when you know some and find out that strangely enough, they are not in fact predators, and are completely normal people with thoughts, emotions, and opinions. It's a lot harder to hate a group when you know and like members of that group. Except for those that are so devoted to the bigotry that they view the "acceptable" people as "one of the good ones". Good prevention though, probably good for middle schoolers near the beginning of the pipeline.

Obama did mature on this issue.

just don't talk to me because I'm not empathetic or kind because I hate people in general

That's the answer to bigotry. Personal interaction, that's how Daryl Davis has convinced so many klansmen to de-robe and denounce the practice. We all spend too much time alone, in our own world. Where we listen to music we want to, ignore people we want to and so become frighteningly less familiar with new experiences. This in turn leads distrust, which is just exacerbated exponentially by algorithmically driven social media and targeted propaganda. It works, without you even realising it. I was super bigoted towards transgender people, without having met more than 5 of them in my life. Not having any sort of sustained interpersonal relationship with any of them. Then I read this in a University Textbook I picked up secondhand to learn about psychology:

“...the context, or circumstances surrounding a behaviour, influences whether a behaviour is viewed as abnormal. Some Theorists have gone so far as to argue that deviation from cultural or societal norms is the only criterion for labelling a behaviour as abnormal (see Mezzich et al., 1999). A parallel perspective argues that behaviours become defined as abnormal if they violate a cultures gender roles, which are expectations for the behaviour of an individual based on his or her gender. -Abnormal Psychology, Canadian Edition (2008, McGraw-Hill Ryerson) (Nolen-Hoeksema, Susan and Rector, Neil A.) pg4

The whole hammering of fringe issues targets isolated men of a certain age range and demographic. That is suffering already with crises of purposelessness created by the transfer of wealth from the working and middle class to the Billionaire elites. They took jobs that used to sustain people, taxi drivers, couriers and they replaced they with (largely) migrant workers that they pay less than minimum wage ; with absolutely no employee benefits. It's just crazy when you realise what has happened because we are all primed to think that The Internet is a place of knowledge, that we shouldn't trust "mainstream media." Ignoring the blindingly obvious fact that The Internet is the mainstream media. That we are being lied to, but that requires the personal strength, (as a man surrounded by an online culture constantly telling you that you are being left behind, that nobody cares about your issues and therapy doesn't work) To be self-critical. They exacerbate these issues and then they use their mouthpieces like Rogan to direct your anger -through the lense of "just joking, bro"- at minority groups within the working class. They divide us to control us and I am so fucking sorry I didn't see it before.