(no subject)

[moon_custafer]

Today is the day I'm officially sick of "wouldn't it be great if we could just let natural selection take out the stupid people, hardy har."

No one ever thinks they're one of "the stupid people," but that assumption is never 100% right. We all have absent-minded moments. Frex, I had to take this image down the first time I uploaded it to Flickr because I'd forgotten to blur out the names.

I know plenty of intelligent people with blind spots, or gaps in their knowledge.*

Furthermore, if I have my doubts that society is really improved by a death penalty for criminal behaviour, why would I favour a death penalty for stupidity?


* a note on the bottle of "Lakota Muscle Pain Topical Rub" indicating how to neutralize the stuff if it starts to burn you would have saved me several painful minutes a few years back -- for the record, the counter-agent is milk.

Comments

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

Well, it all looks good at the Social Sciences level: especially when you consider that on several issues, such as Global Warming, the Stupid will kill all of us so Natural Selection won't be too selective. But at the Social Engineering level you can't find a good way to implement it since it will just be used by stupid people to get rid of everyone that disagrees with their stupid opinions.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I think those issues are mostly driven by Greed and Callousness - there's some stupidity in the form of not thinking long-term, but that's mostly the callousness: "Apres-nous, le deluge."

[donald hutton (from livejournal.com)]

No, I'm talking about Stupid with a capital "S". People who worship ignorance and whose only acquaintance with cerebral pressure is their last bout of constipation. I wouldn't necessarily call Down's Syndrome people and so on "Stupid" as long as they do the best they can with what they have: I'm talking about wilful ignorance and anti-intellectualism at its most rabid. Think Mike Harris's "Common Sense Revolution" and probably the mayor of Toronto. Neither were elected despite their seeming stupidity but because of it.

These people deny that analysis can tell you anything and claim that only direct emotional subjective experience exists. If something bad happens as a consequence of something they did while feeling good about it then that consequence is the result of other people complaining about the stupid actions. It's the Magic Thinking/Infantilism that's at the core of fascism. It's not that they're callous about the consequences of their actions; it's that they don't believe in consequences period.