It's very amusing.
But... I really don't think badly of all Democrats. Some of them are well meaning and stuff. I just think they're all rooted in a basic philosophy that has no Darwinian edge, i.e. cooperation for it's own sake, or for the sake of advancing humanity as a whole. You just can't wrap a selective advantage around that except in an unworkable abstract or multi-generational context.
Cooperative behaviors work fantastically well in terms of common defense (in a tribal warfare context and herd protective context). They also work excellently for hunting since packs are more successful than lone hunters. And according to sociologists, human cooperative behaviors developed from both hunting and tribal warfare contexts.
Unfortunately, the cooperation-for-the-simple-pleasure-of-empathy-and-sweet-altruism movement in humans is likely to dissolve over the next several generations because there's no genetic benefit to such behaviors, certainly not in today's world where we are increasingly isolated from the very forces that drove us together in the first place (hunting and tribal warfare). Isn't the ultimate in compassion for gia to abstain from having kids, thus saving a marginal part of the planet's resources? Like it or not we're all still participating in natural selection as viewed from outside the system and any behavior that doesn't lead to advancing the gene line is likely to be bred out.
Ok, sure, it's a rotten damned shame that some people live in squalor (or at least what passes for squalor in the US these days -- deprivation of cable TV and steak dinners). Makes me feel bad to see suffering too. But it doesn't compel me to whip out a $100 bill and light it on fire, so I'll damned well check out the recipient of my charity first. I don't trust the government to do that for me because they demonstrably suck at it.
And in the end, we have bigger issues to deal with. Technological development is dragging the world out of poverty and is even encouraging large numbers of people to not have kids, levelling off population growth. (But who? Reference the ancient onion article about morons breeding at 2 times the rate of smart people.) What we have to worry about is the growth of personal power. I can easily project a scenario where exponential technology growth puts the power of life itself in everyone's hands via various basement vats and stuff, to say nothing of being able to program a bunch of nanobots to crawl around in the soil under your house, seeking out fissionable materials, then coming together in a pre-programmed design configuration to go boom.
This isn't a fantasy scenario thousands of years off, it's hundreds of years off tops, and some of us may live to see it.
Save the planet? Bah. Save the solar system. Save the Milky Way. I'm starting to think that it might not be such a good idea to let every human carry around the power of a god. There's only so much that my generosity will stand.
Sorry, was this about petty human politics again?
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