

Trying to Matter - h34t
http://matt.is/trying-to-matter

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SkyMarshal
_"and no matter how much you learn, much of the world is inherently
unpredictable."_

I think that's the core lesson. In the West and the rest of the developed
world we've created stable societies that we tend to take for granted. It's
really just a layer of order superimposed on inherent chaos, that can break
down if we're not careful about maintaining and cultivating it (financial
crisis I'm looking at you).

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rdtsc
What is terrifying is that the ones committing these atrocities are people
just like us, they share the same genetic makeup, part of the same human race.
Somehow their actions makes me think that we are not that far away from acting
like them, we have our stable society but how much does it take for us to
start committing those atrocities? Of course we think we would never ever do
those things, but there are instances of soldiers who come from "stable"
societies who end up acting no better than these people (
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre> )

~~~
h34t
Also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment>

I think it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that because this happened
in a primitive village in a part of Africa with a history of conflict, "it's
always been that way."

What made news of this attack so jolting was that our family had experienced
Nyankunde in peaceful years. It was a beautiful place with wonderful people. I
had always wanted to go back.

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onassar
amazing job identifying something that is really hard to express and describe,
especially in words. +1

