Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (313902)	12/21/2024 1:33:02 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 361679

That reminder gives me pause; do I need to rethink my thoughts on the goodness of mankind. You're late to that party. Of all the things that have struck me over the last years is the recognition that the belief I have held all my life that humanity is mostly worthy in temperament and intellect and has been evolving further in that regard has failed. The friend I spoke of has had more or less the same reaction and we got there independently. So you have company, whatever consolation and/or validation that might bring.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (313902)	12/21/2024 1:43:54 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 361679

A problem is that humans have trouble dealing with more than a dozen or so individual items. At some point, things stop becoming distinct entities and become abstractions, groups. Necessarily, those abstracted groups take on simplified characteristics. The more simplified the characteristics, the harder it is to identify with them. So you have the situation where dyed in the wool racists are willing to admit that one individual or another that they know personally is "good folks", while everyone else in that class are, well not. This is normal, though. A human brain has limited capacity, it just isn't possible to deal with a huge number of individual entities without abstracting them to some extent. The problem comes in when those abstracted groups get stripped of all characteristics that make them relatable as fellow primates. It becomes especially pernicious when that group gets imbued with all kinds of imaginary characteristics with the more memorable ones crowding out the more mundane. So imaginary pet eating is what you remember and not something like a Haitian you know who fosters kittens. Now, with training and talent, a person can remember a lot more details and have more nuanced abstractions. But most people don't really have a lot of reasons to put in that kind of effort. I hesitate to call it a theory, but some people have drawn a line between the AIDS epidemic and gay marriage. Before the epidemic, gays were different. Disco, the Village People and David Bowie. But with AiDS, normal people. people you might have known or met, started dying. While Liberace shocked few, Rock Hudson did. The older, confirmed bachelor uncle might have confirmed some not so secret suspicions, but the popular high school jock did not. Or the family man down the street who had a secret life. When it became clear it was people who were dying and not some flamboyant TV character, that might have started the ball rolling. Gay characters no longer had to be played strictly for laughs any more. This was the trajectory that blacks followed, just over a more compressed time period.