Tom's Eyewear
Out of context: Reply #12
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Its funny in most all of nature there isn't really a selfless species, or any that really do selfless acts. Sure an animal may share food with another in the pack. Close proximity and helping the pack ensures survival, which is self preservation. Animals get the basics but they arent smart enough to tell themselves it means something different. Im all for helping if it make sense. Help locally to bring up community so you can benefit as well. People dont deny self preservation, they only lie about it. Much like if tom making tacobell wages he'd be out. Dont do it for fashion or some sense of representative "good" that you EXPECT to get from others. And dont be mad or call people haters if they laugh their asses off at you. If you truly believe your action to be correct why would u get mad?
And for those global heroes looking to transform the world, i ask is it just a good intention with bad outcome? In this case i cant see too much really happening. since its more on the level of a commodity that isnt really necessary. But here's an excerpt from huxley that i think relates to the selfless BS helping of poor nations and forcing our need to feel good about ourselves on them.
... In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind. Under the conditions now prevailing, every advance in medicine will tend to be offset by a corresponding advance in the survival rate of individuals cursed by some genetic insufficiency. In spite of new wonder drugs and better treatment (indeed, in a certain sense, precisely because of these things), the physical health of the general population will show no improvement, and may even deteriorate. And along with a decline of average healthiness there may well go a decline in average intelligence. Indeed, some competent authorities are convinced that such a decline has already taken place and is continuing. "Under conditions that are both soft and unregulated," writes Dr. W. H. Sheldon, "our best stock tends to be outbred by stock that is inferior to it in every respect. . . . It is the fashion in some academic circles to assure students that the alarm over differential birthrates is unfounded; that these problems are merely economic, or merely educational, or merely religious, or merely cultural or something of the sort. This is Pollyanna optimism. Reproductive delinquency is biological and basic." And he adds that "nobody knows just how far the average IQ in this country [the U.S.A.] has declined since 1916, when Terman attempted to standardize the meaning of IQ 100."
In an underdeveloped and over-populated country, where four-fifths of the people get less than two thousand calories a day and one-fifth enjoys an adequate diet, can democratic institutions arise spontaneously? Or if they should be imposed from outside or from above, can they possibly survive?
And now let us consider the case of the rich, industrialized and democratic society, in which, owing to the random but effective practice of dysgenics, IQ's and physical vigor are on the decline. For how long can such a society maintain its traditions of individual liberty and democratic government? Fifty or a hundred years from now our children will learn the answer to this question.
Meanwhile we find ourselves confronted by a most disturbing moral problem. We know that the pursuit of good ends does not justify the employment of bad means. But what about those situations, now of such frequent occurrence, in which good means have end results which turn out to be bad?
For example, we go to a tropical island and with the aid of DDT we stamp out malaria and, in two or three years, save hundreds of thousands of lives. This is obviously good. But the hundreds of thousands of hu­man beings thus saved, and the millions whom they beget and bring to birth, cannot be adequately clothed, housed, educated or even fed out of the island's available resources. Quick death by malaria has been abol­ished; but life made miserable by undernourishment and over-crowding is now the rule, and slow death by outright starvation threatens ever greater numbers.
And what about the congenitally insufficient organisms, whom our medicine and our social services now preserve so that they may propagate their kind? To help the unfortunate is obviously good. But the whole­sale transmission to our descendants of the results of unfavorable mutations, and the progressive contamination of the genetic pool from which the members of our species will have to draw, are no less obviously bad. We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will.
- guess it also hurts how people define "value" on an economic scale.********
- cant trade peer prestige. so x amount of dollars goes to and untradeable commodity********
- everything i've read says iq is on the risescarabin
- IQ wasn't really what it was about. more looking at nature of good intentions and bad consequences.********
- and trying to have some foresight of such good intentions. As far IQ is measured seems pretty hard to qualify to me. I dont put much stake in it********
- quantify it and i dont put much stake in many methods of calculation********
- hell yah, brave new world...********
- guess it also hurts how people define "value" on an economic scale.