Later!

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That, or he said "FARC guerillas." Y'know, either or. I'm sure the jungles of Colombia see (and smell) their fair share of flatulent hominids, though.

Pronunciation: /ˈʃiːp(ə)l/
Noun
Derogatory

People compared to sheep in being docile, foolish, or easily led: "By the time the sheeple wake up and try to change things, it will be too late."

Origin:

1940s: blend of sheep and people

And this is, in my experience, what 90% of the world's human population is like. I would prefer it if wasn't true, because I'm lonely and I'm tired of always having to watch what I say so I don't wind up accidentally offending half the people in the room just by using a word they've never heard before (but which I think is a perfectly ordinary word). I'm tired of never being allowed to be interested in, or enthusiastic about, something that requires you to actually use your brain, and I am tired of the fact that noone I meet - not even teachers who've studied at an accredited university - seems to have even the most basic understanding of science, and for the life of them can't understand why an emotional argument holds less water than a rational one.

I'm really far from being a genius, and frankly, I am not very arrogant or pretentious. I try hard to ensure that anybody who speaks to me feels at ease, and that they feel like the things they say to me are being heard and understood. Because honestly, that's all I ever ask for - a conversation between equals. However, I am just dead fucking tired of living in a society that just seems to sink deeper and deeper into stupidity. It's as if I'm stuck in front of a great, frothing wave of stolid ignorance, and there is just no escape from it.

So, yes. Sheeple. Everywhere. There's just no getting away from them.

Great comment! You raised many interesting points.

One important thing to note that the modern human mind is essentially like an advanced piece of software which runs on antiquated hardware (sort of like running Skyrim on an N64). As many as 7% (though I don't currently have a source for this at hand) of the general population are estimated to experience auditory hallucinations, and surprisingly enough, most of those people aren't psychotically structured. This is why auditory hallucinations are seen as a secondary, rather than primary, symptom of schizophrenia.

Rather, what is actually happening is that the antiquated hardware, for whatever reason, is showing its faults. The primitive responses which tend to stay dormant for most people are finding their way to the surface.

In other words, the truth of schizophrenia is that it isn't so much an illness as it is a regression to a more primitive version of the human mind. And as both you an Eleanor pointed out, this can have both pros and cons. Another example of a broken system which can produce contextually positive results is eidetic memory, which causes a person to be unable to forget.

And this is also something that I find to be quite interesting, because what it means is that mental illnesses are, in fact, contextual illnesses. A schizophrenic person is essentially "sick" because he/she has a bug in his/her software and as a result is unable to download patches from the rest of society. Go back 3000 years and it is entirely possible that auditory hallucination would have been the norm.

The reason for the stigma being so harmful is that it simply focuses on the wrong thing. It takes a secondary symptom, i.e. hearing voices, and makes it seem like the actual disease. In truth, the auditory hallucination is just an externalized version of a process which is actually internal. Where most of us simply have thoughts, the schizophrenic might instead hear a voice. To turn stigmatize those auditory hallucinations is to potentially cripple the sufferer's ability to perform basic maintenance on themselves.

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Someone should really track those penis-enhancing people down. They may possess game-changing secrets regarding the laws of the universe.

Or perhaps they are the only thing holding our solar system together.

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Glad you could fix it so easily, and I'm glad I could be of assistance.

Nope, there's no checkbox there unless I'm editing the message. And really, I've only had this account for about four days, and I would be surprised if the mini-probationary period was even shorter than that.