"The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being."
This is the speech of the year. I've always found it remarkable how easy it is to hate – it's a primal emotion that often comes from ignorance and requires no intellectual effort.
Brilliant!
@Nour @nartagnan Not the speech of the year for me, all the contrary.
Despite its humanist intentions (to which I subscribe in the main), the discourse is tinged with speciesism (recent studies in ethology tend to show that animals such as rats can demonstrate altruism and probably empathy [1], *for example*) and even more biologizing, with a teleological discourse on evolution, against the current scientific consensus. And not a word about social causes (such as education, family environment, the organization of society, and many other factors).
Let me add that intelligence seen as a virtue, because implying empathy, and its absence (idiocy) implying cruelty, seriously 
? Where does he get that from? Isn't it just *cruel* and intolerant of people with general learning disability?
Especially since the strong correlation between intelligence and empathy is yet to be proven, and there are *unfortunately* memorable counter-examples (the IQ score at the Nuremberg trials was very high, Göring's was set at 138[2]).
Finally, it blithely transgresses the principle of Hume's guillotine [3]. To determine what is right or wrong, one should not look to the sciences alone, which should remain *descriptive*. We can turn the argument "Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being" into, for example, "domination through intelligence is an evolved states of being". Would it be desirable?
[1] https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2148-12-41
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring#Trial_and_death
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
Background Although evolutionary models of cooperation build on the intuition that costs of the donor and benefits to the receiver are the most general fundamental parameters, it is largely unknown how they affect the decision of animals to cooperate with an unrelated social partner. Here we test experimentally whether costs to the donor and need of the receiver decide about the amount of help provided by unrelated rats in an iterated prisoner's dilemma game. Results Fourteen unrelated Norway rats were alternately presented to a cooperative or defective partner for whom they could provide food via a mechanical apparatus. Direct costs for this task and the need of the receiver were manipulated in two separate experiments. Rats provided more food to cooperative partners than to defectors (direct reciprocity). The propensity to discriminate between helpful and non-helpful social partners was contingent on costs: An experimentally increased resistance in one Newton steps to pull food for the social partner reduced the help provided to defectors more strongly than the help returned to cooperators. Furthermore, test rats provided more help to hungry receivers that were light or in poor condition, which might suggest empathy, whereas this relationship was inverse when experimental partners were satiated. Conclusions In a prisoner's dilemma situation rats seem to take effect of own costs and potential benefits to a receiver when deciding about helping a social partner, which confirms the predictions of reciprocal cooperation. Thus, factors that had been believed to be largely confined to human social behaviour apparently influence the behaviour of other social animals as well, despite widespread scepticism. Therefore our results shed new light on the biological basis of reciprocity.
@Nour @nartagnan To be clear: my point is that we must fight every forms of discrimination, which kill every day: racism, homophobia, antisemistism / islamophobia, ...
But the way the governor does that is very dangerous, and can be used in many bad ways. Also he discriminates: "idiocy" (which is basically the lack of intelligence) = cruelty.
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