Amazing how fragile “conservative” principles are once they come up against real world experience.

My conversion from a homophobic Reagan Democrat to a flaming liberal came out in just such a way — I became close friends with a gay man, a friendship I maintain to this day, 20 years later.

Course there’s always the good old “But, you’re not like most —-insert religion, ethnic group etc. —.”

No wonder conservatives hate empathy.

I feel bad for them.

conservatives have a fixed world view, some made of concrete and they fix the facts to justify their world view.

What shatters their world view is when the real world intrudes, the wife diagnosed with severely deformed infant late in pregnancy, wife on chemo and treatment for cancer finds she is pregnant at 16 weeks, their brother comes out and wants to live openly, they are laid off, loose their insurance because their employer has been shut down and they have a child with diabetes…. All of a sudden universal health care becomes important and not socialist……

Why is it that they actually have to be hit on the head to get it?
Their empathy is so deeply buried that it takes them getting hit with a mack truck to get it…

Think how empathic they would be if their houses were in foreclosure.

Oh, the humanity!

Conservatives are not the only ones to fix the facts. Mort Sahl had a perfect simile: “like a Christian Scientist with appendacitise”

One can empathasise

Psychopaths have a hard time with empathy.

It’s because they were taught when they were young that any empathic response is a sign of weakness, and the worst thing in the world is to show any sign of weakness.

This often comes back to bight them/their parents in the ass when as you say, reality comes calling.

And then there is this fact that trumps almost all others;

“If God meant you to have access to affordable healthcare, a good education, decent employment safe abortions, he would have made you rich.”

The conservative worldview is based on an assumption of conflict and hostility between “us” and “them.” These kinds of experiences make “them” into “us” — or a recognizable variation thereof. That is what empathy does and why it is fatal that worldview.

Empathy that extends to your family and close friends is okay, but if you extend it any further then there’s something wrong with you…

Hey Jane!

I turned the telly on t’other day and there you were. Whoot! Terrific job.
More of that, please. You’re fantastic.

then there’s this

“Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. … And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up,”

10/5/95

“I have to admit that I am powerless over this addiction that I have,” he said. “I used to think I could beat it with force of will. I used to think that I would be different, but I’m not.”

11/17/03

It’s not empathy when they get it. Just a convenient byproduct of their me-centric world view.

Joe Scar has empathy for doctor killers
http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/…..about-joe/

That is the way authoritarians behave and most rethugs are authoritarian.

No clip of you and Shuster?

Most of you are making the assumption that if you empathize with someone/something, that is somehow makes that action right. The blog above brings up Cheney and N.Reagan. It is fine that they can see the other side viewpoint, but it does not make what they view necessarily correct.

Foothillsmike brings up a interesting point. Being a conservative myself, I can empathize with the killer of the abortion doctor, but I certainly don’t empathize with the doctor himself. Do I think the killing of that doctor is right? Of course not!

Another example from my past was my terminally ill grandmother (cancer). In here 2nd to last day of life, she was in enormous pain as the pain killers were becoming less effective, and something stronger was needed. In one of her bouts, she begged my father to put a bullet through her head (father was a police officer)in order to get the pain to stop. As much as one could empathize with that situation, you can’t have people going around making judgments on whether or not someones level of pain warrants a ‘bullet to the head’. If this were to occur, most people with chronic depression would be gone.

What is even sadder (is sadder a word?) is that you expect it from white men, but this empathy issue is crossing the gender line.

http://progressnotcongress.org/blog/?p=1465

Empathy does not justify putting a bullet in someone else’s head, but everyone should have control of his or her life or death. Your grandmother had no right to ask your father to put her out of her misery. She had every right to access to pills to put herself out of her misery. You may agree her last two days weren’t worth it. We can both agree it should have been her call.

The problem is collective thinking. We think that because millions believe in this or that, this or that is right. If someone wants to spend their life high on heroin they should. If someone wants to drop to their knees in prayer, I say go ahead. I don’t want them to pull me down alongside them or to penalize me should I resist.

Empathy is nice and may even be comforting for someone on the receiving end, but it does not matter. As long as each of us can do as we please with our lives without harming the planet or anyone else your feeling for me has no bearing on what I choose to do. The problem is that we don’t have a society permitting that kind of freedom. We may say empathy is the reason the judge approved the program assisting poor persons. The trouble with our society is that too many are forced to depend on the kindness of strangers. We need a society that empowers everyone and makes empathy irrelevant.

Amazing how fragile “conservative” principles are once they come up against real world experience.

When I heard Darth’s comments re: the gay, I immediately thought of Nancy as well.

Went for the whole conservative “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” ride until Ronnie was stricken.

Now comes my WSJ this morning with the moronic headline on the op ed page “Why the Health Care Rush?”

Beyond the burning stupidity and callousness of that headline, I can think of 50 million (and growing) reasons why.

What in the hell does that statement mean….”expect it from white men”?

If empathy has no place in law, then:

a) There is no need for courts, because there is no need to evaluate the law in the context of human endeavor. We should all just accept what legislatures tell us to do, and reorganize our moral compasses accordingly.

b) There is no need to overturn Roe v. Wade, even if abortion *is* murder. If there is no need to be empathetic, then there is no need to care about the unborn. The law is the law, so therefore just accept it and quit being all squishy-feely-empathetic.

Republicans are incapable of empathy. They do not suddenly discover it when circumstances affect them. They are self-centered pricks, always. It is that self-centeredness that, when confronted with a problem that DIRECTLY affects them or their family, leads them to adopt a view that would DIRECTLY help them. If it helps other people at the same time, it is a coincidence, not an intention.

Alyssa Peterson committed suicide (so they claim it was suicide) due to her “empathy” problem (she had it) in the deadly dark torture game.

This is a ferociously anti-feeling culture. As the insensitive chronically accuse the sensitive of being WRONG — of being overly sensitive rather than acknowledging it is they who are without sensitivity and that is a character defect. The people who brought you and/or enable economic rape and now literal rape without any evidence of moral conscience.

Empathy generates partnership and cooperation. Obviously not a priority in this country without pity. McChrystal so strategic keeping his operation away from the IRC.

There is kool-aid drinking enmeshment-bonding and “empathy”, the capacity to put oneself in another’s situation. Not bond with other insensitives and demonize others for being different and inconvenient.

And cronyism certainly trumps empathy time and time again. As well as opportunism, self aggrandizement.

I am so sick of the flood of Judge shows, from Judy to others, who show about as much empathy as Simon Cowell. A culture of authoritarian followers stuck in a Stockholm Syndrome who give power away by admiring and identifying with the aggressors.