Simple People

Gravity kills, smoking kills, obesity kills, breathing kills. People actually believe this shit...People. Are. Idiots.

Let's go into how this all started: Yesterday my daughter asked a question about gravity. Actually, she asked about inertia, but she didn't know that when she asked. She ASKED about gravity and was corrected. Anyhow, that's really not the point. The point is the subject came up. Later she makes the statement "gravity kills". Naturally S and I want to know where this conclusion comes from. As far as we know, gravity has never killed anyone. So H explains how if you jump from a 10 story building you will die. Ok, I laughed. Not the demeaning "you're an idiot" laugh. Just the simplistic child view of things that is generally amusing. So I explain that no, gravity doesn't kill and neither does falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that gets you. At which point, with all of a child's logic (and from her end of things this is quite logical and technically I could suppose she is correct), that if there was no gravity then it wouldn't kill you.

And then it hit me. How many fuckin' adults have the logic of a 10 year old child and refuse to progress to something more advanced. My 10 year old actually now grasps why one would be wrong to say "gravity kills", however she has acclompished something that many, hell most, adults have yet to acclompish...reasonable thought is in her grasp. And I thought about it, and the fallacy in the statement, and yet how many otherwise intelligent people continue to make such idiotic statements AND DEFEND THEM! Even when normally they wouldn't!

Let's go here: "Smoking kills". Big anti tobacco thing, you just say smoking kills and watch the little idiots run in fear, screaming their heads off. However, if you say "breathing kills", these EXACT SAME PEOPLE will SCOFF at you for being so simplistically ridiculous. They will even give you the EXACT SAME ARGUEMENT that proves why "smoking kills" is such a ridiculous statement and yet if you point it out, these idiots have the unmitigated gall to actually say "well that's different". But it's not.

While technically the statement "gravity kills" is ultimately correct, it's a highly misleading statement. If gravity kills, then we'd all be dead if we jumped 4 cm off the ground. As I've yet to see a rash of jumping related deaths, I'm going to assume gravity works the same as usual. You jump from a 20 story building, no parachute, make it through the fall as usual, hit the ground and die. You jump froma 20 story building, parachute, make it through the fall, land lightly on the ground, live. So there are two several seperate factors here: parachute possession, impact with the ground, gravity, building size. Now, building size is the same, so that's not what makes you live. You don't die from the fall, so gravity is not the issue here. You have two things that changed; 1. You had a parachute in one, and not in the other 2. The impact with the ground was changed by the parachute. While being slightly more honest one could stop here and say lack of parachutes kill, but that's not really the case is it? I mean, that's a pretty broad statement. People go without parachutes all the time and they don't die. One could say height kills, but being up high didn't kill you either. In fact, both times all was actually going very well until you got to the impact part. There is the fundamental difference! One could stop there and say Impact kills, and you'd be a hell of a lot closer to correct than gravity kills is..however, there are various kinds of impact right? At what level is impact fatal? So you do 500 experiments with different heights etc until you can narrow it down, then you release a completely accurate statement: "Impact with hard objects are fatal from 20 miles an hour on up if you land on your head"Maybe you release 30 statements "Impact with hard objects with your legs are fatal at 30 miles and up" "Impact with hard objects from a height of 20 stories no matter what you land on are fatal" Whatever. But all are now accurate and thoroughly educating statements. So what we now know is that you can jump and play in gravity all day long and nothing will happen to you, but if you climb a large building and jump and impact with a hard surface at certain speeds, you will die. Obviously a statement of some significance or we'd lose the entire sport of basketball...In fact, if we had been raised on the simple statement of "gravity kills", we wouldn't have had basketball, jump ropes, and a good portion of follow the leader would be gone. All this is very logical. In fact, it's so naturally accepted we don't even quote studies anymore to prove that gravity does not kill, impact with the ground from certain heights or at certain speeds do. It's pretty much common sense that gravity does not kill.

So wtf is wrong with people that they accept these scare tactic statements that "obesity kills" or "smoking kills"? Hell, with the simplistic, childish arguements like this, I can prove with NO effort that breathing kills, because you wouldn't stop breathing if you weren't breathing to start with.