Would you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? I seem to have noticed you doing it a lot again recently. It would be good if you'd take a step back from that because this comment is over the flameline. That's not cool, regardless of how good or right your points are, and I'm sure you can make them without that.
My read was that he was making a rhetorical point, which he continued carefully and at length below, not actually calling people here "bad". This would be an odd thread in which to accuse him of flaming people.
I don't blame OP for choosing his macbook and burning man over a single Bangladeshi child when OP is likely paying rent to and also employed by people who are personally hoarding wealth to feed millions of starving children and instead using that wealth to invent new ways to make people pay even more for a basic modest existence.
The point is that you have no moral obligation to read the news and learn about the suffering of distant people in some ill conceived attempt to try and empathize with them. Humans aren’t built that way. You don’t have a generalized obligation to inform yourself about the abstract struggles of others and give up your own priorities in some token gesture of support for those people.
Take two people who both go to Burning Man instead of changing some kid’s life in Bangladesh. A reads the news and votes for X out of concern for some disadvantaged group. B doesn’t read the news and votes for Y because he doesn’t perceive the struggles of that disadvantaged group. Notwithstanding that difference, radius of empathy of A and B are almost the same. Both exclude the majority of those suffering in the world—billions of people—from their radius of empathy, not caring enough even to give up a frivolity for themselves.[1] Excessive moralizing over that small difference is indeed rather hypocritical.
[1] The moral rabbit hole here runs very deep. For example, all else being equal, buying an ICE car hurts people in Bangladesh who will suffer the most from rising sea level due to global warming. But at the margin, taking the extra money you’d spend on a new electric car and just giving it to some kid in Bangladesh will do more good than the incremental environmental benefit from buying that electric car.
Please do not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News, regardless of how wrong or annoying you find someone else's comments. Personal attacks, in particular, are right out.
No more of this please, especially since we've hard to warn you multiple times in the past.
Exactly. And my initial point wasn't even criticizing or assigning blame. I was simply pointing out an action that is available to many of us that we may not realize isn't available to everyone. I know in the past it has helped me build my own empathy to learn that I choice I have made isn't open to others and why that might be.
