Straight from the Narwhal's Mouth - April

The Extreme Narwhal

--- Steven Albers

     

      Unless your decision has to be black or white, neither extreme ever works. As much as you may want to say that pizza is and always will be better than burgers, there are people that will wholeheartedly disagree with you. If you argue that newer Guns n’ Roses stuff is better than the old, well you’ll have people disagree with you there, too.

     This isn’t to say that being in the middle is necessarily going to get you out of all petty arguments, or even that it’s a good thing to stay right in the middle on every important issue. Rather, it just sounds irrational if you harp so much about one side without so much as an acknowledgement of the other. Take your stand and defend it, but also see where the other side is coming from. 

     Again, this doesn’t apply to every decision, or every two-sided coin in the universe; for example, in math 2+2 will always equal 4, and you’d be a fool to say otherwise (unless you have one of those .999999=1 proofs, which have errors in them anyway). If someone asks you to go see a movie, you can’t say “Sure, but I’ll only kind of be there. You want to kinda see Sucker Punch?” There’s a big distinction between these kinds of decisions and the gray area (or analog, if you will) ones: there isn’t any sort of bias that goes into that decision, which is most important. For people pursuing math-based careers, triple integrals will always be important (or so our teachers say…), and they can’t decide to flat out ignore them and turn them into ponies, however fun that might be. Some laws of the world are stuck just the way they are, and only those can be taken to the so-called extreme.

     But inevitably, there will always be a gray area. And where there’s a gray area, there’s an opinion. And no opinion is unbiased. Even if you think NCIS is 9000 times better than NCIS:LA, you have to agree that both shows have their merits, and it just plain doesn’t work to say that one of them doesn’t. No matter how extreme you want to be about something (and you can be as extreme as you want; don’t let me stop you), don’t forget that there is always someone more extreme than you about the exact opposite.    

     Even if you hate this article, can’t you say there’s at least something good about it?

Just in case you were expecting something a little more extreme from this article:

Yeah, that’s extreme.