Except for children, the infirm, and the elderly, I think anyone who decides to eat laundry soap deserves whatever happens. I’d rather not have to pay for their upkeep if they survive as vegetables. The Darwin Awards can always use new candidates, and the Tide Pod Challenge certainly qualifies.
For the uninitiated, the Darwin Awards are given to anyone who improves the human gene pool by removing themselves from it. Anyone who eats something stamped poisonous needs to be prevented from reproducing. We have an ample sufficiency of stupid people. It’s time to thin the herd. I feel the same way about ant-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and creationists who refuse their flu shots. If it wasn’t for the innocent bystanders, I’d make all vaccinations voluntary. I want rich California Liberals to kill off their children by not giving them their shots and giving them “raw water” cleanses. Good riddance.
Science has spent centuries figuring out how to keep people alive in the face of plagues, famines, and genetic roulette. The modern world is a testament to its success. Exhibit A is that items that were science fiction when I was in high school, like personal communicators, are now so ubiquitous that people in the most remote places on the globe have iPhone charging stations. More people are alive than ever and overeating kills more people than starvation for the first time in human history. Without science I wouldn’t be alive and neither would most people.
But maybe science has been doing too good of a job and is keeping people alive who are utter failures at moving the species forward or even just preventing it from stagnating. Science has removed evolution from the human gene pool and that might be a huge mistake. Yes, there’s an element of “master race” thinking in that idea and yes that is why some religious folks try and slap an evil sticker on the theory of evolution. But I’m not suggesting that anybody be given the power of deciding who reproduces or not. I’m merely suggesting that we stop trying to legislate Nature out of the selection process.
More people should be allowed to self-select themselves out of the gene pool. Mandatory seat belt laws for adults, helmet laws, and all of the other “nanny” state attempts at protecting people from themselves should be abolished. I do think children and society should be protected from stupidity. Car seat laws are great. And people who smoke, refuse to wear motorcycle helmets, drive unbuckled, etc. should have to pay their own medical costs rather than foisting it off on the rest of us. As I said, children and society should be protected from stupidity but anyone over eighteen is fair game for natural consequences in my view.
The conservative commentator Tomi Lahren blames Liberals for the Tide Pod Challenge. I think she’s right but her reasoning is flawed. One of the great ironies of modern life is that Liberals tend to believe in evolution but then try to use society laws and norms to prevent natural selection from selecting out the morons. Conservatives tend to not believe in evolution even as they extoll the virtues of self-determination and attack government interference in people’s daily lives. There are actually scientific explanations for such apparent hypocrisy but that’s for another time.
No matter who’s to blame, we need more Tide Pod challenges, cinnamon challenges, and “see who can jump into the tiger’s cage” challenges. It’s getting pretty crowded here at the top of the food chain. Natural selection got us to the mountain top and natural selection is what we need to keep us here. But I could be wrong.
