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.

It would be... difficult... not to abuse the HoloDeck.

I can agree with that. However, the thing that makes this so interesting for me is the idea that the human being is a fundamentally unnatural creature, and the idea that modern technology more and more allows us to be an essentially modular animal, with endless possibilities.

As we innovate, we constantly redefine what it means to be a human being - clothes are so ubiquitous and culturally deep-seated that they can almost be seen as just another layer of skin, and allow us to inhabit vastly different climates, where most other animals really only function in a single setting. The same can be said for telephones and the internet, two inventions that vastly improve our ability to communicate with each other.

And what Beardyman shows us here is an example of this modularity. The "natural" human being can only produce one tone. Through cultural innovation, we can learn to sing with two tones. Through technological innovation, we can even learn to create an entire orchestra by using the input of a single man's voice.

To me, that is pretty extraordinary.

Yeah. While I suppose there has to be some sort of limit on what can be deemed acceptable, it is also a very slippery slope. After all, should fantasy really be criminalized? Moral sickness is perhaps the most arbitrary concept imaginable, and history is rife with examples of just how dangerous it is to criminalize supposed moral dissolution.

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.

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None of the things in that list are even the slightest bit unrelated, and I think that you would be hard-pressed to give an actual, rational reason for claiming that they are.

No, what's happening here is that I jokingly said I find a band you apparently happen to like to be offensively homogenous, and you took real offense to it.

Now, look - if I had been fifteen years old, I might have liked Mumford & Sons. After all, I was completely into the craze at that point, reading Walden, listening almost exclusively to bands who took their names from animals and collectively dressed like day labourers from the early 1900s, but... then it got old, and it got old fast. Why? Because they never created anything knew. It was always accoustic, it always had the exact same sound and feel, and it could almost always be split into one of two categories - maudlin lovesongs (as in, "here I sit brokenhearted") or bright-eyed nature-romanticism (as in, "let's go into the forest and pick wild flowers and be happy FOREVER").

And now, Mumford & Sons are simply carrying on that trend. It's not a new trend by any means, and it's certainly not going to end with our current generation of band wagoneers.

And as it happens, I dislike it quite a bit.

And you're just going to have to deal with that.

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

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Well, chiefly, it's the flavour. The alcohol does play a part, though. After all, without it, the whiskey just wouldn't be uisge beatha - the water of life.

Life is sort of meant to burn a bit going down, I think.