There's so much that's so wrong I can't let it go uncommented. Everything you 
say (in almost every post) seems to factor out *time*. When you say "As 
commands to the self, [anger, hate, contempt, etc.] make no sense what so 
ever", you're speaking as if the Nick of 20 years ago is the exact identical 
Nick as the present Nick, which is so wrong as to be laughable.

Your ill-expressed point is that the empathy/sympathy emotions for Trump 
supporters are not under your intentional control. And you seem to be saying 
that those of us who claim we shouldn't "spare" any empathy/sympathy are either 
in denial or self-blinding or somesuch. Again, that ignores *time*. Sure, I 
feel empathy for some of them, someTIMES. But I don't for others of them, at 
other times.

If you've ever extracted yourself from an abusive relationship, you should 
understand this episodic concept. If you have never had such a relationship, 
then you are the luckiest person I've ever met. The longer the idiocy goes on, 
the less empathy I feel, the fewer episodes of empathy I experience. The abuser 
only has so much time to change his ways before I explode and murder him in his 
sleep, my tears of sympathy mixing with his blood.

Maybe the additional premise is that there is such a thing as time and 
evolution? It's weird that someone who talks about things like MOTH would fail 
to understand that, though.

On 11/12/20 9:57 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> Ok,  but, let’s look at that impulse. Is it the impulse to sympathize?  Why 
> is that so scary?  Sympathy is informative, not paralyzing.  Can one not feel 
> sympathy for the rabid dog just exactly at the moment one kills it? Somebody 
> ran over a cat in our yard, once, crushed it’s hindquarters.  I felt 
> tremendous sympathy for the cat, /and so I killed it. / For sympathy to be 
> paralyzing, there has to be one more premise, and I cannot identify that 
> additional premise.  Anger, hate, contempt, etc., are assertions of an ought. 
>  Oughts only work in the context of trying to incite others to a common 
> action.  As commands to the self, they make no sense what so ever.  So, 
> unless you are standing in front of crowd, trying to get them to lynch 
> somebody, these emotions are self-blinding.  Now, I suppose, self-blinding is 
> useful, when you just don’t want to fuck with subtleties of life, but nothing 
> about them can be claimed as rational.  Right?  What is the additional 
> premise that turns my
> empathy into something I should not feel.

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