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In reply to the discussion: That Incredibly Awkward Moment when People Discover that You are Socialist [View all]loudsue
(14,087 posts)The author is evidently someone who watched Tim Russert. Then he goes on to say how we can only think of so many people as human. My theory is that the author tends to be more rightwing than liberal, due to looking at his logic:
The Monkeysphere is the group of people who each of us, using our monkeyish brains, are able to conceptualize as people. If the monkey scientists are monkey right, it's physically impossible for this to be a number much larger than 150.
Most of us do not have room in our Monkeysphere for our friendly neighborhood sanitation worker. So, we don't think of him as a person. We think of him as The Thing That Makes The Trash Go Away.
And even if you happen to know and like your particular garbage man, at one point or another we all have limits to our sphere of monkey concern. It's the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people, usually our own friends and family and neighbors, and then maybe some classmates or coworkers or church or suicide cult.
Those who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They're sort of one-dimensional bit characters."
There is a REASON liberals are called "tree huggers" by the evil rightwing. We ARE able to comprehend the value of all living things, and DO NOT tend to dehumanize the garbage man or anyone else (except wingnuts, of course). And we're smarter... we tend to look beyond our noses when we're looking at the repercussions of legislation we're proposing.
It's interesting that, once again, humanity has two different species on earth at the same time...the Neanderthal rightwingers, and the more evolved liberals. And, truly, if we don't learn to live together in an over-crowded earth, then we risk being the one that is "dehumanized". Rightwingers try to legislate dehumanizing people.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html#ixzz2E69NGmWp