American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth
This is pretty silly. In any society, we must decide how to distribute the resources generated by that society. So you make the rules, set up enforcement, and plod along, making changes as you go, as far as you dare in the face of the inevitable political machinations of everyone involved.The more intelligent and clever always benefit, because they know how to use the system to their own purpose. This has been so since the beginning. The less intelligent either end up in a position where their labor can be exploited, or they're left to slow decline or even death, depending on how much society values keeping them alive.That's any given society, in a nutshell. They may dress it up in value statements, laws, philosophies, religions, and so on, but in the end it comes down to power, and who has enough of it to extract the resources and status he wants.The difference is that now the "menial" jobs are almost gone, and the higher up jobs are on the chopping block. And so the first to die off will be those without power (as usual). We can come up with all sorts of platitudes about the value of human life, but in the end it always comes down to this. Welcome to the true nature of man.Of course, nowadays we have middle class folks who can experience the philosophical angst of the less fortunate, and come up with all sorts of rules, decide which words are acceptable or not, and police outward appearances and speech.You wouldn't think twice in deciding what to call someone who implemented a password policy with a max of 8 characters, or stored the passwords unsalted or even plaintext behind a system that hasn't had a security update in 10 years. But soon you will, because "stupid" is not an acceptable word anymore, nor is any word that compares intelligence or ability. We're all equal, after all, and that person deserves his job and the income it generates by virtue of his being human and equal to every other human. You wouldn't want him to starve now, would you?