Updates and why getting into arguments can be fun and not

Few quick things as I haven't posted much lately. These should be relatively quick (I need sleep).

First up is the now semi old news of the Catholic church excommunicating a mother and some doctors because a 9 year old got an abortion. Oh, did I mention that the 9 year old was raped. Oh btw, by her step father. Oh and it was twins. That most likely would kill her (and possibly destroying the fetuses as well) had she brought them to term. Oh, and the nail in the cross (sorry, couldn't help myself) the step father was not excommunicated.

I'm sorry but if your a catholic and sane, I would think this would be an outrage. Any sane mother would have done the exact same thing. I have a hard time imagining this running through the mothers thoughts "Well, she has twins. Abortion is a sin. Letting my daughter die is apparently not. I guess I have no choice, she must die and hopefully the twins will come out ok. Damn, I really liked this daughter too."
Not really sure thats much of an exageration on how the Church would have liked her to think.

Second, Dungeons and Dragons is the awesome. Not much to say beyond that, but yes I play and enjoy it muchly.

Third and last, willfully ignorant people piss me off. Sadly I ended up getting into an argument with a bunch of people, who im sorry I would classify as people who are willfully ignorant (at least in the subject I was arguing about). To be fair, I started it. Person in question posted something I feel is wrong (basically an anti vaccination video). I posted the recent study story from CNN about the absolute lack of real evidence (real being science based) of a link between autism and vaccines.

It then proceeded into basically a two hour back and forth between the original person and that person had two other (maybe its three, im too lazy to go look and it really doesn't change things) people come to their aid. All of which agreed with the original poster, and whereas I might not be an expert basically the arguments I got back were a bunch of emotional based pleas for "Do you know how many people died from some random vaccine" or the typical "The evil medical people are out to get you and bilk you out of money and hurt you with vaccines."

I realized that arguing with these people is useless. One, they don't accept scientific studies that argue that vaccines are pretty safe and are far better than not getting it (especially on a large scale). That pretty much screws me and I should have just realized that I was going to get no where fast, but I didn't and in general I got angry which I should not have. Especially on day two when one of the people just kept berating me ("You can't do math, do the research" and throwing up a strawman that I immediately claimed she was a horrible negletfull parent) to a point where I just said fuck it and called that person a bitch (though in context I said if they wanted to be a bitch, fine). As I'm writing this I just realized that she removed me from being a friend on Facebook and Myspace. Good. Don't have to worry about it then. Besides, out of the 70ish friends I have on Facebook, she is in general the only one that doesn't fit with everyone else.

So yeah, learned a few things today. One, try not to get drawn into arguments where the primary form of evidence that most rational people accept is dismissed because they think the people behind said evidence have a conspiracy against them. I can't win when they think that "A=bad" and "Science says A is not bad" and they don't accept science. Also, don't get angry. I need to learn to just walk away.

So yeah. Other than that not much going on.