grimsprice said:
2012.
Seriously, like, half a dozen of my friends are going nuts over this shit. My high school english teacher is stocking her garage with canned food and bottled water for the end of the world.
I can't wait to barge into her classroom on jan 4th or whenever school starts again. Point my finger at her and yell...
[HEADING=1]HA![/HEADING]
A-freakin'-men. The 2012 hype is really beginning to annoy me. I've got this one insanely annoying girl in my class who refuses to believe the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (because she knows
so much more than an ass-tonne of PhD holding scientists) and maintains that Nibiru (a fictional planet this 2012 bullshittery has latched onto) is hiding behind Jupiter and will fly past us.
At first she maintained that, as is the current craze with this ridiculous hype, the incoming planet's gravitational pull would flip our planet's geomagnetic field. When I pointed out to her that geomagnetic reversals are a steady occurrence and have been so since the formation of our magnetic field with no proven effect upon the biosphere she changed the trajectory of her fictional planet and starting claiming it'd hit earth. When I showed her the long, long list of facepalm-worthy, whiny, plebeian fears that the poor (probably pill-popping by now) astronomers at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry have answered (one of which outright stated that there was no such thing as this Nibiru/Planet X bull claims and that any large masses such as this approaching our solar system would be spotted tens of thousands of years before they came close, even with our current technology) she started claiming they were working for the government. Can't win with conspiracy theorists.
Another thing I wish people would just shut the fuck up about is anthropogenic global warming. Humans contribute 3.6% of carbon emissions (that's not some crazy right-wing lie, that's New Scientist's data). Even if we manage to cut the 19% of worldwide human emissions required by the Copenhagen summit that still amounts to roughly 0.7% of total carbon dioxide emissions. I'm not saying CO2 doesn't have a causal affect upon climate (it's demonstrably proven that it does), nor, for the same reason, am I arguing that cutting CO2 won't change the climate, I'm arguing that it's illogical to claim that our race's piddling little contribution to total CO2 emissions can be solely responsible for global warming (which is occurring) and whilst everyone and their mother is out demonising this single gas as if it is the fifth horseman of the apocalypse we're not looking at what else could be the cause of the warming or any other mitigation strategies than "Oh em gee buy this car because it doesn't produce as much carbon!111"
In the midst of all this hysteria we miss out on simple and interesting solutions to any potentially damaging warming (which, despite the media's overreaction, hasn't yet occurred), such as Myhrvold et al's Nitrogen Dioxide delivery system for artificial cooling.
EDIT: (there's a lot that annoys me, I'll just throw in one more)
Gender. That's another thing I want people to shut the fuck up about. The American media is obsessed with gender. I can't watch a damn television show without seeing men being thrown into one of the following stereotypical roles: competitive, immature, aggressive (this one has some truth to it at least, I'll explain later), sex obsessed, unemotional/emotionally insensitive and so on. Even more irritating (and nonsensical) is the fact that women are always portrayed as the tonic to these masculine gender defects. However, women don't get off scot-free either; women in the media are usually portrayed as one of the following: irrational, innocent/naive (may not sound like a bad thing, but innocence and infantilization go hand in hand and no-one wants to be denigrated to the position of a child), stupid and, more often than not, unpleasant/bitchy.
This is
really annoying because a spiffing brilliant 46 study meta-analysis by Hyde et al (2005) of the University of Wisconsin discovered that there were
no statistically significant differences between genders in any behavioural or cognitive areas other than aggression (moderate to strong correlation with males, especially when aware of observation (0.58-0.64 correlation on all types of aggression)), sexual attitudes (men don't tend to see masturbation as 'wrong' and don't tend to consider casual sex to be 'wrong' either (interestingly, despite the media portrayal, Hyde et al found that sexual satisfaction (amount and pleasure gained) leaned very slightly more towards women than men)) and lastly motor-skills and complex shape manipulation (being able to mentally rotate and manipulate 3-D shapes, just seems that women aren't usually created in such a way as to be neurologically geared towards this sort of task). A recent study of testosterone has also shined doubts upon its efficacy in causing aggression, as it was found that women in a blind trial were significantly more likely to exhibit aggressive/competitive tendencies when
told they'd been given testosterone (when in fact none had been administered) than when they actually received testosterone. Basically, gender has jack shit to do with anything; the way your life has treated you is the most crucial factor in what makes you different from other people in nearly all aspects.
