That Wacky Redhead
- Thread starter Brainbin
- Start date
Errr... thats been mentioned several times already.
At school in 1975 we were shown a film about the health risks of smoking. It concentrated on lung disease rather than cancer as the main risk and it did mention the addictive nature of smoking.
I think there's an enormous amount of romanticism born of ignorance. If you really had to live like even the early 20th Century, never mind the 15th, you would hate it. I want to give the greens a smack every time I hear "smaller is better". I don't see any of them moving to Ethiopia or Bangladesh(there's a word for that: hypocrite
That was one of the themes of Life on Mars. Even if you were taken back to a time within your own memory, it can still seem like a foreign country.
Which was exactly the argument Humphrey was making. What made it hilarious was, he was, straight-faced & entirely seriously, making an argument the rest of us thought was insane.
The thing is, it's easy to imagine that some government statistician has worked out the optimum tobacco duty to bring in the maximum revenue while minimising NHS and pension costs. I'm not saying that it's the case, but it's not inconceivable.
Which reminds me of something I'd love to see dealt with: Vulcan humor. I simply cannot believe Vulcans have none.
I agree. There are some hints of vulcan humour even in TOS. For example, at the end of Mirror, Mirror, Spock's description of Kirk and McKoy's counterparts as "brutal, unprincipled, uncivilized, treacherous; in every way splendid examples of 'Homo sapiens'".
Cheers,
Nigel.
Flubber
Banned
You needn't only imagine because it was done and continues to be done.
Insurance companies adjust their rates according to, among other things, whether the insured smokes or not, the insurance rates offered to companies depend on how man smokers are employed, and some companies won't even grant coverage to smokers.
If the actuaries have worked out the cost benefit analysis for private health insurers, you can bet your last Camel they've done the same for governments with UHC.
I think there's an enormous amount of romanticism born of ignorance. If you really had to live like even the early 20th Century, never mind the 15th, you would hate it. I want to give the greens a smack every time I hear "smaller is better". I don't see any of them moving to Ethiopia or Bangladesh
The people who tend to espouse such ideologies are usually not too keen on giving up their own technology, of course. And our own media tends to romanticize the past. Lack of indoor plumbing, poor medicine and dentistry, a very different take on personal hygiene, etc. are hard to comprehend when everyone is played by an attractive actor/actress. I've really never understood this, either, though.
I agree with all of that, in the main. I think, tho, our own view is easily distorted by our common knowledge. It's very, very easy to forget, frex, dumping PCP into rivers wasn't always known to be a bad idea, because, today, we've learned (the hard way...
This I did not know. Though I am sure the general population was not keen on accepting Nazi research easily. But by 1970 it was well known enough for advertising to be banned from the US airwaves (starting in January 1971). How crazy that must have seemed at the time, to a generation that grew up with so many major programs sponsored by tobacco companies as so many programs in the 1950s and even 1960s were.
So we feel smarter, & we are--but they weren't dumber, just lacking the knowledge we've gained since... (And, to beat a green horse, Malthus expected a population spike in his infamous 1798 essay. He was wrong. Despite 200yr of evidence he was wrong, the greens are still predicting it.
Malthus is popular when people lose faith in human progress. It's another one of those pendulum swings, humankind has the ingenuity to overcome such obstacles vs. there are certain fundamental barriers we cannot (or should not) overcome.
As a kid, meaning mostly pre-teen, I never had a bedtime later than 11, and The Tonight Show was on at 11:30 in the NYC area. I was impossible to get to bed and keep in bed, though, before 12, a rule which has probably held true most of my life. My sister benefited from my fighting over bed times, she started at 11 and quickly went to whenever. Grrrr! I liked David Letterman, as well, who was on at 12:30... Of course, all of this became moot when I got my own TV. Well, so long as I kept it quiet enough not to be found out, of course!
Why do I think Vulcans humor would typically involve very complex puns? They must be great fun at the annual Federation Roasts...
Think marijuana. And there is a racist element involved. If tobacco wasn't so widely used by middle-class whites before Koop, & any whites after, it would be illegal now. The arguments for the harms done by marijuana apply more to tobacco--but even the Canadian Supreme Court refuses to recognize the hypocrisy of it.
I suspect having a huge lobby flush with cash helps as well. Well, it did, at least, once upon a time... Less and less so these days.
I see this more as a generational thing.
I think there's an enormous amount of romanticism born of ignorance. If you really had to live like even the early 20th Century, never mind the 15th, you would hate it. I want to give the greens a smack every time I hear "smaller is better". I don't see any of them moving to Ethiopia or Bangladesh
I'll have to partly disagree here. There are too many fanatics on the issue who as always are their own cause's worst enemy. However there are serious concerns about the sustainability of our current life-style, especially since more and more people around the world seek to emulate it. You can have high tech sustainability. What you can't have and what is one of the big problems, is people being lazy and saying 'I won't change because I don't want to'. That's one of the reasons so many services, such as car traffic is so heavily subsidised,
I agree with all of that, in the main. I think, tho, our own view is easily distorted by our common knowledge. It's very, very easy to forget, frex, dumping PCP into rivers wasn't always known to be a bad idea, because, today, we've learned (the hard way...
Technically Malthus was right about the population spike and it occurred. What he was wrong about was how successful production of food and other resources was able to keep up with it for a while. Fortunately also what is probably the real solution to the problem was the cutting of the birth rate in many areas as wealth and security spread, along with human rights. Noticeably, with a few exceptions, there are too many areas where such changes aren't occurring, or at least not rapidly enough. It might well still end up very badly for most if not all the human population, the jury is still out on that.
Steve
Yep. Which does give me hope for saving the U.S. political system. If the public can overturn the stranglehold of the tobacco lobby, without firing a shot, maybe it's possible to get the bankers' fingers from around Congress' throat, too.e_wraith said:
It may be now. Go back to when marijuana was first made illegal, tho, there's a strong strain of "look out for the Mexicans" in it.e_wraith said:
Blacks, too. And MJ was never really the drug of choice for whites in this period, so restricting the drug for "them furriners" was OK. (Not unlike the different treatment of beer as opposed to hard liquor under Prohibition, actually). The rationale was very similar, too...tho in 1937, with the Mafia wars fresh in everyone's mind, why anyone thought another Prohibition was a good idea is beyond me.That was one of the things I liked best about it. (Also the contrast of "The Good Guys".NCW8 said:
) Old episodes of "Dragnet" can be fun sometimes, too. I'll never forget the '53 movie. Friday's testifying before some kind of commission, advocating wiretapping everybody. The commissioners aren't shocked, but one remarks, "You'd have people plotting murder on every streetcorner." To which Friday deadpans, "That's okay. There'd be a cop on it." (Needless to say, this was played dead straight.)I'd be surprised if they hadn't, actually. How do you calculate your costs & allocate resources, otherwise? It's widely known the U.S. & Canadian health care systems spend at least 25% (50%?NCW8 said:
) of their total budgets on people in the last 6mo of life. And more on top of that on the last 2yr, including, frex, hip replacement surgery in 85yr olds. I know it sounds cold, but--seriously?(BTW, I also think sending AIDS drugs to Africa is insane.
You've got the U.S. & Europe actively trying to prevent African countries from getting out of subsistence farming & into anything like industrialization, which means they can't raise their standard of living & reduce the birthrate. Meanwhile, you've got NGOs actively providing sophisticated medicine & capping the death rate. This is exactly the kind of clusterfuck Malthus warned us about... And the results have been exactly what he predicted: war, plague, & famine...plus one he couldn't have imagined: genocide. Welcome to the green paradise.)I have a real problem with the greens letting the dogma get in the way of the facts. And people are buying it.e_wraith said:
Technology is evil...except when it does what the greens want. Humanity is unnatural because we make weapons & fight wars...except chimps & apes do, too. Acquisitiveness is bad, & is a product of the last century...except we've been accumulating stuff since we invented agriculture. That's why we have armies & wars, actually: some people have always been better at stealing other people's stuff.The most poisonous is the "only one earth" & "human activity must be confined to the biosphere". I want to hear somebody tell me what physical law prevents us from leaving. Or to explain what part of the biosphere Apollo 11 landed in.
What they're not telling anybody, what they may not even understand, is, "sustainable" really means "steady state". Steady state societies, by their nature, must be highly regimented, or they fall apart: once you allow people to question the underlying assumptions... So we should give up our freedoms in the name of saving the planet? In the name of putting green revolutionaries in charge? Revolutionaries who, just like all the others I can name (from Washington to Lenin to Castro), want to keep what they've got & take from somebody else...I'll say one last thing & end my rant.
I want to get industry, & people, off the planet & into orbit, & turn Earth into a park. If the greens really want to save the planet from human destructiveness, they ought to be helping get private space flight going, instead of trying to kill it off. It will also give us more freedom than we've ever had before.As I recall, this came out before the taint was on things German. Evidently, tho, even then the tobacco lobby managed to get it buried.e_wraith said:
I guess I've always been a technophile. Plus, humanity has a long history of fixing problems with better tools. (Just look at your thumbs if you doubt that.e_wraith said:
)e_wraith said:
My bedtime was 9 PM for the longest time... Then I discovered Carson & started resisting it. I never did push past 11 (except in summer, when it didn't matter), mostly because I only watched the monolog & the occasional bit (Carnac, Art Fleming, very rarely Floyd R.), & wasn't very interested in most of the guests. I'll never forget Sheena Easton's first time, tho. She must have gone 10min before I heard the first word she said.
All I could hear was that delicious Irish accent. I'd have given her anything she wanted.I wouldn't call that humor as much as a jab at McCoy, the premier humanist. I picture Spock more like Francisco in "Alien Nation": "That's all right, Michael. You're only human."NCW8 said:
(And the show actually played the "head excrement" line straight...)Puns, maybe. Contradictions & irony, certainly. "Aliens from the 10th dimension? Don't be silly, there's only life in the first 7."e_wraith said:
Astonishingly esoteric logic puzzles. Whole blackboards full of equations, with one mistaken addition or subtraction symbol, which completely invalidates the proposition. I'm convinced, the more subtle they are, the more careful observation it takes to spot it, the funnier it would be. (I don't see Vulcans doing the "embarrass the dumb guy", tho: if anything, I can see the bit having a prof at a blackboard with a mistake going through half a lecture before somebody goes & corrects the wrong symbol, & the prof saying, "I was wondering how long it would take someone to do that.")For some reason, I imagine a proof angels really can dance on the head of a pin, with a scrupulous calculation of just how many can, depending on the type of pin.
(I suspect this only arises after contact with Earth--which would be a joke all by itself: no Vulcan would have imagined doing it before. I can imagine a whole subgenre of Vulcan humor, "the human joke", showing the various bad influences we've had on them, or the odd things we do--at a minimum, the kinds of questions they've had to ask that never crossed their minds before. {Tonight, on the "Darvik Samok Show", "Stupid Human Tricks".})(BTW, I also think sending AIDS drugs to Africa is insane.
I find it hard to believe that you're not playing DA here, at best. Given how much damage both AIDS and the disruption it causes has done to economic growth in Africa.
The problem as you point out, is the attitude of the more developed parts of the world which has hindered economic development in Africa. Not that charities are seeking to minimise human suffering and deaths. To not do so would be both morally wrong and stupidly short-sighted. Both because the one requirement for cutting birth rates is to have security that children will live into adulthood and because to deliberately neglect so many people would cause understandable resentment, as well as moral damage inside the west itself.
Actually from what I remember hearing it was worse than that. The research was done under the Nazis so the tobacco companies used that fact to seek to discredit the findings.
I'll never forget Sheena Easton's first time, tho. She must have gone 10min before I heard the first word she said.
You do realise she was Scottish?
Steve
Before I make any in-depth responses (which will be done at a later time), I have one special announcement, and then a special request, in that order:
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For those of you who have an interest in space travel and exploration, I give my highest possible recommendation to Eyes Turned Skywards, a timeline by e of pi and truth is life. It has a POD in the exact same era as That Wacky Redhead, and covers the breakthroughs and exploits of NASA, JPL, ESA, JAXA, and CSA in great detail. Today marked the triumphant return of the timeline with Part II, after a hiatus of several months, with a solid backlog of weekly updates planned for the foreseeable future. The two authors have contributed to this timeline, most notably in the "Into the Final Frontier" update, and in return I have provided a guest post discussing popular culture in their timeline, which can be found right here; an additional guest post has already been written and is in the aforementioned pipeline. The good readers of that thread are just as enthusiastic and gregarious as those of my own, so I suggest the directory of updates for the hurried reader who might want to catch up on Part I. If you're already done the archival reading in advance, then I would suggest starting with the first update for Part II. More will follow every Tuesday, so now is the best time to start reading!
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Also, I'm noticing a lively discussion taking place about increasingly sensitive topics. Although I appreciate the civility and discretion that are currently being employed in your arguments, I must request that you reconsider whether this thread is the ideal venue for these topics. Remember that there is a very high-traffic forum on this site which is entirely dedicated to topical discussion. This timeline is intended, as much as possible, to gloss over or ignore highly debatable issues. Please bear that in mind.
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Thank you for your attention! I hope to have the next update ready in the next couple of days. The number-crunching is all finished!
---
For those of you who have an interest in space travel and exploration, I give my highest possible recommendation to Eyes Turned Skywards, a timeline by e of pi and truth is life. It has a POD in the exact same era as That Wacky Redhead, and covers the breakthroughs and exploits of NASA, JPL, ESA, JAXA, and CSA in great detail. Today marked the triumphant return of the timeline with Part II, after a hiatus of several months, with a solid backlog of weekly updates planned for the foreseeable future. The two authors have contributed to this timeline, most notably in the "Into the Final Frontier" update, and in return I have provided a guest post discussing popular culture in their timeline, which can be found right here; an additional guest post has already been written and is in the aforementioned pipeline. The good readers of that thread are just as enthusiastic and gregarious as those of my own, so I suggest the directory of updates for the hurried reader who might want to catch up on Part I. If you're already done the archival reading in advance, then I would suggest starting with the first update for Part II. More will follow every Tuesday, so now is the best time to start reading!
---
Also, I'm noticing a lively discussion taking place about increasingly sensitive topics. Although I appreciate the civility and discretion that are currently being employed in your arguments, I must request that you reconsider whether this thread is the ideal venue for these topics. Remember that there is a very high-traffic forum on this site which is entirely dedicated to topical discussion. This timeline is intended, as much as possible, to gloss over or ignore highly debatable issues. Please bear that in mind.
---
Thank you for your attention! I hope to have the next update ready in the next couple of days. The number-crunching is all finished!
Falkenburg
Monthly Donor
Seeing as I've enjoyed your previous recommendation ("Now Blooms The Tudor Rose") so much, I think I'm obliged to give that one a go.
Also, I'm noticing a lively discussion taking place about increasingly sensitive topics. ~SNIP~
FWIW, it seems to me that your Readership is a self-selecting group that enables such conversations to be conducted with the courtesy and dare I say it, maturity, displayed to date.
Most of your Readers have been along for the ride for a while now and (IMHO) have a 'feel' for those they find themselves interacting with.
That tends to create an atmosphere where tangential discussions develop naturally.
Granted there may be other places on this site where such Topics are specifically encouraged but all too often those conversations degenerate into snarkiness.
Or, worse still, one cannot 'hear' the interesting voices over the babbling hordes.
Still, I'm sure none of your Readers would wish to make you feel uncomfortable.
At least, that's my sense of things from what I've seen.
Falkenburg
Orville_third
Banned
Today while at Grandma's, she was watching Mytv (a digital tv "network" devoted to showing old TV). They aired a brief commercial segment honoring him, and showing clips from "Five Characters in Search of an Exit," a Twilight Zone episode he appeared in.
I'll never forget Sheena Easton's first time, tho. She must have gone 10min before I heard the first word she said.
Yes, she's very good at impressions. You should hear her Scottish accent, it's even better
.For some reason, I imagine a proof angels really can dance on the head of a pin, with a scrupulous calculation of just how many can, depending on the type of pin.
Q: How many Humans does it take to program a computer ?
A: Three - one to type on the keyboard and two to prevent Kirk from talking to it.
Cheers,
Nigel.
NCW8 said:Yes, she's very good at impressions. You should hear her Scottish accent, it's even better
stevep said:You do realise she was Scottish?
Irish or Scottish, it's been 20yr. What do you want? (And it was her voice, not her nationality, I was interested in anyhow.)(Besides being much less attractive {och!
}, her American accent is unpersuasive. She gets it wrong, &, like Emma Samms & every other Brit I've ever heard, except Hugh Laurie, makes the same mistake: a slight "flattening" of her "a"s. So Chicago comes out "shi ca go" instead of "shi cah go".)That would not surprise me even a tiny bit.stevep said:Actually from what I remember hearing it was worse than that. The research was done under the Nazis so the tobacco companies used that fact to seek to discredit the findings.
(I seem to recall hearing that, too.)Och, mon, how quaint.NCW8 said:
(Ever read the Black Tiger novels? That Scots dialect rendering practically required a glossary for translation.)I'm not just being provocative. I really do think the screwing around is making things worse. I get it. The NGOs are trying to be compassionate. Except what they're doing is only making the problem worse, & that's not compassionate.stevep said:
My underlying concern is, the combination of low economic development & high birth rate is making improvement impossible. So long as there are limits on industrialization, & so limits on increases in standards of living, providing modern medicine is a very bad idea. Leave of the morality: is it moral to condemn the population to poverty, famine, & war? I don't think so.
I take the view rising standards of living will do the job. They allow improvements in sanitation & heath care, which bring the death rate down without the need for outside intervention by NGOs. (Or, at least, they'll dramatically reduce the need for it: ramp it down as standards rise.) That's been the historical experience everywhere it's been tried.
Make no mistake, the death rate will drop as standards to up, & the birth rate will drop in lockstep about a generation later. That's why Malthus got it wrong: it was happening as he wrote, & he overlooked the demographic connections. When he wrote, the birthrate was still at the high it had been for generations; it dropped by around 1850, & has been dropping steadily, in every "first world" country except, IIRC, Italy & Ireland, ever since.
Also, cold as it sounds, a massive population dieoff would actually be beneficial,
just as it was after the Black Death: the survivors would command greater economic leverage & control greater fractions of the economic pie. I know, the chance of anybody actually enacting policy advocating a mass dieoff is zero. What governments & NGOs need to realize is, this is the only real option if they don't quit screwing things up. And once the greens get involved, with the "only one earth", "smaller is better"...Africa is finished. (Never mind Africa is living proof lower standards of living actually lead to more environmental destruction, not less.)I'll happily desist. Anybody wants to pick it up, feel free to PM me. Apologies for the highjacking...Brainbin said:
(If you'd like, I'll delete most of the above & PM it to anybody who wants to continue.)Most assuredly. I actually didn't anticipate getting the detailed responses I've gotten.Falkenburg said:
Och, mon, how quaint.
There's also the movie Gregory's Girl, that had to be redubbed before being distributed in the USA
Cheers,
Nigel.
LOL. Then again, TV networks have been putting up stupid subtitles for a few years now for anybody who doesn't have a "mainstream" accent...
Can you say "homogenization"?PS to everybody: stop posting so much! The alerts are turning up in my junk mail folder.
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LOL. Then again, TV networks have been putting up stupid subtitles for a few years now for anybody who doesn't have a "mainstream" accent...
This drives me crazy! For anyone with a slight accent, lately in the US, they have been throwing up subtitles. It doesn't even have to be a foreign person or someone who does not speak English as their primary language, it can be an American that the editor or whomever has decided speaks too differently from... Er, whomever the subtitle guy thinks they are trying to reach, I guess. Sometimes it is totally inexplicable as to why they are subtitling a person. It can even be that the person is taking more care to enunciate their words properly and is speaking more clearly than a person normally does (but in the effort sounds strange, thus meriting subtitles?) Perhaps it is a roundabout way to get people to read more? I don't know if this is just a US thing, but I do hope it is a temporary fad in the TV world.
But sometimes it is really needed, especially if the dialect is very hard to understand.
I've seen it on German tv when the person speaking is Swiss - even when the Swiss person is speaking High-German rather than Swiss dialect.
Cheers,
Nigel.
Because even a Swiss speaking High German is hard to understand for a German. And remember that Switzerland has four main languages (German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic).