crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
30d ago
If the entirety of the funding of the Department of Education was instead given as a block grant to the state-level organizations things would get marginally better, if only for the fact that dumb progressive fads thought up by PhDs who never taught in a classroom can't be imposed from the top-down anymore.
That this approach would be true for every policy-creating federal organization is the great secret of politics.
crushedoranges
30d ago
I think in the West that we're all used to politicians to being carefully managed stage shows that Trump is genuinely an outlier. He's said and done so many ridiculous things that standard retail politics is elevated to a air of authenticity. If a guy is willing to say that Haitians eats pets and illegals have bad genes in public, then saying that he's lying that he likes cooking french fries feels like bit of a stretch.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Trump is an obese, elderly man - but that is confounded by the best healthcare money can buy. He's a teetotaler: he doesn't smoke, he doesn't drink, he doesn't use any hard drugs, as far as it is publicly known. He won't live to be 100 like Carter but he's got good odds of living another four years. He seems like the kind of man to be vigorous and active all his life, but one bad stroke or heart attack and he withers and dies in six months. Being politically active and campaigning is stemming the onslaught of dementia: retirement will kill him.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
You could fund the terraforming of Mars by leveraging the equity of the total value of the theorized real estate.
In other words, a mortgage the size of a planet.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I think the pressing issue is 'how do the F16s hold up to Chinese planes?' and 'how good the Chinese Air Force is compared to the Taiwanese?'. I believe that attempting to do a naval invasion without complete air superiority in the modern day is a messy and painful form of suicide. The carriers won't be enough, so they'll have to sorty from the mainland...
Even if China is weak at sea, if they can blow up ship decks and dockyards with bombs and missiles from aircraft, enough marines can potentially make a landing. The entire issue may be settled by the success or failure of PLA saboteurs in Taiwanese airfields.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Come on, now. It's a fig leaf. If Trump proposed 'A Muslim ban and others' everyone would still call him racist.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I don't see the difference. It feels like salami-slicing to me. You could say this about Bernie Sanders. 'Anyone who disagrees with the integrity of the process is a rebel and an anarchist' is a just-so explanation. 'It's different when we do it' is partisan hypocrisy.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
You are mistaken: the currency of economics is homo economicus, the idealized man-laborer/manager in the shape of a spherical cow. It is human beings who are the primary agents of subjective value, who give meaning and purpose to capital and the commodities it produces.
You make the mistake of looking at the top of the pyramid: and seeing that they are all old, and conflating that with power. Experience and expertise count for much but the simple fact of biological death ensures that transition of power is inevitable. Institutions, by necessity, are constantly replacing their principal agents.
Which leads back to the original premise: any organization that fails to appeal to the young (and young men in particular) will be swiftly made irrelevant. Feminists are only successful insomuch as they are able to appeal to the resources of powerful men (in the suffragette era) or abstractly through the mechanisms of taxation and policy (now.) Old, infertile women have no power over young men and must sway their younger, more beautiful counterparts to have any political power at all.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
That was my take as well: Hillary Clinton is a ghoulish power-seeker, but a competent one. If she won, she'd be a continuation of the Democratic technocrat rule.
If Kamala wins, America gets to experience its own 'time of troubles.'
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Older men have only the authority vested into them in their ability to lead younger men: either in the personal level in tribal and medieval context, or in the ideological and abstract state apparatus in the current era. Young men are the currency of science, warfare, and economics. No vigorous movement has succeeded without them.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Walz is a Elmer Fudd, as the NRA types would put it. (You can hear a groyper shout 'cuck' from the nosebleed seats.) The essential part of the critique is that if he was to be put up against the feminine imperative, made to apologize, he would give in and grovel. If he was in the Illiad, he'd be in the appendices (and be excluded from all of the abridged versions.)
The only way to be a white male in the Current Year democratic party is to be a castrato, a non-entity, and that's what he is: a non-entity.
I am of the opinion that the reason why Western cuisine sucks is that one is not allowed to enjoy it: that the foods one gravitates to when in a hurry are the ones most laden in sugars and fats and carbs. Satiety, in my opinion, is a function of digestion.
If you are making the effort to curb it, you're already ahead of the pack. You are probably one or two dietary/lifestyle changes away from maintaining at two hundred pounds (which still isn't great, but better than the median American.)
If you're prone to snacking, I can heartily recommend a popcorn machine (which, with the addition of popcorn salts, makes for a better snack than other fare.) Granted, if you slather butter and oils over it it defeats the point, but it's just an example of a thing you can do.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Uh, yes? (This feels like such an obvious answer that it feels like a trick question.)
Chinese workers have gained 35 pounds since 1983, if you check out the latest statistics. So yes, western affluence has made them fatter. As for the British, I attribute it to the general decline of cultural shaming and the rise in quality and the low price of convenience food.
But we're getting off topic.
A lot of this seems to be the lose weight/maintenance mindsets, which I do not deny does not exist, but the rule is fundamentally the same. "Must I perpetually maintain my consumption below my output, for the rest of my life?" Yes! It sucks!
But just because it's hard doesn't change the fact that fundamentally, weight gain is happening because they're eating too much relative to basal metabolism + activity. Set point theory is the kind of just-so theorizing that people laugh at evo psych for doing. It smacks of what FA activists call 'intuitive eating', ascribing all of the agency to one's body instead of willful volition. But the body can be terribly stupid. For an addict, it is almost a surety. Even if a set point did exist, it should be - in every case - overridden by what the brain knows to be a healthy and safe weight.
The human body should not be a democratic institution.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Whether or not a calorie-restricting diet in the long run works out is completely immaterial. You submit a false dichotomy. You will start losing weight if you calorie restrict below your consumption. You will gain it if it is the opposite. There is no such thing as CICO advocacy insomuch as it is an iron law of biology of which we all must obey, regardless of our intellectual pretensions.
Are humans a special sort of animal? Does not every other animal gorge themselves in times of plenty and starve in times of lack? What is the set point of a pig? A dog? A horse? As a species, we have engineered ourselves a constant state of endless plenty, which allows us to indulge in the incredibly silly idea that eating has nothing to do with weight loss.
Because the truest set point - engraved in the very laws of thermodynamics - is zero.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I think I owe you a apology.
I threw out a lot of hot flak into a sensitive topic and your reply was too heartfelt not to make a response.
We should all try to overcome our vices. It is truly a struggle that never ends.
I wish you the best of luck in overcoming yours.
And although I don't think I've quite changed my mind, I will endeavor to be more understanding in the future.
For the offense I've given you, I'm sorry.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
A little, yeah! Being a slave to bodily appetites is both unattractive and a perceived failure of my own character. It feels greatly satisfying to have a physical reminder of it.
Now, granted, I don't want to starve myself to death either. I have a epicurian taste for food. But I also want a long lifetime to enjoy such things, so the short-term discomforts will be worth the long term pleasures.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I'm going to have to go through the 'keep off that weight' dietary and lifestyle change phase eventually. I won't lie, that will probably be even more difficult than the fasting phase I'm doing right now.
But I both want and need to do it. And I hope I get through it.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Just because it's trivially true doesn't make it not a fact. Eating less will make you lose weight (or at the very least, slow down the rate of which you gain it.) You need a great deal of education to come to a different conclusion.
I'm reminded of the midwit bell curve, where the genius and the idiot agree.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
We wouldn't watch a show called '160 lb people eat healthy food in regular amounts', now, would we? :P
I believe what the West gets wrong is that it attempts to shift the pride of superiority to obviously inadequate people (and eliminate any pesky shame that came along with it.) But that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of such emotions. You should feel pride in doing something good (and shame when you do something bad.) When you give pride to the weak-willed and shame the strong you upset the incentive structure of society and chaos ensues.
Or, to put it simply, false modesty benefits no one, and false pride harms everyone. To do otherwise to spare feelings is no good.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
And here's where I have a fundamentally different worldview than yours. There's a turn of phrase... 'makes you feel superior'. That would be incorrect.
That would imply that it is a subjective, egotistic feeling rather than objective fact.
There's nothing wrong with judging people better or worse than others. That may be a mortal sin to a progressive, liberal worldview, but to me it is simply the basis of any ideology that makes meritocratic judgement of worth. If you're a fat person because you were sexually abused or have some sort of mental illness or what have you... that's a sad story, but in the end, you're still being pushed off the bridge into the path of the runaway trolley.
I probably would not survive in the governing ethics of which I prefer... and that's fine with me. But that's probably too personal to debate on, so I'll chalk this one up to a disagreement of values.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
If the threat of their imminent approaching deaths isn't enough to establish even a modicum of self control they're not really human beings, but automata who have lost their will to live. But it doesn't matter, in any case: because although they claim to have no self autonomy, they are very good at wheedling out benefits and favors from the people around them. It all smacks of bullshit in the end.
The number of people who weigh more than 600lbs is a vanishingly small number. It's not like in the Jersey Shore, where fake tanned sluts and himbos compete to be the stupidest on camera. Being very fat is comorbid with something very wrong with you and it's a pathology that is rapidly spreading in the Western world. They don't need to pick out the crazies and the exhibitionists: they just need to turn on the cameras and watch them do their distorted routines.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It is reality TV. I'm not contesting that.
But they sound exactly the same way really fat people I've talked to in real life. They behave in exactly the same way, just to an exaggerated extreme. They have the same excuses, the same denial, the same willful ignorance that will lead them - eventually - to an early grave.
One of them is my own mother.
But suppose that there really is a obese person who is well-informed, conscientious, and intelligent. Knowing that what they are doing themselves - that their diet is harmful - and then doing it anyway is no credit to them, no more than that same hypothetical person who was all that, and a heroin addict. In fact, it makes it worse.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
And for most people, that borderline is a wake-up call, yes.
I personally suffer from depression. Being fat didn't help with that. But for some people they look in a mirror and they think to themselves "I'm already fat, I might as well let myself go all the way" and that leads to all the pathologies of personality I just mentioned.
Right now, I'm going through a water fast, and it's difficult and uncomfortable. Losing weight is, in general, difficult and uncomfortable. The avoidance of discomfort and the pursuit of pleasure is the Western zeitgeist and I'd be damned if I let down my ubermenschian will to power by obeying the fickle whims of a decadent body.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Me personally having mental illness makes me profoundly unsympathetic to others in that regard. I admit it is a personal flaw that I judge such people without the characteristic liberal softness: I have seen too many people get away with baldly unsympathetic behaviour because of trauma and I never feel more sympathy when it is brought up.
Even with the caprice of reality TV, the shit they do boggles the mind. (Stranger than fiction comes to mind.) And the food addictions on display (even when they know they are being observed and filmed, like in Secret Eaters) are so shameless, it is depicting the real thing, baldly and unsympathetically.
One must imagine Kamala as a protagonist in a horror film, emptying magazine after magazine into the monster's chest to no avail, before finally throwing the empty gun at the creature in a last, desperate act of defiance before being torn to pieces.
A Hitler is many things, but being a fry cook at McDonalds is not one of them.
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