Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
String
Interact
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
Atheism
Politics
Memes
Mind
Matters
String
Interact
Feedback
Links
Debate
Home
It is a bit of a cliché that there is nothing as low as a bent copper but in my mind the lowest of the low is a scientist who lies. Hanging is too good for them. The betrayal of trust cannot be forgiven. I do trust scientists on the whole to do their job right. Doctors I despise, mainly because they are not scientists but use the same language. Doctors are professionals. I distrust all professionals.
Don't trust anybody who is paid to do it is a reasonable motto. All professionals are likely to put professionalism far too high in their order of priorities. I would much rather tell the truth than “act professionally”. This high minded attitude of mine to truth and integrity has lead me to give up or forced me to leave teaching, politics, direct sales and estate agency.
Naturally this love of truth and contempt for professionalism leads me to regard criminal defence lawyers as the lowest form of life, followed by (professional) journalists. Many people may be surprised by my high regard for politicians, many stages higher than the preceding examples, higher even than social workers, just a few places below viruses. Another thing about doctors, most of them aren't. Doctors that is, they are Bachelors of Medicine.
And another thing, most of the time all they do is translate. “Doctor I've got stomach ache.” Doctor examines you and then tells you that you have gastritis; which is Latin for stomach ache. How many years of college do you need for that? A phrase book would do.
I don't believe that science and art are equal. I get very annoyed at science writers who sprinkle classical and literary references through their work. I couldn't care less if they have never read a word of Dickens or Shakespeare. If I want literary quotes I could read an anthology (I don't and I won't). Scientists should do good science, if they want to see plays or read about ancient Greece they can do it in their time off, and if they don't want to they shouldn't feel guilty about it. Please can we have a good scientific book for the general reader without the obligatory I-am-not-a-philistine quote before every chapter. If a literary reference is illuminating it should be thoroughly explained, if it is not illuminating it should not be included.
Fiction, what is it good for?
It is all made up. It is all lies. There is no difference between good fiction and bad fiction, it is all equally made up and so worthless. No, not just worthless, it is positively harmful. It misleads you with a false image of reality.
Does any man understand any woman? Of course not. Is there any person alive who can empathize and understand everybody? No, naturally nobody has such an ability. Does this stop thousands of people every year from making up stories that must involve the author in plotting the desires, aspirations, motivations, experiences and thought patterns of several principle characters and then peddling the result to us? No, it's business. The greatest novelists have a good understanding of some people's characters and some of their motivations, that is the best we can hope for. If you ever think that reading books is an effective substitute for real life you are sadly mistaken. I have heard that some scholars of Shakespeare are setting up courses to teach businessmen how to use the insights of the Great Bard; all I can say is that this is a last-ditch attempt to sell useless knowledge in the employment market. I have no doubt that those involved think that their knowledge is saleable, they have to believe that or they will think they have wasted their lives, and nobody wants to think that. (That is why I am writing this site, otherwise I might think all my lousy experiences were for nothing.)
What about probability in fiction? Let me start with the trivial; slips of the tongue. Have you ever read in fiction about an innocent slip of the tongue that had no significance, no relevance to the plot, no Freudian symbolism? Never! In real life we all make slips of the tongue constantly without any significance. It just never happens in books. If somebody says the wrong worm by mistake there is always a significance to it. Next the hoary old chestnut, going to the toilet, protagonists only visit the toilet to advance the plot, never to merely empty their bladder. Can you think of a scene in a play, book or film in which a character goes to the toilet, uses it and comes out again without at least making himself late for something or meeting somebody? Thinking back on my toilet visits only about 2% involve any activity that is in any way “relevant to the plot.”
A single bash on the head with the butt of a pistol always renders the hero or minion unconscious for twenty minutes, rather than just causing a nasty lump or killing him by fracturing his skull. The jails of the western world would be a lot less crowded if Hollywood stopped giving people the impression that you can hit a man over the head with a chair and he will just go a bit groggy for a few minutes.
No matter what the relative performance of two vehicles a chase can always be engineered. The hero has an open top two-seater and the baddies have a limousine with all the poise and power of a beached whale but they can still keep up until the author decides the best way to move the scene on.
In space nobody can hear you scream, but of course a good explosion can be heard. In space spaceships fly like aeroplanes, or if they are really big, like ships. A fighter style space ship flies through the air and through the vacuum of space in exactly the same way as a Spitfire or F15. They can bank and turn with the same grace and G forces as if they were using rudders and flaps against fast moving air. All the action takes place with an obvious plane of the horizontal. Relative speeds shown are always in the same order of magnitude as in a jet aircraft dogfight, stars hundreds of light-years away blur past as if they were trees on the ground.
Then let's have a look at soaps. People have a wedding and the church is full of neighbours and work colleagues, and only a couple of obscure relatives. One pregnancy in three is twins, or born on Christmas Day, or both.
They do not do ordinary things, especially they do not watch television soaps. They have severe money troubles for one week then with no change in their employment situation a few months later they seem to be back to normal. If only my life was like that, “This being short of money plot is wearing thin so let's knock it on the head.”
In fiction if you are seen to buy a lottery ticket at all you stand about a 75% chance of wining the jackpot.
Only dross fiction is bad? What about the man who spontaneously combusts due to alcohol? How many heroines have been carried off by a chill caught from getting wet, as opposed to a contracting a virus? How many heroines achieve orgasm through intense desire rather than direct and indirect clitoral stimulation? How many heroes work their way up out of grinding poverty simply through hard work, now that is a joke. How many heroes are millionaires without ever exploiting anybody, cheating or lying? How many heroines are beautiful on the outside because they are beautiful on the inside? How many lawyers never defend a client who is guilty? How many crimes and sins go unpunished?
I do not follow the plot in my own life. How can any author be expected to understand the workings of probability, physics, economics and interpersonal relationships enough to avoid making some gross errors in their stories?
Films
“It makes you think doesn't it?”
What does? A story has been engineered to make you think a particular thought. Your sympathies are automatically focused on whoever first appears on the screen unless they kill a puppy-dog or something similar. It is a fact of human psychology. We will always start to empathize with the first character we see and see the world the way they see it. A film director can make us believe anything. We can see that fate wants that man dead or that the woman with the long hair can really see the future or that the girl with the red hair can move things with the power of her mind. We have seen it demonstrated in front of us. We believe it totally while at the same time in a separate part of our brain we know that it is made up. When asked the rational part of the brain replies that it is fiction, but most of our brains process the main story. There has to be something in it after all, it makes you think, doesn't it? Arggghhh!!!! Instead of passing on the message that big black men are gentle giants with hidden powers of the mind or angels are walking the streets of middle America it could just as easily tell you that blacks live to rape white women and Jews are in league with the devil. It would still make you think.
Don't trust any fiction, it is all made up. |
Advertising.
The principle disadvantage of having a rational atheist approach to life is the knowledge that advertising people will not be going to spend an eternity in hell.
I hate advertising with a passion. The deliberate and calculated manipulation and lies are part of the daily life of an advertising person more than anybody else. (Lawyers don't count as human, obviously, you should have realized by now)
If a company wants to pay to put an idea in my head it should pay me. The conceit of the whole operation is mind-blowing. They will put ideas in our heads and charge for the privilege. But they do not pay us to receive the messages, we are just the dumb vessels. We have to soak up images, ideas, sounds and messages from all around. It is a truism that half the money spent on advertising is wasted, but the trick is to know which half. However the customer pays for 100% of the cost, not just the 50% that works.
Some of the ideas that people are trying to put in my brain are alarming. Hellmans, the only mayonnaise If it was the only one they wouldn't be bothering to say that.
The original and best is a phrase often used, to fall for that we have to imagine a first effort that attains perfection first time, that is then copied less well, and never improved upon despite many different people trying over many years. A singularly bizarre concept.
Imagine advertising Persil washing powder as unchanged since 1893 (or whenever). The only way I can get my head round the original and best idea is by supposing that we get our tastes fixed by the first experience. This makes sense, as an avid reader of Forum magazine I can accept that the first time then colours the way we look on the whole concept, it certainly makes sense for my first sexual experiences. It also explains why with music cover versions are never as good as the original, unless you hear the cover first. It should not matter to the fizzy drink, burger, corn flakes or whatever.
The idea that the first man ever to make a fizzy drink flavoured with cola nuts (not because they had a good flavour, but because they are full of caffeine) made a perfect drink that matches the tastes of everybody on the planet on his first attempt.And subsequently thousands of people have tried to copy it, with huge resources and massive consumer testing budgets, and they haven't managed to do it because the original is always the best...It is just mindbogglingly unlikely. There are, in all probability thousands of drinks that, without the advertising hype and the conditioned tastebuds, would beat that particular beverage in blind tasting.
On a similar tack why is the method used by one monk with a penchant for experimental scientific wine making suddenly “traditional” and the only way to make a quality sparkling wine? More importantly why is wine made by the Champagne method in the Champagne region so much more worthy than any other wines, especially those that try to taste identical? The answer is advertising, marketing, hype and money.
Then what about diamonds. Diamonds are for ever, right? So they must be the oldest rocks on Earth? No. The oldest rock on Earth is a zircon. A nasty cheap imitation? The original and best! If a cubic zirconia looks like a diamond, can be shaped like a diamond and can cut glass like a diamond what kind of idiot wants to pay over the odds for a diamond? Mugs like us. (Incidentally the question “why are precious stones precious” is a fascinating one, I suggest any intelligent thinking person reads “The Human Situation” by Aldous Huxley, it is very thought provoking, despite being over 40 years old.)
Just imagine the extra life experiences you could have if you could remove unwanted advertising messages from your brain as easily as you can delete unwanted files from your hard disk. If I had such a facility I think I would use it on a daily basis. In my head now are trite messages going back many years. I have the experience of having spent three months in the USA, incidentally watching US television, in 1984. I know exactly where and when many of the messages got in. You would be amazed at what I can recall from that period with no conscious effort to absorb it in the first place. That is much less than 1% of the advertising that I must have absorbed in my life. It is a quite sickening concept, I wish I could just throw up and get it out of my system. For every thought destroying message that has been placed in my brain some jerk has been paid big money.
What crap has the TV sold me?
I am sure I am not aware of it all, here are some messages that have been received and detected:-
Spots ruin your life
All children want to shake hands with a giant dumb version of a cartoon mouse, this is “their wildest dream.”
A certain simulated fruit juice drink is cool, not just a chemical soup of additives.
The right car can get you laid.
The wrong car can get you laid off.
One mint can ruin a modelling career.
Actresses that have been selected because they have perfect hair use a particular brand of shampoo. (This is especially weird when the shampoo is new and the actress is not).
Nobody ever does anything interesting or beyond the ordinary unless they drink a particular brand of beer or eat a certain breakfast cereal.
The right shoes can help you be a top sports star, famous enough to do sports shoe advertisements.
Once a month women leak blue fluid for no adequately explained reason.
Travelling to another continent to ride a roller coaster is a rational act.
When the company is paying it is quite all right to choose an airline on the basis that it has staff you want to shag.
Travelling to another continent in order to lie next to a swimming pool is a rational use of several tons of irreplaceable hydrocarbons.
Countries that are further away from you, so cost more to get to, are better places to go. (If you are European then the Far East is exotic, if you are Japanese Europe is exotic...)
You are what you buy.
Then there are the trendy ads. In order to sell any product it is now merely necessary to produce an expensive and stupid ad. This works in the following way:- The target market is always the 10 - 25 year olds. The parents see the stupid ad and don't understand it, and say so. Then the kids defend it, anything that their parents do not understand is obviously aimed at them, and they do not want to seem too stupid to understand it. “It's brilliant, you don't get it because you're too old.” The product is then instantly associated with being too cool and clever for parents, therefore totally desirable. It is a formula that could sell a turd in a bottle. The only hard part is to get the financing for the stupid ad in the first place.
Kids are so credulous and so easily led, they will accept any idea as long as the packaging is right. For perfume looser standards apply. You can sell any perfume to any age group with a visual image, as long as you do not make the product too cheap.
MTV have it made. Any advertisement for MTV that appears on MTV is by definition cool. This is a blank cheque to directors to produce the stupidest rubbish imaginable. Drop some acid, smoke some grass, eat some strong cheese, have a dream, make a storyboard, job done. If it is barely understandable and seems like the result of splicing three inch strips of film at random from the cutting room floor it doesn't matter; it's on MTV, it's cool. If you don't get it you are too old.
And women!
I hold a door open for somebody and then get accused of being a patronizing male chauvinist pig. I didn't even know that flat chested shaven haired thing was a woman. I did not matter to me, I have been brought up to hold doors open for people and other animals. It is called being polite and treating others as you would like to be treated yourself. I never object to somebody holding a door open for me, and I always try to acknowledge them with thanks.
Women in adverts.
They can say outrageous slanders against men. Just watch adverts for a few minutes and imagine the sexes reversed. Half the lines would have to be cut. A woman demonstrates a new cleaning product then says “let's see that again, in slow motion...” while handing the cloth to her idle husband. What would happen if the sexes were reversed on that one, the plug would have been pulled after the first screening. Women stand around eyeing up and drooling over a man drinking Diet Coke, the reverse would be banned overnight. Except in Brazil.
You say something to a woman that she takes exception to and she slaps your face. If a man slaps a woman, even in retaliation, he is in really big trouble. If any woman hits me I will do my best to knock her out cold, just as if she was a man. I do not approve of violence against women, or children, or men.
You buy a woman a meal and she never offers to return the favour. Women can earn the same as men and yet men are still expected to do all the paying. Two sixteen year olds work side by side all day in McDonalds for the same hourly rate, but when he takes her where she wants to go he pays. Her money gets spent on her; so does his.
When was the last time you encountered a woman paying for a man except when she is in a clearly dominant social position? The only women who ever bought me a meal were my wife and my mother, as I said, in a clearly dominant social position...
What is the answer? Equality is not working. It is a sham. It is time we recognize that men and women are not identical and cannot be expected to behave the same. Some jobs are for men and some are for women. Even if dental nurses received the same pay as dentists they would still be 99.99% female. Very few straight men want to be trolley dollies on aeroplanes.
I spent six months recently unemployed. Many of the job advertisements might just have well have said must be female. They specified a long list of typically female characteristics; outgoing, lively people (with large breasts) who love working with people in a happy team environment. Blah, blah. People with individual drive, initiative (and a penis) need not apply.
I recently had to catch the first commuter train of the day to get to work early. Something was very different, fewer people yes, but something else too.... Instead of the 50/50 sex ratio I see on the 8:09 the 6:39 has only two women on the whole train (three if the driver is a woman). I wonder if that is related to the glass ceiling? Women don't go in to work early to do unpaid overtime. They are too smart to do it, so the stupid men get the promotion instead.
If I am stuck in a burning building I want a fireman to save me. That is not being a sexist pig. If they have what it takes to be a woman fireman then let them do it, but don't devalue the job by calling it a fire-fighter and bending the rules and selection procedures to meet quotas. The same goes for the police. I expect the police to fill the doorway when they come running to my aid, I don't expect to look down to speak to them. Any police officer should be capable of picking up an average sized man against his will and throwing him, not judo style, javelin style.
A former colleague of mine joined the army recently. He told me a very interesting tale about sexual equality. Before he was accepted he had to prove his fitness. A large mixed sex group started a mile and a half run. Every one of the young men finished the course. Of the large number of women who had set out to prove themselves the equal of the men the majority gave up. Will an army have to lose a war before this arrant nonsense is ended?
Women are not the same as men and they will never be so. The only sports that women can compete well against men are ultra-endurance swimming, ultra-endurance running, equestrianism and drag racing. Unusually fit women can have very good stamina for long distance events that begins to counter the faster men only on very long distances well beyond 50 Km. Women's lower bodyweight is an advantage in all sports in which they are a driver or rider but only the pure conditioned reflex style of driving in drag racing allows them to compete well with the massive competitive spirit and dedication of the best men.
|
On average women are better drivers but I feel safe to assert that no woman will ever win a single Formula One race. If a woman did achieve such a feat she would never have to do any real work again for the rest of her life, she would be a superstar. If it happens I will have her name tattooed on my arse. |
 |
Phallic symbols. The Lesbian Feminist loonies are always going on about how nuclear missiles are phallic symbols. Utter nonsense. ICBMs are the same shape as willies because that is the only shape that works. Show me a breast or womb shaped rocket...
POST SCRIPT: I have recently come across a wonderful piece of feminist design, the new utterly unnozzle-like, ungun-like, Black and Decker Dustbuster. It is hideous. Pastel colours, rounded curves like a woman's pregnant belly.
Divorce.
Is any WIFE worth a kilo-coolie? The average third world person earns the equivalent of $500 US per year. I my opinion nobody on the face of the Earth deserves one thousand times more than this. Certainly not any person whose sole claim is being the wife of a successful man. Divorce lawyers should have to face a jury of third world citizens to explain why their client is worth more per year than a whole village. Just imagine the faces of the jury as the lawyers explain all the dinner parties, the dieting, the swimming to keep in shape and how their client now needs money to pay the staff at her third house. Let's get real. Nobody is worth $500,000 per year, end of story. You can't earn it by non exploitative hard work. You can get in a position to demand it, but you cannot deserve it.
I would like to see a world wide income cap, but in the meantime we should certainly start with a cap on divorce settlements. Unless a husband explicitly agrees to allow a settlement beyond the $500,000 level the claim should be capped at that point. If the wife can demand more during the marriage and the husband agrees then she has as much right to it as he does, but if she cannot get the agreement of the husband then she obviously is not worth that much in his eyes, so she should leave or get used to the idea that she is not his equal.
Million, billion what's the difference...
Have you ever heard people say something like this; “It was sixteen Million, or was it billion, anyway a big number...” The culprit is usually young and/or female. The difference between a million and a billion is a thousand fold. At least, a million fold if you use the antiquated British system of numbering. A one thousand fold difference always matters. Just imagine your reaction if somebody knocked three digits off the end of your salary.
A similar breakdown in arithmetical logic often comes when profit figures for companies are announced. Every year the tired old cliché comes out as to how much money per second certain large companies are making. The journalists never then put it into perspective by saying how much money has been invested, with the potential to be lost, and how this profit figure compares with the return the money would have yielded if it was just stashed in an interest bearing deposit account or used to buy Government Bonds with guaranteed returns. Journalists are lazy parasites.