Personal Crap

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Meaford, ON, Canada
A big lover of all types of media, from Movies to Video Games, Books to Music, Television to Stage.

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Okay, here's the deal: Blogger has been having problems with their counters as of late, specifically with those blogs marked as having adult content. Now, this particular blog was marked as adult content since it is written as a train of thought, including all the rotten language that flows through my head constantly :) As a result, I marked it adult for that, not for having pornographic photos all over the place. So, simply put, be aware that there is language on this blogsite, and if you are offended don't bother complaining because I wrote this so that you'd know it before reading, and it is your fault if you don't believe me and decide to possibly get offended anyway. If language of a vulgar nature might make you upset, go read something by Disney.

1/18/11

Global Pussification

You know, there should be a law that simply states anyone who doesn't have to work so early in the morning must be kept asleep by Morpheus until a reasonable hour, at least until the sun is coming up or something.  This 'getting woken up by horrible dreams and rotten mattress conditions at 4:30am' bullshit simply has to stop.  Seriously.

Bygones.  So I went back and re-read my first BGJ blog entry just now, because I was at the dentist yesterday and the receptionist was chatting with my wife and I about cleanliness.  She sounds like she is coming down with a cold, and she got on the topic of always washing her hands and using those damn hand sanitizers that you now see all over the GTA as a result of the SARS scare we had a few years back.  This is one of those things that sets me off, so you Good Readers get to hear my wrath.  Thou hast been forewarned.

First off, where the fuck are all these wonderful new diseases coming from?  I have an opinion, but think about it for a minute: For readers over the age of thirty, think back to when you were a child.  Now, how often did you hear about kids collapsing due to a peanut-related allergy?  Think hard now, think really hard.  I know I never heard of it.  Sure, there was a kid in one of my years of education that couldn't eat peanut butter, but there was no peanut-free notifications all over random food packaging, there just wasn't.  How many hepatitis B commercials did you see on television when you were a kid?  Are you certain they were there, and maybe only your parents noticed them?  Fuck no, they weren't there, they weren't anywhere!

I have been seeing commercials recently, always featuring young women saying they couldn't be at risk from some disease due to their age, or having only one partner, etc..  The disease they're talking about is so new to my knowledge base that I can't even remember what the hell it is called.  What I'd like to know is, if this is becoming an epidemic so seriously that it warrants a commercial on television urging women to get tested, why the hell is it that we are just hearing about it now?  I'm not the only one who is asking this question; Scott, Andi, people I've talked to when I actually do escape the confines of my house, all of us are wondering when this wonderful new threat to our planet's women came from, and why it is so serious right off the bat.

Well, I happen to believe that I may have an answer:  Global Pussification.  Not a real term, you say?  Not even a real word?  No, it isn't, but maybe I just created my own new term in response to all the new threats we keep seeming to stumble over.  See, I think I know the reason these new diseases are coming to light all of a sudden, and it is our own fault as a society.  SARS scared the shit out of a lot of people, and so people went apeshit crazy trying to do the one thing doctors kept spouting off about at the time: Wash your hands, avoid the disease.  Now, since then, there have been studies that have shown that hand sanitizers don't effectively thwart a cold or the flu, and are good mainly for stopping a gastrointestinal disease from taking hold.  This means that most people are using the stuff for no good reason, and are thinking that they are protecting themselves when they actually aren't doing a damn thing to fend off the bugs they have been using the stuff for because of uninformed doctors repeating what someone else said, just to make sure they are still in the loop.

Don't think that happens?  Look at the idiots who don't get their kids vaccinated because a fake British study (yes, fake, it has been disparaged by many scientists, doctors, and the study itself has been proven false) has told them that vaccines cause autism.  Jenny freaking McCarthy has become a champion to people who don't bother to do any research beyond reading what 'true stories' are written on the internet, when the real information is right there to be easily found.  Don't believe me about the easy?  Here come the links:  Time Magazine, 2002;  National Academies Press free online book, 2004;  Los Angeles Times article about three cases thrown out of court, 2010.  I had to do exactly one search one Bing and one on Wikepedia (the Wiki link is directly to the article) to find all of these pages referenced by just one article.  That's how hard it is to find proof, not stories from some random guy in Nowhere, Nebraska, who knows a guy that knows a guy, actual proof that this is bullshit.  Yet parents are still fighting the knowledge that an ex-Playboy Bunny couldn't be more wrong about her cause, verifiable proof found here.

What this all boils down to is that parents are more willing to argue the merits of a proven fake study than to actually give a shit about their child's well-being, and yet they are doing everything else possible to protect themselves from a world that isn't out to get them.  Let me go back to the hand sanitizer thing.  People are using this stuff constantly, and fending off quite a variety of virus-causing bacteria (just not the ones they think they are fending off), but doctors are now aware of what I thought would be an obvious truth:  The human body has an immune system, and it is trained to eliminate viruses.  Like an army, that immune system needs to fight off stuff in order to get good at it.  If the immune system doesn't fight anything, just like an army, it gets fat and lazy...wait a second...it gets unused to doing its job, and when a real threat comes along, one that kicks down the walls of a puny hand sanitizer, suddenly the immune system is completely outmatched and the Nazis take over France...just a moment...and the body falls to a disease it might have been able to protect against if it had ever had the opportunity to get stronger in the resistance department.  Just like France during WWII, the body's defence system is like the Maginot Line - if it had been finished (if the body would learn to protect itself properly) the Germans would never have been able to sweep through Belgium unimpeded (the body would not die due to whooping cough or measles, both of which are easily avoided by taking the exact same vaccine that dear Jenny says causes autism). 

All this means is that the worries of the world are causing more problems in the world.  Global Pussification.  We get wimpier, and the bullies, which haven't really changed, get harder to take down.  Again, think WWII.  America was all about isolationism, and it took a major attack to wake them up to defend themselves and help save the free world.  How many adults and children have to die before the general populace wakes up and realizes that protecting our children and ourselves to the extreme extent we are doing so is going to ultimately lead to a quick downfall?

1 comment:

  1. Global Pussification - love the term! I think it should make the dictionary!
    I totally agree with you. I don't get the flu vaccine and didn't panic and take the kids for the H1N1 vaccine. It's the flu people! You don't panic over the flu just because a couple of people died from it (that had pre-existing conditions making them more susceptible to succumbing to it) anymore than you stop driving because people get killed in car accidents - which is much more likely to happen by the way!

    Global pussification could also be a term used to describe what parents are doing to their kids. You can't even play pin the tail on the donkey at a kid's birthday party anymore unless everyone get's a prize for doing "a good job" for crying out loud. And that won't lead to a grown up temper tantrum when they don't get the promotion at work will it. Life isn't fair - and yes - the best do win, you do have to try hard, - deal with it. Sooner than later I say. Don't stop reading the "3 little pigs" because the big bad wolf is too scary - read it and let them learn the lesson that "hard work pays off". Parents who think that protecting their kids from every conceivable hurt in life is a good thing, are actually achieving the opposit result in the long run! Life lessons used to be learned at home, in school and on the playground. It prepared you for the big world where everyone doesn't think you're wonderful and want to be your friend. I meet moms all the time who won't let their boys play fight at the playground because someone could get hurt. School's have banned snowball throwing because "someone could lose an eye". School boards have banned prizes for top fundraising earners - instead opting for a small token for each participant so that noone feels left out. The list goes on and on. We are the most read parental generation and we are actually screwing up our kids. We are pussifying them and raising adults with such a sense of entitlement that they can't see past the end of their own noses, and who cannot in any way, shape or form deal with the reality that life dishes out at them.
    There - I've ranted.
    Thoughts?

    ReplyDelete