Now comes the second of three Comments of the Day on the screaming inhabitant of a “gayborhood” and what her outburst means. (We now know this is not a 2023 episode, but that is irrelevant to the issues at hand.) True to his quixotic mission, Extradimensional Cephalopod weighed in with a formula to deal with such people civilly and effectively. I can picture him (it?) trying these methods out on adversaries like Robespierre, Joe McCarthy, Ted Kaczynski and Abie Hoffman: I’d pay to see it. Nonetheless, EC’s methods are worth considering, as EC’s prescriptions always are. This comment launched a substantial thread with much more commentary from “The Squid”: I highly recommend checking them out at the link.

Here is Extradimensional Cephalopod’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Perplexed Ethics Thoughts On This Video…”

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As it happens, I do have some tools that can help with a situation like this. For starters, both of these people are foolish, but probably not as cripplingly so as it may seem from this incident.

Relevant concepts:

Habits:
Street preacher believes gender/sexual/romantic nonconforming people are hurting themselves.
Person in the neighborhood is stressed when someone shows up in their neighborhood and tells people they need to conform, and thinks others will feel the same way.

Trust:
People in the neighborhood don’t trust people from the street preacher’s religion to respect other people’s choices that aren’t harming others.

Connection mindset, motivations of relaxation and insulation: It took me a while to understand the concept of a safe space, but people do need spaces where other people understand their perspectives with minimal effort and don’t force them to account for themselves all the time. It’s a place with reduced social stress, where people can share and process ideas without feeling the need to defend their identity all the time. Safe spaces can have a variety of purposes; some are where people can challenge themselves to see things differently. Others are for people to recover from stress or trauma. It’s important to draw distinctions between spaces based on their purpose, and not spend all one’s time in a relaxing and insulating space. People definitely shouldn’t try to expand such a space to overwrite the rules of public spaces, if the public spaces are already decently respectful and the changes would make it difficult for people to go about their business.

Application:
The human in the video feels threatened and harassed by the presence of someone who represents an influential culture that seeks to create a world with no place for people like them to live constructive, fulfilling lives with whomever they choose. Because this human’s parents and the education system have failed to impart important lessons about communication, this person doesn’t know how to explain why they value having a neighborhood space that doesn’t have people from hostile cultures in it, so they resort to primitive defense mechanisms. I suspect they may have been having a bad day, and the human taking the video, though soft-spoken, may have evoked less respectful members of that religion. Taking out frustration about other religious people on this particular street preacher is probably quite cathartic, but not ethical, dignified, mature, or wise.

As for the human street preacher taking the video, I would recommend they learn more about the people they’re trying to reach, through research and by visiting the neighborhood as a regular person. They can get to know people without saying a word about their religion, and then reflect on how they feel about the situation and what they want the outcome to be. I’m fairly certain they haven’t done any of that, because if they did they would be doing something useful with their life instead of standing on street corners preaching the dogma of some cult. This person’s idea of Jesus of Nazareth is a half-baked solution looking for a problem, which leads to the ridiculous cliché “you need Jesus.” The translation of the phrase is, “Everyone’s going to suffer unless they choose to be brainwashed!” I’ll cut it off here so I don’t go into a rant about exactly how misguided this person is.

For the street preacher, my recommended thought process is, “This person is afraid. Project non-threatening impressions. What are they afraid of? How do I alleviate those fears? Then, how can I negotiate a way to accomplish my goals that doesn’t encroach on those fears?”

For the person in the video, my recommended thought process is, “Who is willing to distract this person so they don’t bother me or anyone else, and maybe deconstruct some of that dogma and broaden their perspective in the process?”

As someone who was once very antagonistic, I had to learn basic empathy skills from first principles, and I just kept applying them to situations where other people gave up. Having already crossed what I thought were impassible gulfs between myself and other people, I barely noticed the gulfs other people saw between each other. The next step is getting paid to do this.