They can’t have videos and images of their atrocities, imperialism and authoritarianism being passed around like donuts.

But what is terrible about it is that they actually have no problem with these things because they have managed to spin them as entertainment: “Enjoy watching and take incredible satisfaction in the terrible things that the Great Leader has deservedly done to the bad guys!”

It is more like renting a car when you need it and not having to pay for it for the rest of the time, with the added benefit that it is someone else’s job to maintain it for you.

A lot of the people I regularly interact with are at a contra dancing venue. Does that not count as a community because I have to drive to interact with them instead of walking? (Genuine question; not intended as a gotcha.)

Also, keep in mind that my original comment to @ameancow@lemmy.world was responding to the following,

We have spurned community because it’s more tempting to hide inside and feel miserable and lonely. Losing community was how we lost civics and representation and basic human empathy. [emphasis mine]

Gah, it is not hard for me to talk to strangers! It just burns through energy.

In particular, I have never had much trouble talking to strangers with my full empathy turned on. It gets a bit tricky when I don’t actually care about what they are talking about, but I have a couple of abilities that help with this. First, I generally care about the person and making sure that they feel valued, regardless of what they are saying. Second, I have a mild form of bipolar so I am used to having raging emotions underneath the surface that are disconnected from the situation at hand and needing to regulate them, so I can keep up an expression of interest–and again, I am generally genuinely interested in the person–even while feeling very restless underneath. In fact, I have been so successful at this that in the past a couple of conversations with strangers have led to them asking me out, despite the fact that we were both men and I am not gay.

Again, though, all of this burns through energy. So the difficulty has nothing to do with me lacking a skill but more like being exhausted from having done hard physical labor all day, and then having a random person demand that you drop and do pushups or else they will declare that you are not trying hard enough.

Make an effort. I’m sorry it’s hard.

Is this the kind of thing that you also say to the people in your neighborhood when trying to build a community, and if so, how do people usually respond to it?

I don’t know why you seem to think that extroversion versus introversion is the same thing as having emotional intelligence or not. I would consider myself to be a very sociable introvert and have no problem with empathic listening, but it drains my energy pool so I can only engage it for so long. People who are extroverts do not have this problem as much because interacting with other people recharges their energy pool and being alone drains it.

(I also have an additional problem that I have a very weird variant of bipolar that can cause me to get incredibly euphoric when talking to someone but then crash into a dysphoria afterward, which is extremely draining; this kind of thing is very unusual, though.)

Perhaps you should consider applying the same supposed listening and empathy skills to people on internet forums that you supposedly do to people in real life? Or would that interfere too much with your lecturing?

It’s less that I am defensive and more that I think, based on your comments here, that you are a judgemental self-absorbed asshole who does not understand people nearly as well as you think that you do. 😉

(Also, for the record, although I may be a troll online, I am not a troll in real life. Despite what you seem to believe, I do not actually live in a cave.)

Funny how you go on and on about the importance of connecting with the people around you, but then when someone shows up who is different from you and talks about how they are different, you stop trying to connect and turn incredibly hostile instead.

So much for empathy.

“Oww! Oww! Oww! My broken arm still hurts!”

“Stop whining and keep doing those pushups, and you’ll eventually get strong enough that those bones will knit themselves!”

It isn’t quite clear to me how burning myself out helps anyone.

Speak for yourself. I am not hiding inside so I can be miserable and lonely; I just find social interactions to be energy draining, so I need a lot of time in solitude to recharge.

I have no idea what you are trying to get at by that.

There is no connection because consciousness is not fundamentally tied to society (although obviously its contents can be heavily influenced by it).

I figure that we are all definitely living in a simulation because, even if the world has real physical existence, consciousness is essentially a simulation created our brain to make sense of the world.

What do you see outside your field of vision?