I’d like to clarify: Utilitarianism offers zero judgments or metrics about who might be a “good person”, or who might be a “better person”. It concerns itself solely with the effects of actions.

You could build some artificial equation out of total good done, total potential to do good, opportunity cost for doing the good, etc., I suppose, trying to avoid obvious pitfalls like “Bill Gates who has donated 95% of his wealth and still has enough to live a comfortable life for thousands of years is better than someone struggling to make it by themselves who still manages to give a little of their money every month to those worse off than them”.

But that is not something utilitarianism cares about – it cares only about the results.

“Good person” is a useful heuristic for social animals like humans to use – e.g. in your example if someone was able to have a decent chance at saving someone’s life that they were walking past, and didn’t take it (high proximity, low opportunity cost, potentially high value results), I would interpret that as a terminal lack of empathy for other humans, and probably be unwilling to trust that person very far, no matter how much money they had donated to worthy causes (which I would at that point probably interpret as an attempt at moral licensing based on the other behaviour). But it doesn’t really have a meaning in utilitarianism other than possibly the cold calculation of “ally who I might be able to cooperate/reason with to do good”.

“over-paid software engineer”

Ha, clearly you didn’t work for Evil Aerospace!

“sea slug neurobiology is important”

Particularly to sea slugs 😉

Maybe my messages should be labelled: Warning, may contain British sense of humour 😉

That was more me cynically reflecting on UK/aerospace salaries than on you with MS (which I knew about) – UK salaries are substantially lower than US to start with, and the aerospace/defence companies paid less than average. But I made a deliberate decision to work in that field.

(And ‘Evil Aerospace’ is because I’m legally bound not to talk about my employer by name as part of the legal settlement for why I don’t have a career any more).

“chronically enthused”

There are worse things to be!

I’m all for a greater sense of absurdity 😉

http://tab.gladly.io/?r=11141785

Add a little bit at a time…

I don’t think Max is a monster. Or at least, if he is, I don’t think I have the information to know that yet. From what I know – he’s not ripe yet. There are some worrisome tendencies. And yet, I think Alison treated him abhorrently (if understandably). Ethics is a complicated multidimensional space.

Now, from what I saw of him prior to all of this, Max did not impress me and I wouldn’t want to hang out with him socially. This is an entirely different form of evaluation! There are an awful lot of people in the world, and I have very little time – twit in my personal evaluation doesn’t mean I want the wrath of god to rain down upon their heads. …I just would prefer not to interact with them on my own time. (Of course, as a forty-something, it’s likely our interactions would be different. Though I’ve had a string of interactions with older twenty-somethings recently that left me going, “Um, yo, I’m in my forties, we should be having a polite and formal interaction and you should definitely not be hitting on me.” Yikes. No, I’m definitely complaining.)

(His current position would make him an interesting person to interact with in a professional capacity. Say, as a martial arts student, or perhaps in an academic context.)

…though I am so tired about hearing about how trauma can birth monsters.

a) First, there is all the prurient interest in monsters, which seems to be serving on the one hand an interest in entertainment and spectacle, and on the other reassuring ourselves that we would never ever turn into such creatures.

b) Second, as I’ve said before the concept is just so terribly inflated. There is a statistical correlation. But that just means an increased likelihood. To look at a lot of the fictional tropes, you’d really think someone with my actual life history would have job prospects of prostitute and/or drug addict, or serial killer!

When I’m really getting in a pissy mood (and I am about to bike down to the lab to take care of slugs, rather than take a nap I could really use) I kind of want to implore people to look at it from another standpoint –

We’ve created a world that has broadly cut down on the experience of trauma for people in developed countries. (If you look at some of the accounts we have of common people’s lives, gosh, for much of human history, there tended to be more hard knocks distributed broadly.) I’m all for that. But it creates a kind of odd set of expectations that this is what being a normal human is – and seriously, this is about the only time I know of you can say this for.

Living in a hothou- er, growing up in a fine sheltered glade isn’t innately superior. It’s just another way to live. Living in a higher pressure environment,* some people do poorly and others flourish. And those are just other ways to live as well. (Though I often prefer to have a few people who have been through shit at my back if things are getting weird, just because the hysterics quotient tends to be way lower.)**

* Notice that I have veered away from forge metaphors!
** Ah, yes, there’s the unmitigated bitchiness.

Those are pretty much the black and white extremes though, aren’t they? And yes, this is a comic, but it’s not Alan Moore (and let me say a prayer of thanks – we don’t need another one.) In fiction everyone either goes full on recovery and redemption, or trauma become the backstory that is supposed to make the terrible villain more interesting!

…whereas usually people end up somewhere in the middle. Maybe they part-way get over it. Maybe they don’t get over it at all, but they have some kind of coping strategy that let’s them limp through. Likely, they partway get over it, and then express their not getting over it in some kind of totally lame and banal sort of way… because that’s most of what people do. He’s far more likely to be a total douche to future girlfriends than go supervillain.

No, I’m British – just in the butt end of one of the countries that England is currently sucking dry while revoking our EU funding. Or do you mean that as a suggestion for charity?

Okay, I can see there’s a lot of confusion here, so let me clear things up!

I was asking you whether you were trying to guess at my own location or whether you were asing me to personally give money to Pine Ridge Reservation, since those were the only words in your comment! I didn’t know what you were trying to say. So please don’t send me cash!

While I don’t actually want to broadcast my exact home address on this site it would probably help if you had a working knowledge of the area under discussion so that you don’t leave with the impression of someone trying to overplay their situation in life (although as I say we’re actually very lucky compared to a lot of the people in our direct surroundings). So! No, I don’t live in England. I come from one of the four countries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland which includes England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, plus several island chains.

The South-East of England traditionally enjoys a lot of wealth and prosperity and Westminster tends to heap the bulk of our shared tax revenue onto that part of that one country while the rest of us struggle. Due to this there’s massive wealth inequality and a lot of net migration within the UK as people move away to an area that actually has employent opportunities, public services and most other elements that require a well-funded council to provide. On which note, Cornwall is also technically a seperate portion of the UK, being a sovereign power before it was incorporated. Along with the rest of us ‘conquered nations’ it receives far less focus than the areas around London and the South-East. Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish counties are often supported quite heavily by EU financial grants and handouts as despite devolved powers of government the London-centric focus of the UK budget usually means that we don’t have enough money to pay upkeep on our infrastructure let alone to actually revitalise failing areas. The upshot of all this is that the UK has one of the highest rich-poor wealth disparities in the entire world, both from person to person and from region to region.

I said county/state simply because a surprising number of Americans don’t understand what we Brits mean when we describe our country as being effectively segmented into county jurisdictions. The closest thing to our setup that I’ve found for ease of explanation is the way states are seperated in the US – but on a severely smaller scale, of course, and without most of the localised regulations. It’s strange since if I recall correctly US States are also subdivided into counties, so the concept should translate, but apparently doesn’t more often than not. Additionally many UK states are the size of US municipalities and have similar levels of independent function (which is to say, fairly low).

The UK is officially part and parcel of the European continent (despite being very slightly seperate, geographically, to the tune of 18 nautical miles). We consider ourselves culturally, geographically, economically and historically European. The recent ‘Brexit’ vote is about to shake some of that sentiment up a bit but even if we do depart the European Union we’ll remain European by categorisation; it will only end up affecting our economic trade area and potentially the freedom of movement across our borders. There are other island nations within the European group as well, such as Ireland, Malta, and Iceland, to name but a few. People tend to refer to specifically landlocked areas of Europe as “mainland Europe” for this reason.

So when I say that my county and local area is one of the poorest and worst for unemployment on the continent, what I mean to say is that my underfunded Welsh county is one of the poorest counties *in the whole of Europe*. At the time of Brexit I believe it was actually last on the list although it may have been surpassed since. Greater London by contrast is the richest county *in the whole of Europe*. We don’t just have the greatest rich/poor divide in Europe.. we ARE the entire European wealth disparity.

Joblessness is the status quo, here, even though most of the population of my town have at least a university degree. Food is at a premium as the mountains make long-distance deliveries expensive and troublesome. Housing is mainly owned by a few wealthy absent landowners and the majority of people rent substandard and often uninhabitable housing at peak rates from letting agents in a completely different country. Benefits are being completely slashed as well which further decreases the amount many local people have to fuel the economy with. The poverty of my area could be reversed, literally tomorrow, by our own sovereign powers and treasury. Instead they are pressing for us to lose our EU support because it costs the richer areas more than they receive back (oddly enough). You can understand why the nation is politically so divided!

Here’s a map of the average economic strength per region across Europe to illustrate my point. Note the very dark purple on the western edge of Britain (the right-hand UK island). I hope this makes sense, and gives you a bit of insight into the frustrations of the UK political system.

http://www.citymetric.com/business/most-britain-poorer-european-average-and-other-things-we-learned-map-2721

To answer your direct question, UK comprehensive schools (at least in my experience!) teach SEVEN continents. These are: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Australia (sometimes referred to as Oceania), Africa, and Antartica.

Australia is both a country and a continent; the Australian Continent includes Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and others. Oceania also adds in New Zealand and the Micronesian and Polynesian islands but it is generally not considered a continent as it does not make up “a single continuous landmass.”

I think the term “the Americas” is supposed to cover the totality of North and South America as well as Central America (which is usually described as part of S.A. continentally).

Eurasia is just a portmanteau and a combination of Europe and Asia, based on the fact that we share a landmass, but this is something that we don’t tend to use in any real sense here in Europe. At least, not at primary-school levels of education! The traditionally accepted number of continents is seven.

I’m interested in the idea of a “tribal children’s book” .. what does that mean?