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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

Well, the person you originally replied to mentioned having a disability, and your response was "yeah but you have kids so really you chose this and also I disagree that life is harder for some people."

The generous interpretation would be that you have sufficiently good health that you do not have to structure your life around it, and therefore lack understanding of the challenges faced by those who do.

The alternate interpretation, that you do understand and choose to ignore and dismiss, would be rather less generous to you.

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I actually agreed with them that a disability makes life harder. I then pointed out other things that an individual did not choose can make life harder as well.

As for bringing up children, I did make the leap that that is generally a big difference between younger employees and older employees.

> I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.”

It sounds like what you think you wrote, is not in fact the words of yours that everybody has been reading.

My phone will drop contractions, and that would be charitable.

A double negative is risky without typos, though.

Hmm.. I think we are talking past each other. In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

In my follow up comment I attempted to clarify my comment in response to giantg2's reply. "I do not have a disability (my wife may disagree) and I agree it makes life more challenging (wouldn’t be called a disability otherwise)." I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult. I simply added that it is not the only thing that makes life more difficult. All of these things need to be considered when making career/job decisions.

Let me take a step back here. You're contradicting yourself.

> In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

> I completely agree a disability makes life more difficult.

Do you not see how it's hard to square the first statement, with the second? You do not agree that life is much harder for some people, but you do agree that a disability makes life more difficult?

> I think we are talking past each other. In my initial comment I said "I do disagree with your assertion that “Life is much harder for some of us.” I still maintain that comment.

It sounds like you have very little experience with people outside your socioeconomic class. (Or you do have that experience, but have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.) It is an obvious, proven fact that life is much harder for some people than for others.

So you took the generous route in publicly shaming them.

I think their quibble was with a different item being used as evidence there (i.e., having a family), not necessarily with all that was said.

I didn't publicly shame anyone. I pointed out their clear position of privilege to help them learn to apply empathy.

I think helping one another to build empathy is a good thing, and even if the person I replied to is unable to do so, it's possible that observing them tell a disabled person that they don't think their life is any harder will help other third parties such as yourself build that empathy.

I did not flag their original comment, but it's not for no reason it was flagged to death.

Text is a fairly imprecise form of communication. It's pretty common for multiple people to get triggered by misreading a post the same way if such a misread is possible.

In other cases downvoted posts are often the most interesting precisely because they trigger people with points they don't want to consider. I certainly wouldn't cite it as proof of any position.

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