Not just the mindset, it’s policies and enforced rules. Kid punches teacher = temporary consequences. Teacher safely restrains or even touches the wrong violent kid = career over.

Requiring a hands-off approach protects the district from paying out workman’s comp claims for staff injuries and protects from lawsuits when a kid with involved parents is handled roughly. Besides, shit kids are plentiful while licensed educators are scarce. Best not take unnecessary risks and leave 180 students suddenly without a science teacher, over a fight that would have ended one way or another. That’s the thinking.

I mean, where does being upset or offended come into this?

In evolutionary biology, the F2 (or grandchildren) generation is the more conceptually useful focus point for analyzing the success of various reproductive strategies. Many losses will occur along the way for a wide variety of reasons, some of which are built-in.

Worker ants exist, in great numbers. So do sharks who get eaten by their siblings in the womb. Or sea turtles, alligators and the like who basically start life as snacks and continue to exist only because 1/1000 made it to adulthood. How? There were too many to eat at once.

Genes are genes and individuals are individuals.

If I were a sentient worker ant, would knowing what I am cause a revolution? I think not. Should a sentient baby turtle fall into despair? Wouldn’t be useful.

The vast majority of hominid species that existed are extinct. We’re what’s left, in part by chance. Having a baby is so insanely costly and risky to human women as individuals that given the technology and freedom to avoid it, on average the birth rate falls way below replacement levels. And then on the other extreme Elon Musk has this notion to select all boy children (through IVF, no kidding), who he hopes then will go on to serially impregnate multiple women each, spreading his genes as far as possible. This is also pretty gross. He’ll die at the end of his own life, just like every other person.

So, who are the ‘winners’ versus the sacrificial members of the species here? We each just exist until we don’t. The genes we happen to inherit neither ‘belong’ to us nor define us as individuals. Across generations, life continues on as a massive unguided amoral process, up until it doesn’t.

Well yeah I guess I got off track.

The point I intended to get into was to look at it from the grandparent generation perspective. Clearly there’s success in genes that produce a mixture of self-sacrificing and selfish individuals.

It doesn’t make sense to me to call contributing, necessary members of a group an “evolutionary dead end” when the differences between them and the direct reproducers are pretty much epigenetic. But maybe a different dose of hormones in the brain would change which parts of the picture I focus on in the first place lol.

Altruism does imply a choice is being made. The organization of a group into reproductive and non-reproductive members doesn’t usually happen at the choice level in nature. It’s developmental.

Humans can only survive in groups larger than a nuclear family unit. We have to have tendencies inborn to make that work.

Think of dogs. A litter of puppies, left together, will naturally organize themselves into extremes of dominant and submissive personalities. In the wild, the next generation will be coming from the alphas, but sustained and protected by the group. With domestic dogs, we find that separating the puppies at the right age will result in more balanced individual personalities, desirable for training. The dogs aren’t making a reasoned choice to become leaders or helpers, it’s just their programming interacting with their environment, with a little randomness nudging them each down one path or another.

People are unique in the sense that we like to think we have control over our own life paths. We have free will, and we use it, and we have this wonderful ability to analyze those choices with game theory and such. But we’re still animals at the same time, living in an unpredictable world.

The gentle niblings are a sweet addition to our world, often playing happily in the background of family gatherings, sleeping soundly (for all we know) in the homes of other people.

We bring them offerings of noisemakers and candy, as is tradition. It is believed the right tithings will ensure a great harvest of comeuppance over our childhood rivals. Blessed is the home where niblings visit frequently!

Funny how the most terrifying space aliens tend to be the hive insect type

Our need to exist runs so deep, we credit ourselves with the random shuffling of chromosomes that occurs during our own conception, and we trust the products of our mating activities to somehow carry our essential selves into the future.

Your niblings also carry ‘your’ genes. The whole human race carries genes in common with you.

Helping the tribe is enough in evolution. Not every individual reproduces, and yet here we are with a strong urge to cooperate.

Please don’t throw away the bras!!

There are several worthy charities that collect and distribute them… Where to donate bras

Strange to think of it in percents, as if there isn’t, in the first world, a standard of living floor below which one requires rather than owes charity.

If I’ve lived on 10% of Singers net income, how can my better-or-less-than moral status then depend on how much more I earn that I then can give from? It doesn’t feel right as a calculation.