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[nuker w]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/24/3075472.htm?section=justin

So yea. Does not effect me on a person-to-person scale but its roughly a 3-4 hour drive away from me.

So... Discuss.

[Servant Corps]

...29 people are about to die, and no comments? At all? What is wrong with us?!

When the deaths of individuals merits no response at all, almost as if they do not exist as real "persons", then this is real oppression.

VVV Oh, huh. My bad then.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

They almost certainly are already dead, after the second explosion. We had a mini-discussion about this in the sad thread, so all discussion has pretty much been expended there instead of in this thread.

[Sowelu]

What he said, except without the 'almost'.  That was one hell of an explosion.

It's a huge damn shame.  :/  And it really, especially sucks for the one kid who had been on the job for ONE HOUR.  He didn't even start that day, but he was so excited about leaving a fast-food job (or something similar, I don't remember) and starting a serious long-term career that he wanted to start learning his way around ASAP.

Utter tragedy.

[Heron TSG]

...29 people are about to die, and no comments? At all? What is wrong with us?!

When the deaths of individuals merits no response at all, almost as if they do not exist as real "persons", then this is real oppression.

First, they're already dead. Second, they are all outside of my monkeysphere. Even if I feel sad about their deaths (and I do), I can't feel as bad about it as if a relative of mine had died. I've never met them. I don't know their names.

It sounds cruel, but that is why I haven't commented. I don't know anything about it, and I wasn't effected as heavily by this as I could be. In my mind, as well as numerous other peoples' minds, they don't exist as real people. I can conceptualize that they are humans in a faraway land, but I don't know enough about them to know them as people.

It sounds cruel, but what would happen to us as a species if every time we thought about World War 2 everyone committed suicide because of the sadness caused by tens of millions of our fellow humans dying? 

NOTE: I concur that this was a tragedy, but you seemed to be surprised that we weren't all hit at a personal level.

[Servant Corps]

First, they're already dead.

The article itself said otherwise, which is I why said they were about to die...but perhaps the situation has changed so that they are now dead instead of waiting to die.

Second, they are all outside of my monkeysphere. Even if I feel sad about their deaths (and I do), I can't feel as bad about it as if a relative of mine had died. I've never met them. I don't know their names.

It sounds cruel, but that is why I haven't commented. I don't know anything about it, and I wasn't effected as heavily by this as I could be. In my mind, as well as numerous other peoples' minds, they don't exist as real people. I can conceptualize that they are humans in a faraway land, but I don't know enough about them to know them as people.

It sounds cruel, but what would happen to us as a species if every time we thought about World War 2 everyone committed suicide because of the sadness caused by tens of millions of our fellow humans dying? 

NOTE: I concur that this was a tragedy, but you seemed to be surprised that we weren't all hit at a personal level.

Well, I don't think I want to call for observers to have a personal attachment (that the monkeysphere provides)...but I am arguing against discrimination of another kind, that of the cause of death.

It appears as though that humanity has some dislike towards death and dying (mostly because they then wouldn't be living). It should imply therefore that humans' dislike of death should extend to ALL deaths, and so any news article about death should provoke some manner of dismay.

Usually, that is not the case. There seems to be more focus on certain "types" of deaths than others, both in the media and in our own society...for reasons I'm not entirely sure. Death by artillery fire is considered a horrible tragedy, but if it is death via mining accident, we just move on. Death via school shooting, versus death via obesity. Death by terrorism, versus death by car accident. Death by AIDS versus death by old age.

The cause of death should not play any role in determining how much attention is paid to those deaths. Death is death, and we should treat all instances of death equally, which I originally felt was not the case here.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

It appears as though that humanity has some dislike towards death and dying (mostly because they then wouldn't be living). It should imply therefore that humans' dislike of death should extend to ALL deaths, and so any news article about death should provoke some manner of dismay.

Usually, that is not the case. There seems to be more focus on certain "types" of deaths than others, both in the media and in our own society...for reasons I'm not entirely sure. Death by artillery fire is considered a horrible tragedy, but if it is death via mining accident, we just move on. Death via school shooting, versus death via obesity. Death by terrorism, versus death by car accident. Death by AIDS versus death by old age.

The cause of death should not play any role in determining how much attention is paid to those deaths. Death is death, and we should treat all instances of death equally, which I originally felt was not the case here.

That's because people seem to rate death horribleness based on it being "just" or not. Death by artillery fire involves war, and there's been a pretty big Anti-War movement worldwide over the past half-century. A mining accident is, well, an accident. Random chance, or so people would like to think. I still don't know how safe this mine was to begin with. In a school shooting, people who have yet to live their lives out are killed by another (not to mention the Moral Guardian bait that it brings, the media loves that). In obesity, the deaths are seen as having came about through the individual's own choice not to improve their health and avert their fate. Damned by another vs. Dammned by self. Terrorism is once again by another, while car crashes are accidents that are both common and mundane. AIDS is caused by HIV, an illness. It can strike you down at any point in your life, where as you've already lived if you die by old age.

[fqllve]

Yeah, we can't really treat all deaths as equal because no two deaths are equal. Different people, different causes, different circumstances. To say they're all equal would be doing a disservice to the individuality of each one.

Besides that, think about how many people have just died in the last half hour. There's no way you can be sympathetic to all of them. And like Barbarossa said, the vast majority of them are outside your monkeysphere, it in no way affects you personally and it would probably be impossible to try to force yourself to.

Personally, and this probably makes me a bad person, I think this is a worse death that civilians dying from artillery fire. No one should die in a fucking mine.