Empathy is for fags and losers!

Look at this survey.

Empathy Quiz

Is this what they gave to kids? This convoluted piece of shit?

"Sometimes I don't feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems."

The fuck kind of question is that? What if the moron deserves his problem? I should weep for him?

"Other people's misfortunes do not usually disturb me a great deal."

Whose misfortunes? My mother's? Hers I care about. Bumjuice Johnson who plays the spackle bucket for nickels down on Maple St.? Nope. At least not beyond the usual fleeting twinge of sadness that most people have and then forget almost immediately.

Maybe it's not empathy they lack. Maybe they don't see the point of lying on some half-assed survey that looks like it could double as the New Employee Questionnaire for Blockbuster Video. I'm confident that anyone achieving anything near a perfect score on that test is either full of shit, or would get beat to death in a room full of normal people who correctly embrace the beautiful, nourishing hatred that lives in their hearts.

 

I scored a 57/71, I guess I'm empathetic??

If I took this in college with my friends I would have done my best to make sure I sounded like the biggest prick alive.

Beefy is exactly right, If I saw a prick professor getting ripped off buy a student I know was selling him fake 50/50 tickets, or some fake drawing, I would laugh and say nothing.

If I saw a girl getting taken advantage of, or guys laughing or making fun of a handi-capped kid I would step in.

I don't exactly know what I would do if I saw a fat,old, or handicapped person fall down though, people falling have always been my weakness.

 

I haven't seen any evidence in my personal life that younger people have less empathy than their elders. Maybe they even have greater empathy, since they're younger, and thus, generally more emotional.

On this question, I completely agree with Beefy Phil.

A survey like this is complete bullshit and call tell nothing.

By the way, I scored a 36/70. Apparently, even 39/70 is a lower score than 90% of respondents. So according to that ridiculous survey, I have extremely little empathy. Which might even be partly true, but many of those questions were far too situational, vague, dependent on response bias, or just generally stupid.

 

I scored 25/70. Guess I don't give a shit about other people, which is exactly right.

 

Ballsack kindly requested an extrapolation, as he apparently seemed to think I was just calling his mother a whore. Calm down buddy, I don't even eat macaroni.

Spoiler'd for length

Spoiler

Helloooooo Malthusian zero-sum game. AKA "There's too many people for the resources on hand! Everyone's slice of the pie is shrinking!"

This seems on the surface to be a legitimate argument, but unfortunately it makes one key assumption that makes no sense: the food supply is static. Or, as ballsack seems to think, shrinking.

Since when? Do you actually think there is a finite supply of food that once consumed is gone forever? That makes absolutely no sense at all, and would only be the case if all farmers vanished off the face of the earth and no one thought it would be a good idea to take their place. As the population increases, a certain percentage become farmers to meet the needs of the population. It really is that simple, and it applies beyond just food into goods, industrial materials, and just about anything else you can think of.

It also doesn't take into account the fact that no matter how big the population is, whether tiny or enormous, the population always grows faster than the food supply. Always. If you have a VERY shallow perspective, you might think "Oh shit, we're going to run out of food and all die out" but that requires a serious lack of common sense and inability to see what's actually happening.

"But what about natural resources like iron, oil, and trees, maaaaan? What about all those things we can't simply make more of, duuuuuuude?"

GET AWAY FROM ME YOU FUCKING HIPPY, DON'T MAKE ME MACE YOU

Two things. First, the planet is a MASSIVE place that we would need a HELL of a lot more time to tap out, resources-wise, and even beyond that we have the entire universe from which to pull resources, should we become desperate enough. Second, dude...if you think there's never been a resource crunch before, and we've never had to deal with it before, you've been spending too much time rolling around in organic compost while strung out on shrooms.

The ENTIRE history of all civilization has been a continuous story of "We need resource x, how do we solve this?" All of history can be explained by this sentence. All of it. We've spent 15,000 years as a settlement-based species successfully solving, or at least surviving, this problem. There's absolutely no reason for us to get stuck on it now.

If a resource runs out, or is no longer viable, we either figure out how to get more of that resource, or shift the way we function to use a different resource instead to get to the same ends. Can't burn oil? Burn coal. Can't burn coal? Burn wood. Can't burn wood? Burn dung. Can't burn dung? Well, you must be the last woman on earth, because women are the only creatures on the planet who do not poop.

And remember, the ultimate source of ALL energy on this planet is the sun, so you have absolutely no basis on which to argue that we'll ever run out of energy while the sun remains in the sky. And even if it doesn't, there's a lot of other suns in the universe we could potentially travel to.

Partly true, but we also happen to be a social species that has developed a far more cooperative and even altruistic survival instinct because from a survival perspective the whole is far greater than the sum of its parts. The spider gets eaten by a swarm of ants, kind of thing. So this could go either way and doesn't really help your argument one way or the other.

Now, if this doesn't sound like chicken little screaming her lungs out until she blacks out and bangs her head on the cobblestone, I don't know what is.

And don't worry, mods, I'm keeping my hands clean of the politics by focusing on "Overpopulation, lack of jobs and dwindling natural resources"

I believe I already addressed "dwindling natural resources", and I would say "Overpopulation" was that whole "You only think this if your perspective is VERY shallow and naive" thing, these two arguments are Malthusian, Thomas Malthus made these exact arguments in the 1700's, and he's been discounted as wrong for over 300 years. The only people who absolutely adore him are those of the Eugenics movement, who loved the idea of "These people don't DESERVE any pie AT ALL. KILL THE POOR/LET THE POOR DIE, MORE PIE FOR THE RICH". Because clearly rich people are fundamentally better than poor people, and that perspective has nothing to do with the fact that it's the rich people who are saying it.

There's no such thing as "lack of jobs" in this country. If you want a job, all you have to do is go down to the employment office. There's always opportunities to work as a day laborer, if nothing else. You just have to not feel so entitled that you'd rather starve than get your hands dirty. And failing that, there's always the possibility of opening your own business and creating your own job. And failing that, you can always become a farmer and create your own resources on which to live along with a living with which to spend.

Ballsack, I'd argue your post was full of fiction masquerading as fact, and I'd also argue that everything in this post I have already said in the last post, but I condensed it by referencing key ideas instead of extrapolating what those key ideas meant.

Oh, and your mother is a whore.

 

There is a noticable difference in college behaviour since I was a young Gen-Xer big man on campus. When I went to college, EVERYBODY was smoking weed and doing mushrooms on the weekend. A LOT of poeple were doing acid back in the 90's as well, but that wasn't me. There was a real Hippy trend going on and though I wasn't one, Hippies I don't mind because they ARE empathetic, whatever the cause may be. When I go to my old campus nowadays, the students set fire to trees using toilet paper and kerosine and then throw beer empties at the fire department when they show up to put out the blaze (completely true story). These same shitheads also overturn parked cars, knock fence planks out and trash other people's proporties like sociopathic apes. This didn't happen when I went to school. Sure, there were still assholes-a-plenty like any college experience...but it wasn'tevery single student, and there weren't Woodstock '99 riot fires and people assaulting policemen for showing up because 500 drunk retards are tearing a neighbourhood to shreds.

In other words, everybody should start smoking weed again. We'd all get along, and we'd have the added bonus of not having to watch some poster boy for vasectomy shoot an alcohol than can bleach hair through his eye socket.

 

Yeah, well...your mother dresses you funny...and you smell like oatmeal.

Oh don't you worry, I'm doing my bit to help society move forward. That's why I spend all my time working in labs.

I'm going to choose to respond to your PM, since it's of more substance, and this whole discussion is relevant to the thread:

Don't straw man ME, scarecrow.

I totally didn't say that there wasn't a large segment of the population that dies of famine. In fact, I said just the opposite when I said that the population always expands faster than the food supply. However what I DID say was that it would be foolish to look at the poorest people, who are shafted for their food by people who can afford to shaft them for their own betterment, and say "Look at all these people, starving and dying. They're going to reproduce SO FAST and eat EVERYTHING and WE'LL ALL STARVE TO DEATH and society will EXPLODE"

That's the premise of overpopulation. The poor are going to expand and consume all the food and we'll all starve. Do you not see the juxtaposition of two incompatible ideas right there? Look carefully...Ok, maybe I'll just point it out: how can a population that's starving to death have enough food to reproduce fast enough to starve itself? That doesn't make any sense at all.

And before you say it, yes I'm aware of that exact thing happening in animal populations under certain circumstances, HOWEVER those circumstances involve a sudden, rapid expansion in the food supply followed by a sudden drop. So unless we suddenly develop the ability to grow 1,000x the amount of food we currently have, and the population of the earth shoots up 10,000x, there's no reason to worry about that.

Also, just the fact that the net world population keeps increasing means (among other things) that we aren't at the brink of being out of food, if such a thing even made sense.