I don't know, but it confuses me both as an alexithymic and tending to take things literally and speak truthfully.
I know someone who says things like this - if she has a problem she starts saying how she's going to kill herself, or her life is over and she'd be better off dead, and it may be over something very minor. I assume this is not meant literally, it is said flippantly. A sort of colloquialism.
She also says disproportionately intense things about random characters in shows - a character is written as behaving in a certain way to add to the storyline, and she starts saying "with any luck she'll kill herself, the b!tch."
Now I may be a bit odd emotionally and thus, I don't think I'm capable of actually mustering the emotional material needed to literally wish harm on someone, but I think normal people may just say these things in a flippant manner, not literally meaning them.
That or normal people are MUCH more hostile than I would have thought. I don't know much about American politics, but harming others seems to follow the same out-of-sight-out-of-mind model as eating meat with many people. If they actually had to carry out these acts, like killing ISIS as in the example above, I doubt many people would have that resolve. They support it as long as someone else is doing the dirty work for them. The same way as they are fine with eating meat, but could not have the stomach to slaughter the animal themselves.
Would they be pleased if Hilary Clinton hung herself? I don't know. And that's a disturbing idea.
I think most normal people just dismiss this as an empty comment, especially someone in politics. They wouldn't care what other people said about them and would likely expect some of the population to dislike them.
Still, I don't see why disagreeing with someone's policies and arguing their point of view isn't enough. I don't understand why people have to cross over into personal attack or hatred.
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Alexithymia - 147 points.
Low-Verbal.
02 Sep 2016, 3:53 pm
