Having lived for some time in a third world country that has real poverty and real day to day security worries, situations like this spring to mind when people completely without optics compare their situations to those in developing nations. Yes, as insanely ignorant as that sounds it happens. People here on HN last week, as one example, were trying to compare their experiences recently protesting to the Arab Spring. People in the Arab Spring were lighting themselves on fire and protesting everyday longer than most of us have been locked down from COVID. Not the same, not even in the same universe.
The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder.
I've always looked at it this way "things must be pretty bad if lighting yourself on fire sounds like a better alternative then living" I dont need to understand the particulars beyond that.
I think there are two ways to approach thinking about dramatic acts like self-immolation, rioting, looting, stealing, etc.
One way is to think "wow, those people have had very different experiences from me, to drive them to do that." I'd put your reply in that category and I prefer this. It recognizes shared commonality among people, which is a good place to start for constructive change.
The other way is to think "wow, those people are nothing like me, to want to do something like that." This treats differences as inherent and implies there are different "types" of people. It creates a sense of "us vs them," which makes it harder to build the empathy necessary for constructive change.
I try to look for primary intent. If somebody is advocating awareness of something worthy of their passion I can empathize with that advocacy even during times I may disagree with the subject advocated. I find it harder to empathize with people who are stealing designer handbags and claiming it’s a form of protest. I just see self enrichment (theft) as the primary motive and then a lie as a qualifier. To me that results in a difference compared to the prior described advocacy group that I cannot shake.
Personally, I see the very existence of a designer handbag store as a clear indication of a system that is broken to the core - an insult to unselfish people everywhere.
A designer handbag store to me perfectly exlemplifies a completely broken tax system and citizens being held hostage by a corrupt government and corporations defending their interests.
I sympathize with people who would want to damage that system in any way available to them.
I wouldn't do that particular act myself, but I also recognize that I've been very lucky to not have been one of the people who has suffered at the hands of such a broken system. Lucky I had good parents, good health and good education. The system has failed others, and shows no signs of self-correction without intervention.
I really agree with you here, except for your inclusion of looters in that group. You're goddamn right opportunistic looters are nothing like me. Those fuckers care nothing about the fight of the protests, and are willing to tarnish the whole movement for some free shit. Fuck them.
Otherwise, right on. I can't tell you how often I come to dead ends in arguments regarding poverty and crime, where folks who've never been poor or desperate give themselves 100% of the credit for their good fortune. Like they picked their fucking parents before birth.
Without the rioting and looting, the protests may have accomplished nothing. Climate March and Women's March were way bigger but led to absolutely zilch.
So if the climate and women's marchers had destroyed blocks of neighborhoods and looted and burned a bunch of stores and small businesses, you think they would have "accomplished" more? Are you fucking serious?
This is such a stupid argument. The only thing violence, vandalism and theft "accomplish" is further retrenchment of police power. It turns otherwise sympathetic people against the protests, and makes it much harder for policy makers to justify police reform to the huge part of the population whose quiet racist and classist biases were just confirmed by the looters.
If anythin's going to spur change from this particular upheaval, it will the hundreds of videos recording police brutality against peaceful demonstrators.
In this post alone, there are people saying that looting is justified... For every person saying that the looters are unrelated, there is another person or two that either condones that behaviour or justifies it.
Either we have looters in this thread, or the movement is a big umbrella that encompasses the unsavourable elements too.
That's a strawman. Nobody's talking about "stealing a TV from a corporation". That's not what looting is. Go spend five minutes on google and see what's been happening. Looters have destroyed thousands of small businesses -- destroying equipment, ransacking the buildings, and in many cases setting them on fire. The theft is only a small part. Many of these losses cannot be be recouped through insurance, and many of these small businesses will die. For nothing.
Looting and vandalism don't hurt corporations. The corporations have insurance and can rebuild. Looting destroys livelihoods of people who often can't recover, accelerates the decay of already struggling neighborhoods.
I think you've hit on a very interesting way of framing the issue. Perhaps it can be explained with (slightly) statistical language:
- Taking the self-immolator's experiences and actions as sample sets, they are different from the 'stereotypical American' by a statistically significant margin.
- This does not mean that the cause is that the self-immolator is categorically different from the 'stereotypical American' (because correlation does not necessarily imply causation), in fact, it suggests that the experiences and actions may be related.
I honestly think that there are people in the US who feel distraught enough to do so, but they know that it wouldn't do any good for anyone else -- they would be ignored, or labeled as "crazy". No doubt life in the US is still much better than many other places, but we have to remember that protest itself has been systematically marginalized and penalized as a form of expression, and adjust our evaluation of the state of the US accordingly.
I have a theory that distribution of power in democracies leads to "distribution of blame".
Living in a third world country means you probably are dealing with a (semi) dictatorship. That means there's only a few entities (eg regime, government, whatever) that you can assign the blame to.
Therefore, you can light yourself on fire in protest to them.
In the U.S. who would you light yourself to protest to? Elected congress? Elected government? Wall Street? Supreme Court?
Unfortunately when system gets rigged and gamed in a democracy it's really difficult to untangle the mess.
This also has a secondary effect: In these countries people are not so divided. They have a common enemy: The dictator [0].
Source: Anecdotal experience based in years of life in a third world country and the U.S.
[0] This is an oversimplification as even the dictators have support of a big chunk of the population to rely on.
> I have a theory that distribution of power in democracies leads to "distribution of blame".
I think there's some truth to this, but I think this eventually results in widespread cynicism, skepticism and loss of trust towards any sort of institution (aka "the system") in general --including science and religion--, which is a perfect environment for fake news and conspiracy theories. Long term it leads to chaos and unrest too.
I think that you are correct that in the long term it leads to chaos and unrest, but I think it also has a slow burn problem that ultimately leads to deep ennui, cynicism, and a feeling of powerlessness that can last many generations. This has the effect of further concentrating power in those who have rigged the system and leads to such an unbalance that maybe when the chaos comes, it won't lead to anything better.
Conversely I think in more volatile arenas, the power dynamics while large, are less so (logically this makes sense because a revolution that can win is closer in power to the system they are fighting). While this volatility may be worse overall in that society, it is less systematically oppressive than say a rigged democracy deeply meshed into a non-democratic economic system.
The more I think about it the more my nihilism takes hold and I find that very disheartening.
So they suffer enough to want to burn themselves, but won’t because they fear being labeled crazy?
I feel that comparing the suffering of such an individual to the suffering of people who actually burned themselves to protest the oppression they experienced is insulting to the sacrifice of the later.
I agree with the sentiment of the protests in the USA, but there is no need to invent fictional martyrs who “could have been”.
No matter what issue you examine, you can doubtlessly find that somebody somewhere at sometime had it even worse. I think these kind of observations are usually unproductive though; taking this attitude to it's logical absurd conclusion would have you telling people to stop complaining because at least they're not in death camps.
This "somebody somewhere" comparison is callous and dismissive. These are billions of people that live under horrid conditions of tyranny and/or abject poverty.
Hundreds of millions of people lived through the Arab Spring - not "somebody somewhere". Many of them watched their country descend in unprecedented violence that cannot be compared to tear gas and pepper spray.
To them, those are indeed first world problems.
Protesters in Syria were slaughtered with machine gun and anti-aircraft fire. Protesters in Iraq were fired on with machine guns. Protesters in Egypt were killed by snipers from the roof tops, exploded in bombs, and then jailed and quietly executed. Protesters in Libya were massacred by the army - and then by terrorists. Protesters in Iran were shot, arrested, and disappear. AND THEN three of those countries fell into civil war.
As bad as things may seem in the US, they don't even compare to what happens in other countries. How many innocent black Americans were killed by police in any given year? 10? out of 300 million people? ....oh, and the police involved have been arrested and charged?
Please forgive the civilians in Syria who were bombed with nerve gas for not sympathizing - their civil war is still going on - almost 10 years now.
Either I have utterly failed to express myself effectively, or this is not a charitable response. I'm not sure which.
I'll try one more time: it should be possible to empathize with the plights of many people, not only the ones who are worst off. Obviously some people have it worse than others, I hope I've made my acknowledgement of that clear. What I don't find productive is telling some people you don't care about their problems because other people have it much worse.
> These are major HUGE segments of the world population that lived
If it was literally every other person in human history other than those in the present day United States...
...it still wouldn't have any bearing on discussion of the injustices in the United States. It's nothing more than an irrelevant distraction technique.
(And while it's a valid example of the general issue, no one before you raised immediate issues IN THE US.)
> Please forgive the civilians in Syria who were bombed with nerve gas for not sympathizing
Literally no one is asking for that. There is a difference between suggesting that, e.g., the Syrian experience you describe is irrelevant as a deflection in a discussion among people who are subject to, and responsible-as-citizens-for-their-governments-actions in the present problems in the US and suggesting that those American problems ought to be a concern for the victims of the violence in Syria.
I would suspect most people in the current American protest movement, while gratified by the support that has been shown in numerous other first world and even some developing nations, weren't looking for international attention and don't particularly think that it ought to be an urgent concern for people who are neither subject to nor responsible, even in the sense of the Democratic responsibility of citizens, for it.
> ...it still wouldn't have any bearing on discussion of the injustices in the United States.
Of course it would. Because our resources for charity and good will should not be solely given to Americans. There are far far more needy people outside America.
It’s not about who has it worse. That completely misses the point. It’s about accurately reflecting on your personal situation and not drawing absurd conclusions to justify a personal opinion. Let’s call this Dunning-Kruger for sympathy.
If you are trying to qualify who has it worse you aren’t focused on a materially objective outcome. For example many of the people protesting in the US in the past few weeks are trying to raise awareness of systemic racism and for police accountability (different issues, by the way). Most of those people aren’t asking for your sympathy because they are looking for impactful change which isn’t found in sympathy.
I think there may be a miscommunication here. I read "The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder." as meaning you have no sympathy for the plight of poor people in America because people in other countries experience even more severe poverty. Seeing poverty in America is as easy as going outside and opening your eyes.
> Seeing poverty in America is as easy as going outside and opening your eyes.
That so completely depends upon where you live. My big city of 900,000 people reported their highest measured homeless population ever in 2018 with a sizable jump to about 2000 people. That is tiny compared with many other similar sized cities.
Seeing homeless people, like stepping over a drunkard spilled out over a sidewalk, isn’t the same as diving into the research or getting into some of the personal stories.
A man is standing on a beach after a storm with the tide out, where there are thousands of starfish baking in the sun, slowly dying. The man is picking up the starfish one at a time, and throwing them into the ocean.
A bystander is walking by, and says, "Why are you doing that? There are thousands of starfish and it won't make a difference."
The man picks up another starfish and says, "To this one it matters," and throws it into the ocean.
I mean... there is more to poverty than homelessness. I don't believe that anybody in America has never had the opportunity to witness poverty in America.
The same absurd comparisons also come up when entitled people people try to talk about poverty when it’s clear they have never seen poverty in the US, much less in an economy where people earn less than $5 per day working 5x harder.