Hegar

https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/how-power-erodes-empathy-and-steps-we-can-take-rebuild-it

https://hbr.org/2015/04/becoming-powerful-makes-you-less-empathetic

There's a piece from stanford and harvard business review (of all places). I couldn't find the original studies on academia.edu after a couple minutes of searching but maybe you'll have better luck. I think there's a behind the bastards podcast episode about it too.

Squirrels are just the best. If anyone goes to visit Taiwan - which I certainly recommend as strongly as possible - there's a park in the capital Taipei called 2/28 Memorial Peace Park (二二八和平紀念公園).

There are these gorgeous squirrels with red bellies that will eat nuts right out of your hand. They'll come up to you, take a nut and then run off about midway up a tree. Using their back legs to hold onto the bark, they dangle head-down against the trunk, eating with their front paws. Then you look around and all the trees have these vertical furry tree-slug looking squirrels dangling against them. Just cuting it up cutefully.

Red-bellied plumpers is what my wife and I called them. They're just the best.

Ireland is known for having the most support for the Palestinian cause in all of Europe for exactly the reason you imply - they know what it's like to suffer under violent colonial rule.

Irish support for Palestine is well known enough that there was a sporting furor last year when an Israeli team said in a pregame interview "we expect a tough match because everyone knows the Irish are all antisemitic", conflating support for Palestine with antisemitism.

Yesterday NPR ran an interview about student calls for divestment... with an economist who had no connection to either the protests or BDS. She was literally just guessing at what the goals might be and then explaining why it won't work. "If their goal is..."

That's just not actually journalism, is it?

She got paid to keep quiet about it much later.

the operation is highly organised, technically savvy

Of course an operation this sophisticated targets people looking to buying luxury brands for cheap, that sounds like an ideal mark.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, "Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me."

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

Being an asshole is a consequence of being rich. Having social power in the form of wealth, status or fame causes neurological changes that reduce your brain's capacity for empathy, giving you a brain that looks more like someone born with psychopathy. Power corrupts on a brain-chemistry level.

Why are you getting down voted?

I don't see any downvotes, but i'd guess it's because people presume bad faith on the internet - not without some reason - and are interpretting my comment as a rude attack on the previous poster rather than an expansion of the same sentiment.

Edit: Well to be honest, not exactly the same sentiment - I think accusing only the 'baddies' of this 'we own the world' attitude requires forgetting or forgiving a lot of western history.

Yep, Magazine = Community.

Kbin got the same rexodus boost as lemmy but since then has many more atrophied communities and far fewer moderaters to do anything about it, hence spamalot.

I've only seen 1 or 2 pieces of spam in my feed and that was months back - interesting that you seem to be seeing more of it on a federated server. I only started blocking those magazines when I noticed the spam on desktop sidebars.

What other group ... think they own the world?

Literally every single rich person? ~85% of all the bosses i've ever had across three continents? Anyone with the slightest bit of power?

I agree with you pretty much everything you said, I just think that drawing a strong distinction between any one species and every other one mischaracterizes the situation. Evil is a human construct that applies as poorly to human behaviour as to the behaviour of every other animal, for the same reasons.

If you'll excuse me simplifying your point, "They're animals of course they do that, evil doesn't come into it" is not quite as accurate as "We're all animals, evil doesn't come into it", to my mind at least. Because OP didn't just misunderstand an aspect of non-human animals, they misunderstood an aspect of how life works.

They can do those things because they’ve been beneficial

That describes human behavior just as well.