A true psychopath self identifying
A true psychopath self identifying
119 comments
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Sorry to nitpick, but technically not a psychopath but a sociopath.
A psychopath recognizes that things like empathy and integrity and morality exist, and just doesn't care. A sociopath (like, by his own admission, both Kirk and the linked poster) doesn't even understand what they are or believe that they exist.
Aside from that - yes - it's deliciously ironic that the linked poster apparently sincerely believes that the context somehow makes it better, rather than, as it actually does, simply driving home the point that Kirk was a sociopath.
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Im not convinced he didnt know empathy existed. I believe he uses these weak cliches as a piffy jumping off point while "debating." Sure, no one can feel the exact same way as someone but thats not what empathy means. I believe Charlie knew that but instead of conceding the point he would use appeals like this to get suggestable people to deny the reality of empathy.
He demonstrates this by admiting he knows the meaning of the word sympathy and how it is different from empathy.
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Just fyi, I think you might mean “pithy” unless you were going for an onomatopoeia
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Exactly. The whole "just debating" thing is a load of wank. It's just a way to frame manipulative ideological recruitment.
Why was he going to universities to "just debate" ? Obviously, the purpose was to recruit supporters for his kooky agenda.
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Mmm... yeah. I think you have a point here.
And on reflection, I don't know what possessed me to believe that Kirk was honestly relating his view on the matter.
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Damn, somehow it's even worse with the full context.
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Wait till you see the one about gun deaths and he reduces human life down to a statistic. As america spirals into authoritarianism with no recourse from the 2nd amendment defenders. At least cars do what they purport to do.
Everyday I consent to get in my car. I do not consent, to say, getting shot in a public location, like maybe, a university campus.
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Everyday I consent to get in my car. I do not consent, to say, getting shot in a public location
I get that your main point is to debunk this guy's defence of guns, and that's a worthy goal, but this is motornormative bullshit. Cars kill thousands of people who gave no such consent, like pedestrians and cyclists. The analogy doesn't even line up properly. A more apt analogy would be to compare consenting to carrying a gun yourself being equivalent of consenting to get in your car.
And even that implies that you really did give full and uncoerced consent with viable alternative options. Which, if you live in a typical car-dependent American (or Canadian, Australian, etc.) city, you did not. Because your city lacks adequate public transport options, lacks safe cycling infrastructure, and things are too far apart to walk in a reasonable time. !fuckcars@lemmy.world
Guns are also bad and anyone who thinks America doesn't need radical change in gun culture and gun laws is fucking insane. But don't let that fact be a reason to also defend motornormativity.
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Wow, all those armed guards are really good at hiding because I never see them. I feel much safer now
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Christ on a cracker, the context makes it even worse!
[30 comments in this is probably not an original comment anymore, but I had to write it out]
FWIW, I work with children, and I see every day that empathy is a learned skill. Usually learned at the same time they learn socialising with other kids. This person was probably failed by all adults around him in childhood. By the system. But that doesn't excuse going on social media and whipping the masses into a hateful frenzy.
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Isn't Christ THE cracker? Wouldn't Christ on a cracker be two crackers?
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I found Cheesus Christ on a Cracker
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American Christ ig
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ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Too many. [Applause]
ATTENDEE: In America, it's five. Now, five is a lot, right, I'm going to give you — I'm going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?
If this had gone on, the next question should be "does gang violence only count as three-fifths of a violence to you?"
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But also - even if you add gang violence to the figures, all it would do is dilute the number of trans shooters further, if taken as a genuine premise, he devastates his own argument.
Of course it's not a genuine question though as he's not attempting to have an honest discussion, he's just trying to throw in a racist whataboutism to distract (and hopefully derail) the initial discussion. Standard right-wing chud 'debate' behaviour.
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No the reason he asked that question about gang violence is because gang violence numbers are a huge percentage of mass shooting numbers, so if you take them out of the calculation then the percentage of trans shooters is much higher and it is a debate about trans shooters. On the other hand, if you include those numbers then it is a debate about guns in general and ideologies or mental health issues get lost in the noise. I would guess he mostly wanted to make a point that the definition of mass shooting is not really in line with how people think of them.
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This was their framing before they went to the event https://www.instagram.com/reel/DN69cs5Ecab/
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So the rest of the quote reveals a kind of sociopathic narcissism in which he argues that empathy doesn't exist, so instead you just need to passively look down on others.
The context makes it clear that he does not mean “sympathy” in it’s “i support you” meaning but the “you have my sympathy” - aka “thoughts and prayers” - meaning.
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Empathy is about understanding where someone is coming from. Plain and simple.
Charlie Kirk had no empathy because he had no interest in understanding where people were coming from when he debated with them. He was always on the attack and never tried to understand his opponent.
He was the apogee of the thoughts and prayers kind of people.
Empathy for me and sympathy for thee kind of people.
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Empathy means you realise that you are fundamentally the same as someone else, sympathy comes from a position of power. It's a performance where you are pretending that you are feeling something so you don't appear as a psychopath.
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I think sympathy can be something you can try and understand but not fully grasp. I can TRY and understand why women are emotional during menstruation, but will I ever KNOW what that feels like? No I won't.
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I thought the quote was bad, the full version is almost worse.
We go from "mean" to "mean and stupid".
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What a great concept to teach boys/young adults who are still developing or struggling with emotional intelligence.
The world is better without him.
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Tell me you've never looked up these two words before without telling me bruh wtf, they aren't synonyms, they mean different things lmfao rest in dirt.
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I am starting to think that this guy was an asshole.
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I mean this is how he argues too. Well, look where that got him.
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Starting?
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I honestly never heard of the guy until all of this. With that said, he worked for Faux News, so it's a given.
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Not understanding the difference between empathy and sympathy also means they can't understand how empathy is a strength that can be used to your advantage.
Is empathy a strategic imperative? A review essay
Despite its softer connotations, empathy is hard, requiring strategists to confront misperceptions and false assumptions, and overcome individual egos and national hubris. This article reviews the literature, examining some of the gaps and costs incurred. Whilst strategic empathy may have transactional and instrumental connotations, it suggests that the concept holds greater potential to transform strategy. Used wisely, it offers an ethos and means to put people first, foster greater security, and offer innovative approaches to contemporary challenges.
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Sympathy means you are practicing concern for others from your own perspective. Usually that means relating to someone through your own similar experiences. For example, when someone loses their job, your remember how you felt when you lost your job or when you felt inadequate or betrayed, or when you faced financial struggles. And you sympathize with them through those shared circumstances. This is a great thing, and you should absolutely do this.
Empathy means you take someone's perspective to try to understand how they feel. This is of course, impossible to do perfectly as you are not them. But the point of it to step outside of your own lens and your low personal experiences and get a glimpse of how they feel from their own experiences. This is of particular value when you do not have a comparable experience for what they are going through to pull from. Like a white person in America has never had the experience of being racial profiled by the police. Any attempt to sympathize would be ignorant at best, insulting at worst. Your experience getting pulled over for speeding is not the same as being pulled over for seeming suspicious for having your skin color in a given place and time. Practicing empathy is trying to understand what that must feel like for them from their perspective and given all of the experiences they must have had in their life. Again, this is going to be imperfect, but if services a purpose in making you understand the experiences and world views of others that are different than you.
That is why the right hatesthe concept of empathy. A) It means that their experience and viewpoint is not objective. B) It means that they are expected to practice seeing others as individuals in whole, not as charactictures and stereotypes. C) It means that they are faced with the realities of bias, bigotry, privilege, and systemic racism that does exist and is experienced by everyone differently. And D) It means that their gut reactions, their inherent feelings of fear, disgust, anger, and hatred at those different to themselves needs to be challenged and seen for the bigotry it is.
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Very well put. Thank you.
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This is the kind of simplistic 1-2-3 logic they use all the time to destroy entire concepts like… human empathy. Troglodytes around the world will walk around with this phrase in their back pockets for years. Thanks, dead guy.
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At least he's dead. At least we have that.
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Charlie Kuck dropped out of college after 1 semester and it shows.
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One semester? Looked like he was only there a couple hours TOPS before-- OH, oh, oh... I got ya.
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Empathy isn’t just about feeling, it’s about perspective. Not only do you attempt to understand the feeling, you try to understand the situation the person is in that led to those feelings. Sympathy is acknowledging something bad happened to someone, but that doesn’t mean you personally appreciate the emotions of the other person.
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I guarantee he isn't feeling anything now.
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Did he ever?
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Pretty sure he felt a split second of surprise.
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So he had neither empathy nor sympathy...
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Had*
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Corrected.
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As he said, Empathy requires, well...Empathy. the ability to recognize what a person MIGHT be feeling. It's reading someone, and trying to relate. It doesn't mean literally reading their mind, and channeling their emotions like a Vulcan Mind Meld.
On the other hand, Sympathy can simply mean pity, especially to someone like him. He can't recognize your pain, all he can do is feel superior that he's not in pain.
It's the basic definition of Liberal vs Republican. Liberals (general term, not Neo Liberals) are concerned with society, Republicans are concerned with themselves.
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So according to https://www.etymonline.com/word/empathy the word was coined in 1858 in German. And was coined in English in 1908. So "new age" is 117 years (or less, whenever this was actually said).
Then, he seems to imply these things (empathy and sympathy) are mutually exclusive... which they are not.
And the whole point, is to appear intellectual and deep with "and no one can feel what another person feels"... If this was Reddit, this would be pinned, front page of /r/im14andthisisdeep for all time.
And much like many plots in GoT that went no where... the "lot of damage" is brought up but it didn't go anywhere. How does it cause damage? What does it damage? What IS the damage? I'll do you one better, WHO is the damage!
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Charlie Kirk's death is very consistent with his life and ideals. You can say a lot of bad things about Charlie Kirk, but no one can accuse him of being inconsistent 😂
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Consistently wrong.
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This is something similar to what Sam Harris said.
Sam Harris advocates that empathy is the wrong metric by which to evaluate helping someone, and we should use compassion instead.
The difference? Empathy can be highjacked and relies on intuition. You see a news story about some little girl in your city who lost her arm in a dog attack, you feel more empathy for her than a child in Africa whose whole family was just slaughtered by militant Christians.
So, instead, we should use compassion as our north-star. We can use logic to guide us to making choices which lead to preferable outcomes for those who need it most.
None of this relates to Kirk though because he's a pseudointellectual grifter who failed to demonstrate empathy for anyone who doesn't fit into his Christian nationalist world view. That's my two cents.
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As if Sam Harris isn't a personally salient cause away from being Jordan Peterson. Dude has the same arrogance and flies in adjacent circles, so he could easily go full fascist grifter if some brainworms issue took hold.
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That’s a lazy smear. Harris and Peterson are ideological opposites; atheist materialist vs. Christian traditionalist.
Sam regularly loses followers because he won't bend to tribalism, which is the opposite of grifting. He's not afraid to piss off his own base by saying the "wrong" thing.
You can call him arrogant, but suggesting he's a fascist-in-waiting is stupid. His framework has always been about advocating for compassion and upholding the virtues of epistemology as a means of a more tolerant and equitable future.
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I didn't know crap about this guy a week ago. I have 2 sons who sort of like this guy but can't really tell me why. They get pissed off when I ask about him although I'm not putting him down, since I knew nothing about him. Now though, after reading at least 10 articles from left/right/middle/ websites and can positively say that the one shot that killed him was a great fucking shot. No one should die for what they're saying... but then Hitler said many things too but was not killed.
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He was in many ways one of the causes of the decline of constructive political discussions. A man who's income came from having political discussions asking people to prove him wrong and never ceding ground. Debate club disguised as discussion, then filmed and posted to the internet for the masses to see his ideas "win". There was no evidence on a single issue that could change his mind except his donors telling him to or polling indicating he's losing support over his stance.
In many ways it's reminiscent of old videos in which preachers debate scientists about evolution before the scientists either learned to debate to a crowd or got replaced with science educators.
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New age, huh?
1908, modeled on German Einfühlung (from ein "in" + Fühlung "feeling"), which was coined 1858 by German philosopher Rudolf Lotze (1817-1881) as a translation of Greek empatheia "passion, state of emotion,"
I looked up empatheia and it turns out to mean maliciousness and having an opposite meaning
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Spoken like an undiagnosed autistic. If only there were signs
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Now that you mention, I don't really feel a bullet in my neck. Cool.
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This is where I get to say “Fuck your feelings”
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Yeah, I knew it was taken out of context but is this really that much better? There are plenty of other examples.
119 comments
On the one hand, I think everyone hates that person who pulls the "I'm an empath" card.
On the other hand, "empathy isn't real" is a bad faith attack on the concept of trying to emphasize or even understand people that are different from you.
That's what I got from every Charlie Kirk debate I ever saw: a machine gun of bad faith counterarguments.
Debate is about understanding where the other person is coming from, identifying weaknesses in each other's position, and working towards shared truths.
Since he couldn't empathize, Charlie couldn't debate. So he went with the modern debate strategy: I only win when someone else is losing.
Spoiler alert: That's how fascists argue. It's all bad faith arguments.
I noted a while ago that I never once heard Kirk say an argument that wasn’t a debate fallacy. Not one time.
What is the "I'm an empath" card?
Are there people who try to make out like they're Deanna Troi style empaths?
Or do you just mean people who claim to have particularly strong empathy / be particularly empathetic?
As an aside, emphasize isn't related to empathy, and I didn't think empathize is a word, although my spell-check apparently thinks it is?
As an empath, I'm really in tune with other people's emotions, and I cry all the time, so I know that you're super broken up about not knowing about the empath card - even if you can't stand to admit it to anyone but me, who's more in tune with your emotions than you are... Because I'm an empath.
No shit Susan, getting sad at the commercials for starving children doesn't make you an empath.
It was half-facetious, but I think a lot of conservatives hear the word "empathy" and think of means this. (Watch the first 60 seconds and tell me you didn't cringe.)
Empathize is a word. It means" to feel or experience empathy", or "to be understanding of".
When I say Charlie Kirk was arguing in bad faith, I'm saying
he'she was pretending only the first definition exists and that it sounds like the Jubilee video, when most people use the second definition in real life.Empathize is definitely a word.
I despise when women say "I'm an empath" and then continue to tell you how you feel when that is not actually how I feel. No. You don't get to claim to know me better than I do.
".....so....you're an alien from Betazed? I don't understand."
This is the kind of thing that fuels his argument. People who are claiming they can literally read your emotions psychically. I get they don't really mean that, but that is what the damn word means.
He certainly wasn't trying to reach a shared truth. He was trying to win the argument. Which is usually the point of debate. But it would be nice if the goal was to reach a shared truth...
I dont know why you brought up "empaths." That is kinda bad faith if you ask me. No one is talking about pseudo science spirtualism. Empathy, mirroring the feelings of someone else when observing them, is a completely scientifically proven trait people have. There is no debate.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352154617301031
Did you stop reading after the first sentence?
You're describing Hegelian dialectics - not debate.
Debates are usually about proving your position, and thereby proving the other person's wrong.
That's how I was taught to debate.
Unless your positions are mutually exclusive, it's often possible for both parties to justify their position.
From my experience, the zero-sum I'm-right-you're-wrong style of debate started when we started televising them. You may disagree, but I think debate was more productive when we weren't incentivized to score points on each other.
If that's Hegelian dialectics, then I prefer that to what you call debate.