Damn It! Empathy Does Not Mean Sympathy.

[Solomon]

Dumb ass Americans. I'm sick of the stupid. It burns deep here in America.

[Eric J in MN]

1. Empathy means feeling what someone else feels.

If you want a judge to care that a plaintiff gets headaches, then you want sympathy.

If you want a judge to get a headache while listening to a plaintiff who gets headaches, then you want empathy.

[ashling]

7. If you try to make sense of these Republican Senators

You get a migraine!

[JitterbugPerfume]

2. this is not the first time

the meaning of a word has been subverted. The right wing zealots are very good at it.

[Echo In Light]

3. Only in this sicko country would being able to empathize w/others be seen as a negative quality.

What a good, "christian" country!

[sfwriter]

4. #$#$ - Makes me sick... EOM

[my2sense]

5. Exactly

How is it that these fools take something positive and spin it to a negative is beyond me. Me thinks the sheeple need to crack open a dictionary.

[bertman]

6. Should we empathize with the sympathizers?

[Lance_Boyle]

8. Neither has any place in a court of law, where cases should be

decided on facts, not emotions.

[angstlessk]

10. If we all lived by your standard, slavery would still be the law of the land

It was after legal, and if the ONLY consideration was if it was legal certainly would be law today. There are more things to the law than precedent and facts, there is this sticky thing called JUSTICE, which encompasses the law AND emotion!

[Lance_Boyle]

14. hyperbolic bullshittery

there is ZERO room in justice for unequal application of the law based upon the emotional whims of jurists.

[Solomon]

11. As a lawyer practicing for thirty years now, I respectfully disagree.

There is great value in being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, and that means both sides.

We don't need robots on the bench. Nor do we need judges picking one side out of sympathy. But judges who can understand both positions - that's what we need.

[Lance_Boyle]

15. I can see your POV on this, but

I must insist that if this emotional intrusion into a jurists' "reflections" results in unequal application of the law, then justice suffers.

[Romulox]

17. In the US, we have combined Courts of Law with Courts of Equity...

"The Law" is what is in black in white, in statutes, and in case law.

"Equity" is a sense of innate decency, fairness, and justice.

So you are incorrect as to the primacy of "law" in our modern court system--it shares a seat with equity...

[tekisui]

18. Only someone naive or living in a vacuum would believe that

court cases are decided on purely factual or intellectual grounds. The jurists find the legal reasoning to get to the position they hold.

[Hutzpa]

9. It's been over use

thats what happens when people that don't understand the meaning starts using
words because they heard someone else uses it and thought to themselves.....
hey! that sounds cool, it makes me look real cool.

[Deja Q]

12. And your vitriol looses more people every day!

:spray:

But, in seriousness, newspeak seems all too real...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

[Sigh Sister]

13. When I was in nursing school,

an instructor confused the two, and I couldn't convince her she was wrong. She told me to look it up in the glossary of the textbook we were using, and IT had it wrong too! I was astounded. I brought a dictionary in the next day to educate her.

[H2O Man]

16. I suspect that you

are making reference to the pathetic ass in DC. He, too, knows that they are not the same. But he is a paid liar, hoping to fool those who do not know. For deceit is he devil's tongue, and lies his language.