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Notes -
I claim that the calculus is the same. When it comes to caring whether perfect strangers live or die, suffer or thrive, in ways that will never affect you - either you do, or you don't. Those of us who do, I'm confident are, in an overwhelming majority, applying the same drives in the same ways. Sure, some of us care about the suffering of our countrymen, others about the suffering of our whole race, others still of the whole human race, and others still about the suffering of all animal life. But the only thing that changes between all those cases is how you draw the border between the people you care about, and the people you don't. It's still altruism even if it's race-specific, much as someone who cares about other humans but doesn't give a fuck about animals is still an altruist.
This isn't to say you can't have genuine non-altruists who, by coincidence, have similar practical aims to altruists. For example, you might object to rape gangs not because you care whether the victims suffer, but due to a deontological objection to rape. Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole. I wouldn't call those people altruists. But once you start talking about the suffering of random girls an ocean away as something which in and of itself should make your blood boil, something which you have a moral impetus to stop if you can, even though it's in no practical sense your problem - then, sorry, you're an altruist. Albeit a narrow altruist. And a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric.
(Of course, they may have been lying — perhaps Scott was too optimistic in taking those fragments of altruism as glimmers of an underlying better nature, rather than disingenuous, cynical attempts to play on actual altruists' emotions and win them over.)
This is what it is and nothing else, in this case. Transpose this story into India and none of the people involved still care.
I do not believe that to be the case. Not insofar as your specific understanding of "in and of itself". And I don't believe that precisely because unlike, Scott, those people are not altruists.
We could trawl through old posts if you like, though I don't have the energy right now. But from what I saw, the rhetoric was very much trying to build outrage about Those Poor Innocent Girls and how uniquely revolting it all was; which isn't consistent with only caring insofar as it's a very minor victory for The Middle-Eastern Threat against The White Race on a global level. The gang members would have done more damage to ethnic Britons' long-term thriving if they'd assassinated a bunch of adult male investment brokers and computer scientists, or simply burned a lot of infrastructure, but I don't think the responses to such things would have remotely had the same emotional stringency. I can only conclude that they care, in part, because - or pretend to care because - of the actual suffering of the actual little girls, not just the greater-scope racial warfare.
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