Only When Spoken To

So I've been forced to contend with idiocy, once again. I usually oppose forced sterilization, but these people shouldn't just be rendered infertile, they should be Pasteurized.

I didn't want to use the list function, but this flows better if I do. There's only two.

• A conservative writer over at Breitbart's joint, lamenting the fact the Millennial Generation is so largely determined by pop culture, said that Roman popular entertainment was "to distract people", while Greek entertainment affirmed and reinforced the community's values.
  
  Well, it's nice to see the unthinking Hellenism of the Renaissance is alive and kicking—Greece is good and Rome is bad, axiomatically, and actually knowing anything about either is superfluous. Leaving to one side the really ugly things about Greek culture (this idiot seemed to think Romans treated their slaves worse than Greeks, which is not generally the case—and Romans treated their wives vastly better), Greek literature is full, from end to end, of writers lamenting that the people are so easily manipulated by the drama, especially comedy. Y' know, sorta like how 30% of Americans get their news from Jon Stewart?


• A certain kind of hard SF fan will often say, "FTL travel inherently involves time travel." Well, literal, instantaneous-velocity-exceeding-c FTL would, actually—as you approach c, one of the numbers in the relativity equations approaches zero, that's why time slows down; it is zero at c itself, and if you could exceed c, for which you'd need negative rest mass, the number becomes negative, and time would go backwards. Fortunately that's probably impossible—especially since the Feynman-Stückelberg interpretation of quantum physics says particles going backward in time are antiparticles.
  
  But with "effective" FTL systems (theoretically not-rule-out-able, at best, at this point), where an object moves a distance faster than light could, but by rearranging the distance (the fabric of space) rather than moving itself, there's no time travel. You'll still, nevertheless, hear people say that a ship using a warp-type drive would "arrive before it left".
  
  You Fail Relativity Forever.
  
  See, either relativity is wrong about non-simultaneity, in which case there would merely be a net elapsed time, like in Newtonian physics, or it's right, and no comparison is possible between the reference frame you arrive in and the one you left.

Also (that first one reminded me), RE: "Greatest Generation", I'm pretty sure defeating Hitler and spawning the Baby Boomers kinda cancel each other out.