Strategies for Shutting Down Empathy–And How Those Help the Right

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This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets(www.dylanottokrider.com).

Hurricane Katrina could have been a story like the boy stuck in the drain pipe, parodied by The Simpson’s star-studded “Sending Our Love Down the Well”episode.Those stories, while schmaltzy, are in the spirit of “a nation comes together.”

Instead, pundits of a particul...