[ExI] shining example and COVID-19

[Stuart LaForge]

Quoting Keith Henson:
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2020 at 9:13 PM spike wrote:
>
> snip
>
>> The suggestion was made that we do that for a day.  It extended to  
>> about a week.  We have had enough.  You said your piece.
>
> What's amusing is that I made a post that was *much* more politically
> incorrect and it generated no followup comments at all.  I have been
> on and off this list since it started.  Perhaps the current members do
> not grok what I write about.

Keith, a dear-departed friend of mine once told me that for  
philosophers to engage in politics amounted to "getting down in the  
mud to wrestle with pigs." Perhaps nobody wanted to mud-wrestle you  
over racism?

I understand why you think racism is rational. I would say rather that  
it was once convenient but has, with the advent of culture become  
obsolete, unnecessary, and ultimately futile. I get EP POV that back  
when we were hunter-gatherers, obvious morphological differences were  
indicative of less-relatedness and therefore intolerance of  
morphological differences was a trait that was, in our distant past,  
selected for.

What I am trying to tell you is that memes >> genes at this point in  
our natural history. So that you have brothers killing brothers  
everywhere that you look: Israeli vs. Palestinian, Northern-Irish  
Protestant vs Southern-Irish Catholic, East-side Krips vs. west-side  
Bloods.

Racism is these days just one more difference among countless others,  
some as arbitrary as the clothing color that you wear that can be used  
to justify violence. Is that rational? I don't know . . . is finding  
excuses i.e. differences to justify coercion, oppression or violence  
against your fellow man rational? In a zero-sum scramble for the  
resources of a single planet, maybe. For race to colonize other stars?  
Maybe not.

Stuart LaForge