Empathy

After reading this profile of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, I have a better sense of the whole issue of empathy, a key sticking point of conservatives, in the case of Sonia Sotomayor. The issue is not empathy as such, but who you are empathetic toward. Empathy is fine if you are empathetic to the rich against the poor; the president against the congress; men against women and the majority against the minority. It is only wrong if it is practiced the other way round. Empathy is to be reserved for one's own tribe exclusively and not extended beyond the village boundary.

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Compare And Contrast

Tory treatment of auto workers and CPP executives. I wonder if they will ever have the guts to come out and say that workers make too much and executives too little? Doubt it.

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Why We Fight

To send little girls to school.

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Are The Tories Turning To Stalinist Jew Baiters For Ad Ideas?

One would think so, the way they are playing up the "Rootless Cosmopolitan" angle on their Iggy attack ads. I doubt they are, but they really do need to watch their language.

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And As For Climate Change

We're boned.

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What Yglesias Said

Matthew Yglesias on the ongoing saga of SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The argument about Sonia Sotomayor consists of the idea that we should discount her career and her degrees because those are just the results of the kind of “preferential treatment” that poor Puerto Rican girls from the projects get. We’ve also heard that she has a troubling fondness for Puerto Rican food. That it’s unreasonable that she pronounces her name as if it’s a Spanish word. We’ve heard that she’s a soft-hearted woman who wants to set aside the law in favor of empathetic victims, and also heard complaints that she’s failed to set aside the law in order to help out empathetic white people. These kind of criticisms are going to drive Hispanics away from the conservative cause not because conservatives are criticizing a Latina, but because they’re criticizing her in terms that imply a generalized skepticism about the qualifications of all American Hispanics, a loathing of Latin culture, and a monomaniacal obsession with defending the interests of white people. And while not all conservatives have gone in for the full Goldfarb/Krikorian madman treatment, no prominent voices on the right seem interested in checking the tide of borderline bigotry from their camp. It’s a reminder that checking prejudice against non-whites isn’t something conservatives are interested in.

Aside from that the GOP is on to a winner.

Update: Next "argument" against her, she's a bitch and a ball breaker. What is this a public discourse or the locker room of a suburban high school?

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Ah, But The Strawberries

Yes he talks like Nixon, but I think Harper is entering the Queeg stage of his madness.

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