- Total Posts: 10
Just read my posts
Author: Nella
I have finally found the latest shitburger that upsets me so much I cannot help but post an angry rant. For some reason, there are some words that have come through the long and hard process of developing some color, and our immediate response is to drop them from our language. Here are a few examples of words that are no longer usable, or whose meanings have been altered to make them difficult to use:
Factory-replaced by Plant.
Handicapped-replaced by Physically Challenged
Swamp-replaced by Wetland
What the fuck? Supposedly a “factory” suggests a building with looming smokestacks billowing forth vile and odius pollution. I don’t know if you’ve looked lately, but that’s what it is!!! A plant is a beautiful green organism that I have growing in my yard, how dare you defile such a pristine word with an image such as that!!! Changing what you call something ain’t gonna change the thing itself, and if people know better, it shouldn’t change how people think of it, either.
I looked up the definition of “Handicapped.” Know what it is? “Having a condition that restricts one’s ability to function physically” That sounds pretty close to “physically challenged” to me. If “handicapped” is offensive, how could “physically challenged” not be? How can it even be consitered changing the word if you’re simply changing the word to its definition?
The swamp thing arises from these environmentalists who are wishing to save these areas of wetness, and them not wanting to carry around signs saying “Save the Swamp!” Swamp apparently carries an image of a stinky, bug-ridden bog more than the desired marshland of abundant wildlife. …Fuck, i actually agree with this change. Probably should have thought ahead a little better.
Anyway, it still leads me to my point which is that just because a word becomes politically incorrect is no reason to drop it from our language. These words tie into us reading the book “1984″ for English class, in which the negative Utopian society tries to create perfection by writing a new language that inhibits independant thought in every way. Newspeak, the language is called, contains only words that are absolutely necessary to function, any words that express thought or feeling have been dropped. Personally, I’m all for getting my feelings across, and words that have a little emotion behind them assist me greatly with this. Down with Big Brother!
Andrew has advised me to futher my education on this topic before presenting my argument, but I’ve decided that all of your responses might be the best education I can get. Plus I like to spite Andrew.
Okay, here goes. For all my life, I’ve held the Buddhist religion in the highest esteem. In fact, I always felt it would be the first place I would go to if I ever decided to seek out my spirituality. I mean, Buddhists have never once in the entire course of history started a single war, so they have to have something going for them. But in this Religion unit in my World History class, I have come to the realization that the teachings of Buddhism directly contradict many if not most of the philosophies I currently employ to govern my life. Here’s why:
Siddhartha Gautama, while sitting under the famous bodhi tree, came up with four truths of life. They are as follows:
The First Noble Truth quite clearly states: Suffering and sorrow are part of life. Everyone everywhere is constantly subject to pain and suffering.
The Second through Fourth Noble Truths go on to say that all this pain and suffering come from people’s self-centered desires, and the only possible way to escape from all this pain and suffering is to rid oneself of all these desires and spend the remainder of one’s life following the Eightfold path and seeking enlightenment. Then, finally, if you succeed, when you die, you get to escape the pain and suffering and reach a state of nirvana. However, if you fail in your quest for enlightenment, you get reincarnated and have to endure at least another entire lifetime of pain and suffering.
First of all, I find much of this counterintuitive. I mean, as soon as you figure out how to enjoy life, that’s when you get taken away from it? It seems like if you’re enjoying life, you would want to stay in it for a while longer.
Second, I don’t think pain and suffering is a problem. I think you will lead a far better life if you can just accept it, rather than wandering around with a shaved head trying to get rid of it. That’s seriously what you’re supposed to do if you’re really trying to reach enlightenment. In the last part of your life, you’re supposed to get rid of all your possesions, shave your head, and go out wandering, and eat only a grain of rice a day. That sounds like a terrible way to deal with pain if you ask me.
Personally, I don’t lead a painful enough life to have developed my own concrete priciples about dealing with pain. I know the way to get the most out the life I have been given, and those are where my philosophies are based. But the fact that I don’t lead a painful life contradicts the first noble truth. Either that or I’ve reached enlightenment, which I doubt, because I still have the occasional material desire. I don’t think that these desires can take all the blame for causing people pain, it’s natural for humans to want things, and they may or may not be the cause of their sadness.
But what about people who are oppressed? It sounds like Buddhism just tells them to not want to have equal rights as everyone else, and then they can be happy. That, whether or not it is actually what Buddhism teaches, is bullshit. People need to fight for what they believe in, that’s way more important than finding a blissfully ignorant happiness. If Buddhism tells them to just accept that they’re worse than everyone else and not want to be anything better, then I have just lost all respect I ever had for it ever. Someone, please, tell me I’m wrong!!!
I heard another great reason why creationism still blows today.
Okay, so a common argument for creationism is to look at how well a complex organ such as the eye functions, and to speculate that something so complected and perfect could never evolve naturally. But further examination of the eye shows that this organ is not in fact perfect. In fact, it’s fairly poorly planned out. An omnipotent being would not make such a simple mistake as this.
So here it is. The retina, which receives the light entering the eye, has hundreds of little sensors that turn the visible light into nervous impulses. All these receptors connect to nerves which all twine together behind the eye to form the optic nerve. Our intangible creator needed a place to put it, so he decided to make the beginning of part of the retina. That area, called the optic disk, cannot have any light receptors due to the fatty nerve that’s in the way. This creates a blind spot that we usually don’t notice, right, because we have two eyes. But if you have one eye closed, there will always be a spot in your near peripheral vision that cannot be seen.
No problem, right? I mean, it’s not like I walk around with one eye closed all the time, right? Well here’s the kicker: This supreme power actually fixed it once! Octopi have there optic nerves attached to the backs of their retina. They have no blind spot. Their eyes are the perfect ones. Ours still have flaws. He decided that we weren’t good enough to have perfect eyes.
We didn’t evolve from Octopi, so we didn’t get the non-blind eye that evolved after our common ancestor (probably a jellyfish, or something).
I was at the Bat Mitzvah of a girl I have an obscure relation to the other day, and the Rabbi brought up a topic I thought fit to bring to this fine table that is Jalenack. The topic was that of the class-based society that we live in, and have lived in since civilization started. Humans have a natural tendency to fall into different levels of social ranking, even though this system has been hated by everyone not in the top rank since the first time someone said, “I rule.”
God’s deal is that he created everyone equal. He created everyone out of the same mud, so no man should ever look at himself in a more appriciative way than he looks at the next man. Unfortunately, God sprinkled a little too much human nature onto us, so we immediately have to say, “I’m better than you, so I get to boss you around.”
So even though God kept telling people to give everyone equal shares of the harvest, or equal portions of land, people kept saying, “I did more work than he did, I should get more stuff.” So God decided there would be this celebration every fifty years that all the Jews were supposed to go to, and the deal was, after that celebration, everyone started at zero again. No one got any more than the next man. And over the next fifty years, God would let men decide who should get to sit in the throne all day making the decisions, and who had to tend all the fields all day, because it was their nature. For fifty years men could scrape their way to the top, but it would never amount to anything after this celebration.
The Rabbi gave an example of how notorious we are for falling into these classes. A few weeks ago in New York City, three people had heart attacks on the same day. One was a man of the upper middle class, one was a middle class man, and the other was a woman of the working class. The upper class man was immediately rushed to a hospital, and after two days he was let out fully recovered. The middle class man went to a hospital with a slightly worse reputation, was hospitalized for a week, and then let out with a good chance of a full recovery. The working class woman did not want to call a hospital at first for fear of not being able to pay the bill. When she finally did, she was taken to three different hospitals before she could be operated on. She’s still in the hospital today, and has only a slight chance of recovery.
The Rabbi was saying that it may be just that the people who are of the upper class get to enjoy more luxuries than those of lower classes, like have nicer cars, bigger houses, even more vacation time, but it cannot be God’s will that people of the higher class recieve better healthcare. Everyone must have the same shot at life. It’s completely inhuman to have some assembly line worker waiting out in the hall while the CEO of Genentech gets a triple-bipass surgery.
Andrew’s Utopia project featured a country that was a rigidly class-based society, which is one of the reasons I decided to post about this. I’m not exactly sure where I stand here. I agree that people who work hard should definitely come out with more than the people who sit around watching TV all day, but how can you measure who’s worked harder than another person? It’s the fact that the people who sit around watching TV all day are almost always upper or middle class that really gets me about our society. What do you guys think? Class based society, yeh or nay?
You know what gets me? When you make some sort of sexual reference, and somebody says “you have a sick mind.” I don’t know about you, buddy, but I, along with every other human teenager’s body, happen to be biologically programed to be screaming for sex in this ten-year period of my life. And it’s bullshit that you think simply talking about it is sick.
Unfortunately, society has in fact deemed it to be inappropriate to be having sex at this point in our lives. In fact, the age when people think it’s okay to have sex is pretty much right after this influx of hormones your body gets as a teenager. This is actually logical, because sex leads to kids, and I don’t know anyone who is really interested in having kids as a teenager. You gotta live a little first, there’s no arguing with that.
Now, obviously having kids when you’re 14 is perfectly fine when you’re only going to live to be forty. That’s pretty much what we’re programmed for. But now that we have extended our lives, society is now asking us to completely ignore these urges and abstain from this biological happenstance until a more suitable age. In the meantime, just twiddle your thumbs to take your mind off it.
Of course we’re gonna think about it. Of course we’re gonna talk about it. It’s the least you can do to let us make these references, because we’re using up all of our will power not to actually go forth and do it. What if guys didn’t have this kinda will power? We’d have to go rape every girl we saw. Which is pretty much how it worked back in the stone age. We saw female that had certain desirable qualities, our biochemistry took over, and before we new it we have a baby!
We’re programmed to look for these desirable qualities. Guys look for girls with big hips, because big hips used to mean easy childbirth, which means it’s more likely that our offspring survive. Women look for physically fit men, because that means that they will be able to provide for them and their children. It’s all still there in our genetic code from back when these things actually mattered. Now hip size doesn’t matter, you can always have the child removed by an operation, and yet I’m still more turned on by a big ass.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re being denied our biological rights here, but unfortunately it’s for good reason. Maybe we should get someone to rewrite our genetic code or something, so we hit that big hormone burst in our twenties. Any thoughts, anyone?
Okay, you guys have been complaining about how utterly boring this site has gotten, so I think it is time to wheel out the big guns. We’ve been talking about some pretty deep issues (my favorite kind) here, but I think this one might top them. The deal with this post is, I’ve got a question, and I need some help answering it. You guys have never let me down before, so don’t get discouraged that the entire scientific community hasn’t found the answer to this one yet. I have faith in you (even though I am terminally against faith :smile:) so that should be reassuring.
In order to properly ask this question, I’m gonna need a demonstration. I would like you to extend you arm so that it is perfectly straight. Okay, now bend your arm. How did you do that? (this is the first part of the question.)
Most of the answer I have pertains to the laws of physics as I know them. But I’m still baffled by the end. Okay, I’ve gotten this far: Your biceps contracted, and pulled your forearm along with it. Not a big deal, simple mechanical advantage. So why did your muscle contract? An nerve impulse, an actual electrical shock released by your motor neurons that are buried in the muscle fibers. Totally acceptable, a muscle will do this with just any old shock actually, and it doesn’t even have to be inside you body. There are other non-organic substances that will react similarly, so this is still gettable. Okay, where did the shock come from? It began in your brain, traveled along your spinal column and into your outer nervous system, where it travel along a nerve until it reached the muscle. Simple conductivity, right? But how was the electricity created? From the chemical breakup of the food you eat of course! That’s where all the energy in you body comes from!!!
Now, here’s where I need all your guys’ help. Here’s the question: What directed this impulse to the nerve that leads to your arm? Well, lets look at the cause. It had something to do with the light coming out of your computer screen while you were reading that second paragraph. For some reason, that light went though your two optical organs, the information was converted into an electrical impulse and carried down your optical nerve to the brain. Something happened there, I don’t know what, something just from that pattern of light, that your brain somehow processed, and that told your arm to move.
Let’s think now. Is there anything else in nature that would move simply because it saw a certain pattern of light. I can’t think of anything. This is a trait only demonstrated in living, thinking beings. The ability to process this information and come up with a desired reaction. Somethin’s goin’ on up in our heads that just isn’t natural.
So what is it? What is this consciousness that you and other humans, and possibly other animals to a certain extent, posses? What is this force?
Okay, lets take a step back. Lets look at animals. Lets look at very, very simple animals. Lets look at jellyfish. Think about these guys. They float around in the water all day, and while they do move, there movement is almost the exact same thing for their entire lives. Just a gentle pulse, that sends them moving along with the current. I have very little doubt that these creatures do not posses the same level of consciousness we do, if any at all. There minds are programed, much like a computer, to have a limited number of reactions for every action. Sure, you poke them, they recoil, but then they just go right back to their gentle pulsation. Even the simplest computer in the world can mimic that level of consciousness.
So at what point is life more than just a programmed action/reaction, when does that consciousness come about? That’s why you can’t have artificial intelligence, right? There’s this consciousness that make the things humans do more than just action/reaction.
I’m not sure how well this example applies, it kind of demonstrates the power of our minds, but here’s another example. Close your eyes and picture a blueberry muffin. (I meant once you had finished the sentence!) Where is the muffin? You can see it, right? And if you have a good imagination, you can touch it, smell it, and taste it, too. You can simulate all properties of it’s existence, even though it is simply a figment of your imagination. (Kinda makes you wonder, what if all of us are just a figment of some superbeing’s imagination. It would be inteldesign! Of course, that would mean nothing as we know it exists, and were faced with the problem of reality melting again. Bummer!)
Go ahead and chew on that for a while. I’ll speculate more when I hear you guys’ responses. (BTW, this is not an argument, Jackie, this is just a speculation. You don’t have take on the responsibility of taking up an opposing side.)