Please offer an opinion on...

John, Basically I agree with the premises outlined in the article.

I've run across this before and it is the result of other studies purporting to show the number of relationships of one sort or another that a human can(will) sustain.

In WWII we victors called them "Krauts" or "Japs". In Viet Nam they were "Slopes". Currently in the U.S. they are "Towel Heads".

I think that it is because we instinctively "sub-humanize" all those persons whose ideas are different from ours. This may well result from our inability to "humanize" more than about one hundred fifty entities. We do this rather selectivly and call them friends or acquaintances.

It's worth thinking about, particularly if you must make decisions that involve larger numbers of people. Stalin once said that one death is a tragedy, fifty thousand deaths are a statistic. (Consider the careers and adulations between "Jack the Ripper" responsible for perhaps a dozen deaths, and "Nikita S. Kruschev" responsible for about 500,000 dozen deaths.)

For instance in this modern world I am afraid that G.W.Bush, Pres. of the U.S., is unable to conceive of Allah as a real God.(God or Allah being the ultimate human in this case) Consequently he is unable to understand the concerns of the people to whom Allah is real. Therefore all persons who are not Abrahamicist in their outlook are not real people. Their extermination, and that of the GI's who also must die, doesn't matter any more than the extermination of the screwworm fly in Texas. Since they do not think (rationally like me ) evidently they are "sub-human".

A little education could go a long ways in this case. If people realized how limited in their outlook they "naturally" are perhaps (hopefully) they could change some of their most destructive behaviors.

Best wishes, M.

Good stuff.

Reminds me of a book I read called The Naked Ape. I think it was written in the 1970s by Desmond Morris.

He goes all into how human society & human interactions resemble ape interactions, etc.

It does help put a lot of things into perspective.

We are part monkey, no doubt.

Good stuff.

Reminds me of a book I read called The Naked Ape. I think it was written in the 1970s by Desmond Morris.

He goes all into how human society & human interactions resemble ape interactions, etc.

It does help put a lot of things into perspective.

We are part monkey, no doubt.

I also read "The Naked Ape". Also the "Descent of Woman" is written in a similar vein. You may enjoy it.

They both have some points that are little appreciated in todays world.

Very compelling, John. I read the entire piece, then saved it to favorites.

My sister and I once discussed the idea that when Cain went into the land of Nod, he may have mated with some species of ape, thus giving some credence to evolution from a Biblical viewpoint. I often wondered what made creationism and evolution mutually exclusive. I have never read Eugene O'Neill's Harry Ape, because I never particularly cared for the man, but there may be a similarity.

Letty, Personally I always figured that there were two separate species of homo whatever and we are the happy result of some fortunate crossbreeding-hybridizing.

Farmers, in choosing beef cattle often utilize this method to help develop more desirable characteristics. Also the broilers (chickens) and corn and many other crops are frequently crossbred or hybridized (which are different things)

Perhaps I am just being mulish. Superior to a horse or a donkey in some respects

we are what we were, unfortunately.
If only we could wipe our hard drives, and start over!

If there were a god, it would be a Bill Gatesian entrepreneur, pedaling a flawed operating system.

I tried that. Took me the longest time to re-boot my life after doing that. And the jury is out as to whether it helped.

I thought that the article was a funny piece by someone whose "very last nerve" had been frazzled by politics.

Nonetheless, I seem to recall reading, or watching, something to the effect that archeologists had determined that 120 people seemed to be about the comfortable max for prehistoric groups of humans (encampment fossils or some such). Also, there is a recollection concerning empathy for victims of catastrophes growing and diminishing in proportion to the geographic distance one was from the actual occurence. These two things taken together might tend toward lending some credence to the gist of the article: that we are programed for smallish social groups and our psychological disposition is somewhat xenophobic.

Please don't ask me to cite sources or provide links. I am 61 years old and there is stuff floating around in my head.....
By the way, I poached that link from a Libertarian site which has the purpose or staging a legal political coup in New Hampshire. I kid you not!

Hey, John of New York City. You ain't over the hill yet. Lots of us farledoats here.

We're not getting older, we're just getting sharper.