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How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

theatlantic.com

131–140 of 157 posts

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#131

I suspect a large part of this is down to 1. People defaulting to the nuclear option constantly, in their reactions, and 2. People not wanting to accept that some issues are complex, and that a blanket approach doesn't work. The latter of these is the real issue. People love being outraged over the lack of women in STEM fields, and how those that are are treated, but few people talk about the lack of men in teaching…

I used to go hunt sabbing. everyone else that went had lived in villages for most of their lives. You're simply wrong about that - lots of people in HSA are by any definition rural people.

You're wrong about nursing and teaching too. Lack of women in STEM comes up on HN because HN has a STEM focus. All the teaching / nursing unions, professional bodies, colleges, etc think that the lack of men is a problem. There are plenty of news paper articles about this too.

It's weird that you call your opponents infantile yet present such a simplistic, and wrong, set of argument.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a different example, you could look at the issue of badger culls it fox hunting in the UK. The most outspoken people against both aren't from the countryside, have never kept cattle or been on hunts, don't understand (or want to think too much) about the issues involved, but know that badgers and foxes are cute. So I'm guessing you are from the countryside and you think its ok to hunt foxes and badgers? Just to…

>I don't know anyone who thinks its ok to hunt For fun or for necessity?

Hunt in this context is "ride to hounds", or fox hunting, on horseback, with dogs.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can tell you authoritatively, although you may not believe me (or say I should stop anyway, which would beg other questions on my part), that there's no "deep opinion" of black culture or speech in that, in fact, the highschool was unfortunately VERY self segregating and most of the white kids didn't have enough interaction to form deep opinions. (which is part of why I'd be curious to ask now about the accent th…

Fair enough; your last sentence was a reasonable answer to my primary question, since I'm not sure I could differentiate natural vs constructed dialects (I'm tone-deaf enough to have trouble with truly foreign language accent identification) so I err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt that it's not malicious, however it seems you were referring to more obvious imitation which I can't speak to, and…

> Take "jawns" for example.

From what I read, the usage has become pretty cross-cultural there, and drifted away from the way "joint" is used in other places.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#134
post #98
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you want realism, wolves are one of the really select club of species of animals known to readily protect, nurture and adopt a lost human children if some circumstances occur. This is a fact, not a feeling. Do you know what other animals can be dangerous for a small children in a close encounter?: Buffaloes, mooses, deers, bulls, rams, bears, rats, horses, rhinos, donkeys, chimps, coyotes, pigs, snakes, raco…

Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly. Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related? Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts s…

> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population

True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the role of wolves as predators.

In the other hand, to put your "population of wolves has doubled between 2014 and 2015 but ticks had not changed" claim in context, we need to note that wolf population in the Netherlands between years 1869 and 2013 was composed of zero wolves.

Then, in 4-Jul-2013 something very strange happened. A she-wolf was found dead in a roadside next Luttelgeest. The first confirmed case of a "dutch" wolf in 140 years. A study in the journal Lutra covered the issue concluding that:

1) The animal was a purebreed wolf genetically related with East Europe populations [discarding a dog-wolf mix or a sarloos dog], was unchipped, and between 1.5 and 2.5 years old.

2) She fed on beaver in either the Carpathian mountains or the Eifel which is too far for the animal to have walked (9Km/h) from by itself within the 24 hours needed to digest its last meal (Genetic analysis from the remains of the beaver and the wolf linked both animals with populations living in this areas).

3) Bullet impacts and shattered fragments where found in the chest and flank indicating that the animal was shot twice before being hit by a car.

4) No car accident involving an animal was reported to local emergency services in the previous hours to the discovery of the corpse.

5) A discrepancy between the timing of the post mortem and rigor mortis intervals indicated that this wolf was shot prior to illegal transport to the Netherlands, from a distance within 2 days.

[To fake a car accident, running over a previously killed animal is a common procedure to cover environmental crimes against protected species].

Source:

The first wolf found in the Netherlands in 150 years was the victim of a wildlife crime. Lutra. 2013. 56(2): 93-109. Gravendeel, de Groot, Kik, Beentjes, Bergman, Caniglia, Cremers, Fabbri, Groenenberg, Grone, Bruinderink, Font, Hakhof, Harms, Jansman, Janssen, Lammertsma, Laros, Linnartz, van der Marel, Mulder, van der Mije, Nieman, Nowak, Randi, Rijks, Speksnijder & Vonho

Link to the article: http://www.kora.ch/fileadmin/file_sharing/5_Bibliothek/51_KO...

... So in 2013 there was still zero dutch wolves.

Then in 9-march-2015 a single wolf was photographed in Hunze.

So, unless you can show us new data, yes, wolf population was doubled in Netherlands in the last year... but you forgot to mention that is from zero to one animal. Here have your answer to the lack of changes on tick population.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#135
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the most fantastic environmental fails were incubated in the local pub For some arrogant interplanetary alignment, lyme disease cases are increasing in my country at the same time as wolves being culled regularly. Oh how ironic. In which pub were you when you decided these two must be causally related? Tick numbers are increasing because the climate is getting warmer. Also, ticks regularly use mice as hosts s…

> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the…

Yup, that was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I should probably have left it out. I didn't look up the specifics, but I know a second wolf sighting was claimed in Limburg, raising the number of wolves in NL from 1 to 2.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#136
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ticks regularly use mice as hosts so the mice population may affect the tick population True, (well, shrews are preferred in fact to mice), but only when young. Adult ticks feed mainly on large mammals, specially herbivores, and die if can't find a host in a few days, therefore is easy to understand that the recruitment of new ticks, the number of tick eggs released by surviving adults, is directly linked with the…

Yup, that was meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I should probably have left it out. I didn't look up the specifics, but I know a second wolf sighting was claimed in Limburg, raising the number of wolves in NL from 1 to 2.

... Or maybe the same wolf was seen in two different places. Is relatively common with this species.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#137
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you object to inflicting more suffering than you have to, how do you justify not being a vegetarian? In the end this is a trade of a bit of pleasure for you and quite a bit of suffering for the animal. Fox hunting, it seems to me, is precisely the same sort of trade. You could argue that the pleasure you get from eating meat is worth the suffering, but the pleasure the hunters get from fox hunting is not worth the…

Easy: I have to eat meat, and I'm not a reductionist. I don't eat meat for pleasure, particularly, and certainly not as recreation. Fox hunting is purely recreation.

Why do you have to eat meat?

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#138
post #12

They talk about the influence of academics, and yet we (as a people) seem to successfully ignore things like global warming... I don't know if that explains it. We have, indeed, become a nation of wimps, with little common sense. We fear now, much more than we used to. When I was a kid, we feared the red menace (Communism), but that didn't stop us from moving forward, or adhering to our ideals. Our independent spirit…

>Our independent spirit as a people. Except for those pesky blacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws

Geez, this is exactly what the commenter is talking about. Nobody brought race into this, and everyone knows about the racist history of America. Your comment was off-topic and did not further the conversation in any meaningful way, except set a tone of condescension towards this person's generation. Stop it.

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#139
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You put it so much more eloquently than I did. Yes, this is exactly what I mean.

I recently stumbled on a podcast I found very interesting that relates: The Art of Manliness #189: The Classical Education You Never Had [0] They had an author (Susan Bauer) on discussing topics from her book The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had [1], where they discussed the differences between a classical education and today's modern education (in America). One of the salient poin…

> stopping every few pages/chapters and discussing what you think/feel about it and your interpretation.

> students are being taught to come to conclusions and judge things before getting the full picture

> I haven't read the book yet [, but I am happy to discuss my impression of it]

Beautiful satire!

Re: How Americans Became So Sensitive to Harm

#140
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.

Where do you get your ethically produced meat from?
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