prog | (no subject)

I keep returning to this thought experiment, concocted by the part of me that's been continually angry since November:

You are presented with a button, and are told that pressing it will instantly vanish every person not in the United States. They will simply wink out of existence, leaving the whole world empty of people, except for this country.

Would you press it?

Intentionally worded to avoid words like "kill" and "destroy". If the interviewee asks if the people would die, the interviewer does not answer definitely, instead reiterating that the people would vanish entirely, as if they had never existed in the first place. If the interviewee asks if they could choose to spare certain people, the interviewer says that they could not; it's an all-or-nothing deal.

My hypothesis, which I have no intention of actually pursuing: among people who voted in the 2004 presidential election, a greater number (to a statistically significant degree) of Bush voters would choose "yes" over Kerry voters.

I would not be surprised if in fact a majority of Bush voters chose "yes" and a majority of Kerry voters chose "no", but that would be an interesting side-observation if so.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Your question made me forumlate this more abstract question:

Would the world be a better place if it were only made up of Americans?

The may be the same as mine except without the (quite intentionally) nasty accusatory underpinnings.

Yours puts the responsibility for the fact that the rest of the world is gone on the answerer's shoulders. I think (hope?) that very few people could really go for that. However, if it's posed as "what if this was just the way the world is, would that world be better then ours?", I think we would see the sorts of results your hypothesis predicts. That is, I think most right-wingers would believe that the world would be better with just Americans, even if they might pause at personally being the cause of that...

Though I suppose there is a critical difference between our two things. Yours is geography based, mine is nationality based.
Do you think results would be changed if your question was rephrased as:

You are presented with a button, and are told that pressing it will instantly vanish every non-American. They will simply wink out of existence, leaving the whole world empty of people, except for Americans.

Would you press it?