CapitalistImperialistPig

... is one of the famous Homeric epithets.   I happened to be up early today and noticed the pink fingers of dawn quite prominent in the morning sky.  A closer look revealed that the pink fingers were in fact jet contrails illuminated by red morning light filtered through a dusty atmosphere. So what were they in Homer's day?

... you are too deficient too know, or (it would appear) even to care, what "conservatives" think....... William Connolley, addressing your (no doubt insufficiently) humble correspondent. Well, yes, Mr. , er, Dr., Connolley has managed to irk me.  Fair enough, I suppose, since I suppose I have done the same by abusing some of his sacred bovines.  A couple of his changes of subject later, he further accuses me of ignorance of the conservative position.  Of course that was never the subject of my post - I was talking about mutual opinions of conservatives and liberals, and, more importantly, their neural substrates.  However, WC is rarely guilty of either that foolish consistency that Emerson called the hobgoblin of little minds or any other kind of logical consistency. Of course it's true that I don't know what conservatives think, though I think the functional MRI brain studies provide some strong hints.  So, I imagine, are the actual words of those selfsa...

If you bite into rancid food, the insula activates, just as in every other mammal. You wrinkle your nose, raise your upper lip, narrow your eyes, all to protect mouth, eyes, and nasal cavities. Your heart slows. You reflexively spit out the food, gag, perhaps even vomit.  Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (p. 713). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.  Man and mouse activate the same or at least analogous neural circuits in these reactions.  Humans do the same if they witness or think of something they find morally or esthetically disgusting.  Mice, probably not.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me................  F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Rich Boy . Hemingway heard and borrowed critic Mary Colum's rejoinder to the effect that the only difference was that they had more money.  Robert Sapolsky takes a look at the data and the neurobiology.  It seems that the answer is both no and yes.  ...when it comes to empathy and compassion, rich people tend to suck. This has been explored at length in a series of studies by Dacher Keltner of UC Berkeley. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, on the average, the wealthier people are, the less empathy they report for people in distress and the less compassionately they act. Moreover, wealthier people are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions and in experimental settings are greedier and more likely to cheat or steal. Two of the findings were picked up by the media as irresistible: (a) wealthier people (as assessed by the cost of the car ...

Plato and Aristotle get credit for propagating the notion than man is "the rational animal."  The main problem with this idea is that detailed psychological studies show that it is a myth.  It's true that people, or at least some of them, exhibit rational thought on many occasions, but aside from problem solving, our rational thought is more commonly used for constructing post hoc rationalizations for what our instincts told us to do than in actually deciding. Most human behavior arises out of our instinctive or emotional responses.  We don't save rational thought for solving algebra problems or crossword puzzles, though.  We also use it in our moral and social reasoning, but it's implicit in our neural design that the logical elements of such thinking are literally an afterthought.  Initial processing of such decisions comes from the evolutionarily older emotional and instinctive parts of the brain, with the higher level logical thinking parts of the prefron...

...make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal.   Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (p. 569). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. A lot of research and pontification has been expended on what makes a person conservative or liberal.  One broad conclusion that is not particularly controversial is that liberal and conservative tendencies tend to apply broadly - those liberal on some subjects tends to be liberal on most.  Similarly for conservatives.  Both conservatives and liberals are convinced that their opposites are morally deficient.  Liberals find conservatives deficient in compassion and tolerance and conservatives find liberals deficient in some other stuff. Some studies seem to confirm the liberal suspicion that conservatives, at least those o...

Newspapers have pages to fill up, even when the real news is either too inconsequential or depressing to print, so a lot of really stupid stuff gets printed.  My nominee for today comes from the New York Times: 60 times Madonna Changed Our Culture.   I guess the former pop star just turned sixty.  I would be more sympathetic if I wasn't so much older. I was never much of a fan, though I did appreciate some of her music once it made it into its Weird Al version.  Anyway, it seems that every reporter, copy boy and kiosk tender in the NYT stable got to submit some way in which Madonna "changed the culture."  Some of them might even be real, but the top few give a hint of the intellectual gravity of the enterprise: 1. SHE IS FIGHTING THE PERNICIOUS IDEA THAT OLDER WOMEN DON’T MATTER.   - yeah, we all fight that notion that old people don't matter, but we always lose. 2.  SHE TURNED HER CONFIDENCE AND STYLE INTO MOVIE STARDOM. - omg, that's got to be ...