Toddler gets run-over twice. Meanwhile, Steven Pinker thinks people are oh-so wonderful.

Vocal new atheist critic of religion, Steven Pinker, in his article Why Is There
Peace, writes:

“Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its
cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more
violent than we are today.“

In Guangdong province, a child was run over twice and was subsequently ignored by dozens of passers-by until an unlikely hero in the form a 57-year-old trash- picker finally stopped to help. (See video here)

This staggeringly horrific incident should be a reminder to all of us to take  seriously the iniquity of human nature, and to doubt the naively optimistic  claims of people like Steven Pinker who are committed to the belief in the  inevitability of society’s moral progress.

But this is, in the end, the only recourse for the naturalist atheist who can’t have faith in God; he must have faith in man.  Yet, if there’s anything of value at all to take from history, and from books like  Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, it’s that one must always, by default, adopt a more inauspicious view of human nature.

Catherine Hakim Writes A Whole Book On How To Be Stupid

Catherine Hakim, author of Erotic Capital, wants women to use physical attractiveness to get ahead in their careers. She says in an interview:

“Discrimination is part of life itself.  [...] We discriminate between good restaurants and bad restaurants. We discriminate between people who are intelligent and stupid. We discriminate between people who are competent politicians and incompetent politicians. We discriminate between people who are attractive and unattractive.”

That we do. But there’s an obvious fallacy lurking in there somewhere; isn’t it that when we “discriminate between good..and bad restaurants” we do so precisely among factors that inform our decision to be eating at any restaurant in the first place? We discriminate between “intelligent and stupid” people precisely because stupid people, as opposed to intelligent ones, will ostensibly be less qualified and capable than we might require. In other words, we’re discriminating against the qualities that go against our intentions for choosing one over the other. On the other hand, to discriminate between the attractive and the ugly should add no value given that physical attractiveness has no bearing on how someone can and will perform in the workplace.

A woman using sex to get ahead of a man, careerwise, is analogous to a man using physical force to do the same.

Catherine essentially wants people to think as superficially as she does; since men, on average, find it easier getting up on the corporate ladder, she’ll suggest, to even out the playing field, it’s perfectly fine for women to leave their brains out the door and show some cleavage instead. Catherine thinks she’s empowering women, but in reality she’s doing the opposite.

She’s no doubt pleased with the sheer lunacy that is the cast of Jersey Shore, the Kardashians, and people like Heidi Montag, who, despite their idiotic interiors, are somehow able to get by on physicality alone. (Well, maybe not the cast of Jersey Shore.)

Then again, maybe this is all just the kind of tongue-in-cheek, agent-provocateur type of nonsense authors tend to do nowadays to get attention to their books. One wonders how she was able to stretch this childish ideology into a whole book. It must be one hell of an intellectual lobotomization.