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Why Obama Can Empathize with Everybody and Sympathize with Nobody

By Jacob Freeze, Section Diaries
Posted on Sat May 30, 2009 at 11:47:25 AM EST
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Apparently "empathy" has lost its status as a Presidential buzz-word, like so many other discarded buzz-words on the trail of linguistic trash which Barack Obama is gradually tracing across the English language.

Goodbye to "hope, change, and empathy," and hello to torture, trillion-dollar give-aways, cover-ups, murder, "preventive detention," and the rest of what we would probably have to call "the real Obama," if such a thing existed.

It's probably silly to talk about shades of meaning in a universe of public discourse where newspapers long ago laid off the last old-school copy editor, but in this particular instance it may be worthwhile to step outside the context of all those warm and fuzzy slogans which elected a cold and cynical President, and ask...

What's the difference between sympathy and empathy?

Sympathy means the stimulation in a person of feelings that are similar in kind to those that affect another person; empathy means a mental or affective projection into the feelings or state of mind of another person.

If I sympathize with you, I feel what you feel, but empathy is more like mental role-playing. Classical actors understand a character, but method actors feel the pain.

Empathy is different from sympathy in that to be empathetic one understands how the person feels rather than actually experiencing those feelings, as in sympathy.

For a con-man like Obama, sympathy would be a crippling disability. Who wants to feel what the suckers feel? But every successful con-man is a master of empathy. How else can you figure out what the suckers will fall for?

This distinction has absolutely no cash-value in the United States today, except for a marginal difference in tone. "Empathy" is a slightly more intellectual representative of the empathy/sympathy hodge-podge, and probably more appropriate for a speech by the sort of high-class con-man who belongs in the Ivy League and Oval Office, instead of Las Vegas and San Quentin.

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    Why Obama Can Empathize with Everybody and Sympathize with Nobody | 2 comments (2 topical)

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    Ricci, Raniola, and Dabit (none / 0) (#1)
    by Jacob Freeze on Sat May 30, 2009 at 02:50:18 PM EST
    Legal news-junkies will immediately recognize that the title of this comment is a list of some notable decisions by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, instead of an obscure legal partnership in... Omaha, maybe.

    "Discussion" of Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court in the mainstream media will probably buzz around Ricci, with some carry-over into Raniola, but if Sotomayor's opponents had any real regard for the truth of the situation (and they don't), they would forget about trying to convict the nominee of extra-judicial "empathy" in connection with her high-profile rulings in the area of work-place and employment discrimination, and concentrate instead on the only instance where Sotomayor may have actually jumped the tracks of judicial restraint, and written an opinion based on sympathy for a plaintiff and revulsion for one of the most miserable statutes (SLUSA) ever enacted in the ongoing transformation of federal law into a shield for the ultra-rich against the rest of us, and that would be Judge Sotomayor's opinion in Dabit v. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc., 395 F.3d 25 (2d Cir. 2005), and its sequels.

    The Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998 (SLUSA) throws class-action suits against deceptive stockbrokers out of state courts, in the same way that the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) had previously thrown them out of federal court.

    What a beautiful statute!

    Now annoying little investors can't clog any kind of courts with class-action suits against our benevolent Wall Street masters, no matter how deceitful they may be!

    But SLUSA only specifically denied class-action suits based purchasing trash stocks, and Sotomayor opined that suits based on retaining trash-stock could proceed in the state courts.

    This decision was crushed 8-0 in the Supreme Court, with a majority opinion composed by Justice John Paul Stevens, an icon of the liberal judiciary.

    Anyone who bothers to read Judge Sotomayor's meticulous opinion in Raniola, "addressing every one of the trial judge's rulings and rationales methodically, with exhaustive citations to prior judicial decisions from around the country"...

    For anyone who reads that paradigm of unreversible case-law it's almost impossible to recognize the same hand in the tenuous reasoning which allowed Dabit's case to proceed against Merrill Lynch, and try as I may I can't imagine how Judge Sotomayor could have written such a thing except out of sympathy for all the little people who have been bankrupted by Wall Street gangsters and their stooges in Congress.

    Pam Karlan would have been my first choice to replace David Souter, and I virtually never agree with anything Barack Obama says or does...

    But I applaud the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, and on the day when she is finally confirmed, I will literally stand up and cheer!

    Typo (none / 0) (#2)
    by Jacob Freeze on Sat May 30, 2009 at 05:43:48 PM EST
    It should be...

    "But SLUSA only specifically denied class-action suits based on purchasing trash stocks..."

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    Why Obama Can Empathize with Everybody and Sympathize with Nobody | 2 comments (2 topical)

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