What peeves me is that people keep mixing up "empathy" with "approval" or even "enablement". It's a very leftoid (or, more precisely, feminine - shut the fuck up, Imp) way of thinking, and they've been doing it for so long that everyone thinks that's the meaning. But it isn't.

Empathy simply means being able to see things from another person's perspective. I can do that often enough, it's not an issue for me. But it doesn't automatically follow that after I've seen a problem from someone else's point of view, I agree with their proposed solution. Most people are incredibly stupid, and some people are outright evil, and that's their perspective. I can see why someone who's been gooning it up to increasingly deranged porn every day for the last decade wants to dress up as a lot lizard and have unsupervised access to small children. That doesn't mean I'm willing to be all "aww, he's not evil, he just really, really wants to be balls deep in a five year old!".