The Perils of Lindsay Lohan

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Now Lindsay Lohan is going to give our criminal justice system a little tour, after it has barely gotten a rest from Paris's little visit.

I saw a news report today in which she assures us that the cocaine the police found in her pocket was not her drugs. She was just holding it for someone, being a pal, you know. So, we needn't worry.

Good luck with that, babe! Maybe your lawyers can make that work. Of course, that defense wouldn't even draw a smirky chuckle if it came from an underclass urban minority.

I actually don't like her odds. The Establishment seems to want to make an example of these privileged party girls. Cracking down. As if to try to retard the decline of civilization. Good luck with that, too!

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The Perils of Lindsay Lohan

♠
Now Lindsay Lohan is going to give our criminal justice system a little tour, after it has barely gotten a rest from Paris's little visit.

I saw a news report today in which she assures us that the cocaine the police found in her pocket was not her drugs. She was just holding it for someone, being a pal, you know. So, we needn't worry.

Good luck with that, babe! Maybe your lawyers can make that work. Of course, that defense wouldn't even draw a smirky chuckle if it came from an underclass urban minority.

I actually don't like her odds. The Establishment seems to want to make an example of these privileged party girls. Cracking down. As if to try to retard the decline of civilization. Good luck with that, too!

xXx

Capitalism Makes Idealism Affordable

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"American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change," he writes. "Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a 'creative class' of 'knowledge workers' -- all are the progeny of widespread prosperity."

-- John Stossel at RealClearPolitics.com

Stossel is still in an evangelical mood over the virtues of capitalism and libertarianism. There is a point to it. But you cannot help but think the world could be better, but maybe this feeling is itself part of the luxury of our system.

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Capitalism Makes Idealism Affordable

♠
"American capitalism is derided for its superficial banality, yet it has unleashed profound, convulsive social change," he writes. "Condemned as mindless materialism, it has burst loose a flood tide of spiritual yearning. The civil rights movement and the sexual revolution, environmentalism and feminism, the fitness and health-care boom and the opening of the gay closet, the withering of censorship and the rise of a 'creative class' of 'knowledge workers' -- all are the progeny of widespread prosperity."

-- John Stossel at RealClearPolitics.com

Stossel is still in an evangelical mood over the virtues of capitalism and libertarianism. There is a point to it. But you cannot help but think the world could be better, but maybe this feeling is itself part of the luxury of our system.

xXx

Empathy: Of Mice and Men

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Empathy for another's pain is apparently not limited to the nobility of the human. Some new science suggests that even mice can register this emotion:

For instance, it's tempting to explain empathetic behavior in animals that we believe to have only rudimentary cognition, such as mice, by arguing that the sight of a suffering fellow mouse simply evokes an automatic fear reaction. This study undermines that explanation by showing that mice showed empathetic reactions only with cage mates; the mice seem to go far beyond being frightened by injury to accounting for whom the injured party is -- friend, family, foe, stranger. This response is a significant step toward human-like social feeling -- toward caring for acquaintances more than for strangers, just as our empathy for someone who is hurt differs depending on whether the person is a foreigner, a national compatriot, a school chum or an immediate family member.

However, in these mice studies, an interesting anti-empathy reaction was observed among male mice:

Male (and not female) mice showed an interesting additional phenomenon when witnessing a strange male mouse in pain: its own pain sensitivity actually dropped. The counter-empathic reaction occurred only in male pairs that didn't know each other, which are probably the pairs with the greatest degree of rivalry. Was that rivalry suppressing their reaction, or did they actually feel less empathy for a strange rival?

This gender effect reminds me of a wonderful 2006 study of human Schadenfreude by Tania Singer and colleagues. They found that in both men and women, seeing the pain of a person we have just cooperated with activates pain-related brain areas. But if a man felt he had been treated unfairly by another man, his brain's pleasure centers would light up at seeing the other's pain. Such male antipathy towards rivals may be a mammalian universal.

Well, it is still a Hobbesian kind of world.


(Source: ScientificAmerican.com)

xXx

Empathy: Of Mice and Men

♠
Empathy for another's pain is apparently not limited to the nobility of the human. Some new science suggests that even mice can register this emotion:

For instance, it's tempting to explain empathetic behavior in animals that we believe to have only rudimentary cognition, such as mice, by arguing that the sight of a suffering fellow mouse simply evokes an automatic fear reaction. This study undermines that explanation by showing that mice showed empathetic reactions only with cage mates; the mice seem to go far beyond being frightened by injury to accounting for whom the injured party is -- friend, family, foe, stranger. This response is a significant step toward human-like social feeling -- toward caring for acquaintances more than for strangers, just as our empathy for someone who is hurt differs depending on whether the person is a foreigner, a national compatriot, a school chum or an immediate family member.

However, in these mice studies, an interesting anti-empathy reaction was observed among male mice:

Male (and not female) mice showed an interesting additional phenomenon when witnessing a strange male mouse in pain: its own pain sensitivity actually dropped. The counter-empathic reaction occurred only in male pairs that didn't know each other, which are probably the pairs with the greatest degree of rivalry. Was that rivalry suppressing their reaction, or did they actually feel less empathy for a strange rival?

This gender effect reminds me of a wonderful 2006 study of human Schadenfreude by Tania Singer and colleagues. They found that in both men and women, seeing the pain of a person we have just cooperated with activates pain-related brain areas. But if a man felt he had been treated unfairly by another man, his brain's pleasure centers would light up at seeing the other's pain. Such male antipathy towards rivals may be a mammalian universal.

Well, it is still a Hobbesian kind of world.


(Source: ScientificAmerican.com)

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