u/LiatrisLover99

I've frequently heard that "normal" people only act fairly or with empathy in order to perform that behavior for others. A person who does these in private rather than optimizing for self-interest, even when they could not possibly gain social standing by sacrificing potential gains, is exhibiting a symptom of autism or some other behavioral disorder.

Is this true? How widespread is this behavior such that is considered "normal"? Could you even experimentally test for this or evaluate how common it is?

This is a fairly sizeable opposition where I live (Somerville Massachusetts), people hate developers and see allowing new housing construction as rewarding developers with profit from the lack of affordability in housing. But what's the alternative, when they also don't want tax dollars going to pay for said housing?

I don't like to straw man positions but this is what I hear every time housing comes up. Whether it's the tower in davis, the new housing in Union, the old star market building, a new development near the community path, the refrain seems to be that all new housing is bad for the city and is going to bring in new people that will harm the city.

What separates new people that will cause damage and harm the city from existing residents that don't? If people hate their current / prospective neighbors already so much why do they live here?

I went for my first properly long ride of the year the other day, out on the backroads I had a dude in a pickup going in the other direction hold down his horn and slow all the way down to shout "you're fucking gay" out the window at me. WTF? I was on the other side and could not have negatively impacted his trip at all in any way. If anything he slowed himself down to shout abuse.

I don't mean we hate the prospect of living in apartments ourselves. There are so many local people currently up in arms about Cambridge allowing four story buildings across the city. They talk about how apartments ruin neighborhoods, the kind of people who live in apartments are not real Americans but are scum who ruin the community, it's going to bring trash and crime to everyone who lives in the area. Or cite stories where one single three unit building got put in and now it's the source of all the rats and trash and crime in their area.

What's going on? It's not blanket misanthropy because it's specific to "apartment people" apparently?

You're going to kill someone. All the street lights and traffic lights are down, why are you still going full speed?

By this I mean apparently popular positions such as "we should require all new housing to have parking, because I personally have a car and if that new housing didn't have parking, it would be exclusionary to me." No consideration given to people who don't drive, only people like them matter. (This also sometimes extends to "we shouldn't allow any studio apartments to be built, because they would exclude families like mine")

Or someone I know as a prominent anti-bike activist in my community who in a moment of great honesty advocated for traffic calming and speed bumps on her street, because drivers were going too fast. But she advocates against traffic calming on parallel streets, explicitly saying she opposes measures that might cause drivers to use hers instead. Only her life matters, the neighbors one street over can get fucked. Needless to say she opposes traffic calming everywhere else on the basis that it would slow down her commute, too.

People are so angry about others on food stamps getting "too much help" or buying "name brand" things or steaks and stuff like that. Meanwhile we're spending 20 billion dollars on a war nobody can coherently justify and handing out hundreds of millions in government contracts to toadies, somehow those same people who were up in arms about tax waste don't care?