You can tell when politicians don’t like something because they intentionally misrepresent that thing. That is why I am convinced that many conservative Senators dislike the English language.
You might say that these Senators are not intentionally misrepresenting the English language. I disagree. They tend to be well-educated. They all have access to dictionaries and well educated staff. And, they spend all day parsing words and crafting laser-precise legislative language. Okay, I went a little overboard on the legislative language. But you get the point.
Let’s take a look at dictionary.com:
em⋅pa⋅thy
–noun 1. the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. 2. the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.
sym⋅pa⋅thy
- harmony of or agreement in feeling, as between persons or on the part of one person with respect to another.
- the harmony of feeling naturally existing between persons of like tastes or opinion or of congenial dispositions.
- the fact or power of sharing the feelings of another, esp. in sorrow or trouble; fellow feeling, compassion, or commiseration.
Do you see the difference between the two? Empathy: intellectual identification or vicarious experience. That is to say, the ability to understand someone else’s position. Sympathy: agreement in feeling, sharing of feeling between individuals. NOT THE SAME THING. I may be intellectually capable of understanding your bizarre fixation on and professed aversion to homosexuality, for example, without having it in any way affect my judgment of you and without in any way having it sway my own feelings.
And, yet, these yahoos continue to suggest that the “empathy” standard for judges (read: the ability for a judge to intellectually understand all arguments, NOT the prerequisite for a judge to agree with all of them or allow them to bias her decision) will rape the Constitution, permit legal racisim and eat our babies. Let me say this in plain English. WTF d00dz?
These unpatriotic ingrates should be run out of office. Don’t they know that English is our one and only national language?
