Hacker News Reader

Comment by thejackgoode | Hacker News Reader

Being Eastern European, I can attest to the fact that this kindness and generosity (poorly abstracted as being passionate about things) has a flip side, and you don’t want to be on the opposite side of this treatment.

View on HN

This is a really good point,

when an American (or other rich Westerner) shows up in remote area, they are treated like a king,

basically you are treated as people treat ridiculously good looking and popular people around them that they want to be around,

that generosity you feel is nothing more than being popular and center of attention

start living there, all of a sudden that generosity is not so obvious, families are at each other's throats for that bushel of corn one guys grandfather stole from the other fifty years ago, random shit gets stolen, the whole garden is trampled because someone is stealing a few of your tomatoes, trash is thrown over your yard because the neighbor wants to "save" on trash collection fees, people cut ahead of you around in the queues, people have untrained dangerous dogs that are a menace to the whole community ...

etc

>start living there, all of a sudden that generosity is not so obvious, families are at each other's throats for that bushel of corn one guys grandfather stole from the other fifty years ago, random shit gets stolen, the garden is trampled, trash is thrown over your yard because the neighbor wants to "save" on trash collection fees, people cut ahead of you around in the queues,

So basically all the same petty BS that you get in the urbanized inner suburbs HN raves about without the bickering being laundered through lawyers and local officials to give it a veneer of acceptability?

Humans gonna human.

You could reframe your point without it being an attack on "HN" as a unit, and without making yourself sound above it.

Yeah, my Berkeley neighbor has been on my case for that bushel of corn for the last two decades

I'm sure if you borrowed some power tool and half broke it he'd be more than happy to call the city on you every time you violate one of the million rules for the next few decades. Of course nobody is fighting over corn but there is no shortage of fairly obvious parallels.

I come from a rural environment. Sometimes it was literally about corn. But yeah, most often it was about mechanical stuff.

> families are at each other's throats for that bushel of corn one guys grandfather stole from the other fifty years ago, random shit gets stolen, the garden is trampled, trash is thrown over your yard because the neighbor wants to "save" on trash collection fees, people cut ahead of you around in the queues

If this is supposed to be the description of Kazakhstan, I haven't seen a post with more bullshit in my life. Like "bushel of corn ... fifty years ago", "the garden is trampled", "save on trash collection fees", "people cut ahead of you in the queues" gee.

My sentiment is not about Kazakhstan in particular,

It is about the rich westerner's naive gushing when visiting African, Eastern European, Central American remote villages etc

"Everybody is so nice and generous around here ... not like back home in the civilized world"

They confuse how people treat them in particular with what it is like living there.

One possible explanation for the pattern of generous hospitality in poor countries I find quite interesting (I'm sure it's only one component of many in the motivational environment) is that hosting the traveler from afar is the closest thing they can do to traveling themselves.

They're tourists in an area where they're uncommon. Outside places where they are very numerous, people always treat tourists well. It's simple, really.

Note that generosity to travelers is a common virtue in many societies throughout history, and violating this can bring severe consequences if only in myth (e.g. a traveling stranger might actually be a god in disguise checking up on you).

And after all, next time it might be you looking for a bite to eat and a place out of the wind and rain for the night. There's not a lot of Holiday Inns on the steppe or in ancient Greece.

It reminds me the old joke https://www.anekdot.ru/id/309796/

A lot of his examples though depend on his observations, as a 3rd party, such as the accident. That wouldn't have any dependency on him being the center of attention. His observation in Morrocco also without his involvement.

> you don’t want to be on the opposite side of this treatment.

How high is the risk, if you make an effort to behave well?

Low, but it’s quite a skill. Referenced here “bald and bankrupt” is an expert in “behaving well”, I am still amazed by his skills to be honest

That is only on camera. He has been kicked off almost every other platform except YouTube. Visa, Uber, PayPal among others all kicked him off. Off camera he has been exposed as a debased sexual predator. Anyone interested can find the whole drama exposing him by searching reddit, his name, and similar terms to what I discussed.

I'm not interested one way or another but if you're going to make claims this extreme the least you can do is provide a link to the evidence yourself. Let's leave making unsubstantiated, outrageous statements to the other social media platforms that do it best.

These are just a few posts digging into his past. There are plenty more to research as well.

https://www.reddit.com/r/internetdrama/comments/d4zo17/1_mil...

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier/comments/judnlm...

Most of the URLs of that thread are broken including Archive.org.

Thanks for posting the links.

I used to be a fan. Until as you described, I scratched the surface and found the posts he made. The rape allegations. It doesn’t take long to connect the dots that his trips to poor socioeconomic areas are not because they are interesting. But to find vulnerable women. And his naive audience is how he continues to pay for his predations.

Other than the accusations that the other poster made (which I've heard as well), I wouldn't consider him a model expat. First, he essentially speaks Cave Russian (Morning! Taxi how much?) despite living there for decades.

The other more concerning thing, is this clueless chipper tourist act he does constantly - many times, I've seen him interview desperate, bitter, destitute people who lived in derelict former industrial centers of the USSR, telling stories of how their towns were the centers of industry, culture, activity - only for the factories to shut down, the opportunities disappear, the buildings turn to slums, and the only escape that remained was drinking.

And he just grills them question after question - and grins like a five year old at his first time at the zoo. It made me think something is very wrong with that man.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier/comments/judnlm...

A random traveller from afar is unlikely to be subject to the worst risk, which is something like sudden bout of sectarian or ethnic violence between neighbours.

As if people felt the need to compensate for their hospitality and generosity elsewhere.

Can you elaborate?

For example, ex-nomadic and Caucasian “honor culture” is linked to necessity of trust in regions with predominant animal husbandry. If your cattle gets stolen before winter, you die of hunger. That’s why honor killings and hospitality are the flip sides of the same coin — you can’t afford losing trust. Robert Sapolsky gave a lecture about it.

While i can't make absolute statements of what he may or may not have said in every lecture he ever gave, i doubt Sapolsky would claim that honor killings and hospitality are the flip sides of the same coin. In "Behave The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst" Sapolsky differentiates "honor killings" as inwards violence, whose victims are usually young women, from "retribution" against animal thieves, and links it to social power structures in families and to religious laws, not ethnicity or nomadic origins.

Here’s a piece that I found, I vaguely remember there was more in that lecture on the topic:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz3hBuq-Huk

While it’s possible to differentiate these two things like you mentioned, if you look at honor as a concept, it’s useful function is about curbing higher cost of distrust. And that Sapolsky does explain in the linked video.

Well Sapolsky sure seems to love to make dubious absolute statements and oversimplifications in his lectures, and yet he still says that pastoral nomadic honor cultures foster strict rules of hospitality, which is not the same as hospitality in and of itself, even if it can be an amplyfiyng effect. I would be more inclined to agree that "strict rules (of hospitality)" and "violent enforcement (of subservience)" are flip sides of a coin. Note that "honor killing" is a very loaded term and quite different from domestic violence and retribution.

Interesting. Does that mean there's a low level of petty crimes like theft?

yes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com