• Jerkface (any/all)@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    No sympathy for parents whose ignorance got their own child killed? None? I mean, that’s a way to go about life, but IMHO it’s a pretty fucked up one.

    It doesn’t directly affect the parents whether randos have or withhold sympathy for them. That’s a choice that we make about what kind of people we want to be and how we relate to the world. “lmao boohoo” is not an appropriate, sane response when a fucking infant dies. Not in any context. Seeing that dehumanizing shit like that being normalized harms everyone who comes into contact with it. I cannot believe this even has to be argued to more than that one person.

    Having sympathy for a person, or better yet, having empathy for a person does not mean that you excuse their actions. It doesn’t reduce you. It isn’t letting them get away with something. It is not unfair, it is not unjust. It grants insight to make better decisions. It enriches you with wisdom and robs the feelings of disgust, reproach, and righteousness we all naturally experience from their ability to warp our own perceptions and decisions.

    • dom@lemmy.ca
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      5 days ago

      Nope. No sympathy. They also put other kids at risk.

      Someone driving 150kph in a school zone doesn’t get my sympathy when they crash into tree, either.

    • Akuchimoya@startrek.website
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      5 days ago

      The baby absolutely didn’t deserve to die like that. The parents, on the other hand, are experiencing the natural consequences of their own choices, literally what their actions brought on and deserved. Nobody has to say, “I told you so”, but neither do they deserve anybody’s sympathy.

      This is no different than parents refusing to get a car seat for their child because they think seatbelts take away freedom, getting in a car accident, and the child dying in the accident. The child’s preventable death is the parent’s fault. They created the environment that was unsafe for the child because they were arrogant enough to believe they knew better than decades of evidence. In this car seat scenario, parents might even be charged with endangerment or negligence.

      Or the grandmother who didn’t believe her granddaughter’s coconut allergy was real, because she knew better than the baby’s doctors, and put coconut oil in the poor baby’s hair and killed her. That grandma doesn’t deserve sympathy for what she did.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      5 days ago

      It grants insight to make better decisions.

      Will the anti-vaxxer parents learn from this? I’m not sure. We saw similar during COVID with people having family members contracting COVID, dying from it, and then still refusing to get vaccinated.