Prioritising life | Hacker News Reader

Prioritising life

abc.net.au

47 pointsoscardelben20 comments

The article started off well with a look at the way we give undue priority to terrorism, then seemed to deteriorate into an anti-capitalist rant.

Yes, humans make bad choices. However, I have never seen it explained to me how government, made up entirely of fallible humans, will make better choices than it's constituents.

"Bob Ellis has had a long and close involvement with politics, covering as a journalist twenty-four campaigns in Australia, the UK and the USA, and writing speeches or slogans for Kim Beazley, Bob Carr, Mike Rann and others. Ellis's work for film and stage has won numerous nominations and awards for writing and direction. His most recent book is The Capitalism Delusion and is also the author of And So It Went: Night Thoughts in a Year of Change."

You also have to remember that he is writing for the ABC, a government funded "independent" media. Make of that what you will.

Yeah, I loved this:

> China, a socialist state, handles earthquakes well.

> When will we get our priorities right, and learn how useless the free market is in dealing with tsunamis, earthquakes, Aboriginal health, African AIDS, Middle Eastern pogroms, Chinese tyranny and the sort of shameful poverty that breeds terrorists everywhere and sends them walking in explosive underpants out of universities into airline waiting rooms?

So China is socialist when it's handling earthquakes well, and free market when it's tyrannical? I think the fellow has the reasoning backwards.

Yeah he seemed hilariously biased.

Also his comment that the free market is lousy at fighting poverty seemed particularly egregious since:

a) Capitalism and free markets hav done far more to fight poverty in the world than foreign aid; just look at China, capitalism is lifting over a billion people out of poverty.

b) Protectionism helps keep poor countries penniless. The Western world frequently subsidises the hell out of their farmers, depriving poor countries of an export market for something (staple foodstuffs) that they can actually produce competitively.

Does it really handle earthquakes well? How many thousand children died in poorly built schools?

I believe they handle media about disasters well - very little information is released and it is always positive.

The west just needs the Iraqi news anchor who was stating 'The Americans have not invaded Baghdad' while the tanks were rolling past behind him. Fox should have handed him like $5 mil and got him to host Fox News, he would have been so much more convincing than the complete hacks they have on it.

I can just imagine him in Haiti right now, "Haiti recently received a very minor earthquake with little damage to the countries infrastructure, to which the international community is overreacting and pouring money into the worlds latest non-catastrophe." Behind would be a levelled city-scape filled with burning buildings.

Incidentally, he'd have been the best guy to handle the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. You just have him say "The President did not have sexual relations with that woman!" in front of a presidential sex-tape. The man would have, quite frankly, been the most useful tool to American media propaganda. Sadly he's probably dead now.

I think the point he is trying to make is that we have 'n' reasons why we are better than nation X and we are very proud of those reasons. But despite those n reasons, we aren't prioritizing life, while the countries that we put down constantly for various reasons are still doing better than us in some areas.

Anyway, one can always find specific sentences to nitpick about. I think his overall message is correct.

What, precisely, is his overall message?

"We could spend five billion dollars on aid that civilises East Timor and ten billion dollars buying up Indonesia's forests and a billion buying eighty Elvises over three years and the cost per week per taxpayer would be nine dollars fifty, the price of an hour's parking or two Toblerones."

Yea, and there is an unlimited number of other things we could pay for if everyone sacrificed their two Toblerones. How do you choose? Why East Timor and Indonesia, specifically? Are there other nations that need that aid even more? Are we sure that there are not even more cost effective ways to spend that money to save lives?

Should we all give up our Toblerones and all our other luxuries until deprivation, preventable death, and want have been eliminated everywhere on Earth? Has the author taken this step himself?

I suppose he makes a good argument that the funds spent in the name of battling "Terror" made for a poor investment. With the bankers, I agree with his sentiment of the injustice of it all, but does he stop to think even for a moment whether things might be even worse if the world financial system were allowed to collapse just to spite the bankers who caused it? Was there a solution that both would avoid this situation and appropriately punish the bankers who got us in to this mess? Has the author run any numbers to determine this, since he is so fond of sums?

His overall message seems to be that the solution of humanities ills are simple, and it is only the refusal of a few powerful Americans to do their sums correctly that prevent the implementation of these solutions. Forgive me if I suspect the reality might be more complex than that.

He is not calling China free market in that quote, he is listing things which he does not like (tsunamis, earthquakes, tyranny) which he thinks are not dealt with by only the forces in a free market.

The bottom line is that people, and by extension governments, are very poor at judging risks. The distortions in our prioritization reflects underlying cognitive bias, and our existing biases are greatly amplified by the mass media.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Agreed. This is an excellent book:

http://www.amazon.com/Risk-Science-Politics-Dan-Gardner/dp/1...

on the subject (I've recommended it a few times before)

That List of cognitive biases almost reads like a list of software bugs! Thanks.

For those that are wondering what Elvises are; they are large helicopters that drop water on bushfires.

Thanks, I had interpreted it as a confused comment on the capitalistic folly of paying people to dress as dead rock stars and go parachuting.

God dammit man, don't you know you're supposed to be careful with what you say on the internet, once you say it it makes it true: http://www.flyingelvi.com/main.html

S-64 Helitanker to be exact. Elvis is the moniker of one such helicopter which divides it's time between California and Victoria for their respective fire seasons.

This article is just so silly and prejudicial, I will not bother writing long about it. But a few points - what does geographical proximity have to do with compassion? If people are afraid of planes, will that not split up the world even more? Why make blanket judgements and reinforce deadly stereotypes with phrases like "Aboriginal health, African AIDS, Middle Eastern pogroms, Chinese tyranny"?

This is what is called a "political article"

In it, the author takes up a series of positions that he feels we should also have and makes a case why they are better than other positions. (In this case other positions weren't really defended at all rationally and instead just assumed to be insane, which makes this a _really bad_ political article)

The problem with posting this on HN is that we have two main choices: agree with the writer, in which case our response amounts to "heck yeah!" which is information-free. Or other main choice is to disagree with the author, which amounts to "shit no!" which is also information-free.

Nuanced responses, along the lines of taking each point and ripping it apart (easy enough to do here) only elicit arguments from both the heck-yeah and shit-no crowd. Eventually the two crowds just go at each other with platitudes.

I'm not saying there is no merit in discussing some rant like this...

On second thought I AM saying there is no merit in discussing this. It's an awful piece. Flagged.

Great column. It's so good I expect a million frantic rebuttals from Americans who don't like the truth well told.

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