Pigeon
coo coo
No bio...
User ID: 237
I should add that my experience of American food has been pretty shit. The vegetables are tasteless and overgrown, the pork smells and tastes like it was marinated in a sewer (and that’s only an exaggeration most of the time), and the chicken is this spongy tasteless unrecognizable species of meat.
I’ve had good American food as well, but it was definitely the outlier rather than the norm.
Edit: also everything tastes too sweet for some goddamn reason
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Come on, most of the UK parliament can't even give the probability of two coins both coming up heads: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666
That is astonishing.
I wonder how well the average EU parliamentarian or US congressman etc. would do. I can’t imagine that the average Politburo member in China would be this bad.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I don’t know if anyone has had this experience before, but I’ve had times where my brain decided to make mouth sounds in a word/sentence-matching way that was eeriely like it was AI generated. Sometimes I would catch myself even mid-sentence and think wait that isn’t remotely close to what I’m actually thinking.
So it at least gets close to something that I’ve done in the past as a meatbag.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
China didn't become a major player on the world stage until this century when it got within striking distance of first world status.
I think this requires a massive qualifier on “major player on the world stage”, or at least some sort of time limit. Same for India as well, to be fair.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I'd never suggest the quality of the product and the sales figures are anything but loosely correlated.
Perhaps quality assures sales but sales are affected by much more than quality, so looking at good sales as indicative of quality is a sketchy metric but poor sales is a much better metric of poor quality?
Though I can think of examples here that buck the trend as well. Bach wasn't well known during his lifetime, after all.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Speaking of which, this has become less joke and more reality on the progressive edge.
This in particular:
Lesbian [sexual orientation]: A non-man attracted to non-men. While past definitions refer to ‘lesbian’ as a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women, this updated definition includes non-binary people who may also identify with the label.
I think Johns Hopkins has taken it down since then, though, for obvious reasons.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
But also—what happened in ‘22 to make crime the Current Thing? Are gender politics really going to drive up support for law-and-order conservatism? The biggest BLM talking points should definitely have shown up in the 2021 data.
My understanding (as someone who doesn’t live in the States, but has friends who do and other friends who keep track of local city news there) is that crime has continued to get significantly worse even after the pandemic. As such, I am not surprised in the slightest that there’s movement towards a more law-and-order position in America.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
That is exactly why FMF threesomes are more common
My understanding is that women looking for threesomes with heterosexual couples were rare enough that they were called unicorns in that community. Is it simply a matter of that the demand well exceeds the supply?
Maybe something like an FMM? You’d need a bi man and a gay man who doesn’t mind the F…
Weirdly, I’ve always thought MFM to be more…threesomey? than FMF. It feels like to me that at any given moment in an FMF threesome one woman isn’t getting the whole package, even if it evens out in the end. Like some sort of serial monogamy with an observer waiting in line, or maybe a couple as a unit having sex with a woman. Then again, thinking about it, it probably isn’t necessarily that different from MFM…
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I have trouble picturing a complete sex act in which nobody orgasms.
To be frank, has happened to me a fair few times.
Maybe “intended to”?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Is "straight" a slur? "Able-bodied"? "Neurotypical"? Those, like "cis", are all neutral valance ways of describing a person as normal along some axis.
Honestly, in certain contexts I would consider those slurs. Able-bodied aside (and that probably because I don’t know that many disabled progressives), I’ve certainly heard straight and neurotypical used in the same way slurs are.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Everyone else has given pretty good explanations of this. I’ll just quote an old comment of mine:
And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.
I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.
Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...
This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.
This has been morphed to something like:
A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.
It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).
(Consider:
A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).
If I did not make it clear.)
That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.
If you’re still confused, I’d add as an addendum that not all $ATTRIBUTES are reconcilable; as such, you’re really only putting a pretty name and trying to self-justify the privileging of certain things above others.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.
Not this interpretation of the paradox of tolerance again!
For reference, the original Popperian paradox is more limited and much less explicitly progressively coded, and describes tolerance of people and ideas that refuse to be discussed.
The issue with the common misinterpretation is that it’s not much of a paradox at all.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I confess I didn’t read the entirety of your comment at first and only skimmed the top, before you got to the classical mechanics part.
That said, I would expect non-orthopods to have an even worse understanding of statics than statistics, yes!
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Is there a doctor in the house? How about a structural engineer? Someone who hasn't slept through their statics class like I did?
If you’re talking about statistics, I have bad news regarding doctors…
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
It's also rather odd because the fanzine that set the whole thing off is, well, garbage. It is genuinely not baseline competent. Setting aside all politics, it is bad even by fan fiction standards.
”Rawr.”
How on earth did people raise enough money to publish this sewer dredge?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Same for this phenomenon of gender “euphoria.” Not something I was familiar with. Then I started to get more into firearms. They’re loud, fun, dangerous machinery. They’re also male-coded as hell, and most of the women in my life wanted nothing to do with them. But when I was engaged in this stereotypical, pointless, masculine hobby…I understood.
Does that mean women who get a kick out of shooting guns are experiencing gender dysphoria at that moment?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Not very differently. Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays.
Like, this isn’t Alabama, and this is just one case, but I dunno, man.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
mother assigned at birth
I’m tempted to point out that the terminology is “assigned fe/male at birth”, which further dissociates the idea from man/woman. It’s not a great change, but I think it’s noticeable.
Maybe “assigned female parent at birth”?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
I always took “stereotype” as more a widespread belief of something associated with a category, with more than a whiff of unfairness or injustice implied.
I don’t think that contradicts what I said, though. As I said, it’s unlikely to be all intrinsic, but it’s also unlikely to be all contingent either.
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
Isn’t the western coast of Taiwan famously difficult to land troops on?
Pigeon
coo coo
1yr ago
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate.
I thought it was perfectly clear. I would put the onus on the other party in this case on being unreasonably obtuse.
I mean that even when it's just me cooking, the chicken is remarkably bad, the pork is absolutely rank for some reason, and the vegetables are stringy and bland even when I try to buy from either ethnic or higher-end grocery stores, compared to what I could do with equivalent ingredients elsewhere; and this is even more true for many (non-fancy) restaurants. I mean, seriously, what is up with your chicken? It's horrible!
(American beef is pretty decent, though.)
That isn't to say that there aren't good restaurants in the US -- I've been to a fair few -- but I don't think the food is particularly good outside of, say, New York and LA. Even San Francisco was pretty disappointing, even if it wasn't horrible.
Steakhouses and grillhouses are pretty hit and miss in my experience, and there's really only so far that I can take burgers, pizzas, doughnuts, fries, barbeque, cheesecake, etc. as "good food". Americans have managed to butcher most continenal European foods that have travelled over the pond; Italian-American is on the whole really not close in quality to Italian, for example. This goes down to individual food items, too - the bread is just better across the Atlantic, as is yogurt, as is the seafood (especially around the Mediterranean), ...
And don't get me started on the "ethnic" cuisines. Most of the Japanese food in America is a travesty (or at least it was until very recently, and I haven't had the opportunity to check in the last five years), similar with Korean food (mostly pretty shit). Most of the Chinese restaurants in SF were unimpressive; I think I thought one, maybe two Chinese restaurants were good, and maybe another handful were passable to decent? I thought SF was supposed to be a city with a high Chinese population? And I haven't even got around to most of the Malaysian or Thai food.
Put another way, America is the only place I know of where the food processing is sophisticated enough yet the average food quality is bad enough that the food in Honey Honey Boo Boo makes sense.
On the other hand, Western cuisine is good. The few times I've been to Europe the food has generally impressed me. I'm not sure why Americans can't seem to replicate it.
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