Poor citation, Diablo and a little bit of entitlement

As the title of this post suggests, it's about two wildly different things. I'll cover the poor citation bit first.

If an article discussing scientific "fact", in this case medical, is not properly cited it is invalid. Without proper citation from multiple sources that are also properly cited and peer-reviewed (if original work) the article is an opinion piece. This is an issue for people such as anti-vaccination advocates as there isn't any solid scientific fact behind anti-vaccination. That statement right there however is uncited and must not be taken as fact but my opinion, which is ok because you know, this is a personal blog. I must say though, it baffles me that people are willing to take such a huge risk in not vaccinating their children just because of a few conspiracy theories. There's recently been news of a measles outbreak in the UK which has been linked towards parents declining to vaccinate. As a side note, a lot of the people I know who seem to be anti-vaccination are conservative Christian Americans. This is funny because the anti-vaccination movement was largely popularized by Jenny McCarthy... a Playboy model.

Now for the Diablo and entitlement part. Recently Diablo released a patch. This was a rather large patch that added to and changed a lot about the game. When massive changes happen, bugs are likely to occur. In this case, a rather nasty one did. Trading in Diablo 3 is done via an online auction house. People post items they found in game and others bid on them for in game currency or actual real money. When the patch released some gamers discovered a bug that allowed them to duplicate gold within the auction house. This started a tumble into crazy inflation and all around fucking up of the market. Blizzard (the makers of the game) have taken the auction house offline to fix this best they can. Most the players understand the reasoning behind this, what blows me away are the ones that aren't. Yes, they are entitled to a working game due to the fact they will have probably paid $60+ for it. However, they are not entitled to be nasty to the very people trying to make the game enjoyable and maintain it's inner workings. Gamers suck sometimes.

One or two common(ish) unrelated assumptions that really bother me

Assumption #1:

If someone is bisexual they have to be with both men and women.

I've come across a fair few people that are under the impression that it is impossible for someone who identifies as bisexual to be faithful. For example, if a bisexual woman is married to a man, she would be unable to be faithful to him as she has to be with a woman as well. This is so incorrect it's not even funny. Being bisexual simply means being attracted to both genders. They are no more likely to be unfaithful than straight or homosexual people. The only difference it makes is that they have the potential to be attracted to both males and females as opposed to just one or the other. For example, there are billions of women out there that have the potential to be attractive to me. However, this does not mean I will cheat because I have this amazing thing called self control which allows me to be faithful to Laura. If I turned out to be bisexual, this would not change.

Assumption #2

How can we know (enter topic here) happened if it was meant to have happened before humans were alive.

SCIENCE MOTHERFUCKERS!!! I wouldn't dream of attempting to explain exactly how we are able to know about things that happened before humans were around, I sadly don't possess much knowledge of advanced science. However, there are various techniques of approximating events that happened long, long ago that have been developed over the years. Sure, they're not entirely accurate and could end up being completely wrong. This is why scientists tend to say they think something happened. But just because there were no humans around at the time, or the event wasn't recorded doesn't mean it didn't happen. What really bothers me is when Christians use this argument. There's no way there were humans around when God (allegedly) said "Let there be light", yet people who believe in the Bible are rather certain it happened. Yay for contradictory statements!

Assumption #3

The ocean can't be rising due to global warming because the icebergs are already in the ocean.

Yeah, I've actually heard that one. One word: glaciers.