Friday, September 17, 2010

Someone Else's Comment of the Day

Another month, another Glenn Beck rally. This one is in Chicago and the press won't be allowed in. Prompting a Wonkette commenter to remark:

I want to believe that Beck & co. are afraid that the Media might expose their wicked lies, but I'm 99% positive they simply don't want to hand out any free tickets that would otherwise bring in $125.00 a pop.
Now THAT'S a gotcha! Let's hope Beck doesn't cancel!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

On a completely different topic: Are we evolving or devolving as a species? Make the basic assumption Darwin's theory is correct. The fittest should have an edge on survival, and in time their progeny should increase in numbers relative to others. With individual human beings, clearly it doesn't apply, although we're animals and it should. But we are social creatures (like apes only smarter) and it seems that with human beings, groups evolve, not people. Is that what they call Social Darwinism? Must be, but I don't know... I'm just making this up. Back to the question. Are human beings evolving or devolving? As groups of human beings are competing against each other, some will outcompete, some will dominate if we wait long enough. Eventually, either the so-called Islamists or the Jews or the western societies or Chinese will prevail. Some have to win and some have to lose, because they're all vowed to fight to the death, and the world is getting smaller all the time. So, back to the question, slightly differently: Is it possible that if you take all human beings and put them in a blender, and then take the average of what's in there, is the average individual evolving or devolving? I say individuals are on average devolving, getting cruder and stupider. They can't be getting wiser and smarter as a result of individual evolution, if there's only group evolution. Plus, we don't see any evidence of people having more offspring or offspring that have more survival success as a result of their parents being evolved individuals? If there were, then you might expect to see kind people or wise people or successful business people or whatever you think is "evolved" have their offspring live more and gradually become the majority. And you might expect that mean people or destitute people or sad people or low IQ people or whatever you consider "devolved" people disappearing off the planet due to not having enough kids that survive. It's not happening. Everybody pretty much has kids and everybody pretty much has kids that somehow survive and have more kids. So, if everybody has the same amounts of future progeny, then there's no evolution. So, if there's no evolution, there must be de-evolution. Nothing ever stands still. Even Darwin never said, as far as I know, that the smartest or the wisest or the most civilized and genteel people survive... he said the strongest survive. The strongest could be brutal and primitive as hell, it doesn't matter. Back to the groups within human society, that can evolve. What kinds of groups are there? well, many, but the ones that have power are the ones to watch...religious, political, nationality mainly. There aren't too many groups that have power that are formed based on goodness and wisdom.

piker62 said...

This puts me in the mind of Idiocracy, Mike Judge's comedy about that premise - he suggests that idiots are too stupid to use birth control, inevitably the population will dumb down. I found it one of the most depressing comedies ever made, and more than a little nightmarish. A social horror movie, if you will.

Still, these things tend to be self-correcting, sometimes magically so. Maybe we're all headed for a race of dumb slobs, or maybe something no one sees coming will keep it from happening, just because that's how things work. After all, Einstein's parents were no Einsteins.