Words like psychopath have a common usage for people not in psychology/psychiatry. I'm sorry that we're not meeting the clinical definition that you want, but I don't think ranting about it all over Lemmy is going to help anything.

When the average nonspecialist individual thinks "psychopath" they think of someone like Hannibal Lecter, who is dangerous and must be locked up to prevent them harming others, and that's not going to change from a short form text post. It would take a semester of psychology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Not having empathy should be cause for at least suspicion in and of itself

[–] [email protected] -4 points 2 days ago

That's a very vague statement. You didn't specify which type of empathy. For example, cognitive empathy is the ability to intuit what other people are thinking. Autistic people tend to have less cognitive empathy, which is related to the poor social skills. It's hard to participate in social situations when you have a clinically significant inability to read minds. Drag doesn't think you want to treat autistic people with suspicion, so why don't you work on clarifying your statement to an appropriate level of specificity?

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Then we should make psychology a compulsory subject in high school.

[–] Shizrak 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah drag, we probably should. More education is pretty much always good

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Unfortunately, most Lemmy users are past high school age, so we'll have to educate them ourselves.

[–] Shizrak -1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, but remember the honey and vinegar metaphor.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Actually, flies love vinegar. It smells like rotting flesh, which is a great place to go lay eggs.

This unintuitive fact matches the truth that being rude to people is an important part of the process of personal growth. Getting people to change takes a carrot AND a stick. When they do change, they'll remember the carrot more easily. But the stick is important too. You can see this politically with the fact that the government likes to praise MLK for his nonviolent methods, but Malcolm X is the one who got Reagan to pass gun control laws in California. MLK's movement was threatening because the politicians knew that if they didn't work with the nonviolent protesters, those protesters would join movements like the Black Panthers. Likewise, rude leftists encourage people to be more open to listening to the polite leftists in their lives. The rude ones raise the stakes.