Author: marc (Page 45 of 60)

Having a child of a certain age, I was forced to watch The Hunger Games. I was prepared to hate it, but didn’t.

The post-apocalyptic dystopia has had a long history. Narrowing it to the “filthy peasants are forced to provide victims (voluntary or otherwise) for the sporting amusement of the patrician class,” the genre is still quite broad. First to mind (for me, in any case) comes the story of Minos of Crete demanding sacrificial victims for the monstrous denizen of the Labyrinth. This story has been told and retold over and over, with recent incarnations including well known and not-so-well-known novels from Stephen King (written as Richard Bachman): The Running Man, The Long Walk. From a psychological perspective, it is a satisfying story of and authoritarian government literally making a show of subjugating the masses.

People can be evil, and oppression occurs, yet this is never done. Why not? Certainly objective oppression is within the power of the ruler or ruling party with absolute power. Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, the cartoonish overt evil of such a scheme makes it not simply hard to swallow, but rather impossible. People will quietly accept or even actively participate in wholesale murder and destruction. Humiliation is another thing. When an activity can objectively be called evil and is done with humiliation as a principal aim, the overwhelming majority of the population will be antipathetic to the government. That is the second most important ingredient of a overthrow, after only hunger. Secondly, the viability of such regimes must be so short that no examples even exist, despite the existence of a number of truly despotic and murderous governments. Third, well, two is plenty.

I just hate this theme. It makes me want to oppress rubes.

Maybe I’ll finish this thought tomorrow…

George Hrab (of the Geologic Podcast) on his parents’ and grandparents’ generations passing along the Ukrainian language and traditions to subsequent generations:

They made us go to Yukie school. They made us wear the M.C. Hammer pants while we were doing the Yukie version of Fifteenth Century breakdancing to polka music.

Weirdness really is all around us, especially in this country.

My in-laws have a good way to get rid of pesky Jehovah’s Witnesses. The “I don’t speak English” gambit always works. That is to say, it always worked. The other day, I went to my in-laws house. Apparently the JWs had been by and provided some pamphlets. Judging from the title, they were either about how Jesus hates modern medicine or the tragic career of Jimi Hendrix. Anyhow, I was rather surprised to see that the wisdom of Pasty white Northern European Jesus (not to be confused with pasty white Northern European Space Jesus, who is totally different) is apparently available in Chinese even in a Southwestern town of less than 100,000 people.

It shows the lengths to which they will go to spread their bullshit the word. I think I will be forced to believe in space aliens when the JWs and the Mormons have translated their various texts into Rigelese.

Sure, Romney and a few top right-wing stooges have “refudiated” (also, can we quit pretending that Sarah Palin has an IQ much above room temperature?) Akin’s stupid “legitimate rape” comments.

Why? When it comes down to it, we all know it.

When Uncle Bill’s been hitting the bottle, everybody notices, but politely pretends not to. It’s not until he starts threatening to “show you punk kids” that people intervene. But unless you are around strangers, you never act shocked. Does anyone actually believe that the gentlemen of the GOP refrain from using the n-word in private, like they have finally come to do in public? Why, then, does the press corpse collectively clutch its pearls and collapse in its fainting couches when someone lets slip what he thinks of women? Who are the media fooling? I assume it can only be themselves. They love pretending that Limbaugh’s occasional intentional tipping of his hand is a revelation. It’s not. Just like you knew Uncle Bill was a violent drunk, you know that blacks are “niggers,” the house help are “wetbacks,” and those rape victims are “sluts” who probably “had it coming” to all the GOP headliners.

That excludes Willard himself, of course. Have you ever heard Mormons curse? Imagine Ned Flanders’ version of cursing. It’s actually rather amusing. I mean the guy actually claimed to have used the phrase “for Pete’s sake” when berating an employee (regarding paying wetbacks over the table, rather than under or something like that. I don’t really give a shit). This, despite the fact that he is well under 90 years old.

You see, Space Jesus hates cursing. Pasty white Northern European Space Jesus used to live in the Middle East for some reason, but then went to America on holiday, and now resides at or near the planet Kolob. Anyway, he hates cursing, but he hates Lamanites (dark people) even more.

Is there ever a point at which wrongness becomes established? In science, there certainly is. The dustbin of science is home to countless theories that have been proven incorrect. From the four elements of ancient Greece to the five elements of ancient China, from caloric theory to phlogiston theory, from Olympian creationism to Hebrew creationism, innumerable cases exist where the scientific community has collectively discarded one theory in favor of another. I’m no historian of science, but I am a working scientist and I am not familiar with any cases of a discarded theory making a resurgence.

Aside: I should add a caveat, that out-of-favor theories on relatively small details do occasionally come back into favor, but I know of no theories that have been completely abandoned only to reemerge as canon. An example of this would be Alfred Wagner’s theory on what would become plate tectonics. At the time if its introduction, it not generally accepted, with most earth scientists being actually hostile to the idea. Wagner, however, was never considered a crackpot, and he continued to be a respected member of the scientific community despite the unpopularity of his theory. When the evidence in support of Wagner became overwhelming, it was fully embraced and became an integral part of modern geophysics.

What I wonder, though, is how long we have to continue with such long-lived failures as abstinence-only sex education. It is often difficult to characterize social issues or problems scientifically. In this case, however, study after study has borne out the idea that AOSE is not only a failure, but is actually worse than doing nothing. That means that old fashioned sex ed (in my generation, that consisted mostly of watching R-rated movies) is superior in efficacy to the programs on which we waste hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.