Scoundrels, and cavemen, and experts. Oh my!

[rain_gryphon]

It's de... por... tation time!
It's deportation time!
The judge and jury too,
Have said "Tough luck" to you!
Your lawyers had their say!
Now you must go away!
It's deportation time!
It's deportation time!


I should probably feel sorrier for them than I do. They're almost certainly correct in that they're going to get murdered when they go back to Iraq. However, they had the golden opportunity of coming to America. They showed the depth of their gratitude by breaking our laws, and preying upon our citizens. No longer America's problem.

*****

There's something that has bothered me since I was a cute gryphon fledgling - the idea of "uncontacted tribes". Now, as the Tasaday debacle made clear ^1, a great many of these tribes aren't "uncontacted" at all. Let's assume for the sake of the argument, though, that one or more truly uncontacted tribes exist. What should we do about them? Cultural anthropologists pretty much universally answer "Leave them undisturbed". To be sure, they've got some good points. It's a solid gold opportunity to study how societies evolve with no outside input - it's extremely rare and valuable for that. Also contact is liable to collapse their society, as has already happened more than once.

Set against that, though, is the core value of OUR culture - the right of the individual to seek happiness. To preserve the group culture, we have to deny opportunity to the individual. Deny him, basically, his chance to choose for himself how he wants to live. That's how we treat animals in the zoo. And the zoo animals, at least, get a balanced diet, a comfortable home, and medical care if they get sick.

I don't know the answer. I would, however, steer a lot more strongly toward preserving the rights of the individual, even at the expense of his society.


^1 https://www.livescience.com/4972-savage-hoax-cave-men-existed.html if you're too young to remember. It was, really, a fascinating affair. All that summer and autumn, you got saturation coverage (such as it was back then - not a stitch on what we have now) of the gentle and noble Tasaday, who, of course, being in a state of nature, embodied all of the Age of Aquarius virtues that had been fashionable for the past three or four years. That alone should have raised some red flags.

*****

Headline of the day: Hand sanitizer and fireworks don't mix, experts warn. What would we do without our experts?