Evangelion

In actual fact:

• I said very little.
  
• I provided context.

Evangelion

This from the nation that demanded a global pity party in the wake of the WTC disaster...

Jinto

I know the feeling... at the time I was wondering what made this particular terrorist act any more deserving of sympathy than all the palastinians dying from Israeli terrorism - oops, I meant "military self-defense," terrorism being only the stuff other people do to us, not the stuff we and our allies do to other people.

Americans are idiots.

meritocrat

Why can't he think that?

George Oilwell

Of course he can think that way and I in no way suggest he can't.
I was however shocked to see that kind of attitude so blatently expressed as if to say "Yeah, I'm an asshole and proud of it".
If all I can do is voice my displeasure and bring to the attention of others this kind of thing then that is what I will do.

Evangelion

I guess he's a Dennis Leary fan...

Jane Bovary

Most of us tend, openly or not, to adhere to the Kantian imperative: what you do personally should stand as a general principle. When you express your own lack of caring, you say, essentially, that care isn't important, and, again, you're saying it in public and hurting people. I don't mean to sound like some mushy-hearted liberal here. Shared pain is an essential part of human life.
Most of us tend, openly or not, to adhere to the Kantian imperative: what you do personally should stand as a general principle. When you express your own lack of caring, you say, essentially, that care isn't important, and, again, you're saying it in public and hurting people. I don't mean to sound like some mushy-hearted liberal here. Shared pain is an essential part of human life.
RED DAVE


Adam Smith wrote a theory on morality before he wrote the Wealth of Nations and said that a man cared more about the pain in his big toe than all the people in China, claiming that the market worked because it made use of the egotism that is human nature.

It is hard to care about the fate of complete strangers on any deep emotional level and its because of this that people can rip people off, ignore poverty, wear shoes made from sweatshop labour, launch and support wars, read the papers and watch the evening news without flinching[much]. As long as the victims remain anonymous statistics we can handle it with relative impunity. If we didn't have this insular protection we'd probably go mad with all the tragedy and mayhem in the world. Sometimes just one image or a well-written paragraph from a journalist will trigger a more profound emphathy...like the photograph of the Iraqi boy with his arms blown off and his family wiped out....it seems there has to be some sort of recognizable connection for something to really hit us.

We shouldn't expect people to care about strangers in the personal emotional sense, but they should care in a general humanitarian way because if we don't...we're fucked. It's not necessary to feel a dagger to the heart for every death on the other side of the world, but I agree with Dave that there's something wrong if we cant empathize in some generalized way with human suffering and recognize that if we dismiss it, we're making the world a lousier place, for everyone....including ourselves.