 Forbes wrote: |
| Let's go back to your original statement:
“I reckon that there are chimpanzees with more potential than some burkes I have had to work with over the years”
Which I remind you followed this one:
I have seen horses being ridden by blokes who brought the average intelligence of a stable up as they shut the door and left for the night.
When I read the first statement in the post in which it first appeared I imagined something like this: you are an engineer and you have had to work with some pretty obtuse people on some projects. The overall impression I obtained, given the context in which it appeared, was that there are some people you disdain for their lack of intelligence. Now we find that the people you have worked with include serial rapists. It may be that there is a difference in English and Australian usage, but to me "burk" is just a slang word that means little more than "fool"; it is not a term that I would apply to serial rapists or someone who microwaves cats. Bearing that in mind, you will perhaps understand why I found the statement offensive and felt constrained to express myself forcefully after the exchanges that followed the post in which it appeared.
I can quite understand the way you feel about people who commit terrible crimes. If you were talking about such people from the start, I feel you ought to have made it clear. Now you have made your position clearer by stating: The thought processes of some of these people is so foreign to mine that I have to consign them to a different type of intelligence and I do not believe that any of those individuals lived up to the potential due to any human. When you put it that way I can far more readily relate to it. I can accept that such people have different thought processes and that they have not lived up to their potential as human beings. However, I must disagree that they have a different type of intelligence. This is simply because I believe that intelligence, whilst it may be manifested in different ways and to different degrees in different individuals, is a faculty of the mind that is essentially the same for everyone.
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G'day Forbes,
This feels really weird trying to hold a discussion with you throught the vaguries of unaccepted posts and your own thread about John Locke being locked.
That would have John Locke spinning in his grave. Someone has decided that the truths of John Locke discussing the existence and perception of truth is considered by some censor here to be self evident and beyond discussion. I can only assume that the locker is a person not that acquainted with the intent of John Locke. Zealots are seldom well read.
A burke may be different to a burk but the devil is in the detail.
Burke and Wills were a couple of explorers who made just about ever mistake possible before they died but one of Robert Burkes final acts was recorded by a horrified Wills. As they lay dying they were approached by a mob of sleek fat natives who were confused as to why the Wundas were not eating properly, surrounded as they were by some of the richest land in non tropical Australia.
Burke told Wills that he intended to display White Man's supreiority and pulled out his pistol and fired a shot that was still reverberating as the mob dissappeared between blinks never to be seen by the weird Wundas who were left to die.
A burke is a person so full of hubris that they choose to persorn obviously stupid actions to their own detriment.
You will accept that psychopaths may have a diifferent type of intelligence but you still defend that as being human. I will take that undar advisement. I was chained to a thing with two legs for seven and a half long hours and I warned it that I would destroy it if it touched me and it very carefully did not touch me but it was not human.
You understand that such 'people' have failed to live up to their potential but it is entirely possible that they have lived entirely up to their potential and that such creatures are still rolling in the memory of their deeds.
How about corrupt cops? Where do you place someone so lacking in decision making skills that they turn an opportunity for the most intensely pleasurable lifestyle currently possible and trade that in for a few pieces of silver. Do you consider that corrupt cops have failed to live up to their humanity and does this indicate something about the value of their intelligence?
I will have to agree to disagree with you on this point.
I am not arguing pedantically with you. I firmly believe taht I have worked with and for many people with an IQ of 70 or less and I am also firmly of the opinion that some animals would exceed 70 IQ points were it possible to test their IQ.
Again, I must say that I respect the manner in which you carry yourself when disagreeing with me and that you do display a genuine magnanimity of spirit sadly lacking in too many contributors to this forum.
It would be wonderful were this forum set up to allow an examination of John Locke so that we all may benefit from his acquired wisdom but that is obviously not possible in a place that is so scared that John Locke may be wrong that he is simply quoted and wrapped in cotton woll with the imprecation, 'Heed this ye vassals and get your acts together!'
Well maybe John Locke was right but I'll bet you that few English learners are any more enlightened by reading his mashed potato prose. Jouhn Locke may well have known how to think freely but his writing reveals a heavy Religious Censor (wonder what that feels like) looking over his shoulder as he wrote and the result is stolid circumloquotous stodge dense to the point of unintelligibility.
I vote that we open a thread about John Locke but I won't bother to try as too many of my questions are deemed too dangerous to ask. Go and figure that out. If it is not dangerous to question the existence of The Holocaust, and it is not dangerous to ask if one race is less developed intellectually than another race how is it possible to have a dangerous question?
Stannum
Off to have a look at the slack jawed yokels sat along the barber's wall, their eyes were dull, their heads were flat, they had no brains at all. (The Man From Ironbark)