Is this selective outrage really suits a rational platform like HackerNews?
Anyway, the whole thing reminds me of the NPR bit about "The Cost of Free"[1]. People's expectations rapidly change once you offer some of them something. While the main lesson in that story is about charging after offering something for free for many years, there's the second lesson: the reason it was made free was that the Brits were upset that the Americans got free doughnuts.
Afterwards, no one got free doughnuts. It's funny. Something that seems clearly like a Pareto improvement ends up not being one because of people's opinions of perceived privilege.
0: https://www.facebook.com/sheryl/posts/10156585333855177
1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-c...
If you pick say $50 each, the other person tends to always accept. If you give him more, he'll accept too. But what if you give yourself $75, and the other $25?
If he rejects it, you both get nothing. Turns out, at certain levels (cant remember where), people tend to reject.
Which is interesting, because every non-0 figure is a benefit to you. If you get $5 and the other $95, why reject it? You'd get nothing. It's a one-time experiment, you're basically rejecting free money.
It turns out that the other guy getting $95 and 'screwing you', is so bad, that you'd rather reject free money than for him to get more than he 'deserves'.
Now if this was your enemy, or say someone close to you, sure. But this experiment holds with complete strangers you don't see and will never meet. The notion that someone gets more than you, when normal moral notions suppose you deserve an equal amount, incites people to be vengeful even at the cost of free money.
We have not evolved in an environment where you interact with "complete strangers you don't see and will never meet". So, you can't allow others take the upper hand on you too much. That is even more true if third parties are observing the interaction.
You can see the same, for instance, in how pub fights start for the most stupid reasons. Even if is a big city and they will never meet again, they can't just leave it alone because when our brain was programmed it was not going to be only an interaction. And if your friends, or god forbid, attractive women are present, then the contenders are trapped in the situation.
But for me that lives in EU, a bomb in EU feels much closer than a bomb in Turkey. It is not strange at all?
What point are you making here? If they were covered a lot, why no safety check?
https://www.facebook.com/safetycheck/ankaraturkey-explosion-...
Hypocrisy? Yes.
Surprising? Not really.
I also think that there is not just empathy at play, but fear. Because the closer an event is to us or the people we know/relate to, the more we realise it could also happen to us.
These Brussels attacks have wall-to-wall coverage on all news stations, including local ones, unlike the Turkish blasts which were covered much less and only by the major outlets.
Belgium wages war against ISIS as a part of NATO, and ISIS includes some Belgian citizens, so they wage war against them. It's just they are further away than Kurds. But as we can see, explosion-wise, this makes small difference.
It goes without saying. My statement was meant to be general.
You may ignore it since you don't know anyone there, but people from there would appreciate knowing their friends and relatives are safe.
Still, like it was already told, FB did activate the feature also in the Ankara bombings and other occasions for Turkey, there is nothing racist here going on.
Nothing about any of this is very rational, but there's something in our collective nature that draws more attention to a single incident involving X casualties than X/Y unrelated incidents each involving Y casualties.
Actually terror attacks that harm more than 10 or 100 people, as opposed to less than 10, are a small minority. [0]
Firstly, these are mostly teenagers in caves with yesterdays cell phones. They simply don't have the resources or the numbers to kill millions, or even tens of thousands. I don't think you understand that your argument is a purely emotional one[1]. It appears to be rather simple to sneak a firearm on a plane[2], and yet there has not been any repeat attacks like 9/11. Firearms are illegal in Paris and they have large divisions of domestic and foreign spies, that failed to prevent anything[3]. Now lawmakers around the globe want to outlaw prime numbers (encryption) yet terrorists don't seem to even bother using it[4]. Emotion aside, dollar for dollar, fighting malaria is more effective in preventing the loss of human life than fighting terrorism by many orders of magnitude.
[1]"If a man is crossing a river And an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man He will not become very angry. But if he sees a man in the boat, He will shout to him to steer clear. And if the shout is not heard he will shout Again, and yet again, and begin cursing - And all because there is somebody in that boat. Yet if the boat were empty, He would not be shouting, and he would not be angry." - Chuang Tzu
[2]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percen... [3]http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/18/europe/paris-terror-attacks-in... [4]https://bgr.com/2016/03/22/paris-attacks-iphone-encryption/
I don't have a Facebook account, so I can't verify, but at least on that landing page, they're not serving up advertisements.
Glenn Greenwald (The guy who broke the Snowden story) sums it up quite nicely. https://theintercept.com/2016/03/08/nobody-knows-the-identit...