News All Lives Do Not Matter

[Andy_T]

Hello,

please read this very interesting article / opinion piece about what is wrong with excessively mourning the Paris terror victims, but at the same time forgetting about the victims in Baghdad killed a day earlier (or the 20,000 who die every day from hunger)

All Lives Don't Matter

The article also covers animal use.

Best regards,
Andy

 

[Moll Flanders]

I think it is normal to care more about people that you identify with. If people didn't compartmentalise we would be walking around traumatised with all the awful things that happen to other humans and animals on a daily basis. If we cared about all humans equally we wouldn't be able to cope with life IMO.

 

[Second Summer]

There is a lot I can agree with in that article, but like Moll I think there is one problem:

"But, when it comes to people they don’t know, it makes no sense that they would care more about some innocent people they don’t know than other innocent people they don’t know."

We generally care more about people and animals who are more similar to us, and who live closer to us. Compassion is not entirely altruistic. It is easier to feel empathy towards someone who looks like us, lives in a similar society, speaks a similar / familiar language, believes in the same god or ideas, lives geographically closer, and so on, because we can more easily see ourselves in their shoes. Perhaps the reason for this is genetic? It makes genetic sense to give preference to others who look like us (similar phenotypes etc.) as that will help ensure the survival and proliferation of more similar genes.

Is that tendency racist? Wrong? Something we should attempt to avoid?

 

[PTree15]

I think it is normal to care more about people that you identify with. If people didn't compartmentalise we would be walking around traumatised with all the awful things that happen to other humans and animals on a daily basis. If we cared about all humans equally we wouldn't be able to cope with life IMO.

I agree. I guess just in my case personally, the attack at the concert hall hit home for me, as I attend so many concerts, and as IS said, it seems easier to place myself in those people's shoes because I can relate. Also, at least in the U.S., I'd wager that more people have visited Paris than they have Lebanon, so again, easier to relate, and thus it hits home harder. It definitely doesn't mean I don't care about the rest of the atrocities happening worldwide. It's overwhelming to think about the horrors humans inflict upon one another on a regular basis.

And while I do agree with the writer's assessment of the media and its money-grubbing ways, I think the issue is far more complicated than just the media leading people by the nose. Politics, money, greed, self-interest...all of these play roles in what Western countries pay attention to and devote their resources to. The politics of food production alone are enough to send me into a downward spiral of despair, just knowing that as long as there is money to be made from animal slaughter, we likely won't see the end of industrial flesh production any time soon.

 

[Andy_T]

And while I do agree with the writer's assessment of the media and its money-grubbing ways, I think the issue is far more complicated than just the media leading people by the nose.

I am not saying the media is deliberately leading people by the nose. They have a product to sell, and they think that an atrocity in Paris sells better than an atrocity in Baghdad, which is why they put it on the first page.

Nevertheless, it helps me to remember this when I read about such stories. I personally can strive to put it into perspective for myself.

It kind of reminds me about a comment I have heard some 20 years ago ... about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Somebody said that one of the biggest problems about Chernobyl was that it had happened somewhere in the Russian steppe (I know, not Russia, in reality it was Ukraine, but this is a matter of speech), so while it was quite terrible (about 1 million total casualties estimated, most from cancer), there will not be much change coming from it.

If it had happened in France, Germany, the UK, the US, then we would have banned nuclear power by now....

 

[Moll Flanders]

I was thinking about this topic yesterday as I was talking to a taxi driver and we were discussing what was going on in Syria and whether we thought the UK should start air strikes there. He was saying that what happened in Paris was awful but he was from Pakistan originally and he was saying that there have been thousands of people killed there by terrorist attacks. I looked it up when I got home and I was shocked as I had no idea how many people had been killed there.

Terrorism in Pakistan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia