Stupid Idea Dept.

Story.

Retail Sophistry

 

Link: The (Stoopid) Case For Evil


The author of the piece, witty or insightful on any number of issues at times, is entirely right: one should rationally choose to be evil.

Provided one accepts two tiny but disastrously stupid premises:
1. That you'll get away with it here and now.
2. That here and now is all there is, infallibly, and human existence ends at death.

Because if, and only if, those are both infallibly certain, being evil is a no-brainer.

BUT.
Maybe - just maybe - life isn't like that, neither here, nor hereafter.
Maybe, by not being the World's Greatest Asshole, you'll avoid untold numbers of fat lips and black eyes.
Maybe, by not f**king someone else's cheating wife, you won't get blown in two by a pissed off husband with a shotgun. Even if you pass up the pussy someone else will get.
And hey, maybe she has gonosyphiherpaloids, because she's already f***ed twenty other guys, and by passing on the offering, your dick doesn't fall off.
Maybe by not f**king over everyone you can, you won't get tied to a cinder block and dropped in a lake, or have your house set on fire by a mob, or get dragged off to prison forever for breaking every law writ by God and man.
Just for starters.

Secondly, let's bear well in mind that raw capitalism is just as fallaciously stupid as raw communism: both assume that material wealth and well-being on earth is all that matters in life.
As expressed in "He who dies with the most toys, wins  dies. (There, FIFY.)

So if such materialism were true, why are so many rich people so neurotically unhappy?
Why are so many people of lower to middling wealth vastly more satisfied with their lives?
Are you really stupid if you're the latter?
Are you smart if you choose a lifetime of attempted wealth, with the associated level of misery?
And how does any system of economics value a horde of intangibles: doing something worthwhile, helping others, raising your children safe, free, and better off than you, or hundreds of other things which are beyond any  valuation in economic terms?
We have a name for people who don't feel any of those pulls of intangible virtue: sociopath.

And speaking of sociopaths, if man and life here and now is the only thing there is, how can anyone stand in judgment of anyone, e.g., Charles Manson? How can anyone who thinks evil is rational call anyone evil or wrong, except from self-serving tautology?
The nihilism of such an outlook ends, as always, on the rocks of reality.

And lastly, who can tell you - authoritatively - that this life is all there's ever going to be, and it ends at your death?
(Except, of course, someone choosing evil "rationally".)
Who's ever been there and come back to tell us convincingly that there's nothing there?

What of Pascal's Wager:
If God doesn't exist, and I don't serve him, I lose nothing.
If God doesn't exist, and I do serve him, I lose little.
If God does exist, and I don't serve him I lose everything.
If God does exist, and I do serve him, I gain everything.
?
The rational bet is not to choose evil, but rather the opposite.

The very existence of evil argues for a deity.
Everyone knows what is evil, particularly when it is done to them, with or without any teaching of same. Even a dog - lacking any moral instruction whatsoever - knows instinctively the difference between someone accidentally stepping on its tail, and being maliciously kicked.
Everyone understands a standard of good exists. And they all know they don't meet it (however much one may attempt to rationalize that reality).

And only taking that rationalization beyond sanity could allow someone to argue the existence of both good and evil, and suggest with the slightest whit of seriousness to aspire to the latter.

It's sheer madness and idiocy.
The sophistry referenced in the link is philosophy for the mentally and morally retarded.

The prior practitioners are to be found in cemeteries and prisons throughout the land, or the local skid row: go, please, and ask of them what riches their lifestyle and choices have provided them.

There is far more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the referenced petty silly philosophy.

Quackery

Ars Technica link: Like science, but stupider: The XSTAT30.

It’s a wonder product that can almost instantaneously stop bleeding from gunshot wounds. It does not heal the wound, but it plugs it temporarily to avoid significant blood loss until the wound is treated. The device looks like a syringe full of tablet-sized sponges that expand after injection to the wound. Within 20 seconds, the expanded sponge then fills the cut, preventing blood loss and giving the patient a higher chance of survival. Each sponge last for up to four hours and absorbs up to a pint of blood. . . XSTAT 30 is manufactured by RevMedX, Inc., in Wilsonville, Oregon.

If the article got it right (which is far from certain given general and specialist media obtuseness) it's a wagonload of bullshit.
If it isn't cleared for use in "certain" parts of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, WTF good is it? Jack and shit.
You're making a device that will be applied by 110-hr wondermedics with basic EMT certs, or at best by 6-month paramedics, and you're going to have them play "Do we or won't we?" games with the exact parts of the anatomy where tourniquets don't work?
Which have unhelpfully been blown open by bullets??
Total hype, hokum, and horseshit.

If you shoot that thing into a head wound, and it swells with blood collected, you've produced an unreduceable hematoma in the cranial vault. Stroke, and/or pushing the brains down through the spinal foramen (the hole at the bottom of the cranium where the brainstem lives and connects to the spinal column). The only more effective way to kill someone would be to pull their brains out with a crowbar and then stomp on it.

You can't put it into the chest, because it could tamponade the heart or major vessels, and they then have an unsolvable heart attack, or a hemothorax that a needle thoracotomy won't fix.

Ditto for the neck, where it could choke off blood flow to the brain, or block airways.

Put in inside the digestive tract, and you have a bowel obstruction that won't resolve. Ditto if it ends up in the bladder.

That eliminates 85% of the human body where it can't be used.


So when you eliminate the head, neck, chest, abdomen, and pelvis ("certain parts"?? I repeat, total horseshit) you're left with the arms and legs: IOW the exact places where the CAT and SOF-T tourniquets are expressly designed to shine, and have done for near 15 years. At one-third the list price!

And on an anatomical note, the sponges (92 of them) are designed to absorb "up to a pint of blood" each. So what they've designed is a device to exsanguinate the entire body at the speed of blood loss, since you only have 10-14 pints of blood in your entire body.

So as the blood flows out the holes and into the sponges, it is removed from circulation permanently, to form a cluster of clotted sponges full of blood, and your veins and arteries are sopped entirely dry. Rapid and profound shock, coma, and death result, in short and irreversible order.
Fucking genius, that. If you're a mortician looking for a handy way to prep the body for burial.

On the spectrum from Shineola to shit, this appears to be a truckload of the latter. An utter abortion, without legs.

Absolute best case: You might could use it on groin and armpit wounds.
If the bladder/lung isn't punctured. I suppose you'd need your handy field ultrasound machine to make that call. Which no one has, because it doesn't exist.
And if the wound's so bad you can tell they are punctured without your nonexistent field ultrasound machine, you can't use it. QED

So still worthless bullshit in search of a purpose. And government and institutional dollars.
While it clogs your kit with something of dubious, if not even non-existent, utility.
That thing's a CAT or Israeli bandage you didn't bring, both of which actually work.
And priced at the DoD friendly $100@.
Comedy gold.
"Mr. Shoddy: Dewey, Cheatham, & Howe are calling about patent infringement..."

Maybe in the new gender-bender military, it could find use as a field marital aid, and ad hoc birth control device.
"Introducing the SpermStopper 2000!"

That analysis is based purely on the article, but I can't imagine where you'd usefully shove it with the restrictions stated in the article, or how they expect field medics to utilize it under such recockulous restrictions under actual conditions. (I could suggest a place for the manufacturer to shove it, which you can probably guess that without further hints, but they'd have to pull their heads out first.)

If I hear or see more about it, and the maker has a better-than-the-Underpants-Gnome explanation of its function, utility, and restrictions that makes more any sense, I'll revise that opinion.
Comments are open.

Elucidation and explanation is welcome.