Malice

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

-- Aristotle

After much thought, I've concluded that ethics boils down to getting the above right and racism, misogyny and other forms of bias are frequently rooted in getting this wrong.

Someone hurt them and they don't take their anger out on the specific person who did that. Instead, they keep carrying that anger and they take it out on other people who are in some superficial and unimportant fashion "like" that person, often people outright lacking the ugly character traits that got them hurt because nicer people are less likely to hurt you back if you take your shit out on them.

Righteous anger -- being angry at the person who harmed you without reasonable cause -- can be a force for good if you direct it at getting justice over the specific incident or otherwise fixing the problem so you and others stop being unjustly harmed.

Being angry because someone hurt you long ago and far away and taking it out on whomever you feel like because they happen to remind you of that person by being the same gender or same skin color or something is malicious behavior and keeps problems alive and spreads them virulently, like a kind of disease.

I'm convinced that the most malicious people are frequently huge fans of Christianity and absolutely LOVE it when society feels obligated to ENDLESSLY try to help the poor babies while they make ZERO god-damned effort whatsoever to get over their shit. Rewarding sadistic monsters for being sadistic monsters by going "Awwwwwww poor baby!!!! Someone else hurt you first! I UNDERSTAND!!!" just gets more sadistic bullshit from people who don't WANT to fix themselves and don't want to figure out how to stop being intentionally bad actors.

I'm pro death penalty. I see ZERO reason society should endlessly pour resources down the drain trying to help people who will never get better because they have no desire to get better and will just eat it up if you are ENDLESSLY "nice" to them in response to their intentionally malicious behavior because you are some fool who thinks that will eventually get them to change their tune.

Yes, I'm aware we need robust metrics for deciding whom to execute because in a heteronormative, homophobic, White Supremacist, misogynistic world, simply being the wrong category of person can get you treated like you are a bad actor merely for trying to make your own life work.

No, I'm not confident planet Earth has any hope of sorting this out. We don't seem to even be trying to sort it out and having "sorting it out" as a GOAL is an essential prerequisite for having any hope of getting there.

We have a planet of eight billion mammals with brains designed to function in a community of about 150 people. My understanding is that formality is what population-dense cultures use as a primary coping mechanism in social settings where you can't possibly know everyone well enough for our monkey brains to figure out enough to be confident we know who is good, who is bad, etc.

We also use a lot of rubrics that are easily broken and taken advantage of by malicious actors. 

We assume polite people are morally good people and many malicious actors are intentionally superficially polite, charming and likeable for the express purpose of being able to hurt people.

We rely on social signals to determine whom to trust. If other people seem to like someone, people trust that person without having any real reason to do so. If other people seem to dislike them, they don't trust them and give them no opportunity to earn trust or prove they were being unfairly maligned.

This is especially problematic for women and the LGBTQ crowd where sexual attraction and sexual rejection and even just making someone uncomfortable simply because you are you can cause social friction of a sort that gets you gatekept out as if you are a sex offender when your only offense may be that you are attractive to them and they can't have you, perhaps because they are married or perhaps because you are.

No matter how innocent the reason, being "offensive" to an important gatekeeper can permanently close a lot of doors in your face with no hope of ever opening them again because you will never get the opportunity to argue your case in the court of public opinion and prove that he's mad because he can't have you and it's not even your fault. It's because HE is faithfully married, not even because you are rejecting him.

God forbid you actually don't want the man. Women don't have real agency in a world where not wanting to have sex with a rich and powerful man can permanently destroy your career because your career field is a relatively small world and some tiny number of people can and will keep you out merely for not wanting to have sex with them.

I'm quite confident LGBTQ people face similar problems from making gatekeepers uncomfortable merely by being LGBTQ. Most people haven't spent tons of time in therapy sorting their baggage and if they are a closeted gay guy or otherwise have baggage or skeletons in their closet, merely being someone attractive or comfortable with their own sexuality can be "triggering" for people who will make it that person's problem rather than finally go get therapy and deal with their own problems.

I'm sure I could write volumes on the topic and perhaps over time I will. For today, I merely want to make the point that righteous anger aimed at in some way fixing the problem that made you angry is a force for good and anger or hurt feelings taken out on anyone and everyone except the person who hurt you is a root cause of much evil in the world.

People who feel entitled to harm others "because someone else hurt them first" are malicious actors and being sympathetic to their SHIT doesn't improve fuck all. That's called aiding and abetting.

Sympathy for malicious actors makes you part of the problem. It's completely different from having sympathy for people who are just trying to make their lives work in a broken system that denies them the means to do so merely because they are a woman or LGBTQ or the wrong color or some other demographic that they cannot opt out of and which really has nothing to do with how good or bad they behave.