Somewhere in the course of this forum, my actual point –
was interpreted as “I hate vaccines, no one should get them!” That’s not my point at all. I’ll accept responsibility for not clarifying that I’m pro-free vaccines, regularly scheduled at school, so that, yes, society can be safe. But if people want to self-select and opt out of civil society through their untimely demise, that’s their right, whether I agree with it or not. It has the side benefit of cleaning up the gene pool, which I’ve freely agreed is a callous philosophy. I still don’t think it’s wrong: they’re adults and they can make their own bad decisions.
The Darwin Awards are a thing. They’re brought up on this blog from time to time, most often when reporting that an idiot did a potentially fatal thing but survived, and should be a candidate for receiving one. The comments typically include disbelief, amazement, Schadenfreude, and sympathy for how stupid a person has to be to, say, grab an alligator, or keep a cobra as a pet, or have a fist-fight with a moving car. We hear about the misadventures of “Florida Man” practically every week. And we also hear about how smart people live longer.
Anyway, I’m kind of done with this conversation. In this forum I’ve been called Randian, short-sighted, misanthropic, antisocial, and a shield for Randian bullshit. I’ve been accused of opposing water fluoridation. I’ve had one of my posts flagged by the community and deleted by an admin (I hesitate to mention the point of that comment, since it might be a violation of terms, or just get this post flagged and deleted). All of which leads me to believe that I’m not contributing to the conversation in a constructive way, and should probably leave.
Anyway, my sincere thanks to the community for an interesting conversation.
You’re still missing the aspect of scale. One idiotic Florida Man can only do so much damage to others in the course of enacting his own self-destruction – we can afford to laugh that off and hand him a Darwin Award. Tens of millions of Florida Men voting for America’s foremost public grifter since the 1980s and millions of Florida Men clogging up hospital E.R.s with cases of avoidable childhood illnesses eventually ends up doing damage to you and me, and long before evolution takes its course (because that operates on a long time scale).
I have no idea if you’re a Libertarian or not, but at least in this thread you do share their chronic inability to perceive the importance of how scale can affect things for the better or the worse.
The truly cool rich kids will have that withered polio leg, in the ghetto the lowly vaccinated will have to bash theirs with a sledge hammer to create the effect.
Okay so everyone is just dancing around it, and I hate when this attitude is allowed to just be without being specifically pinned down as what it is. Let’s not beat around the bush, you just proposed eugenics. That’s the philosophy described here. Maybe have a long think about that.
I think this kind of gets at it, but it’s even worse than that.
The world is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty (not surprising that I would think so, right?). And it seems to me that there are, at base, two kinds of people:
Those who don’t mind uncertainty and ambiguity
Those who do.
Those in the latter category tend to really misunderstand science (and if we’re going to pain with a very broad brush, these people tend to prefer religious explanations).
Science makes no claims to the truth. Science can be wrong. Science can change its mind.
These are all good thing!..if you’re a member of the first camp. If you’re a person with little dispositional ability to deal with uncertainty, you’ll end up not “trusting” science, because in your book, trust means correct, not trying ethically to be correct.
So yea, layer on bad science and unethical science, and you can multiply the above be 10.
This is the natural result of the perverted and pervasive viewpoint that wealth is an indicator of intelligence and correctness. This and the last election.
