How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm • Hacker News Board

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#61

Post by mistermann » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #30

estefan wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that we're meant to believe everyone's opinions are equally valid. Empirically, it seems to me, some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent.

> some people are just manifestly stupid and/or incompetent Some are. Even more are just plain incorrect for all the many reasons human beings are incorrect. At least in the states, we've spent the last 30 years making people believe that simply because you feel it is so, it must be. That's got to be a huge factor in the degradation of discourse in the same time period- if instead of coming from the classical positio…

If you watch old political interviews and things like that you can really see how far the state of political discourse has fallen, there used to be genuine public discussion, now politics (at least as shown on TV) largely consists of sound bites and catch phrases.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#62

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:26 PM UTC

Shivetya wrote: post #4

a tyranny of the minority backed up by politicians, government appointees, and judges, all who realize their power by separating people into groups to play off each other. Each new victim class further increases the power of government, the loss of privacy, and worse the loss of community and seeds of distrust and anger are set to drive people into different camps. when the individual becomes so important that commun…

[deleted]

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#63

Post by codingdave » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:29 PM UTC

vinceguidry wrote: post #18

I look at this as a sign of society evolving. Subtle emotional traumas exist, micro-aggressions exist. Way more things are harmful to children than we are really aware of. Mental health issues scale smoothly from 'nonexistent' to 'makes you completely nonfunctional' and can't be easily separated from 'ordinary' personality. Society was not-so-blissfully unaware of these aspects of life, this is the process of coming…

I thought the article laid out nice examples where the "evolving" can be good in some ways, but harmful in others.

I know teenagers who have never been left alone. I know people graduating high school who have never independently taken care of themselves. And even on an independence scale, when I was 18, my friends and I could pretty much survive on our own in wilderness situations just fine, and we did - heading into the woods and mountains to explore almost every day. Nowadays that would get you on reality TV shows.

Sure, things are safer now... As long as we all stick inside the little boxes society provides for us. But that is not always what is actually best for us.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#64

Post by pron » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:30 PM UTC

Kristine1975 wrote: post #56

pron wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, statistically and empirically women get pregnant more often then men. Statistically and empirically, the father is less likely to care for the child than the woman. As a result, statistically and empirically, issues relating to abortion, contraceptives or day care affect the lives of women more than men. For example, statistically and empirically women get sexually assaulted and harassed more than men. S…

>Therefore, statistically and empirically women are more interested in pay-equity laws. I don't think that actually follows: 1. People are perfectly capable of caring for injustices they don't experience personally. E.g. men being interested in pay-equity laws not because it would benefit them, but because of a belief that they are necessary for a just society. 2. People are also perfectly capable of acting against t…

> I don't think that actually follows

Which is why I said statistically and empirically. As to men caring about this too, this is obviously possible, but even if they care, they are less affected, so they may prioritize it less. Like the joke about the chicken and the pig vis-a-vis breakfast: The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed!

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#65

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:31 PM UTC

DougWebb wrote: post #42

jules wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I'm wondering whether you are a vegetarian, or whether you pay others to kill animals for a few minutes of eating pleasure.

I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.

Not that they're always successful, but hunters also want animals killed as quickly as possible (not necessarily painlessly, but are our methods of slaughtering really that painless? Do we give them a nice general anesthetic before bashing in their brains or decapitating them?). Anything but a good clean shot is considered, depending on the hunter, cruel, wasteful, poor form, etc. Most of the people I know who hunt aren't sports hunters. They hunt deer (because there's an abundance in the area, more than were here before the US was founded), primarily for food. A couple decent-sized deer, properly butchered, will last quite a while for them. If they hunt anything beyond what they need, it's to give to family/friends who won't or can't hunt.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#66

Post by petewailes » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:33 PM UTC

willvarfar wrote: post #60

petewailes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suffolk boy myself (though Welsh by birth and parentage). I suspect that's more because Suffolk isn't traditionally a hunting area. However, where my fiancée is from, is, so I get both sides of the argument. Re. badgers, my problem is that the work that's been done on the trial culls has been so badly managed that it's hard to say one way or the other whether it's working or not. Quarantine and cattle culling in Wale…

(Suffolk is very much a traditional fox hunting area. There are plenty of hunts. Toffs on horseback in red jacket affairs.)

Bits of it are (or more accurately bits of the population are). Depends who you hang around with. The garage where I used to have my car serviced had hunts go past there.

If you look at the number of hunts in East Anglia vs the south west, midlands or north west, it's nothing like the same number. And when you consider the population differences, it's even more stark. There's hunts in Suffolk, sure. Just not as much as lots of the rest of the UK.

Also, as an addendum, describing people who hunt as "toffs" sort of doesn't work very well once you've actually known the people who do it. 100 years ago, it'd have been an vaguely accurate assessment, but nowadays it's pretty hard to argue. A red jacket does not a landed gentleman make.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#67

Post by mooseburger » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:34 PM UTC

afarrell wrote: post #2

> like saying the word “fútbol” instead of soccer Hispanic folks: Is this in fact a thing that feels alienating to you? If so, would you be willing to explain why? It is the first time I've heard about it so I'd just like to confirm that Conor Friedersdorf is referring to a real thing.

I'm Puerto Rican. I've never heard of someone being offended at an American saying futbol. Then again, we say soccer over here, unlike all other Spanish speaking nations. As for myself, I just think it would be silly to hear. I assume an American who does that would merely be trying to be accommodating.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#68

Post by lr4444lr » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:35 PM UTC

This article is a bit muddled in several issues. Important and not mentioned, though by no means authoritative, is the enduring "negative liberty" principle and its enormous impact on the American ethos from its founding. An big reason a lot of this "concept creep" makes us uncomfortable is that the "right to be free from harm or negligence causing harm" is coming into diametric opposition with other people's right of expression, movement, and property. For an article that goes so far as to evoke Aristotle, I'm surprised no mention of Locke or JS Mill was made.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#69

Post by DougWebb » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:36 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #46

DougWebb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a vegetarian, and I gladly pay others to kill animals for me to eat. But I do not pay for the animals to be tortured in the process; I want them killed as quickly and painlessly as possible. Cats injure, torture, and play with their prey before killing it. Humans should not do that.

Why would hunting be torture, but slaughtering not?

Fox hunting, where the fox is chased around by dogs for a long time before it is finally killed, is torture. Hunting with a rifle, where you sneak up on an animal and kill it before it even knows it's being hunted, is not. I'd say bow hunting is a grey area; if you have to track the bleeding animal down while it is slowly bleeding out, that's cruel. But if you're hunting for survival and a bow is all you have, or if you're training for that situation (and it's realistic that you might be in that situation) then it's ok.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#70

Post by alanwatts » Wed, Apr 20, 2016, 1:37 PM UTC

This is hardly a phenomenon that is limited to the arbitrary boundaries of the US. This "sensitivity" in my estimation is due to the new found interconnectedness of consciousness via the internet. As Marshall McLuhan wrote many decades ago:

"The human family now exists under conditions of a global village. We live in a single constricted space resonant with tribal drums."

"The global village is a place of very arduous interfaces and very abrasive situations."

Go look at YouTube comments and you'll see what he meant. Never before has the world, with all its highly variable levels of intelligence, ignorance, and ideologies, been thrust into a "room" together and "forced" to listen to other opinions like it has with the internet.

"In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us, we necessarily participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action. It is no longer possible to adopt the aloof and dissociated role of the literate Westerner."