Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by dr kellie on January 24, 2011 at 5:26pm

I caught that because my island grandmother called people boobs all the time.  Her other favorite slur was calling people a dirty so and so, which I find hilarious.

Permalink Reply by William Young on January 25, 2011 at 8:37pm

Money talks.

I challenge the fundies every chance I get quite often using their book of myths as ammunition.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 26, 2011 at 1:43am

It is a borrowing from the old 1950s term, "boob," referring not to breasts but to the sort of person who, in rhyme, we used to call "rubes"

 

Ah!  Now suddenly I understand what Hannibal Lecter meant when he used that word in one of the films.

 

Thanks! 

Permalink Reply by William Young on March 27, 2011 at 9:39pm

I challenge them whenever they say something stupid, which is all the time, about 99 & 44/100ths % of what they say is garbage.

Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on December 27, 2010 at 8:24am

Being in health care, I get the "It's not natural" argument constantly when it comes to medicines.  People want so much not to take pills that lower their blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol, etc.  "I don't want to have unnatural things in my body". My most effective argument for them is that living past about 40 is not natural, because only in recent history did most people live that long.  "natural" means an early death.  Driving cars is not natural either, has a high death rate, leads to obesity, heart disease, and psychological disorders.  Neither is flying in airplanes.  If people want "natural" they can live in the fucking stone age, hunt animals with hand made stone tools, wear animal pelts (or run around naked - is wearing the skin of a dead animal "natural").  

 

On the other hand, same gender sex is common among animals, so is natural.  So even if they give in to having an early death, give up central heating and cooling, computers and medications,  it's still "natural" for people of the same gender to pair up romantically and/or passionately. If they want to see "natural" they can go to the fucking zoo and visit the monkey exhibit.

 

"Natural" is meaningless but if people want it they should be willing to live it or be called on their hypocracy.

Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on December 27, 2010 at 4:58pm

Yes, but the trip to the zoo will only reinforce their opinion that evolution is bunk.  If evolution is true, why haven't the chimps and baboons evolved?  You can't win with these nitwits.

Permalink Reply by Sentient Biped on December 28, 2010 at 10:30am

You can make a list.  What is "un-natural" and what is "natural"

 

"Un-Natural"

cars

airplanes

twinkies

ho-hos

television

computers

commuting to work

antibiotics

heart pills

cholesterol pills

pain pills

corn (human made hybrids not existing in nature even before genetic engineering)

wheat (same)

cows (same)

dogs (same)

and a few billion other things.

 

"natural"

butt sex (animals do it in nature)

oral sex (animals do it in nature)

same sex sex

opposite sex sex

genital - genital sex

living in trees

eating raw food

sunshine

hugging and kissing loved ones.

and a bunch of other things.

Permalink Reply by William Young on January 23, 2011 at 12:49am

ROFLMAO

Verrrry senssibllle (long version)

Permalink Reply by William Young on March 27, 2011 at 9:36pm

One more thing to add to the unnatural, civilization.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 23, 2011 at 10:48am

There's a lovely annecdote in Robert Sapolsky's a Primate's Memoir, where a baboon swinging through a tree clutching an infant - drops it.

 

And three baboons and at least two human researchers had the precise same reaction: they gasped, put their hands to their faces and stood up.

 

The infant was fine it shrugged off the fall, but afterwards Sapolksy notes with a degree of relish that across the species were the same synapses firing in those different brains?

 

Becuase to a creature they all behaved the same way, in  situation you couldn't easily repeat in a laboratory.

Permalink Reply by Richard Healy on January 23, 2011 at 3:14am

My most effective argument for them is that living past about 40 is not natural, because only in recent history did most people live that long.

 

A very good book, which I think every one but particularly health care professionals should read is "why we get sick" an evolutionary approach to disease by Randolph Nesse.

 

I have a relative who recently got gout, so I explained to him why we get gout, which curiously his doctors hadn't.

 

There a lot of that, we live in an age were disease is largely regulated ou culture is heavly medicalised, people go see a dr get given a pill and better - that's where the cultural power of palcebos comes from too - but very few people really understand why we get sick (or conversely why we get better) and therein the distinction between natural and unnatural practices and outcomes.

Permalink Reply by James M. Martin on January 23, 2011 at 10:03am

Why would the doctors tell your relative what caused the gout.  By doing so, they deprive themselves of a fee when the gout gets them going to see him again for help.  Some doctors are also dumb asses -- some of them.  I was put into hospital for a bowel disruption, non-specific.  An MRI showed I had a variety of ailments, from gall stones to an aortal abdominal hernia.  But the imaging also showed a pinched disc.  (Actually, a compression fracture.) 

 

Mind you I had told all the doctors who saw me that two weeks earlier I had thrown my back out by trying to lift a 12K window A/C into the window.  (OK at 40, stupid at 65.)  I had done some research into bowel obstructions and found out that the vagus nerve, if switched off by a pinched disc, will not "tell" a person when to take a shit, or for that matter, help a person shit when they know to go.  The reason I had not shat in three weeks (yeah, yuk, yuk: "I told you he's full of shit") was that the vagus nerve was not helping me evacuate -- or even feel the need to.  The last time I looked, it takes an exercise of the muscles to crap.  I had not crapped because of the compression fracture. It was that simple.  Do you think a single one of those doctors had even thought of that.  Beware hospitals whose nurses say, "We don't have any Houses around here."

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