And even in the U.S., where the culture and default ideology encourage arseholes, there are plenty of people who don’t think that way. @anon29537550 being a case in point.
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Outside of medical mission work, strictly USA. Our culture certainly encourages “fuck you, I’ve got mine” mentality, and i am sure other cultures are more collective in their thinking (extremely low bar) but i suspect there is no shortage of assholes anywhere, just how they present. A number of those highly collective cultures are pretty shitty to outgroups, for instance.
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It’s complicated, of course, but sometimes it does. I’ve known people who started from the same base state of normalcy as Dolly Parton and probably would have continued being a decent person if not for the money or power. They can really do a number on a person in our society.
There’s a chicken-and-egg element to this, of course. Did the arseholes in this famous study buy a BMW or Mercedes because they were already arseholes or did making enough money to buy one of those cars also foster a sense of entitlement?
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That’s true. We are always complicated, and it’s never that simple.
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Oh no doubt!
I was just disagreeing (as grac did) to the asshole-as-default-setting comment.
Seems to me that most people are peaceful and even kinda nice. But that usually ends up meaning that selfish greedy assholes can take advantage of how most people have their guard down most of the time.
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As i said, i have grown increasingly cynical over the last couple of years as my faith that folks just need to know the right thing to do to help others and they will do it has been beaten out of me. I also suspect that the innate in-group, out-group psychology we seem to have plays a role. Even most assholes are kind to folks they see as “theirs,” for a certain value of “kind.” The ability to see different people as fully human is what seems to make the difference between good people and assholes. IMHO, of course.
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and don’t forget the u.s. has refused to allow itself to be under the jurisdiction of the international war crimes tribunal. win or lose, we’ve opted out.
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This is I guess kind of off topic here, but I think most ideas about default settings are misguided. To me the defining property of humanity is how variable we are. Save basic biological properties like eating and sleeping, there is almost nothing about how a hunter-gatherer and video game developer spend their day in common.
There is a simple model that XY chromosomes should make someone a male attracted to females, and XX chromosomes should make someone a female attracted to males. That’s the “default” and there has been so much concern over why all these people deviate from that. The real reason of course is the model is too simple…but as the proliferation of letters in LGBTQ tell you, maybe it’s better to say that people don’t stick to models. I think it’s our thing not to.
I think altruist and asshole are probably the same kind of thing. Philosophers love to ask if we are basically good or evil. Really though ever kindness and every harm anyone has done is part of humanity, saints and war criminals alike. And my guess is it makes no more sense to talk about a default there than anywhere else. People learn to be one or the other, or more often neither. And here it looks like we as a culture have a choice to contain the results. It’s not easy, but we didn’t go from roaming forests for food to sitting at desks eating sandwiches in a couple years either.
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Finland issues NOTAM warning for aviation due to GPS signal problems along the eastern border to Russia.
Last time this happened was in 2018.
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I just wanted to make the point of saying that I appreciate your posts in general, but right now specifically it is great to have a regular poster who can provide valuable information about what’s going on at a crucial Russian border. The concerns that the Finnish people must have regarding Russia are not anonymous to us, because we ‘know’ you.
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As I can’t spam:
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