Am i the only one with NO empathy for the Cinema Massacre?

Post Reply New Topic

Let's see, there are situations in life where sometimes it's best to simply observe.....

What is going to happen in this community with regards to members promoting 'lack of empathy'..... is analogous to what happened in the African-American community with members who promoted the n-word.

People are going to feel comfortable and justified in referring to Autists as lacking empathy because a lot of Autistics are doing it amongst themselves. And, what is going to inevitably happen is people are going to compare 'autists lack of empathy' with the psychotic behavior of criminals.

Whether you care or NOT is strictly up to you.

BUT, no one can complain THAT someone did not take the time to tell them what will occur.

TheSunAlsoRises

Last edited by TheSunAlsoRises on 26 Jul 2012, 12:44 am, edited 1 time in total.

2:00 in this video seems very relevant, in more than one way.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfmkRi_tr9c[/youtube]

Naw. But, i will leave it, alone.

Right movie, wrong scene.

TheSunAlsoRises

You can't do that! You're gonna drive everyone nuts!

Yea i mean I know it was f*cked up but ........ I hate to say I don't really care

I don't see what point you want me to perceive here.

I do not have any issue with people not feeling upset or sorry or badly about the shooting.

My comment earlier about compassion was mostly to do with the whole GTA: Aurora nonsense.

Isn't the Joker saying almost exactly what thomas81 said, and what you agreed with? He's saying that there are certain deaths that we don't even think about - the deaths of soldiers and criminals (and civilians in Muslim-majority countries). And yet we all (pretend to) go into mourning when a few privileged people die (like the Mayor of Gotham, or movie-going Westerners).

Nope. I do not trust any government, corporation or political party. I do not trust any individual person either, at least until they have proven themselves worthy of my trust. I have lived too long and studied too much history to think that I can trust anyone other than myself with my personal safety. This is why, politically, I am a conservative libertarian. Yes, we need government, but no, we don't need anywhere near as much government as we now have. After all, if more government made life better, than North Korea would be a paradise and the Soviet Union would have succeeded in seeing a worldwide worker's revolution against bourgeois oppression.

At any rate, this is where I stop with this thread jack. It's distracting too much from the original intent of the thread.

Last edited by outofplace on 26 Jul 2012, 3:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know. I possibly didn't understand a good number of the words the Joker was saying.

I don't think I understand the picture, so I won't bother commenting on it. The rest of it however is interesting. I wasn't even aware that I felt "no empathy" for the victims until people started talking about the fact that they did. I just sort of assumed that the only people to feel empathy for what happened were the friends and family of the victims. Makes a lot more sense now why my NT friend kept telling me how bad she felt about what happened. Another question; is it possible to only "think" sympathy? Because I acknowledge that what happened was terrible and sad and that people are going to be emotional about it, but I don't actually feel anything for it, there is no emotion tied to the event for me at all, except a mild, very brief fear for my own safety when I went into a movie theatre last week, but I doubt even that would have occurred if my friend hadn't been telling me all day how worked up she was over it.

I feel as bad about it as I felt when my grandmother died or when I think of the many anonymous people who die every day--children and mothers and wonderful people who should have lived longer, people who never had a chance to fulfill their dreams. In other words--the emotion is barely there, but cognitively, there is a huge sense of wrongness, like a pattern out of place, like a rhythm turned to random noise.

I don't feel any sort of particular empathy for the people and their families--it more just kind of adds to my general sense of the injustice in the world and how I desperately want to fix it, and can't. I wonder how we can prevent it from happening again, and what tragedies we might cause in attempting to prevent it if we went about it the wrong way. I get angry that death has to exist at all, and that so often it comes when we're not ready for it.

So... I don't experience empathy in the NT way. But my own style of empathy responds as strongly to that as to any other tragedy.

I don't understand why someone would take their 6 year old to see a violent film.

Autists have empathy and ToM BUT it presents itself differently.

And, it makes sense given the spectrum of social challenges found in Autism.

There is probably a correlation between True Empathy (non-obligatory show of concern) based on indirect and direct interests.



TheSunAlsoRises

This is something I have wondered for a long time. My father took my sister and I to see such films as Death Wish, The Incredible Melting Man, Bug (a monster movie about cockroaches that set things on fire - a lot of characters burned to death with giant roaches crawling all over them), and one I forget that featured some kind of monstrous leech that would cause chemical burns and kill people.

I found these films pretty disturbing and terrifying. However, I do not know what my reaction to the Nolan Batman films would have been, since I loved the whole Batman thing as a child.

I'm of the opinion that if you are a 16-year-old boy in New Zealand, like the OP, or of any age living anywhere else, who does not read in depth the news stories about other people's tragedies or has not felt a personal family or friend loss, then AS or not, you are just not going to care about or feel sympathetic towards other people who suffer horrible tragedies as the Aurora massacre. Honestly why should people's deaths in mass killings, single murders, train wrecks, tsunamis, earthquakes, drownings, car accidents, wars, etc. even bother anyone, especially if their deaths occur half way around the world?

But then again, with time, experience, including learning to love somebody other than our individual selves -- which may lead one toward feeling a part of the human race -- those of us who are/were callow youths may grow into thinking and feeling a kinship towards the plight of our fellow man. We may even learn to like them. When they die, we may appreciate the finality of their deaths and to mourn them. If we tell their loved ones, "I am sorry for you loss," we may even mean it. Thus we have become empathetic and human.

Then again, if no one's death, not even that of our parents, siblings or so-called best friends, affects us with sorrow and grief, then maybe we're really just androids after all.