andrewducker | Cultural Imperialism

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andrewducker

[Poll #1356607]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

andrewducker

Then tell us what your answer would be.

Bad comment.

:->

From:

the-magician.livejournal.com

Nope, bad reply!

;-P

From:

andrewducker

Well, if you're not willing to share your opinion then complaining that it doesn't fit into a pair of radio buttons seems a tad pointless...

From:

the-magician.livejournal.com

I'm not the only one to point it out. Either it's a deliberate ploy on your part to get people to comment, or you need to spend more time thinking about providing a set of answers that actually cover the answer space.

Hint, if you have two radio buttons, then to cover the answer space, the second one has to be the reverse of the first. So for example a bad set would be
What colour should Ferraris be painted
A) green B) pink

and a better set of answers would be
A) green, B) not green

And the actual answers should be a ticky box or similar that accepts black, red and yellow, and NOTHING ELSE (grin!) (oh, all right, maybe white)

Edited Date: 2009-02-27 04:52 pm (UTC)

From:

andrewducker

Either it's a deliberate ploy on your part to get people to comment

Have you not noticed the discussion on the construction of my polls before? That's _exactly_ what they're there for.

From:

the-magician.livejournal.com

Bad Question, so I can't

The world
can be divided into "us" and "them". "They" should help themselves rather then relying on "us".
0 (0.0%)

Nope. The world is both united and endlessly subdivided into groups from one person to family to community to religion to football team to skin colour to country to meatVSvegetarian etc. We are all individuals, we are all unique snowflakes and at the same time we are all parts of many overlapping and disjoint groups.

The world
is made up of people. All people deserve our help equally.

Nope. (well, yes, at one level the world is made up of people, let's ignore all other levels in that statement!). All people deserve our help equally. Nope. My mother deserves my help much more than George W. Bush. My friends deserve my help much more than a random member of the Taliban does.

I call it circles of influece and circles of interconnectedness, but I'm sure there are better sociological terms.

If my mother needed £5,000 for a hip operation, I'd borrow the money immediately and send it to her. If some random person in California needed £5,000 for a hip operation I'd probably send nothing. If one of my fannish friends put an appeal on LJ saying that a filker in California without adequate health insurance needed £5,000 as co-pay on her hip replacement, I might donate £20.

Thus I do not believe that "we" should treat everyone equally because I am firmly committed to "I don't treat everyone in the world equally" and I'm perfectly happy with that.

From:

andrewducker

Now that's a _great_ comment.

I can't remember the name for the circles of interconnectedness, but The Monkeysphere is the term I tend to use.

Dunbar's Number probably helps here too.

I'm with you, by the way. I'm motivated by selfishness and altruism, and the "further away" someone is, the less altruism there is. There's probably an inverse square rule or something :->

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

I'm motivated by selfishness and altruism, and the "further away" someone is, the less altruism there is. There's probably an inverse square rule or something

the_alchemist made an interesting post about something similar this recently (unfortunately friends-locked), although her post was purely about time and space proximity, rather than social. She calls it the Proximity Rule, and says she doesn't have one.

From:

andrewducker

In which case I assume she either never helps anyone at all with anything, or is constantly in a state of dire poverty as she gives away all of her time and money to help other people.

From:

woodpijn.livejournal.com

As I emphasised, she means time and space, not social; but on that scale AIUI she tried the latter and found it unsustainable, so moved to the former at the cost of being thought callous.