Mugged by reality

MP Nigel Evans, who was cleared of rape and sexual assault on Thursday, has said the Crown Prosecution Service should pay his £130,000 legal bill.

So: Tory MPs happily vote to remove right of defendants to recover costs, and are then upset when Nigel Evans cannot recover his legal fees.
— Jack of Kent (@JackofKent) April 13, 2014

You have to feel sorry for poor Nigel. When he agreed with Chris that "we" simply can't afford Britain's £2bn legal aid bill, how was he to know that it was going to affect him, personally? Clearly, when he got behind the slogan that "we" need to tighten our belts, it should have been understood that "we", in this context, meant "somebody else."

A legal bill that swallows up somebody else's life savings is a regrettable consequence of the tough, but necessary, decisions that have to be taken in these difficult times. One that wipes out my life savings is an outrage about which Something Must Be Done. I've heard about another group of people who experience the world in this way:

When highly psychopathic participants imagined pain to themselves, they showed a typical neural response within the brain regions involved in empathy for pain, including the anterior insula, the anterior midcingulate cortex, somatosensory cortex, and the right amygdala. The increase in brain activity in these regions was unusually pronounced, suggesting that psychopathic people are sensitive to the thought of pain.

But when participants imagined pain to others, these regions failed to become active in high psychopaths. Moreover, psychopaths showed an increased response in the ventral striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure, when imagining others in pain.

Science Daily

Or maybe, if you're feeling more charitable, a liberal is simply a conservative who's been mugged by reality.