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Crowds are stupid. People panic over every "end of the world" theory they read about on the Internet, forward each other emails claiming Barack Obama is building concentration camps and they repeat urban legends without taking five seconds to verify them on Snopes.
But everybody can get taken in sometimes. Just look at these panics that seemed to draw in lots of well-educated types right along with the rubes. Like... #5.
Swine Flu
Cough. Within 30 seconds, someone in your office will ask if you have Swine Flu. If you say you do, you will be quarantined by a crowd bearing pitchforks and torches.
That scene is repeating itself all over the globe, to varying degrees. In Japan, they're selling a suit that makers claim can repel the H1N1 virus. In the Middle East, Iranian officials have banned their devout from going on Pilgrimage to Muslim holy sites, including Mecca, to avoid contamination. Saudi Arabia is requiring that pilgrims coming to Mecca provide proof of vaccination. For the very few of our readers who aren't devout Muslims, that's like canceling Christmas and making Aunt Ethel stand out in the snow until she shows you her small pox scar. Why It Sounds Rational: It's Swine Flu! Didn't the news say that this shit had the potential to kill like 100-million people?
And look at the response! The U.S. is preparing to vaccinate half the freaking population in under a year. That's never even been attempted before. Not even with Polio. If you don't speak the language of local and cable news, allow us to translate: THIS IS AN EMERGENCY, PEOPLE! Get in your Swine Flu bunkers before it's too late! Why It's Not: The current pandemic of Swine Flu has claimed less than 3,000 lives. Well... that's still pretty bad, right? After all, that's like a flu-caused 9/11. Then again, the ordinary flu, that gives us the sniffles every year? That one kills several hundred thousand people around the world. The reason for the early panic is that they believed this virus was a descendant of the 1918 Spanish Flu that wiped out a jaw-dropping 50-million people. And while it was obviously not as deadly, the fear was that it would eventually mutate into something like its apocalyptic ancestor. Also, it's got a scary name.
It hasn't lived up to it. Even the World Health Organization is describing this as a "moderate" outbreak. Their advice? Same as with the regular flu. Babies and old people should get vaccinated. The rest of your should wash your hands and stay away from sick people. The World Health Organization would also like to remind everyone that it's safe to go back to eating your pork rinds, as there is no proof that pork causes Swine Flu and you cannot believe everything you read on fucking Twitter. #4.
Killer Asteroids
Giant killer asteroids aren't just something Michael Bay dreamed up so he'd have an excuse to flatten Paris on the big screen. Stephen Hawking just made headlines around the Web by proclaiming that the biggest reason intelligent life doesn't develop on planets is because they get wiped out by huge fucking space rocks before they have the chance.
Experts have conferences on how to orchestrate a "planetary defense" against such threats and magazines like Popular Science do articles every year on the asteroid menace. Holy shit! Why It Sounds Rational: It's true that asteroids and comets are everywhere. Scientists guesstimate that somewhere between 18,000 to 84,000 meteorites bigger than 10-grams hit Earth every year. Our planet's crust is pock marked with proof that meteorites have slammed into Earth time and time again. Why It's Not: We're not disagreeing with Mr. Hawking here. It's that people tend to take what experts like him say and extrapolate it into, "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AT ANY MOMENT" because that makes such a better headline. For instance, the story linked above got sent around the Internet with the headline, "Stephen Hawking: Asteroid Impacts are the Biggest Threat." As if he was saying we should be more worried about asteroids than global warming or curing cancer.
He wasn't. He was saying that it takes millions of years for life to evolve and if you wait millions of years, eventually a big-ass asteroid will hit. To be ranked as a planet killer, an asteroid has to be pegged as a 10 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. Currently, scientists can only find one asteroid near Earth that ranks even a one on that scale, never mind a 10. Everything else is a zero. So how dangerous is that level one asteroid? It has about a one in 3,000 chance of hitting the Earth 40 or 50 years from now, and it's one-hundredth the size of the one they think killed the dinosaurs.
Again, we're not saying it can't possibly happen. It's that the odds are overwhelming that you will die of something else long before it does. #3.
Cloning
Let's face it: There is not a single movie in the history of science fiction where cloning has turned out well. It's no surprise that when scientists in the 90s managed to clone a sheep named Dolly, the news media lost their shit.
Even the most enlightened, forward-thinking guy you know will hesitate to eat a steak that he's been told was cloned, and that guy will react even worse if his parents tell him they're going to clone him a little brother.
In fact, in 2008, the European Union called for a ban of all cloning for commercial purposes, meaning that no cloned critter bits could be brought into the European market and would prohibit everything from T-bone steaks to leather fetish gear being made from clones. Why It Sounds Rational: There just seems like so, so many ways this could go wrong. Science takes a few cells, bakes them in their magic E-Z Bake Ovens and produces an animal that was not conceived in any natural way. Then along come the venture capitalists, pie-eyed with dreams of cloning pets at exorbitant prices and filling private zoos with extinct species. The next thing we know we're all living in Jurassic Park without a dinosaur expert in sight.
Why It's Not: First, what scientists are trying desperately to do is clone cells, as there are all sorts of medical breakthroughs that can happen if we learn how to grow certain kinds of cells at will. But cloning whole creatures is also in the cards, and fears about that seem to break down like this: "Imagine a future of identical, soulless clones! All respect for human life would be ruined!"
They're not talking about building a machine that spits out fully-grown human photocopies. They're talking about cloning embryos and letting them grow up normally. You can still think they're unnatural and weird, in the sense that you are also free to think identical twins are unnatural and weird. But if you treat them as less than human, you're the dick in that situation. "The cloning process will produce horrific deformed cloned babies!" The manufacture of grotesque flipper-babies for our amusement is probably already illegal where you live and if it's not, it soon will be. No one is in favor of that.
"It's playing God! And who can predict the effect such tinkering would have on the ecosystem?" Actually, we've been "cloning" living things for thousands of years. We're talking about plants here, and farming depends on it. The result has been better plants that produce more food for everyone, without a single sentient man-eating plant to be found (though we probably tried). It should also be noted that this is one of those technologies people assume is way further along than it actually is. Possibly because some publicity-seeking mad scientist comes along every few years and makes an outrageous claim about cloning humans or something else equally sure to get him headlines. Said scientist always proceeds to offer zero evidence, and then quietly slips back into obscurity, never to be heard from again.
Real scientists have managed to clone about a dozen species... almost all of which immediately die. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? Professor Wilmut, the scientist behind that project, has abandoned cloning as a technique. A team in South Korea that had claimed massive breakthroughs in the field turned out to be frauds. What we're saying is we're much closer to a robot dinosaur rampage than a cloned dinosaur rampage, and urge scientists to put their efforts there instead. |
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@amner, the "scientific community" to which you refer is in fact nothing but a purely political organization (the IPCC) dressed up in scientific trappings in order to lend legitimacy to the conclusions it was determined to reach regardless of the facts. The "established scientific fact" of global warming is such a blatant hoax that its cultish believers have since chosen to rename it "climate change" so that they can pretend we have reason to panic about the climate no matter which way the temperatures go; the reason for this being that the latest research shows the globe is in fact COOLING, not getting hotter. It has been cooling since 1998. Meanwhile, here's one site collecting all the REAL scientific research, which demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that all fears of global warming are indeed irrational: http://www.c3headlines.com/ Even leaving aside the overwhelming evidence against man-made global warming, of course, this latest bit of scare-mongering comes to us from some of the very same people who gave us the great global cooling hoax of the 1970s, which likewise had the backing of much of the so-called "scientific community" and was supposedly going to kill us all. The track record of your so-called "scientific community" for divining the future, in short, sucks like an Electrolux. The facts are against you. In a few years, the green charlatans will probably go back to predicting that another ice age is imminent, and they'll be just as wrong then as they are now and always have been.
I've had swine flu. It's not that f**king bad. I don't see how people could even get that worked up about it. It's the flu. The flu kills lots of people each year. Unless the swine flu started killing thousands of people immediately or was even any worse than the regular flu, then it's not that big a deal. Right? Right?
Anyone afraid that a category A virus is being injected into rich women's faces?
I am really hating the swine flu mismash of media coverage. My mother-in-law has been buying into crap like that since she started reading a book on how apple vinegar flushes can cure herpes (It Really Works!™ The FDA Is Lying To You! Read These Customer Reviews!) and even though she doesn't have herpes, this book also details how to cure diabetes (using the same variable method of flushing one's system with improbably cure-laden fluids) which she has been told BY A DOCTOR she MIGHT POSSIBLY HAVE and should CONSIDER TAKING MEDICATIONS TO PREVENT if she doesn't. So when she says that the people at her food-service workplace offered vaccinations for H1N1, she says she REFUSED. She refused a H1N1 virus vaccination based on the fact that it might contain horrible ingredients that will make her sicker in the long run. Nevermind that most vaccinations are loaded with chicken egg proteins, other inert harmless fluids and dead viruses for your body to run practice ass-whuppings on. As far as the swine flu goes, I get chronic bronchitis every year that hits far worse than the symptoms of this p***y zombie cold.
I had swine flu. I rested the weekend, missed one day of school, and had no problem. Besides a wicked sore throat and a bit of muscle soreness, which could have easily been from my wheightlifting, it was no different than any other type of flu.
@StormyMcCloud Rego is aussie for registration. And what sucks is that you have to register just to comment.
Wired for consciousness subordination to materialism “Doubting Thomas” was NOT the idiosyncratic iconoclast. He was the DNA, hard-wired, expression of humanity. To keep people provincially conscious within the material and tangible, our DNA has been structured so that we are metaphysically adverse as a mass. Those of us who made it to the probability margins of low adverse metaphysic wiring have been the pollenators, which the “manipulators could tolerate our marginal numbers. As long as they had the masses generating the energy expressions and tangible manisfestations for their “harvesting” then things are left alone. When “free thinkers” and “radicals” come alon, having the masses hard-wired to being metaphysically adversed act as a inbred control mechanism within humanity on those who’d otherwise radically mutate cultural evolution by their provoative impact. Control. Moderation. Repression. Twitter.com/JacobinTrotsky
I'm, like, this close to getting vaccinated against flu after the whole swine flu thing. I'm diabetic, which means I am at risk even though I'm not old or a baby or on dialysis or whatever. Given how much I normally laugh in the face of fearmongering, I think that means I'm scared of that one. So watch it, or I'll turn it into a powder and put it in an envelope and send it to you. Then we'll see.
i got a boner
@mahawk, susan H probably didnt put "global warming" on the list because the "rational people" that are afraid of it constitutes the vast majority of the scientific community. saying its "irational" would kind of make her sound like an total moron for railing against established scientific fact. say, isnt that what you were doing? "there is really no consensus on what should or shouldn't be going on with the planet along with a myriad of variables confusing the mix" yeah but the facts remain, its getting hotter, this is bad.
So it only takes a few minutes for a list-based comedy website to settle the score on the most contentious issues of our time? Who knew. /sarcasm.
@ d3m0n1c: Honestly?!?! Get the f**k over it.... LMAO
Thank you for posting this! Especially the first irrational fear. XD My god, why are people so worried over swine flu? 3,000 lives. Gasp! Compared to the 7.2 BILLION people making up the total world population, that's nothing. People forget that the real flu killed many more people.
Irrational fears??? This is my biggest irrational fear. I look down and I see this in the morning: http://bit.ly/9A3vh
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I really really really really think Global Warming should have been on the list. From what I've read it seems that people freaking out and wanting to drastically change our energy policies have a pretty tenuous grasp on the whole concept. That is, there is really no consensus on what should or shouldn't be going on with the planet along with a myriad of variables confusing the mix: from the fact that we recently came out of an ice age, to the lack of a standardized method for interpreting all this data that is being gathered, to the lack of a standardization with regards to how to even collect this data. I could spend 20 paragraphs explaining the science behind it along with equations and jargon which probably wouldn't mean s**t to anyone, no offense, or you can check out JunkScience.com along with NASA's Goddard Institute Fact Sheet to corroborate it. Or I guess you could also just ignore this and go back to burning straw dogs. What's up next for the comment section? Conservatives are war mongerers who want to control people? Liberals are social-engineering-mongerers who want to control people? Ron Paul would have stopped all the mongering by shooting rainbows and anti-federalist leglation out his ass? Hmmm???? Meet tall women now?
@ ondona flash You might be right (to a degree) about the risk of lawsuits in north america. But what about overseas? your telling me that legislation is gonna be harsh enough to prevent use of completely unsafe technologies in places like inda? Or africa? No the big western tecnique of mono-cultured, GM foods have done massive damdge to tohe crop production of both those places in the long run. Thats why they are saying now the best thing we can do for africa, is to leave it alone. And im not so worried about virus production, as pharmaceutical Companies are indeed highly accountable, but seed companies, and the big food chains, they have much less pressure on them not to f**k up. After all, there will always be more land right? Nobody dies as a DIRECT result, and it doesnt make the headlines. btw, i think the ame of that company was monistat? or something like that. Damn I knew i should have checked that s**t when i got home.
Kudos for using a Goosebumps illustration.
Another thing about bioweapons: only two specimens of smallpox exist, one in Russia and the other in the U.S.
hey ondonaflash, if new vaccines and cures take so long to get on the market, how come we got a 2 month old swine flu vaccine for a 9 month old disease?
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