Friday Rants
purepedantry | February 22, 2008Over for the last week I have been mulling whether I want to continue doing Friday Rants, and I have come to the conclusion that I think I going to end the whole business. It is not that they aren't really amusing to write and -- I hope -- to read. It is just that I have become concerned that they are a distraction from other more important goals I have for this blog.
I am going to end the Friday Rants for two main reasons:
First, you may find this difficult to believe, but there are only so many things that inflame my indignation. I have actually had trouble of late figuring out things to…
purepedantry | February 15, 2008I haven't been in a large lecture for a while, but this semester I decided to take a course in introductory economics at a local community college for my own enrichment. The experience has reminded me why I was so happy that I didn't have to go to lectures anymore.
(Ed. sentence removed. See below.) My classmates need to stop. They ask so many irrelevant questions. It is astonishing how much of everyone's time they have wasted. What is even more astonishing is that the rest of the students haven't conspired to have them renditioned to some foreign gulag.
I know what you're thinking. The…
purepedantry | February 8, 2008People, you suck.
When I was younger (and less of a calloused bastard), I was willing to believe that human beings' pernicious behavior was restricted to particular unsavory individuals or select groups. Likewise, I would write off unscrupulous behavior as isolated incidents in the lives of otherwise good people. In short, I used to believe that bad behavior in people was circumscribed in some way, either in time or into individuals.
The more I experience it, however, the more I believe that bad behavior in humans is so pervasive as to damn our whole species. This is not an anomaly. We…
purepedantry | February 1, 2008Complementary and alternative medicine has no business participating in mainstream science or medicine.
As I understand it, there are five core premises on which complementary and alternative medicine is based. I would like to confront each in turn:
1) The evil, old white men who run the medical establishment are united in a vast conspiracy to suppress legitimate treatments. If we had only looked to folk remedies sooner, we would have cured things like cancer and Alzheimer's long ago.
Think about that for a second: do you sincerely believe that everyone -- I mean everyone -- in the…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008My Friday rant about intellectuals triggered lots of interesting comments, both positive and negative.
Treb:
I know it was a "rant", but, wow, is it ever funny to hear someone rant that they are open-minded and someone else is not. Sounds like a high school column about trying to be cool.
caynazzo:
I think many of your many generalizations apply equally to Med students.
And Jennifer Jacquet from Shifting Baselines:
Two wise men once wrote, "A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content." I liked that line (by Sokal and…
purepedantry | January 25, 2008Intellectuals, I have had it with your crap. I have had it with your Laputan thinking and your Utopian fantasies. I have had it with the assumption that people who do not instantaneously agree with you are somehow mentally deficient.
I have had it with being lectured by people who know nothing of the subject about which they are lecturing me. Read a history or an economics textbook; they aren't that hard to find. Further, I read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, and all the heroes you shove in my face -- Rousseau, Marx, and their ilk -- were actually philandering, maladjusted bastards. (…
purepedantry | January 18, 2008That's right. I'm talking to you, Lou Dobbs of CNN.
What fascinates me about you is that although you are a thug of at least comparable measure to Bill O'Reilly -- what with your nightly anti-immigrant rants -- your thuggery seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the liberal establishment. If my liberal friends will not watch Fox because they employ O'Reilly, why will they watch CNN while they continue to employ you?
Aside from your regular anti-immigrant jibes, you seem to show the economic understanding of a shell-encased invertebrate. The protectionist measures you advocate were shown…
purepedantry | January 11, 2008I hate you IO Digital Cable. I haven't the foggiest idea where you are or what you sell but I hate you. I hate you because of this commercial (see below fold) which has been running on a continuous loop on cable and has now been shown 4,000,000,000 times in NYC alone.
(Picture of Angry Crab by Ryan Harvey on Flickr)
That is the most horrible advertising jingle I have ever heard. It calls to me in my sleep; I can't get the damn thing out of my brain. It tries so hard to be "cool and hip with the youngsters" that I want to slam my head against the wall until I pass out.
Further, every…
purepedantry | January 4, 2008(Keeping in the promised theme of having rants on Fridays, here is rant number one. For those of you who are offended...well...I am going to have to say that it is Friday. The weekend is coming, and frankly I couldn't care less.)
I hate you Iowa. I hate your sprawling plains of uninterrupted nothingness that remind me why even the Mormons kept on trucking. I hate your obscenely well-mannered citizens that remind me why New Yorkers truly are bastards. Most of all, I hate the Iowa caucuses. (The only thing I like about Iowa is Tara. Tara is cool.)
The only part about the Iowa caucus that…