In any case the question given by the radio announcer was whether someone values Jewishness or Israeliness more, not
whether someone agrees that humanity is of worth simply by nature of being human.  In other words, it was about which
specific connections do you find most important.
Properly organized(organized isn't really the word but it'll do) someone's personal inclinations and loyalties will encourage him
to do what is right-which includes be charitiable toward the mass of mankind.
Take our hypothetical Righteous Polish Catholic.  His(presumed)generous disposition, his patriotism, his religion and so on are helping him to Fight For Freedom and Help The Oppressed. What he believes and what he is loyal to helps him do what is charitable for mankind(except for Germans perhaps).
Now imagine if he was brought up a German. He would be brought up in a society where(at that time) national loyalty took a sinister tone. If the way his parents brought him up, and his personal disposition were different then he would be a bundle of contradictions.
Now imagine if he had been an American, Englishman, or Dutchman trapped in Europe for some reason. To add to all those whatevers he had Democratic Ideology.
And so on.
In all these cases he behaves different because of his culture and upbringing. In fact he is a different person, however slight.
This is not to endorse racism-that would be an "either-or". It is saying that people are people and when you ignore that you pay for it sooner or later.

I do not. I look at the man and I analyze him by his actions as an individual chooser and as a group.member.

If the "Californian " is an active  member of MS-13, I  immediately classify him as "enemy".

Why? First, because he acts as a drug pusher and a murderer. Second, because he is affiliated with one of the most violent and deadly internal terrorist enemy organizations inside the United States.

But as I try to KILL him [and believe me if you encounter one of these thugs, its a life or death situation], I never forget that he is a Human being.  If circumstances dictate that it is a choice between the tiger and him, well then the tiger dies.

And he dies shortly thereafter.

But not as FOOD.

Herald

Of course not; who would want to eat him?

A tiger wouldn't know or care.

See, there is your philosophy thrown in.

Herald

More seriously then Californians, I have read that Germany in the 1940's had one of the lowest crime rates in the Western World. Which seems to indicate that they were in fact "nice" individually and "nasty" collectively, which indeed is a description of them I have heard over and over again. And while every stereotype has a grain of salt of course, one can at least see how that might be true in a given situation.
This can be said of others. I don't think I have ever met a Russian I disliked and some I liked very much. But every one has heard "things" about Russia.
I suppose you can say that about everyone-their collective behavior is different from their individual and may be better or worse.

Have you heard the American expression, "There are things a man will never do, but that a mob compels him."?

Herald

You know, I never heard that expression but it is accurate. Albeit my original point was that the collective mass of one's fellows has positive as well as negative effects, and in any case cannot be avoided. Therefore the thing to do is to bring out the positive effects as best one can.

Hey, I was joking, I have nothing against Californians, in fact I do like the ones I know, and even some I don't really know, and I even miss HtJ sometimes...
I'm also fairly pro-tiger, in any case I'm a rather feline-friendly person. I don't really understand Herald's point here, as I think this rather horrifying, sad freak accident is not a good example of the "us against them" human solidarity principle. It is clear that the poor beast had to be shot, and the cop that pulled the trigger probably saved a few more lives doing this, but the tiger threat on mankind is a rather minor one these days, especially for those of us apes that do not happen to live in the Sundarbans. The opposite does not hold true, and the tiger is the emblematic endangered species for a very good reason.

I also had to go to the Wiki to find out what "MS-13" means. Well, they're a bunch of bad guys, but I don't think that killing them, or anybody else for that matter, solves anything. Such people might provide Herald, however, with enough self-defense situations to justify his point, so I do not feel inclined to argue with him about that.
If the  species identity thing wasn't real , movies such as Independence Day wouldn't be blockbusters. My point is that the opportunities to apply human solidarity in the face of a non-human enemy are few and far between, and because of that this solidarity does not apply to a majority of the conflict situations we're facing every day. It's a pity, but that's the way it is, and I'd give an arm and a leg to join the war against malaria or against onchocercosis, but they're telling me that even the rank-and-file in these front line units must have a PhD. Oh well...

Our own worst enemy is us.

The point I elaborated on a bit is that the tiger knows who she is and acts as a tiger. In fact we understand tiger behavior better than we understand our own, so its easy for us to deal with an unfortunate tiger who just tigers.

We don't understand ourselves. We don't understand how our new "hive [group] mind" we acquired about six thousand years to ten thousand years ago makes us radically different from our chimpanzee cousins or our previous versions of ourselves. We don't understand what  "culture" is.

Example? How is it that two peoples virtually identical raised in similar environments side by side produce  two culture sets so different? Yes I mean the Palestinians and the Israelis. Pick a start point of 1948 CE where both start approximately equal in wealth and resources in the same ecology,  For the influx of refugees that flooded the Jewish community, offset the massive arab base from which the Palestinians could draw.

What happened? Two cultures took off in diametrically opposite directions. One went about the task of building a civilized life for its polity, and the other went sociopathic.

The individual Palestinian might be a nice joe, face to face, but he is by my standards culturally trained to be INSANE. To blame others for his failure is the principle cultural basis of his outlook.

The typical Israeli has a more ordered and to me balanced world view and has inculcated a cultural sense of personal responsibility. If he fails he tends to try again until he succeeds.

Its the cultural difference between a businessman and a professional victim. From one set of Humans you build a nation. From the other? Gaza?

Until we learn how to fix that problem in ourselves we are going to prey upon each other [bandits], but unlike the tiger we can't just kill all the bandits that break loose. For one thing, its still to hard for us to tell the leader bandit type apart from the normal sane leader until its too late and we see how the bandit has infected a normal group of men with his crazed thinking. Group minds remember?

That is why I look at what are to me, obvious bandits, relatively stupid men, who mislead  millions and I wonder in amazement  at how they get away with it.

Another example. Chirac of France. Don't think he's a bandit and that he didn't infect people with his crazed thinking? See what a difference a relatively sane leader has made in FRANCE. Sarkozy comes in and France calms down and tries to sort her own troubles out now instead of raising international havoc in the pursuit of one man's private criminal dealings.

This is something we need to STUDY in Human beings. Its a flaw. If we can fix it, we could save so much grief.

Tiger, tiger.

Herald

The first place to start is the simplistic but profound point that people are scum. We each have an urge to
be bad and an urge to be good-but, remarkably it is easier to be bad then to be good.
As for studying human beings that is a flawed concept by the nature of the fact that the studiers will by necessity
be human beings and bring their own bias to it-and might not even imagine that they need to be studied too. Be that
as it may people have devoted more effort to studying other humans then they have devoted to any other subject. For thousands of years. And no one has fully succeeded.
As for why Israelis and Palestinians evolved different there are several answers. One is simply that they are different-the original Zionist leaders came from a very different culture. Another is, "the conquerer's thick skin". English are  more pleasant then Irish sometimes and Turks more pleasant then Serbs. Less inclined to be quarrelsome or have generational grudges and paranoia, because more assured. And while Jews(honestly) do sound on the net suspiciously like Irish or Balkan-folk, it never dominates in quite that way. A little glory can work wonders for the disposition. What is really more remarkable is that Jews never really quite became like Palestinians even before that and I don't know the answer to that. But bad luck is perceived as injustice, and of course injustice is perceived as injustice. And envy is one of the most frightful emotions. Yet somehow Jews always did remain civilized in good times and bad, and if there is a scar left by it all, it does no more then itch. The best comparison is someone with PTSD who jumps when he hears a noise but has no other effects. The only explanation I can figure out is that Someone really is Looking Out and that is one neither Battar nor Herald will accept(which is of course their perogative).
Another reason is the nature of Arabism vs Zionism. I read an essay on it somewhere and it rings true. Most nationalist movements focus on the