IntenseDebate - angelhead

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Fascinating And... · 0 replies · +1 points

Even scarier than the actual procedure is our willingness to accept this kind of butchery as valid medicine. Assaulting the brain with 20 000 volts of electricity is still considered a valid treatment for depression. This procedure has actually increased in popularity during the past decade. I guess insulin-induced coma and lobotomy will also make a come-back, and just like electroconvulsive therapy, they will be marketed as new and improved – "not the brutal procedures they once were." Okay, so you may lose all your childhood memories and you don't recognize your own children, but, hey, you'll be much calmer.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Another 20 Unfortunate... · 0 replies · +1 points

There is also a range of Finnish puddings/yogurts called Jacky, which is pronounced like yacky in Finnish.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Most Influentia... · 0 replies · +1 points

Why? What was his contribution? To make psychology hip and trendy?

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Most Influentia... · 0 replies · -1 points

Freud's most lasting contribution to humanity was not any particular idea of his but the fact that we are now neurotically self-obsessed.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Final Recordings of... · 0 replies · -9 points

Well, the way I see it, if you can't laugh at modern technological death, what can you do? Cry?

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Final Recordings of... · 9 replies · -81 points

Security system: "Pull up... Pull up... Pull up..."

Crew: "Aaaaaaaagh! ..."

:D

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Reasons The Dar... · 0 replies · +1 points

There was an article in the paper the other day which touched on the subject of sexual morality in the medieval times. It turns out it was not always as harsh as is commonly believed. There were, for instance, public bath houses in many European countries where women and men would bathe together, that is, appear naked in the presence of the opposite sex. Also, subjects like homosexuality were openly discussed in medieval plays and comedies, although it used to be the notion that there was near complete silence on such matters throughout the medieval times. It was only in later medieval times, the article says after the 14th century, when strict puritanism took hold, and bath houses, along with other dens of vice, were raided and closed by the authorities.

13 years ago @ Listverse - 10 Books that Screwed ... · 0 replies · +3 points

I think books like The God Delusion are potentially dangerous, too, as they promote a charismatic and pseudo-religious mythology of scientific culture. And mind you, this is coming not from someone who is a theist but someone basically atheist.

I find there is something deeply unsettling, even sinister, about Western notions of rational culture. Scientific rationality is often no more than a sanitized veneer for an ideology of domination, as in the case of Western civilization it most certainly has been. I believe it is possible that in a hundred year's time our hubris-driven age will be looked on not as a time of reason but as a singularly dark period of intellectual apathy and confusion.

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Politically Inc... · 0 replies · +1 points

Number 6 is interesting as it reverses the conventional roles in the PC-ness debate. It places anti-homosexual sentiment in the position of the politically correct thought police, a role usually reserved for "the liberal left."

13 years ago @ Listverse - Top 10 Ancient Inventions · 1 reply · +1 points

Simple tools, like axes and ropes, do not really count as technology in my definition. Technology for me is not a category of objects but an entire system based on production, division of labor and domestication of nature. The technological system encompasses not only the machines of production but also the social and economic forms that develop around production. I suppose you could call technology a matrix onto which everything else in industrial society is built.

Marx was right when he said that our way of life, social as well as mental and moral life, is based on the material conditions of our lives. He was wrong, however, in assuming that the material conditions that lead to alienation and oppression are set by capitalism. The conditions for an alienated and oppressive existence are set by the technological system, and it is entirely irrelevant whether the system operates under capitalism or socialism, or free market liberalism or totalitarianism. A technologically structured life is always one of alienation.

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