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To be clear, what I am referring to are people who would want someone other than themselves to be more generous to someone other than themselves. This a very co
by zarkov99 6y ago
To be clear, what I am referring to are people who would want someone other than themselves to be more generous to someone other than themselves. This a very common pathology in well-off, educated people. You get the virtue points without the actual sacrifice.
- CydeWeys 6y agoCan you give some examples of what you're referring to? Generally what is wanted is for problems to be solved by the government providing services that we all pay for through tax revenue, not for problems to be solved through private donation. I legitimately can't think of examples of what you're referring to.
- zarkov99 6y agoAn example would be attitudes towards immigration. The people arguing for taking in more poor immigrants or refugees typically do not live in the communities most impacted by their influx.
- CydeWeys 6y agoI dunno ... I'm pretty pro-immigration, and I live in NYC, which has one of (if not the) highest immigrant populations in the entire country. The same is generally true of large cosmopolitan cities. And the "impact of their influx" is actually net positive. It turns out that having more people, yes, even immigrants, has a net positive impact on the local economy, because more people means more consumers (not just more labor market competition), and you realize greater efficiencies of scale. So I don't actually think this is a good example. I think the hypocrisy you're alluding to here is that coastal liberals are often NIMBYist, which has the direct effect of making housing expensive, which affects most people negatively, immigrants included. I'll agree with you on that one as being a problem, but I don't think it exactly fits into the class of issues you're talking about.
- pbalau 6y agoA better example would be Americans arguing Turkey, Greece and Italy should do more for emigrants coming from Middle East/North Africa.
- CydeWeys 6y agoYeah but now we're getting into the land of international relations. This is becoming awfully abstract from the original topic. Also I think you're missing some nuance here, which is that the people arguing in favor of this would indeed do a lot more to admit emigrants/refugees here, it's just that they aren't in power and don't run the government. So they can't be hypocrites for advocating for something they genuinely would do if only they were able to.
- zarkov99 6y agoWould they really? How many of these people do you think would be happy to open their homes, or at least their neighborhoods, to a substantial number of poor, unskilled, uneducated and culturally alien people? The world would work a lot better if we all learned to ignore opinions when they come from people with no skin in the game.
- CydeWeys 6y agoYeah, I really do think many of them actually would. For example, I'm Jewish, so I know what happens when the US turns its back on refugees fleeing genocide. But they're not in power and they aren't making the immigration decisions, hence it's not happening.
- zarkov99 6y agoFair enough, we disagree on that but I have no data to back my intuition up. Thanks for the civil discussion.
- zarkov99 6y ago
- ThrowawayR2 6y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/nyregion/school-integration-progressives.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/nyregion/school-integrati... might be an example? One particularly striking paragraph: "When I was watching the George Floyd protests, I was noticing that many of the white neighborhoods where a lot of white liberals were out participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations were some of the same neighborhoods that resisted school integration. And that filled me with a lot of despair."