Explosions of bile
I am slowly becoming more rational about the lack of rationality that surrounds me: in my dotage I find I can grudgingly tolerate those who still do HTML layout with tables, and those who insist on selling things in ounces. Being inconsiderate of other people really is more irritating than such trivial failings. I might even eventually learn to let "5 items or less" wash over me without wanting to scream "Fewer! It's fewer you dolts!". However - much as it does indicate a sociopathic personality-disorder to wish severe harm on those who don't stand on the right on an escalator - when the media tries to bring on a measles epidemic merely to boost circulation, and where the only choices presented in politics are between war-mongering born-again neo-cretins and anti-nuclear post-modernist relativists, you begin to wonder if life wouldn't be just a little better with a speck more rationality and a smidgeon less knee-jerk idiocy.
My least favourite things
- Creationism. The longest rear-guard action in history, and if it weren't for the fact that some UK faith 'schools' are now teaching this crock, it would also be the most laughable. Natural selection explains what we are and where we came from, and it underpins all biological and medical research. You should care about creationism's insidious creep into the curriculum because this is the perfect example of intellectually stultifying claptrap trying to dress itself in the clothes of science to achieve enough respectability to be taught as science. This isn't even a slippery slope argument: creationism is what you find at the bottom of the slippery slope.
- Risky business. Humans tend to be good at stuff that the last four billion years of evolution forced our ancestors to be good at: things like eating, having sex, and avoiding crevasses. Trusting your intuition of impending death is all well and good when you're at the edge of a chasm, but intuition is rubbish when it comes to judging hazards that didn't kill all those organisms that aren't your ancestors.
- Lies and statistics. Just in case you think this is just a heap of whinges and whines. How to avoid being taken in by nonsensical statistics and poorly conducted experiments.
- Environmentalism. There's probably an insightful pun to be made from the fact that environmentalism contains the word 'mental'. There's every reason to protect the environment, but you're not going to solve a problem as big as this using Luddite intuition.
- Pseudoscience. Science is proving you're wrong most of the time; pseudoscience is knowing you're right even though you are in fact, a drooling idiot. Cross Madame Perlmina's palm with silver.
- Godless scum. Why I am not a theist. With extra blasphemy and satanic verses.