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Comment by nukeop | Hacker News Reader

I think these kinds of antagonisms are central to American society. Other parts of the world often find them alien and incomprehensible.

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Not true - the Karpman drama triangle (victim-aggressor-rescuer) is a fundamentally human way of seeing the world (however dysfunctional and unhelpful) and so it is present all around the world, not just in the US. I would agree that based on what I read about it, the US seems to be particularly in the grip of this perspective though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karpman_drama_triangle

The question is if other societies also adopt the triangle for classes of people in the way the American society does.

Not all countries have "affirmative action" laws, which essentially codify victimhood large scale - and also beg the question in which other bucket everybody else belongs.

Add an intuitive and statist interpretation of the drama triangle (instead of acknowledging that the same persons can be in different roles at any given time) and you have a society of people rushing to demonstrate that they're not the aggressor, either by ending up protected ("victim") or protecting ("rescuer").

>Not all countries have "affirmative action" laws, which essentially codify victimhood large scale - and also beg the question in which other bucket everybody else belongs.

The US doesn't have any 'affirmative action' laws. It has non-discrimination statutes.

No, there are explicit affirmative action laws too. For example, some federal contracts are set aside for what are known as "8(a) businesses": small businesses owned by disadvantaged groups.

I have extensively studied the statistics about neoteny (=compassion gap) in USA vs Europe and they are very close to each other. If you’re talking about the position of women in the Taliban culture, this is a very interesting talk, despite the title: https://youtu.be/5eqYEVYZgdo

I wasn't talking about compassion (which may differ in shape but not volume) or Taliban culture (that I know little about, nor am particularly interested in).

Sounds like a way of conveniently ignoring my point. I’m aware it’s a caveat to the narrative you explain. That’s why it’s not reasonable to dodge the caveat on the grounds that you see a difference between “compassion” and “empathy” that is so massive that it would invalidate my comment, and that no culture from Europe to Taliban were cultures you were talking about.

So... what countries were you thinking of, when saying “Not all countries have affirmative action laws”, given my comment has covered cultures from Western to Taliban?

Would you please stop using HN for ideological battle? This is not what this site is for. In fact it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think what seanhandley meant was that the current obsessions and the particular form they take in the US is highly particular to the US and it is a mistake (often made by Americans and those in the Anglo-American sphere) to universalize and project this American phenomenon outward instead of understanding it as something bizarrely and uniquely American.

More worryingly, it seems that the "anglo" media is expert at exporting their world view to the rest of the world given time.

This is definitely an interesting point. There are quite a few people on social media sites acting like US specific outrages are somehow common to the whole world, despite their area not actually being affected by those issues (like police violence in the UK where it's mostly nonexistent). Seems the internet and popular media has given people the impression they're all Americans and that American issues and cultural norms are true everywhere on the planet.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EaglelandOsmosis

Or how in other cases, there are quite a critical comments on media from other countries because they don't go by cultural norms in the US, or what not.

Not fundamentally human! Animals can recognize aggression and intervene in favor of the perceived victim.

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