1. Can people generally tell how smart or stupid they are? I've been told my whole life, but I don't think I can actually assess it objectively. And the longer I live, the more I think the people telling me I'm smart didn't know what they were talking about.
2. Anyone else think Antonia Zerbisias at the Star seems kind of artificially limited writing about women's issues? I keep getting the impression that she has all kinds of interesting things to say, but has to sort of force them to fit into the "women's issues" category. I'd be much more interested in reading her write about whatever she wants regardless of how it could be categorized.
3. I would do horribly in a survivalist situation. I'm much better in civilization, in a knowledge-based economy where I can trade brains for money and money for goods and services. Some people consider this a sort of moral failing and point out that in the olden days I wouldn't have had the comforts of my current lifestyle. But it occurs to me that that's irrelevant, because in the olden days I wouldn't have survived infancy. The circumstances of my infancy are completely unremarkable now, with fully-equipped neonatal wards readily available, but if I were born to cavemen or medieval peasants I would never have survived (which would also have been completely unremarkable). So in the great tradition of pluralizing "anecdote" as "data", I wonder if there's any correlation between how well people would do in a survivalist situation and whether they would have survived infancy without the intervention of modern medicine?
6 comments:
1. No. We're all both smarter and stupider than we think we are. Our differences are in where we choose to put our values.
2. Yes. Zerb has been, and I use the term advisedly, castrated in the last couple of years.
3. You and me both. Our only hope is to keep civil society active and vibrant. You, me, and Plato.
Yeah, we're boned.
Once again, I say: what he said.
I am just hoping that civil society sticks around until I and everyone I love are dead.
M@: weren't you in the military? Aren't they kinda into survival?
Not in the artillery -- maybe in the rangers or something, but we depended on being brought truckloads of everything. Ammo, food, water, gasoline. We weren't exactly roughing it. I think the closest we ever got to roughing it was making lean-tos between trees beside the trucks.
Sure, we messed around in the mud or the snow now and again, but we weren't survivalists. The only thing I took away that would serve me in an anarchy situation is -- maybe -- an attitude that would help me get done what needed to get done in a given situation.
I doubt, however, that if society completely broke down, I would last very long.
I didn't know that, I thought everyone had to do hardcore survival. That's what I get for filling in the gaps in my knowledge with Starfleet practices.
That's the modern mechanized military for you. The Royal Canadian Artillery is, I assure you, no Starfleet.
(They got survival training in Starfleet!?)
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