forking children, proven by hippy bullshit (tm)

so we're at moonflake's folks' place on sunday and her sister's hippy boyfriend is there. now he's a nice enough guy except he's been indoctrinated into the whole hippy thing by his hippy parents.
talking about anything medicinal or scientific is like trying to convince a devout chrisitian zealot that the world is a big cosmic joke and the real "man behind the scenes" is actually a giant pink elephant named borris who has a liking for vodka, russian communists, and being mistaken for god.
so he makes a typically hippy statement:
"in the past doctors had supreme power, but nowdays that power's being taken away from them which is arguably a good thing."
lets just slice this little (crap) argument into its components shall we:

firstly: to prevent commiting the fallacy of "guilty by association" please disregard the fact that the statement comes from a hippy.

note the use of the word "arguably." obviously he's trying to sound philisophical and also show that he's open minded to the fact that there could be another opinion. of course if you disagree then you must be taking the stricter, less open-minded side right? crap!
his argument is full of argumentative errors (highly un-philisophical) and supporting the other side is simply a matter of preference (some may say intelligence, but for the purpose of analysing its just preference).

the statement "something had supreme power and now it doesn't." sounds very good. people don't like things that have supreme power over them (except for the religious who like the safety of their decisions not being their own... but that's an entirely different discussion). but when you look at what that something is, doctors, you realise that he's talking complete shit!
doctors used to have a lot of say over your health (and still do) simply because they spend their lives studying the subject. the application of their help is still up to you. you can always not take what has been prescribed (and you could have refused to "let two leeches disolve under your tongue and call back in the morning" back in the olden days).
in addition: back in the olden days (when he claims doctors had supreme power) there was even more bullshit remedies from housewives and protohippies (what i like to name the precursor to hippies. you know: old hags that smelled bad and lived in the woods alone, prescribing treebark and potions made of worms to their "patients").
so the "supreme power" was always split between the two (and back in the day people trusted doctors less than they trusted the protohippies).
but you could always choose to have a stiff drink and hope the gangrene went away on its own... so ultimately the patient had the power.

as for power being taken away from doctors being a good thing: bullshit!
doctors do need to be monitored to prevent god complexes and those wacky nazi-style experiments involving needles, the spine, and injecting things. and guess what: the doctoring profession is self regulating.
doctors understand that if a patient trusts the proffession then they are more likely to accept help from the proffession and more good can be done!
of course the argument is hinting at that power being given over to "alternative" (read "untested and untrustworth" and add a liberal dose of "snake oil" for good measure) medicines.
obvious reasons dictate that that is not a good thing. no alternative medicine is scientiffically proven. all of it is proven with anecdotal evidence and a special brand of quantum mechanics (i like to call it quantum mechanics for hippies... it takes real quantum mechanics and ignores it. in stead it uses a bastardisation of schrodinger's cat to prove things, as far as i can tell).
if an alternative medicine really worked it would be tested and accepted, thusly not making it alternative anymore.
(maybe that's why the hippies are keeping their medicines a secret. not because they don't really work, but because they afraid of becoming "mainstream" and being seen as a sell-out by their friends?)

so basically i can condense his argument into the following statement:
"complete shit, crap, bullshit!"
ergo: shut your stinking, hippy, vegetable hole and think before making a stupid statement. especially when its aimed at someone who actually thinks.

its like there's some hippy textbook out there that teaches hippies to believe a small set of (stupid and easily disproved) opinions, hate the FDA, become a vegetarian, and to ignore any kind of proof that disproves a "radical" belief.

a hippy is more likely to believe a channeled atlantean scientist who says "moss covered treebark is a wonderfull antiseptic. i can prove it with quantum mechanics." than an actual scientist who has to remove their gangrene infested arm and tells them that prehaps introducing dirt and bacteria to their blood supply was not the smartest thing they've done in their lives.
This statement highlights 2 things:
1) hippies are really closed minded. they don't accept anything that counters their "alternative" beliefs in spite of their calls for open-mindedness from others.
2) doctors are fallible like all humans are. that probably was the smartest thing that hippy has done his entire life.

DISCLAIMER: the above example is a fictional story created to highlight some points of my argument. you can tell its ficticious as no hippy would go to a real doctor. they'd probably just take some coloidal silver to stave off infection (*cough*bullshit*cough*).

i think that all "alternative" remedies that have no scientific proof (and that includes all those "food supplements" that are only labled as such because the hippies can't get permission to call them medicine) must be labled: "proven by hippy bullshit (tm)"
and if they ever claim "proven with " then they should have to produce papers that have been submitted to bone fide scientific journals (not hippy journals) and those papers have to have been accepted and published. otherwise they get the lable "proven by hippy bullshit and covered in unscientific lies. probably harmful! (tm)"

i wouldn't find hippies so bad if they actually were open minded and used their brains to question things and decide on things for themselves. the problem is that they all spout the same arguements that have been disproven hundreds of times, yet they still refuse to believe that they could be wrong.
refuse to believe in the possibility that there is a probability that they may be incorrect.
stupid hippies!

in a complete side whatsits:
i realised that computer scientists must hate children.
while sitting in my comsci lecture today i pieced the pieces together.
creating a new process thread in a program is called forking. the new thread is called a child thread. when a thread completes you kill it.
when assigning resource to another process/client and that process/client dies, the resources are refered to as an orphan. it is encouraged to constantly seek out orphans and free up the resources.
so basically, in computer science it is common practice to:
fork children then kill them, and seek out orphans and eliminate them.

gaming news:
castlevania: portrait of ruins pictures (not many) at the magic box.
techeblog says that its expected in november 2006 and there will be two player characters to switch between and more powerfull summmon attacks to use on the 100+ different enemies and "massive bosses" all in new locations such as "the desert and Misty Town."