Empathy: College students don't have as much as they used to

Fits in with that study on Millennials. Any ideas on why the measured 'empathy' is dropping? This page suggests violent media is a contributing factor. Anything else?
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/uom-ecs052610.php

haha, tell me about it

haha, tell me about it, here are two other ones i just discovered recently.

http://osocio.org/

http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats


haha, i knew of the second one for ages, just forgot about it until like a week ago.
if you travel back to the home page there are some other relevant/disgusting statistics.

JUST FOUND THIS REALLY GOOD SITE: SOCIAL IMAGES

http://contexts.org/socimages/

Its like a database of social responsibility related news. I hate how I come across things like this so late in the piece.

have you guys seen this?

Social dilemma

Social trap is a term used by psychologists to describe a situation in which a group of people act to obtain short-term individual gains, which in the long run leads to a loss for the group as a whole.

Sound familiar? It seems we are on the wrong end of a social trap.
Read more on:
Social Dilemmas
Tragedy of the commons
Black Swan Theory

Taleb's Ten Principles for a Black Swan Robust World

Taleb enumerates ten principles for building systems that are robust to Black Swan Events:^[10]

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become Too Big to Fail.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence".
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

a little disenheartening

http://exiledonline.com/confessions-of-a-wall-st-nihilist-forget-about-goldman-sachs-our-entire-economy-is-built-on-fraud/

GENDERCIDE

I've never looked into this... until someone told me today about a story her friend told her about a friend who used to work as a nurse in china. Apparently nurses in Chinese hospital are (or at least were until recently? I don't have anyway of finding out wether this is past tense or present tense) made to murder, by strangulation, the second baby born to any mother. If they refuse to do this they risk loosing their job. It is all hushed up.

"in September 1997, the World Health Organization's Regional Committee for the Western Pacific issued a report claiming that "more than 50 million women were estimated to be 'missing' in China because of the institutionalized killing and neglect of girls due to Beijing's population control program that limits parents to one child."

culture dictates that when a girl marries she leaves her family and becomes part of her husband's family. For this reason Chinese peasants have for many centuries wanted a son to ensure there is someone to look after them in their old age -- having a boy child is the best pension a Chinese peasant can get. Baby girls are even called "maggots in the rice" ... ("The Dying Rooms Trust")

This info was taken from here:  http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html


Now if I am to understand the situation, I know its very complex, and I say this at the risk of being arbitrary and naive, but it appears to me like the thirst for money, economic development and the health of the countries GDP (AKA capitalism) is responsible for the worst genocide in human history and its happening right now and we are part of the silent hand pressing the button, displacing resources and ethics and morality and 'freedoms' from others to fill ourselves with more fast food and distraction.


6 million Jews were killed horribly in the second world war, an atrocity I struggle to comprehend.


50 fucking million baby girls that should currently be alive are 'missing' as of 1997...


there are 111 million more men in China than there are women, half that and you get about 50 million so the numbers add up...






Seriously: Fuck you Ayn Rand.

Hmmm This might be a bit of a gold mine for you Leon, actually for all of us

http://www.backspace.com/is/in/the/house/work/

http://www.backspace.com/notes/about.php

and some essays linked to from the site:


http://backspace.com/is/in/the/house/work/pg/essays.html


I particularly enojyed this one: http://backspace.com/notes/2007/08/the-conversation.php

haha

"As he says, in his analysis of the doomed Norse society on Greenland that collapsed in the early 15th century: 'The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity.' If this is so, and his examples would seem to prove it, then we can isolate the values of American society that have been responsible for its greatest triumphs and know that we will cling to them no matter what. They are, in one rough mixture, capitalism, individualism, nationalism, technophilia, and humanism (as the dominance of humans over nature). There is no chance whatever, no matter how grave and obvious the threat, that as a society that we will abandon those.

hey team, here is the first one of those posts you requested

http://scsuintellectuals.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/the-moral-economy/#comment-404

its a blog about lots of things, including morality and the economy.

if anyone else can remember what else i was supposed to post, tell me and i'll post it

Status Anxiety - the film

Actually a good watch.

this is coolish, read the about page.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/about

HEY MATT!

http://www.droppingknowledge.org/bin/forums/list.page;jsessionid=9286FEAA2EF72EEA388C031F0B37191B

this is a cool sight and an interesting, web2.0ish way to encourage meaningful debate.

maybe a precedent for you?