Social Justice Warriors: The Revenge

I recently wrote about ‘Social Justice Warriors’ and how absurd and hilarious they appear to the rest of sane humanity. I provided a few humour besmirched examples in order to further illustrate my underlining thesis of woe. Today, I have decided to revisit this rich vein of cultural insanity as the previous post was received and rewiewed with mind-numbing apathy and ignorement (not a real word). To be honest such posts are easy to put forth as they virtually write themselves. Basically, I’m a very lazy man and writing serious stuff is hard even for an intellectual prodigy such as myself. So occasionally I like to take the easy option of going for the ‘low hanging fruit’. But remember the lowest fruit is often the sweetest. So, sit back and enjoy and try not to get juice stains on your nice shiny, shell suit. Arse.     

This is a hard one. How many gender neutral names are there? What about Lesley or is it, Leslie? No, can't be doing that- the spelling gives away the gender. Thinks hard. What about Ashley and Kim? Mayhap, this could work. But choosing a baby's name is always going to be hard as both parents have got to agree. And yea, if you want a true gender-neutral name the list is not extensive and let's be honest most of them are a bit too 'exotic' for nice middle-class parents. Why not go for the 'new wave' option that is popular amongst air-head celebs. Call your kid Space Cadet, London, Tipton or something to do with nature like Winter, or Land Crab? Certainly, the lower echelons of society have quickly latched on to this one and mothers shouting out to their offspring, Nokia and Storm resonate loudly throughout every Aldis and Lidl. I think the 'right on' crowd will have to think very hard about this one as the pitfalls are numerous and not subtle. They may efuse about the proles but they do not want to be proles themselves, do they? I've got an idea. Why not give boys girl names and girls boy names? Remember Shirley Crabtree? He turned out to be a successful heavyweight wrestler with the moniker, 'Big Daddy'. And let us not forget that John Wayne was Christened, Marion. Naming your brat is too hard. I recommend going the way of the parents who named their child named, 'Baby'. It had intellectual deficit. Nuff said.

O dem pesky trans folk: sensitive little petals, aren't they? I think we should go through the dictionary forthwith changing all words beginning with 'trans'. Might take some time and what should we substitute 'trans' with? I suggest Twat. Thus Transperson becomes Twatperson. That should work. 

The above says it all, I'm afraid

I confess I had to look up 'STEM fields'. It stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. Yea but what is wrong with a degree in LGBT studies, Black feminist literature (short course), Hispanic studies, Women's studies and Puppetry (no, not a double major)? Did you know that you can obtain a degree in the UK on David Beckham studies? Some argue that we go to university to expand our mind. This is only part of the equation. More likely today you will be exposed to leftist ideology and a pandering to all strange minority weirdo lifestyles and philosophies. Not so much expanding the mind more of a case of narrowing the mind and blocking dissent and debate concerning anything that doesn't fit in with the current shade of Markism. How is a degree in 'Black studies' going to help you in the real cut 'n' thrust, competitive world of work? Imagine what would happen if someone suggested a degree in 'White studies'?

The acid test: After leaving the hallowed halls of acadaemia, how are you going to earn your living and make your way in a tough world? It is my contention that a degree in Native American (what happened to Indian) studies is a fast track to the dole queue. MacDonald's are always hiring. Or you could become a professional economically disenfranchised whiner continually banging on about how a misogynist, white, middle-class, conservative controlled society is the real evil. Or you could, like sensible white middle-class folk, pursue STEM studies thus obtaining nice, potentially high paying jobs and satisfying careers.    

Makes me laugh, it really does. Too much to unpack here for a blog post. Anyway, I just want to make a couple of points. I don't have an issue with homosexuality. As an ex-professional biologist, I'm aware that sexual orientation is not a choice. Most folk are born attracted to the opposite sex and a minority are attracted to their own sex. From a purely biological perspective, homosexuality is an aberration and unlikely to bear fruit. For a gay man to date and have sexual relations with a woman is akin to a heterosexual man having sex with a man. Both would find the situation equally repugnant. The good thing: the weirdos are starting to turn on each other. In dat a sad shame?

Sometimes even my jaded soul is surprised by this crap. Perhaps the above should hide away somewhere, preferably in a box so that messy, nasty, abhorrent real life doesn't insinuate and encroach on their hyper-sensitive sensibilities. How do they react when they drop an egg in the kitchen? My advice: find a house out in the country; find a large room therein, paint it white and sit in the middle gently rocking in the foetal position. Real life should not intrude. And don't go outside, tis full of squelchy, nasty critters and smelly poo.     

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa......... No further comment. I'm off out to burn down the local orphanage.

Well, boys will be boys and girls will be girls…….  Innate behaviour will out. Evolution has fashioned differences in the behaviour of men and women and these behaviours become manifest in early childhood. I’m reminded of an ex-colleague. He was very ‘right on’ and was very vocal about raising his young son in a gender-neutral atmosphere. Consequently, my colleague’s son was not allowed masculine toys such as cars, toy guns and any object associated with war and aggression. One morning my colleague came to work in a state of great despond and disarray. Apparently, his son had fashioned a toy gun out of wood and string and was found ‘playing war’ with his friends. Later I heard that the boy in question went on to join the British Marine commandos. So much for a gender-neutral upbringing.

Err, some confusion here, mayhap? I'm hoping HE turns out to be a man? What do you think?

Bugger! This post has taken a lot longer to write than anticipated. Should have taken the time to write something more cerebral. Could have put the time profitably in a more fruitful endeavour and started my Magnus Opus on: 'The influence of lesbian, black, disabled, mentally encumbered transwomen on the development of Western Society'. Although, on second thoughts, this would take, but a thrice.

Toodly Pip, for now.    

                                                  Bonus image- no comment neccesary

PARASITE

Have you ever bewailed the lot of the humble parasite? Mayhap you should as they are a much maligned but poorly understood group of biological entities. Let me start with a formal definition: An organism that lives and feeds on or in an organism of a different species and causes harm to its host is considered a parasite. This covers a multitude of organisms from bacteria to vampire bats. But not viruses as they do not constitute life according to strict criteria. It has been estimated that up to 40% of extant species are parasitic to some degree. It appears that, as a biological strategy, parasitism can be profitable. They can be likened to the human economic parasite, Estatus Agentus Twatus Maximus. A most pernicious breed of humankind dedicated to sapping the lifeblood of every human contemplating a change in location. Makes me wanna burn stuff. Moving on…….

Parasites should be distinguished from critters which live in harmonious accord with their host, called commensals. Commensals cause no harm or benefit, or none we can detect. A good example would be the remora fish which attach to sharks to garner morsels of food from prey taken by their gracious host; the ultimate perpetual dinner guest. The next category I would like to consider are species which engage in a beneficial interaction. Mutualism engages both species with benefits without detriment. A good example would be the association of flowering plants with a variety of bee species. In turn for a good feed of nutritious nectar, the bee transfers pollen between plants thus ensuring pollination.

There is contention amongst biologists that given time, a lot of time, parasitic species will eventually, through coevolution, become more in tune with their much suffering host, eventually becoming less malign and therefore entering the stage of commensalism on their evolutionary way to mutualism.  This, of course, is just one scenario. Predictions can only be made if we understand the intrinsic and extrinsic evolutionary pressures, demonstrated, over time. In fact, if there is competition between parasitic species for the same host then drift to a more aggressive form of parasitism may ensue with shorter life cycles for the parasites engaged.

Humans like to classify into discrete entities. For some reason, we are made to view the world this way. Life is not so simple or discrete. Life tends to morph into blurry categories thus predation is but one end of the scale proceeding, by degrees into parasitism, through to the commensal, and ending up with the mutualistic way of life. If only life was this simple.   

Anyway, I’ve provided an example below of the parasitic way of life. This example is said to have swayed Darwin away from a belief in an omnibenevolent deity. In his own words:  "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars." Take no heed gentle reader, Darwin’s atheism came as a consequence of his own deliberations in the field of natural selection and evolutionary theory.

Consider the Ichneumon wasp, a most delightful and clinched waist creature with the habit of laying its eggs in butterfly larvae. Once cosseted inside the grub the egg hatches into a wriggling worm which begins to pork out on the tissues of the unfortunate grub. They are mindful not to ingest vital organs leaving the succulent nervous tissue to last. Thus, the grub undergoes a long lingering death as it is consumed from within. Of note, the wasp has engaged the help of a virus that suppresses the host’s immune system. The intruder thus lurks within without being detected by the grub’s innate internal vigilance system.  Isn’t Nature just a complete treasure in all its manifest horrors. Arse.

And so, I would like to finish with part of a poem from the pen of the satirical cleric Jonathan Swift. This excerpt/extract is taken from, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody". Take it away, Jonathan. In this version, the vermin only teaze and pinch.

Their foes superior by an inch.

So nat'ralists observe, a flea

Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;

 And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em.

And so proceeds ad infinitum.

Thus every poet, in his kind,

Is bit by him that comes behind: Ain’t dat the sad truth.  

What do you think of my new tongue? 

Schrödinger’s Ferret

The famous thought experiment, Schrodinger’s ferret, devised in the 1930s by the physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, has insinuated into general consciousness without being understood by the general population. The development of quantum physics came hot on the heels of Einstein’s insights concerning relativity. If the concept of relativity is strange and counter-intuitive, the quantum world, in all its glory, is so weird and bizarre that sane physicists have been driven to contemplate the possibility of supernatural forces at work in the universe. More fool them, say I.  

At the beginning of the 20^th century, all seemed tame and sensible with the real world of physics. Newton had entertained his vast intellect with the physical world in the mid-17^th century and set things to right. He tackled the main problems of physics and prevailed in the realms of optics, gravity and motion. If ever there was a god in the world bedecked in human raiment, then Newton was that embodiment. Such intellectual immortality fosters an air of stifling, intellectual atrophy and although the great Newton described the effects of ‘gravity’ he had no idea of what this mysterious force consisted of and this problem remained a thorn in Newton’s intellectual side until his death. Newton’s work on ‘nature’s wonders’ acted as a block to future discoveries in the realm of relative motion. Newton’s three laws described the motion of physical bodies with such elegant mathematical precision that further exact delineations seemed futile.  But the pesky problem of gravity still remained. Then in 1905 and 1915, Einstein came along with his rather strange theories of relativity (special and general) upending Newtonian physics in a thrice. His theories suggested an explanation of gravity, of sorts, indicating that this force existed as a mere artefact of mass deforming space-time. 

Anyway, I’ve digressed somewhat. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the world of the ‘super small’ was showing signs of being rather odd and quaintly silly. In 1900 Max Planck devised his quantum hypothesis of energy consisting of discrete elements (quanta) although the name ‘quantum mechanics’ would not be coined until the 1920s. At the infinitesimally small, particles and energy seemed to exist in discrete states spread out in a blurry mess. Their position in space could only be described statistically (damn statistics) and the ultimate position could only be determined by interfering with the situation by direct observation and measurement. At such a time all probability collapsed and the particle conveniently reverted to a single position in space. The situation appeared so counterintuitive that it spurred the great physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, in the 1930s, to propose his famous thought experiment to illustrate the absurdity of the current status of quantum mechanics, known as the Copenhagen explanation. The experiment is outlined below for edification and general illumination in order that the blind may see.

Imagine a box containing a ferret, it might be Shagger, it might not- can’t say. Also, in the box is a small amount of radioactive material wired up to a vial of hydrogen cyanide gas. Please note, the wire is super strong to prevent Shagger from chewing through it thus voiding the experiment. The lid of the box is closed and the box remains undisturbed for one hour. During that time the radioactive material has a 50:50 chance of decaying. If that occurs the mechanism is triggered releasing the gas, killing poor Shagger.  According to accepted quantum theory, during the experiment, the ferret exists in a zombie state of neither being alive or dead (quantum superposition). The situation can only be resolved by peeking in the box at the end of the experiment. Thereupon the ferret’s situation would collapse into a state of life or demise. 

Tis of course, totally absurd. We know that the macroscopic world does not act this way. We can’t have a continuous sensible extrapolation from the quantum world of the very small to the ‘real world’ of the large. If matter ultimately exists as a blurry mess the appearance of solidity is utterly convincing, at least to our eyes.

The experiment is often put forth as Schrodinger’s way of illustrating the strangeness of quantum theory while in fact, he wanted to illustrate the ridiculousness of the quantum world as it was postulated in his day. He in no way accepted this interpretation and considered the original premises, flawed.

Subsequent modern experiments have lent support to the mysterious blurry nature of matter at the quantum level. How is it possible for a particle to exist in many incompatible states and how does this relate to how matter behaves according to our priveleged perspective? We are starting to stray into the world of metaphysics and rarefied philosophy and I will proceed no further. Anyway, while you contemplate such outré notions, hopefully remaining sane, I’m off with Shagger, assuming, of course, a happy resolution to the experiment, to go a rabbiting.      

 Please note: no ferrets were harmed during the writing of this post  

Resurrection, two thousand years later.......

O, Lordy, Lordy. To be honest, nothing really surprises me about news arising from Africa. Africa certainly lives up to its name, ‘The Darkie Continent’. A continent of extreme poverty, extreme violence, extreme corruption and extreme stupidity. But now and again a story emerges from this disease infested land which is so astonishing, so unbelievably asinine that it steals my breath away and robs me of any hope that Africa will ever be accepted into the bosom of any real civilisation.

For primitive barbarism look no further than a recent story emerging from stygian Johannesburg, South Africa. It is reported that a Jo’berg Pastor, named Ipad Mugumbo (perhaps), raised a man from the dead in front of a myriad of credulous parishioners. Astonished readers, please refer below to savour the unfolding video of this miraculous event, in all its garish and uncomprehending glory. Note the acting: surely worthy of an Oscar or two. The dead man arises from his coffin in bemused bedazzlement. Onlookers look on, tautology notwithstanding. Although to be fair, most closest to the event appear unconvinced as to the veracity of this supposed suspension of natural law. Could it be that they are party to this charade? Or perhaps, miracles are fairly commonplace in this part of the world? Do you think that the preacher is performing this preternatural phenomenon for nowt? Or do you think he’s taking money from the numerous onlookers for services given?  It is frank testament to how dumb, ill-educated and gullible Mugumbo’s congregation are in that they are prepared to follow, and no doubt hand over gelt, to this dusky charlatan. Folk this stupid deserve, nay demand to be fleeced and left to skulk to their well-deserved life of utter deprivation and filth.       

Watch and weep

The dead fella becoming a live fella is technically a zombie. And what do we do to zombies? We burn them, preferably with napalm. As an aside, the pastor seen here, bestriding the stage like a colossus happens to be the richest preacher in Africa. No shit say I. Mayhap we should burn him too?      

                                                          

The Charmed generation?

The Flaxen Haired One pontificates thusly.

'Tis true. If you earn minimum wage it is because you have no marketable skills. If you work as a cleaner don't expect a surgeon's salary. Get orf ya arse and learn stuff. Skills generally get you more dosh. If you live in part of the country which is too expensive, then move elsewhere. Not saying it is easy, but when has life been easy, unless you are born into wealth? Life has never been fair. Recognise the reality and do something about it. Don't expect the state (the taxpayer) to give you more than existence pay. And then it should be a temporary measure. If you are too dimwitted to appreciate these simple truths and act accordingly, don't expect your life to be an economic 'bed of roses'.'

The above is a comment I recently placed at Bucko’s place. There is nothing profound in my musings. In fact, the sentiment is perhaps banal and obvious at least to those who can see. I would just like to expand a little and add a little contextual wisdom.

I’m a classic representation of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. Economically I have done rather well, I suppose, and managed to retire at the grand age of 62. I’m haunted by the spectre of my poor father dying a day before he officially retired. I’m thin, active and healthy so statistically I’m likely to be still around at 65 to pick up my State pension. However, no one is guaranteed a span and chance and circumstance lurketh in unknown corners of the room/doom. I’m starting to get morbid, so moving on….

I contend that the boomers are an economic anomaly. Certainly, prior generations did not do so well, particularly the working class. Opportunities available to young baby boomers, especially in the realms of education, were unprecedented and many working-class folk, such as myself, took advantage of the educational possibilities with gusto. Jobs appeared plentiful and if you were educated a whole vista of career paths became available. I’m not saying it was easy. Motivation, hard work and due diligence are always sound predictors of success.

Let us proceed to the succeeding generations. Times have changed. Globalisation, a decline in traditional industries and other economic factors, which I barely comprehend, have insinuated into the Western economy. Quality work is harder to find even for the educated. This is compounded by the fact that 33% of youngsters aspire to obtain a college degree (UK data). Note: there is a 30% drop out rate. When ‘I were a lad’, only 5% of the population went on to university. It seems today that you need a degree for any paid work- an over exaggeration, of course, but I’m sure you get the point. As an aside, not all degrees are equal. Graduates in the physical sciences, engineering and mathematics still do quite well; graduates in the liberal arts, not so much. There is a general and naive assumption amongst graduates of today that a degree is a passport to the professions and a high paying job with an established career path. In many cases this expectation is unrealistic. Also, later generations have an expectation of relative wealth especially if they are nurtured by the stereotypical middle-class boomer family. They aspire to their parent’s economic well-being without understanding the wherewithal involved or fully appreciating the modern economic environment.

I am of the opinion, and I may be wrong, as this is not my area of expertise, that the latest generation to hit the job market and aspire to the traditional trappings of adulthood will find life a bit tougher than their boomer parents. Great jobs are not so plentiful and the competition is keen. Relative salaries are probably lower than the boomer generation, in relation to the cost of living. Certainly, getting onto the property ladder is becoming an impossibility for most and renting is very expensive. All that said, there are opportunities for those with the right skills to prosper in the modern age and do well. As the market is international, a life abroad is worthy of contemplation. As they say: ‘the world is your bivalve shellfish’.  

So, there we have it. Just a few of my ‘lay man’s’ thoughts on the issue. I would welcome my reader’s opinions on the matter. In order to gain perspective and balance, it would be great to hear, not only from boomers but also from those troublesome and pesky ‘whipper-snappers’. Let the mass debate commence.