The tall, tall, people of Paree

Altruism is a thing that only goes so far. Some people like themselves but nobody else, and sometimes they like their immediate family, and sometimes their extended, and maybe their neighbors, and maybe their city, their state, their country, and then it usually stops there. People think we ought to be nice to people in our own country, but people in other countries, fuck them, because they feel the same way about us, and you know what, the only thing they understand is force.

That phrase kills me. Whenever we go to beat up on some other country it’s because the only thing they understand is force. It’s like we’ve tried reasonable discussion and that doesn’t work so now we have to punch them out. The reasonable discussion amounts to we want them to do something and they don’t want to do it, and so it’s clobbering time. If everybody always did what we wanted them to do we wouldn’t have to use force on anybody. There will always be war of course and sometimes we will be more right and sometimes we will be more wrong, I just wish we would quit using that phrase ‘the only thing they understand is force,’ as if that meant anything. Sorry, off the track, Christmas eve, just a little peacenik talk.

But the fact is there is always us on one side and the other guys on the other side. And we have to be nice to us, but we can treat the other guys like shit. Not that we are actually all that nice to people in our tribe, but there was no limit (slavery, extinction) to what we did to the other guys. Way back when kings converted to Christianity they were technically not allowed to attack other Christians. Well they found ways around that of course, but with pagans they didn’t even have to make excuses.

What I meant by the example of France and those other western European countries that have less infant mortality and are taller, is that they see themselves as essentially one people, different from other people, and so they are more willing to share their stuff with other French people who are like distant cousins. This does not extend to other countries who they are willing to go to war with from time to time. And it doesn’t extend to people in their country who they don’t think are like them, like muslims. They are just as bad as we are about that, maybe worse, it’s just that they don’t have so many minorities.

When I said they were maybe worse to their minorities, I was thinking about how anybody born on American soil is a citizen of this country, but that is not the case in France (which I am going to use to stand in for European countries). Actually I had to look that up on wiki, because it seemed so wrong, so unamerican, but it’s true. You have to wait until you are an adult, and then you apply for citizenship, and then I assume you could be turned down. Well it’s not quite like that, it’s more complicated, facts get in the way.

Let me try it this way. When Martin Luther King got shot, he was down in Memphis to support a garbage men’s strike. All the garbage men were black, and they paid them poorly and treated them like shit, and the assumption is that if there had been some white garbage men they never would have treated them that way. I guess that’s what I mean when I say that one factor in America’s big percentage of poor people is that most of them are black and white people aren’t as eager to help them as they would be if they were white. As opposed to Frenchmen who are more willing to lend a hand to a fellow Frenchman and that is why they, on average, have a lower rate of infant mortality and are taller.