If I Sleep for an Hour, 30 People Will Die (2016)

Really interesting discussion. I would add a guess that living a long life has become so normalized and expected that risk taking behaviour has become more eschewed.

Acitvists have always been attacked as "terrorists". Look at the brutal repression of the Civil Rights movement, where imprison was one of msnycworries when faced with a murderous police force and general public.

> in today's world many of those would be viewed as terrorism

I’m involved in local politics. The problem is a low give-a-shit factor. Older Americans will reliably show up to vote, stop to sign petitions (real ones, not online ones), donate to candidates and show up for town halls and protests. Young, well-educated, technically-savvy urbanites are a predictably anodyne bunch. (To be fair, I’m those things.)

The risk isn’t higher. The cost just is. When activism competes with brunch, Instagram time, and the necessity of a high-paying job to settle student loans, it’s a tougher sell.

In the article you cited it is not about helping refugees, but about the WAY they were helping refugees.

Of course you can argue that the laws violated are stupid or inhumane. But in a democratic country like Greece you’ll have a hard time. The laws are generally a result of balancing different interests, here refugees fleeing from a very unpleasant life in Turkey and there EU tax payers having to pay for their integration for the next few years.

You can disagree and if caught happily pay the price (after all, why not go to jail for some time to save a few humans).

I'd say it's actually very hard to find effective charities. Most charities don't evaluate the outcomes versus the cost of their work, regardless of their earnest desire to be helpful. While Charity Navigator and GiveWell can weed out some of the truly bad orgs, the orgs trying to do the right thing and being ineffective is probably a larger problem than anyone realizes. You want to make a huge impact on people's lives? Solve food transportation, early cancer diagnosis, or basic medical care. Those are easily the most impactful and least sexy parts of making lives better.

Canada doesn't either. We just have big signs warning people not to try to bring pot with them because it's probably illegal wherever you're going.

Even though CBP doesn't check any papers, airline agents swipe your passport or record your passport details. And these details are sent out to CBP.

Mexico didn't check me on the way out. Then again, it probably depends on the port of egress.

That is relatively new, though. As far as I remember, in the "old days" as a foreigner you got those cardboard slips stapled into your passport which were removed again when you left the country. Today they just do this electronically and keep track of who is in the country by receiving your passport information from the airlines. (You can even check your arrival and departure history online: https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search)

'Neocon' is a label applied to a group of formerly-liberal foreign policy hawks, who moved to the right in the 1960s and subsequently. They were some of the strongest voices for military intervention in foreign countries during and after the Cold War, and are considered part of the conservative movement. Think Paul Wolfowitz and colleagues.

Neoliberalism is focused on economics, not military policy, and advocates free movement of goods, capital, and (sometimes) labour to build a global interconnected capitalism. It's probably the 'consensus' position amongst policy elites in most Western countries, though is suffering blowback from varying groups including economic nationalists (who dislike its open, cosmopolitan, nature and lack of concern for the nation) from the left (who dislike its promotion of the interests of capital over the needs of workers) and from localists (who dislike its homogenising qualities and dismissal of the value of 'place').

I think most people just mean by corporatists 'beholden to corporate interests' rather than specifically 'corporate fascists'; in either case they probably don't mean the original meaning of corporatism, which was control of the economy via negotiation between organised interest groups representing sectors of the people (farmers, businesspeople, industrial workers, etc.) This was prominent in Italian fascism in the 30s and had echoes in various other parts of the 20th Century such as the institutionalisation of trades union bargaining in some social democratic countries from the forties onwards.

Venezuela has a ban on personal gun ownership for many people, however many/most people still own guns because the murder rate is very high due to the insane poverty that's gripped the country. One of the leading candidates is talking about removing gun restrictions. The problem isn't that the populace doesn't have guns. Guns do not solve political issues. The US couldn't solve Vietnam's issues despite winning on the battlefield in most incursions. Guns don't solve any problems in nearly any case. Boots on the ground solves problems and lots of them. Basically there's no way individual people can fight against an armed military with modern weapons and transport.

It's not the truth.

Most people understand that it's counter-productive to impoverish one's self in the process of trying to help others.

It's for both sentimental and practical reasons that we give the greatest help to those closest to us - our spouse/partner, children, parents, siblings, close friends; if everyone were able to do that, then the world would function just fine.

And we know that if we spend our entire wealth and productive capacity trying to help people unknown to us, we'll soon be unable to help anyone at all and will quickly end up in need of welfare rather than being able offer it.

Effectively every employed person pays tax, and is comfortable knowing their taxes help others unknown to them.

Many people give to charity because they like knowing that some of their wealth helps others outside their immediate circle.

The assertion "you could have saved countless lives, yet you did not" is false and misanthropic.

I'm no objectivist or right-libertarian, and I'm fully supportive of benevolence, humanitarianism and welfare.

But in order for these systems to function optimally, we must begin by ensuring the needs of ourselves and those close to us are taken care of, so we can be net-contributors to welfare rather than net-recipients.

Because as soon as too many people become net-recipients, welfare systems collapse.

> Or more concretely, how do you go about deciding when it is permissible to engage in self-serving actions at the expense of others?

Roughly, parochial altruism, though not in the traditional sex/race/language-based sense. As you can imagine, almost everyone's point of view here is not summarizable into text short enough to be of value for you to read, so that's the un-nuanced way of putting it.

The truth, though, is that what I said previously was more descriptive than aspirational. That's just who I am, observed solely through the lens of my actions. It's not very different from anyone else. Really, I only say "I" in that entire text because if I said "We" people would be offended, even though what I said is really banally normal.

Actually, my answer wouldn't change. I'd take the computer over saving some child I don't even know.

Posing hypotheticals like this and passing judgment on their character for their answer is not a good-faith way of discussing a topic. It's just not a realistic scenario and someone's answer to the hypothetical indicates nothing about how they would actually act in a real situation where they were able to help someone.