“vices and follies of the powerful are much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.”
This is soooo good, I’m just going to post a big chunk of it below. It’s Chris Dillow nailing a key problem with the UK media’s obsession with bringing celebrity to the big politics table… He cites an experiment (pdf) by James Andreoni and Justin Rao involving a constructed roleplay scenario involving a ‘dictator’: There are two things going on here. One is that if someone communicates with us, we tend to become more sympathetic towards them – even if …