Have you seen Misery?

I agreed with the article. Thank you for sharing.

I found the generalization that "helicopter" parents "use their children as pawns" highly offensive, being that due to circumstance fell into that role because I felt too many in charge of my girl's well being were careless with her when she was young. Helicoptering in my case is a reaction to damaging situations and the protective nature that stems from those incidents. I do not try to live through my kid through her enrichments, which was also cited as an example of "dark empathy". Disgusting. Not everyone who is a helicopter parent is a "stage mom" FCS.

With that the terrorism example made sense to me, something that was never on my radar before.

It seems to me that he is not speaking of empathy as a process but more on the actions that are taken when in an empathetic position. This can only be determined by the individual. The process here can also be applied to trust, love, affinity and so on.

This seems to me to me nothing more than semantics, empathy is, by definition:
Definition of empathy
1
: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner
also : the capacity for this
2
: the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it

What the author appears to be doing, at least as I see it, is claiming that:
empathy = empathy + X

Granted, it is doable, but I think that it is an attempt to take away the whole gist of the word empathy. That is just my take on it though.

Another complicated subject often looked at with simplistic eyes. What is the difference between empathy and pity? How about loyalty? How about a person using another's sense of empathy to take advantage of the other? What about empathy for one at the expense of another or toward a group against something that, that groups needs to survive? "People assume that empathy is good because it is good for the recipient of empathy — I'm actually skeptical about this." Being a parent often means (and it should) doing something you don't like and the child doesn't like but is necessary for their growth.

Anything that evolution gave us in the Pleistocene might work to our disadvantage after the Agricultural Revolution. That's what we use Culture to correct.

My opinion. The ability to empathize/ understand other people, in any way, just increases the ability to manipulate them/ their outcomes. Some humans are more Machiavellian about it, some are more alteusitic, then others, but that's not because of empathy or lack of. Empathy is just a tool in the tool kit, and how the tools are used is an independent trait.

If Hitler only had less empathy...