Archive for the ‘Lose’ Category

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Human Memory: justice based on misinformation

Thursday, June 17th, 2010

EyewitnessHumans rely on our memories. Memories tell us what happened in the past, so that we may recount it and learn from it.

The problem is, memories don’t tell us what happened in the past. Our memories are incredibly unreliable. We remember what we want to remember – not what actually happened.

In fact, we don’t have memories at all, not as we believe we do. Memories aren’t stored like the brain’s equivalent of a videotape or a library. Instead memories are assembled on the fly whenever we try to recall a specific event.

This is known as the misinformation effect, and its repercussions are severe.

For one, we’ve built our entire justice system around the concept of eyewitnesses. The problem is, there is no such this as a reliable eyewitness. Our memories are too fragile and way too easy to manipulate to trust anything being said by a person taking the stand.

There are countless examples of innocent people convicted for crimes they didn’t commit based on nothing but unreliable eyewitness testimonies. Some of these innocent people have even been convicted to the death penalty – and have subsequently been executed by the state.

But now that we know that eyewitnesses are so horrendously unreliable, that we truly cannot trust that which we remember, surely there must be urgent steps being taken to change our justice system?

The answer is, of course, no. Nothing has changed. Justice is still dealt out based in large part on eyewitness testimonies. It seems humanity prefers to live in a comfortable lie that accept a difficult truth.

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Global Pandemic: humanity fails to unite

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

HIV/AIDSYou’ve probably seen this scenario in a film at least once: a new type of disease breaks out and causes massive amounts of death and mayhem across the globe. Sometimes the afflicted turn in to flesh-eating zombies, sometimes they just perish, but always it’s a global pandemic that destroys human civilisation as we know it.

This, unfortunately, is not an entirely fictional scenario. In fact, this is something that is happening right now.

The disease is not some high-tech articificial virus cooked up in a corporate laboratory. Nor is it an alien disease brought here via a crashed asteroid.

The disease is known as AIDS, and it is caused by a virus called HIV. The global outbreak of AIDS is classified as a pandemic. In Africa alone more than 90 million people are HIV positive. Over 33 million have developed AIDS, and more than 2 million die from it every year.

In comparison the H1N1 outbreak (Mexican flu or swine flu), which caused so much panic and hype, has caused a bit over 14,000 deaths worldwide. That makes AIDS 142 times more deadly than H1N1.

HIV/AIDS is currently the largest and most deadly epidemic sweeping across the planet. Humanity should be united in response against it, committing resources to preventing and curing the disease.

Instead, what we get is religious fundamentalism: religious leaders coming out against the use of condoms, the most effective prevention system we have.

Instead, what we get is corporate profiteering: pharmaceutical companies extorting massive amounts of money from bankrupt governments for vital AIDS medication.

Instead, what we get is more profiteering: quacks proclaiming common vitamins are cures for AIDS.

Instead, what we get is widespread ignorance: tidal waves of misinformation and lies about the causes and prevention of HIV/AIDS.

If not even the deadliest pandemic known to man can unite humankind, nothing can.

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Capitalism: Ryanair demonstrates its flaws

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

RyanairLet’s talk airlines. Discount airlines specifically, and Ryanair in particular. You see, I consider Ryanair to be the living embodiment of what is wrong with capitalism.

Ryanair is a company that doesn’t hide its nature. Ryanair is a vicious, cruel, profit-hungry monster that will do everything it can to maximise its profits. Ryanair treats its passengers worse that we treat our livestock – they extort, manipulate, cheat and deceive their paying customers in every way imaginable, often barely within the limits of the law.

If capitalism worked, customers would eschew Ryanair and choose to fly with a different airline. Capitalism, after all, boasts about the strength of market forces where consumers choose to buy from companies that offer the best product.

But Ryanair most certainly does not have the best product. It may actually have the worst imaginable product in its industry. And, contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the cheapest either. With all the fees, penalties, charges and additional costs they add on top, Ryanair fares are actually more costly than many of their rivals.

But somehow people still choose en masse to fly with Ryanair. In the midst of a global recession, with many airlines diving deep in to the red, Ryanair has reported a profit of €354 million.

Why is this so? Why do consumers choose an airline that is so obviously evil? Why do people buy a product that is so clearly and blatantly flawed?

It is because that basic foundation of capitalism – that people make rational choices – is wrong. Humans are ridiculously easy to manipulate. So easy in fact that companies like Ryanair don’t even have to pretend to be a good service provider.

On the contrary, they can even boast about being a vile, despicable airline that extorts its customers and treats their passengers like shit. Because Ryanair knows people will still buy their fares. All Ryanair needs to do is wave another one of their horrendously misleading €1 flight offers in front of the public, and their fares sell out faster than you can follow.

Ryanair has shown us more clearly than any other company that capitalism is a broken system built on a hollow foundation. Companies don’t produce the best possible products – companies produce the worst product they can get away with. Consumers don’t choose to buy the best product – consumers are manipulated in to buying shit.

Capitalism is wrong. And yet it is the most dominant form of commerce on the planet.

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The Catholic Church: child abuse is fine

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Pope Benedict XVIThe child abuse scandals surrounding the Catholic church are not a particularly new phenomenon. For as long as priests have been in charge of children, those children have been harmed and abused.

Yet the sheer scale and pervasiveness of child abuse, especially in Ireland as revealed by the Ryan report, is mind-boggling. One can only conclude that Catholic institutions exist primarily for children to be systematically indoctrinated, tortured, and raped.

There is only one sensible response to this, one acceptable reply from a civilised society wanting to deal with this inexcusably vile, depraved behaviour: Catholics must abandon their churches – the institutions directly responsible for decades, probably centuries, of rape and torture of their young children – jail the guilty parties and all those who aided and abetted them, and punish them as severely as possible under the law.

Of course, none of that is actually happening. Catholics around the world still sit contently in their churches, listening to sermons from those exact same men who either raped their children, or knew of child rape taking place and did nothing to stop it – or even actively hid those facts from public scrutiny.

Few of those responsible have been expelled from the Catholic church. Fewer still have been arrested for their heinous crimes. This can only mean one thing: Catholics are okay with systematic child rape and torture. There is no other explanation.

Catholicism is the self-proclaimed largest religion in the world, claiming over one billion members. This religion implies that the large scale rape of young children is fine. Its members seem to agree, by virtue of their continued support for their church.

You’ll have to forgive me for thinking that these humans deserve to be exterminated.

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The Capitalist Economy: A House of Cards

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

We tend to think of the capitalist economy the West lives in as the best way of doing things. It enables economic growth, gives us stuff to crave and buy, and generally serves to make us happy. Well, not so much the latter.

The thing is, capitalism has many, many problems. You’ll be reading a lot here about the various issues with capitalism, but today I’ll start with one problem inherent in the capitalist system that’s recently been painfully exposed for all to see: fraud.

The whole capitalist economy is built on fraud. Fraud is so pervasive in the western economic system that without it, the economy would quite literally collapse. It would fall apart utterly and irretrievably, coming down like the house of cards it really is.

This article, lengthy but worth every second you spend reading it, hammers it home: Confessions Of A Wall St. Nihilist: Forget About Goldman Sachs, Our Entire Economy Is Built On Fraud. A brief excerpt:

The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail “this scrutiny”—or that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny would work like nerve gas on what’s left of the economy. Because in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet Volts—fraud’s all we got left, Doc. Scare off the fraud with Obama’s “scrutiny,” and the entire pyramid scheme collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.

Eventually it will all come crashing down. And when it does, it won’t be pretty.

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