As this last brutal week has made clear, although most people react to unimaginably medieval murders with horror and instinctively feel great sympathy for the victims, that’s not universally true.
Sometimes the need to assume that such sympathy, were it to become visible, would enrage part of a semi-public figure’s constituency leads that person — say, for argument’s sake, a public school superintendent — to placate proactively. To kneecap the sympathy. To both-sides something to which there is only one side.