I may not be dancing, but I certainly have more bitterness than empathy for him and all of them. I guess we are devolved into barbarians, but what did you expect? I'm not going to take the high road on any of this

Our culture fell into barbarism a long time ago, Kirk's death is just one more example.

There's one common thread in all
these shootings...







.....guns...

to preserve their fucking gun rights.

*Coventina resumes grave-dancing*

I don't have empathy for fascists and fascist enablers.

And had to look it up. I’ll have to find more about it. I knew there was some controversy about her, but never knew about the affair.

How banal.

I presume this is Heidegger. She had an affair with him in the mid 20s, before he showed any Nazi signs. In the 30s, he joined the party; not in charge of any crimes, but doing nothing to denounce or prevent them either - what his feelings about Jews really were, who knows, but she was Jewish herself, of course.

After the war, they reconnected (resumed a physical relationship? I don't know), and she defended him. But I don't think that's "enabling" him - because he didn't do Nazi things after that.

Given her work helping Jews to emigrate to Palestine, and her arrest by the Gestapo, I don't think it's fair to dismiss her as a "fascist enabler", or to implicitly dismiss her ideas.

Bashing Arendt for her affair with Heidegger is very silly business.

That said, I wouldn't exactly say that he showed no Nazi signs in the 1920s. There's a good case to be made that much of his philosophy was proto-Nazi and certainly right wing all throughout that period.

Heidegger's writings on Jews are much better understood after the release of the so-called black notebooks. They are pretty bad. The major rub for Heidegger scholars is that he absolutely refused to apologize for any of it, even when begged to do so (by Arendt, among others!). Of course, he was barred from teaching after the war as part of the de-Nazification programs. One Heidegger scholar, on writing about the postwar period and the black notebooks, concludes simply that Heidegger was prideful and had a "hard heart" (see Krell, Ecstasy, Catastrophe: From Being and Time to the Black Notebooks). It seems an insufficient judgment.

In any case, I agree with the gist of what you're saying here, and the attempt to discredit Arendt's point on empathy by pointing to her relationship with Heidegger is...not great.

We didn't even need his journals to see his Nazi support.

She had empathy (and love) for Heidegger, and that made her do the disgusting thing she did

I'm not sure what Id call her, but her gross defense of Heidegger post-war was a kind of enabling though.

Empathy is dead in the US. It's primary executioners were Reagan, Gingrich, and Murdoch, and its date of death was a few seconds after we elected a black guy POTUS.

It's that the less so, or totally unempathetic people are louder esp since drumphf was first elected.
He gave them "permission" to be out, and about.
Imho.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning—knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair

None for him. He cared more about guns than human lives.

Will you be sad when Putin dies?

How about Muammar Gaddafi? His death was particularly brutal and grotesque.

Pretty sure I know the answer to the Putin question. It’s not exactly a mystery at this point.

Who knew?

It was worse than the death of empathy. And now it's just a blank space.

No. We aren't. Kirk was a horrible human being. I don't need to have empathy for him. I'm sorry for his children that they lost their dad. How's that?

I call it out when I see it and Kirk exemplified a modern American brand of evil.

I have only so many fucks to give about the state of the world. Most of my fucks are given about my family. The rest are sparingly given (the state of democracy is one, and I actually have empathy for dead kids at school and their families).

Kirk, in life or death really doesn’t get any and he wouldn’t have given any either.

Kirk and others like him helped to get us to this place.

I don't condone what happened to CK, if for no other reason than I do not ever want to see that happen to someone on our side.

I feel empathy for his family, especially his kids who may end up seeing the horrific video online at some point. But we're talking about a guy who viciously attacked various groups, several of which I am a part of. If David Duke gets shot do I have to feel empathy for him too? WTF?

Japanese internment camps, Native American genocide, slavery, which group to hate this week and the most recent was putting children in cages without proper identification treating them worse than a dog in a boarding facility. This is America without the false halo, let’s be honest and see her without her makeup.

I have doubts that empathy is a very common human attribute.

It doesn't awaken as easily in me as it once did, I know that . . .

The barriers, the lawyering, the absurdly expensive shit just for them.

Root of all evil....

None.