… is not a scale that some people would allow you to adjust yourself.

White People Don’t Live in Flint or Puerto Rico, So President Sends Aid to France

In short: there are local problems, so we shouldn’t care about distant problems. This is in fact a position I can *kinda* get behind: let’s face it, proximity often drives give-a-damn. A bus crashes in Zimbabwe: you’ll never hear about it, much less care. An equivalent bus crashes into your neighbors house: suddenly it’s newsworthy.

But the water problems in Flint are not *historic* like Notre Dame.

And it does raise another philosophic ponderable: as some of the angry selfish commenters on the racist website linked above make clear, lives are more important than stuff. But… are they *really*? It’s easy to say that a single human life is more important than and physical object. But most people, like it or not, are filler. Most people will NOT be remembered when they’re gone, just like most buildings won’t be. But then, most people are not Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking, and most buildings are not Notre Dame or the VAB. Is a single human life more important than, say, a single USB drive? How about a hundred lives? A thousand? What if that USB drive contains the single copy of the cure to cancer or a map to a cavern containing a backup copy of the complete library of Alexandria?

If the Notre Dame cathedral was just an elaborate warehouse… who’d care. But it is a historical structure that means a *lot* to a *lot* of people. “Meaning” is important.

Now, clearly people can care about multiple things at once. But if we shouldn’t, if we should only care about the most important issues first, then clearly we need to yank all funding from historic preservation and artistic spending, including defunding Hollywood and shutting down Netflix and Facebook and whatnot, and devoting every last ounce of effort and dollar to the colonization of space, since that’s obviously the most important thing that humanity can do. Every moment we delay we put at risk not only the survival of humanity but of all the other species on Earth. A single major impact or supervolcano, an interesting new virus or the sun burping, could turn the Earth into a lifeless rock. Anyone who stands in the way of dealing with that existential threat, from directly opposing it or spending money that could go into nuclear rocket engine design on frippery like lipstick or childrens toys, is a traitor to the species. That’s how this sort of thing goes, right?