Ancient Aliens Debunked

I'm not saying it was aliens... because it's not.

This is a great documentary debunking the claims of Ancient Aliens, up until the last half hour.

A little disappointed that after talking about the methods that Ancient Aliens uses to "prove" bunk theories, the narrator does the same thing with the story of Noah's Ark.

He goes on to say that "the Nephalim passages prove that Something Weird happened" and that we can't dismiss the fact that similar stories are found in ancient cultures around the world.

However, all that proves to me is that human beings are sex-obsessed and anthropocentric the world over, and that they tell themselves stories of the Gods having sex with humans to prove to themselves that humans are cosmically important. The idea that humans are cosmically important is something that humans love to tell ourselves, because the idea that we're not cosmically important can be damned depressing (but true).

My probme with Ancient Aliens, is that it tries to trade one bogus theory of existence--- religion -- for another, pseudo-scientific new age claptrap.

In the last half hour, this documentary goes on to trade the pseudo-science for religion again, when the real moral of the story should be that most human cultures got it wrong for most of our history, and continue to do so.

I'm really disappointed by the end of this documentary.

Moose don't have a God to tell them what to boink: homophobia, transphobia, science, and religion

The apartment next to mine has a front stoop that manages to carry conversations with perfect clarity to my apartment's second story window.

Normally these conversations are about the usual uninteresting things that college freshman-aged people talk about, like how crazy a party was, or how much they are looking forwards to getting drunk, but occasionally a turdbit [sic] wafts it's way into my living room.

"God didn't create more than two sexes."

I'll admit, my ears perked up at such a nonsensical claim as this. It seemed that this was about to be used as the supporting statement for some hateful bullshit, so I listened in:

The person in question, went on to expound, "I mean, if I looked at your dog, and I was like, 'your dog has a penis, but I think it might be a girl' you'd be like... that wouldn't make any sense."

She went on to explain that this was the reason why gay marriage doesn't make sense.

Ah, Transphobia and homophobia wrapped into one conflating statement!

There's so much wrong with this line of thinking, it's hard to figure out where to start. Having overheard this conversation, however, a roommate of mine and I discussed and came to the following counterpoints:

* 'God' didn't 'create' any sexes at all.
Biology created sex. Evolution created sex. And when it was creating sex, there was still a lot of asexuality going on, even amongst species with divergent sex traits. For instance, Clownfish, the little guys who live in Sea Anemones, and many other species of salt water fish, have only a single sex organ that produces male sex cells early in life, and after a few years, goes on to produce female sex cells. There are species of lizard that reproduce either sexually, if there are males around, or asexually (laying fully fertile eggs without the input of another lizard's DNA) if there aren't any.

* Gender identity and sex are totally different things.
A nifty little cliche to distinguish between sex and gender is, "Sex is what's on the outside, gender is what's on the inside." But it's actually more complex than that. (Of course it is.)

Gender identity is a social construct. Dogs probably don't have gender identity, because they probably don't have the cognitive capacity to tell themselves that sort of a narrative about "society" and their place in it. I love dogs, and they have high Emotional Intelligence, but I really dont' think they're smart enough for human concepts like that. I mean, dogs smell each other's butts.


* Dogs don't get married.
Dogs also don't exhibit a whole lot of sexual discretion. If they did get married, they would probably, in addition to getting both straight and gay married (and cheating constantly, just like humans), also marry plush toys and people's legs. For example:

Exhibit A:

A female miniature pincher being dominant in the bedroom

Exhibit B:

A dog engaging in premarital coitus, making the Baby Dog Jesus cry

And they do so shamelessly and publicly! Most humans who have sex with plush toys do so privately in their own homes. So dogs aren't the best analogue for human social behaviour, especially in regards to marriage, a concept which for dogs, does not exist.

* There are tons of gay animals.
FACT: homosexuality exists in nature, and it's everywhere. Everything from dogs, moose, to parasites in your intestine, all exhibit homosexual behaviour. Even bed bugs do it.

From Wikipedia:

Male bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are sexually attracted to any newly fed individual and this results in homosexual mounting. This occurs in heterosexual mounting by the traumatic insemination in which the male pierces the female abdomen with his needle-like penis. In homosexual mating this risks abdominal injuries as males lack the female counteradaptive spermalege structure.

Seen here: a bed bug gay bar

* Moose and deer will mount anything when in rut, be it another moose or deer (regardless of gender)*, a bison (regardless of whether it's just lawn ornament**) or your pickup truck***.

*Exhibit a

**Exhibit B

***Exhibit c

Basically, the most fundamental argument here is that neither moose, deer, bedbugs nor dogs, have a 'God' to tell them what is appropriate to have sex with and what is not. They will boink anything. They don't shame one another for being gay. They don't have a concept of binary gender, nor binary sexuality. They just boink who, or what, they want to boink. And they seem to be getting along just fine.

But animals are savage!

Sure, animals don't have computers, or advanced civilizations. But that's got nothing to do with homosexuality.

We would not have computers, but for Alan Turing, a theoretical mathematician who in addition to creating the logical foundation for binary code while laying in a field and staring at the sky, was also openly gay during a time in England in which it was illegal to be gay. (Interesting sidenote: he also pretty much single handedly broke the Nazi's "enigma" code, a key factor in winning WWII)

And we wouldn't have an advanced industrialized civilization, nor the concept of macroeconomics, if it wasn't for economic theorist James Maynard Keynes, another openly gay man.

So to wrap things up:

Regardless of whether or not your dog has a penis and thinks it's really a girl dog, that statement is a really lousy supporting statement for whether gay marriage is ethical, natural, etc.

I'm really sick of this argument over gay marriage having to be rehashed every few years, and I really hope to see gay marriage legalized soon. Because frankly, I'm sick of the stupid statements like "Your dog has a penis, therefore gay marriage is wrong."

---

UPDATE

This:

Richard Dawkins on Homeopathy

Why I'm a Democratic Socialist

The stories we tell ourselves are all essentially just lies that we tell ourselves so that we distract ourselves from noticing how shitty and meaningless our lives are.

I know that coming from me, a white male living in a 1st world nation, that sounds like I'm just being ignorant or bitchy about not having everything handed to me, but it's totally not the case.

I'm just recognizing what can only be described as a fact. Life is shitty. To be alive, no matter WHERE you live, is to suffer.

So let's get ethnocentric for a moment-- Here in the United States of America, we've got this narrative that we tell ourselves. That if you just work hard, do the right things, and you'll get ahead.

We go to school and school sucks, but we're told that we're supposed to endure being bored while being fed lies about Europeans who got lost and “discovered” places where people were already living, told a bunch of dates from history that have absolutely no meaning or relevance to our tiny myopic 10 year old universe, having dodgeballs hurled at our heads in gym class-- and with all of it done in shifts, like at a factory, which was designed to mentally prepare us for a life of working in all those factories that left the country 30 years ago. For our tests, we regurgitate answers without understanding them, and we accept things our teachers tell us without thinking about them. And we call that “learning.”

And it sucks, but we endure it all. In fact, we work really hard at doing well at this thing that sucks, because if we do well at this thing that sucks, it opens up this chain of possibilities for other things that suck, but supposedly lead to better things (but which in reality, also suck). If we do well in school, we're supposed to be able to get into a good university, and then we stress out and work really hard going to that university because if we do well, we supposed to be able to get a good job. And then you get a job, and you work really hard no matter how much you hate it, in the hopes of moving ahead in your career, so that eventually you'll get to a point in your life where your body is giving out, and your organs are failing, you can do all those fun things that you wanted to do in life.

But it's all a load of bullshit. We are constantly deferring our happiness today for this abstract happiness in the future which never materializes. And it's not going to either.

Well, I mean it could work out for you that you get your story book ending where you live happily ever after, but more likely than not, it's not going to work out that way. You're just going to keep suffering through the shit in front of you today, and then at the end, you just die, and it's all shit. It's just one long line of continuous shit from birth till death. Rather than getting ahead, you spend every day giving it your all just trying to keep what little you have, and then you're even losing ground, day after day, no matter how hard you work.

That procession of success we're all told to believe in is complete and utter bullshit. Some people have the right skills or the right connections and happen to be in the right spot at the right time and get lucky, but most people don't.

Some people don't go to college, walk into a street while drunk, get hit by a car, and end up with a huge settlement, and then invest it in something that makes them rich. Some people just happen to be born to the right parents. Some people just happen to be born to the wrong parents. There's just no fucking rhyme or reason to anything, and it's foolish to assume that anything in life is going to resemble ANYTHING like fairness.

Some people are able to amass huge amounts of wealth for no goddamned reason, and most people end up with little or nothing. That's how we currently organize our society. And part of that too, is that's just how life works-- some people get rewarded for doing the totally wrong thing, and some people get punished for doing everything right. Being successful in life seems to be a lot like winning the lottery-- it's just random chance, and it's totally out of your control.

Unless you happen to be born to the right parents, the parents of successful capitalists, and then you can use your money to do all your work for you. Then you can hire people to do other things for you. You can even hire people to do your hiring for you. You also get buy politicians, politicians who will change the laws to make it easier for you to do whatever the fuck you want to.

While there is abundance which can only be described as insane for a small few, that wealth is gathered by force from everybody else. And that is where poverty comes from.

So if we're living on a planet where odds are, you just happen to be born to the wrong parents, you know, parents with brown skin who live in a place without clean drinking water, how can we say, “well, there's some winners who profit from being born to rich people who use money to buy force to control natural resources and fuck other people over, and that's totally fine with me” and then call ourselves moral, or ethical?

If you subscribe to the theory that we live in a cold and uncaring universe, and that life on the planet earth is as fragile and meaningless as mold in a bathtub, you quickly realize that the world is filled with suffering FOR NO GODDAMNED REASON, and the very least that we can do is reduce the total amount of suffering on the planet by evening things out a little bit.

And that's why I'm a Democratic Socialist.

Logic: An owners manual for your Brain.