On 08/12/16 17:18, Bill Wright wrote:
On 08/12/2016 10:47, Max Demian wrote:

The idea you can always learn from your mistakes falls as either events
don't repeat themselves or not in a recognisable way.

But humans have an uncanny ability to generalise productively. After
years of trading I gradually learnt to be especially wary of any member
of certain social and ethnic groups, whether or not I had encountered
the individuals in question. Some call this racism; I call it pragmatism
born of evolution.


Your friend gets bitten by a snake and dies.

You see a snake behind your baby daughter.

Do you:

- take a picture, rush to a computer and look it up in the Internet to
see if its venomous?
or:
- engage in an internal moral dialogue about the sanctity of life, and
the right of a snake to exist, even if at the expense of your baby daughter?
or:
- grab a big stick and smash its ****ing head in?

I maintain your genes will propagate better if you choose the latter
strategy, every time. Innocent snakes may well die. That's THEIR problem
for not being immediately recognisable as the 'OK' sort of snakes.

How many people eat wild mushrooms having picked them, on the basis that
they have positively identified them?

Almost no one. They eat shop bought ones, because someone else has done
that job for them.




It's a life and death struggle out there.

And prejudice is how we can act fast enough to stay alive.

All muslims may not be out to get me, but if the ones that aren't walk
around looking like the ones that are, I'm going to get me a big stick....


Bill