Ok maybe I am autistic after all, but I'm not buying that people actually casually feel others' emotions. When someone's telling me about something awful that happened to them, say a car crash, I feel angst, which I think is a fear that something like that may happen to me too, my stomach crunches, the hair stands up, maybe I get a little nauseous...
That's empathy. There is no immediate threat to you, yet someone else's experience gets an emotional reaction out of you. Feeling the threat makes you able to relate better to the threatened person. But you will never be able to produce a 1:1 copy of the real experience. The argument empaths propose is that you can extend empathy consciously by proactively trying to; hence, you
should extend empathy proactively, because it would help you recognize threats posed to other people; which abstracted in a society would mean that threats are recognized better, hence society is geared better towards minimizing harms, hence harms will be minimized. The counterargument is that everything gets overly moralized, and empathy is tiresome. Still, empathy is good is for no other reason than because it helps achieve mutual understandings a bit better.
For the record I never thought you were autistic, I just got irritated that you were really quick to strawman the **** out of me when I presented an unconventional perspective to you, when I make a decent effort to try to understand you when we have disagreements.
Why is everyone so mean has it always been like that?
Read the forum before 2010. It's weird. Some people enjoy the stimuli you get from hurting someone or bringing them down a lil in some way; it's exciting and fun in small doses. But it cultivates a toxic culture. I don't know how to interpret it or what the correct position is here, personally.
She may argue the opposite the next week if that's the contrarian thing to do then. But she is a cold-hearted right-winger and you can bet she has a diminished capacity for empathy compared to us bleeding heart liberals, and tries to justify her lack of feelings as if it's a norm.
I'm a moron/autist myself to a degree, for the record. But I think that what
might seem so reasonable and self-evident to us is not necessarily shared with the majority of people, really. Kurczak in my view is not more or less progressive than any other white person in the US. I don't think we should hold the majority of people to
our standards. We should acknowledge the standards of the majority and work within those parameters(?) when we advocate for something, if that makes sense. That's my view.