Values

People are different but we tend to view others the way we are ourselves.

This causes us to judge their behavior using our internal values and not theirs.

Everyone's world view is shaped by their experiences.

Certain values may be common, but even then they may be less common than they seem.

The more different the experiences, the less common the values.

Of course many of us have the same general experiences based on shared experiences.

F Scott Fitzgerald noted in the Great Gatsby that the rich are different.  They grow up in a world where they can have anything they want and other people are always trying to help them.

This is not what most of us experience.

On the other hand we have a whole bunch of people who are viewed suspiciously simply because or the color of their skin.  

The first group is just not able to truly understand the second.

Saturday Musings

Mass shootings, as horrible as they are, have become routine enough that start to rate them as being more or less horrible than each other.  Innocent people or children get gunned down, they can't lose their shock value.

I see a lot of talking heads on TV ignoring what really happened in 2016 and predict that our current dontard will get re-elected in 2020.  He didn't even really win in 2016, it was simply a few states that swung the electoral college and no one is going to take them for granted going forward.  Of course elections are a bit hard to predict but he's not wining any popularity contests.

The economy is fine in many ways but the issue of high paying manufacturing jobs going away and unequal distribution of income hasn't gotten better, maybe worse.  A lot of old manufacturing areas are still in recession if not depression and will need to reinvent themselves.

When you consider energy, our dependence on oil and coal is diminishing as people switch to renewable or natural gas.  Oil consumption has recovered some since the recession but is still lower than it was in 2008.  Its not happening fast enough but its starting.

One of the not so secret problems in America is how much racism had worked its way into our culture over the years.  It's certainly better than it was but its why the term politically correct is so onerous, it suppresses these learned behaviors.  The dontard is part of the generation that grew up with all these racist stereotypes and it just seems normal to him.

Its actually ingrained into some of our news reports.  I see a lot of them talking about how "white" people will become a minority in a certain number of years.  Well, as long as we are all Americans, what difference does it make?

Once again we have a democratic congress that has to deal with a tremendous deficit from a republican administration.  Who is the party of big spenders again?

Human IQ

I recently read a story about a High School student in an accelerated program who tried to justify the relative absence of minorities via a science project.

Science Project

As misguided as this type of study is, I'm not ready to vilify a young person who seems, well misguided.

One interesting aspect of science today is that we can actually track people's DNA and ancestry.  I recently did this and while the results indicated a lot of what I already know about my ancestry, there were a few areas that I didn't expect.

We tend to forget that the human race has experienced any number of migrations and invasions which we know about as well as who knows how many that predate recorded history.

Its pretty clear that the world was populated as Homo Sapiens spread out of Africa to eventual replace or intermingle with prior Neanderthals who had preceded them.  We also see an expansion out of central Asia that led to the populating of the American continents.

By every definition in science, including the one concerning having viable offspring we are a single race sharing a range of characteristics no matter our external appearance.

The idea that we have subsets with significantly different basic abilities is clearly not supported by any science.  Of course, we have cultural differences and if a person from a Western culture was forced to live in a "more primitive" society, they may very well come across as an idiot because of what they don't know.

On a lesser scale it's also clear that much closer to home we can be uninformed about certain slang and behavior in different niches of our culture.

A recent episode of the TV show Blackish covered how everyone in the Black community is familiar with "The Talk".  Of course they need to explain the unique situation of being black in America to their young, its a matter of life and death, unfortunately.

Instead of studying differences it would be better to make "The Talk" unnecessary in the future.

Maybe someday.