> “I’d like to extend my respect and compassion and sympathy for the ex president and his family, because they’re going to be going through an especially tough time,” Adams added.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.
Sure, but one wishes that it didn't need to arrive on the back of a face-to-face encounter with his own mortality. That understanding of a shared humanity is accessible in other ways, though cancer diagnoses do have a way of shoving it in your face.
We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
I think of it as being reactively empathetic instead of proactively empathetic. Comes from a place of incuriosity and probably fear of mortality and bursting the just world fallacy, among other things. It's a bummer so many are so stingy with their hearts, as though love is some finite resource.
I like to call it "radius of empathy". My spouse provides counseling and therapy services, and is amazed how some of her colleagues can show such genuine empathy to their clients, yet be so unconcerned with the suffering of others that result from the policies promoted by the people they vote for and vocally support.
Well said. And it is probably worth a point of clarification, since some of these replies are acting as if I said that conservatives can't be compassionate. That isn't what I'm saying. I'm specifically using a definition of empathy like the following (emphasis mine)[1]:
>the ability to share someone else's feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person's situation
It isn't a question of caring about people. It is a question of being able to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger with which you might not have anything in common. If you can do that, you will likely have general compassion for immigrants, the poor, the sick, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks, and really anyone who is being persecuted, oppressed, or unjustly burdened by something outside their control. That is fundamentally a more left leaning mindset.
If you need more direct experience (and that includes hearing a firsthand account from someone you are counseling) to engender that compassion, you are more likely to only extend this compassion to people who you share a lot with like your family, friends, and community (not just geographically), while people outside those groups wouldn't automatically be granted that compassion. This is fundamentally a more right leaning mindset.
The respective "radii of emapthy" are just different sizes.
"In my experience, the right wing is always asking 'What about me?' whereas the left wing asks 'What about them?' And that, in a nutshell, is why I will always lean to the left."
-Source unknown
EDIT: alternately, you could argue that the left simply has a more expansive definition of "in-group" than the right does, with fewer litmus tests as to who is granted membership. i.e. "I don't care about their skin color / sexual orientation / gender identity / disability status, they're still human beings and therefore we're on the same team." But it might be a distinction without a difference.
If you want to be this petty, this can be easily explained as american right not caring about Palestine specifically and simply hating him for other things. Please do not try to left/right this.
There is something crazy ugly going on on the left with all their 'happy he got an extremely painful cancer' that is not normal in American discourse and needs to have light shown on it. Please don't try to cover that up, it needs to stop/go away, or at the least be called out, not the calling out being silenced.
> All the people saying Biden's a genocider of Palestine and you shouldn't forget it just because he has cancer are on the left.
Well, they are from the crowd using leftist rhetoric to convince people that the most important thing in the world is to oppose the dominant center-right liberal wing of the Democratic Party at all costs, and which has continued to hold that position even when the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government, and most state governments, and is in the process dismantling the rule of law. A crowd which, incidentally, rapidly metastasized from a small fringe group to a well-funded, highly-visible network between the time that Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020 and the 2024 election.
Now, they could be genuine leftists with the worst imaginable praxis (certainly, truly effective praxis is too rare a commodity on the left), but there are other obvious explanations.
I see it differently. There was a huge outpouring of sympathy from the right when Bidens news broke. I didn’t see a single unsympathetic comment.
Then compare it to mirror issues, when something bad happens to someone on the right. It may be the rage-bait algorithms steering things, but I seem to remember snark from the left after Trumps assassination attempt, the healthcare CEO shooting, Teslas stock decline, etc.
> Here, we tested this putative asymmetry using neuroimaging: we recorded oscillatory neural activity using magnetoencephalography while 55 participants completed a well-validated neuroimaging paradigm for empathy to vicarious suffering... This neural empathy response was significantly stronger in the leftist than in the rightist group.[0]
> Our large-scale investigation of the relation between political orientation and prosociality suggests that supporters of left-wing ideologies may indeed be more prosocial than supporters of right-wing ideologies... However, the relation between political orientation and prosociality is fragile, and discovering it may depend on the methods used to operationalize prosociality in particular... Nonetheless, we are confident that our investigation has brought us one step closer to solving the puzzle about whether our political orientation is intertwined with how prosocial we behave toward unknown others—which we cautiously answer in the affirmative.[1]
Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
But empathy is a feeling that an individual feels, group or no group. In fact, a group (collective noun) can't feel - only people can. Social groups can't have feelings, nor can they know/think etc - these events occur internally/within living humans, who themselves may then identify as part of a group. But empathy cannot be a group activity.
And even if we accept the linguistic shortcut, and agreee that the individuals in some group purport to feel the same thing, how can one know whether they feel it to the same extent? And that they are all of one mind to do whatever action?
Politics and feelings are really worlds apart, and intermediated by one's perception of the world. If you believe it is the group that needs to feel and do, you will look for answers in entirely different places to someone who thinks that only individuals can feel and do.
> Do you think that prosocial is the same as empathy?
Empathy is one of the main prosocial traits that the second linked study analysed.
> Prosocial means getting a group/everyone to do things.
No it doesn’t, it means your individual behaviour benefits others. Empathy is one of the most obvious things to analyse when investigating prosociality because empathy motivates you to behave in ways that benefit others.
The second study are very clear that the results are mixed, weak, and dependent on how prosociality is measured and where (i.e, same study done in one country will give different result in an other). They explicitly note that you can not apply the results to the US because how different the political landscape is between Germany and US.
In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing, which the economic games that the study uses may have a bias against. That would contradict the simplistic conclusion that the prosocial behavior is unconditional.
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing
That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:
> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
A person don't need to go through a similar experience in order to consider themselves as part of an in-group. The commonly used example in social science of an in-group are sport fans who align themselves with a specific team. The fans may have no personal experience of the sport or being part of that team, but they still view themselves as part of the in-group.
Personal experience can definitively help to form identity, but it can also be completely abstract and arbitrary. In many situations there are just an abstract proxy of an implied shared experience that never happened.
Left and right-wing voters also divide the in-group and out-group categories differently, which adds an other dimension to studies looking at empathy towards in-group vs out-group based on political alignment, and they will definitively differ when looking across borders and culture. The in-group of a left voter in the US may be the in-group of a right voter in Germany.
This is why I'm personally unimpressed by "I supported Trump until it personally affected me and my eyes were opened" narratives.
When I see these stories, it's clear that nothing about that person has fundamentally changed. They didn't care that this same thing was happening to others; in many cases they cheered it on. Only when that same injustice is personally turned against them do they actually care, and they will go back to no longer caring the moment their own pain ends.
In the case of George Wallace, he really did change. But like you're pointing out, it's not great if someone has to get shot before they realize they've been a jerk.
On the other hand...plenty of alcoholics know they're ruining their own and others lives but persist in their behavior.
Except of course this other dig at Biden elsewhere in the article:
> “I have the same cancer that Joe Biden has. I also have prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones, but I’ve had it longer than he’s had it – well, longer than he’s admitted having it,” Adams said.
The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
I’m no doctor but I know PSA test would have identified its existence long before this stated progression. It’s a blood test that would be routine for any male his age, he’s probably had them at least annually for decades of his life at this point
Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
> Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not.
The recommendation is not based around the public impact of the patient's death, but around the expected utility of the test in improving the length and/or quality of the patient's life, which is fairly low in the best of times for PSA screening.
A president and their team is absolutely going to take a "better safe than sorry" approach. The doctor is not the only person who decides what treatment should be, the patient does too.
PSA is not fool proof test, and is susceptible to false positives. A substantial fraction of men, in the 40+% range have prostate cancer at death. The treatments for it can be painful and have long recoveries, so there's not obvious solutions.
> Second, many recommendations are based on resource limitations that simply don't exist for a POTUS.
AFAIK, the PSA one isn't based on resource limitations, though.
It's based on the specificity being low enough and the risks, especially with advancing age, of the follow up tests being high enough that at a certain point the test is perceived as having zero-to-negative value in terms of QALY for the patient.
The guideline to stop screening at 70 has nothing to do with financial cost. It’s that detecting it at that point is useless because you’ll generally be dead of other causes by the time it catches you.
Compounding the issue, the rate of false positives rises as you get older which then 1) freaks people out and 2) encourages them to get more invasive tests done which are themselves increasingly hazardous (and less valuable) with each passing day.
There are a lot of good reasons not to speculate about others' health decisions on the Internet, and avoiding a spotlight on your own basic ignorance is one of 'em!
Yes, because most men won't live to be 82, so on average it's not worth it. But presidents are not "most men." They're also
attended by personal physicians who can keep them from freaking out when informed accurately of their health.
I would appreciate less condescension about my supposed ignorance, but I guess that's unrealistic.
Doctors don't adjust how long they're trying to keep you alive based on your job title.
Doctors also don't believe that rich people are somehow immune to the psychological trauma of "you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good → you might have cancer → nvm all good."
Doctors are, unfortunately so far, people. And they're also gatekeepers to care.
It's naive to think they don't discriminate on all sorts of factors outside the guidelines, for instance when treating fellow doctors. Not that they'll admit to it. I know doctors who won't even admit to it to themselves. But they still do it: they'll just call it by a different name or make up an outside reason.
Doesn't track when we are talking about a slow, years long chronic illness and someone who over the last 4 years has had personalized healthcare to the tune of 8 figures.
>The use of the word "admitted" implies that Biden is either lying about how far it has progressed, or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Adams doesn't need to imply it when medical SOP implies it.
I understand why Biden would not want to share that info and think that he made the right call for the situation he was in at the time (even before you consider domestic politics it's generally unwise for heads of state to talk about medical problems unless they're imminently stepping down because of them) but every man in this country over 40 knows that this cancer is screened for and someone getting "head of state" level care doesn't just get surprised by this kind of cancer at this stage unless many people were negligent.
"admitting" could also be in the sense of "disclosing". I wouldn't expect anyone, even an elected leader, to immediately disclose a health issue that requires some amount of understanding and decision-making.
There's a segment of the population that thinks he knew while he was running for president but didn't disclose or "admit" the issue to the public. Given that this is an aggressively metastatic cancer, and Biden's campaign ended nearly 10 months ago, I think that's implausible to the point of being ludicrous.
> or that he has known about it longer than he has admitted.
Which is probably true. And it's fine, he has no obligation to disclose this until he wants to. In contrast his dementia though ....... that's something he should have disclosed earlier.
That in and of itself puts him above what I've come to expect from this low-bar dip in American culture. Good for him.