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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4371 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I struggle to see what the point of Supersize Me was, other than being an anti-corporate applause light.

He was also a vegetarian, so was an anti-meat applause light. But really, more important than either of those by a wide margin was pwning the chuds. Morgan Spurlock absolutely hated the chuds with a burning contempt, so showing how they're so stupid and destroying their bodies while he garnered applause and profit was just the perfect project for the early 2000s style of smug liberal.

Eating a tolerably decent diet that includes lunch at McDonald's isn't hard and doesn't require doing anything weird. A McDouble and a medium fry is about 700 calories. If you're a hungry boy and must have the Big Mac and large fry, you're looking at 1100 calories.

Wasn't there a guy in the movie who'd eaten a Big Mac (no fries) every day for like 30 years and seemed fine? For me a lot of movies in this genre end up saying something slightly different from what they intend. (also the way they are interpreted by extremists on both sides of the aisle)

Another example is "Bowling for Columbine" -- Moore establishes that Canadians have lots of guns, then goes around Toronto walking into people's houses because their doors are unlocked. The logical takeaway seems to be that "has lots of guns" is mostly not correlated with "has lots of high-school shootings" or "has high crime cities", and it would be best to look elsewhere; ofc the left's takeaway as I recall was "guns are bad and should be banned" and the right's "Moore wants to take our guns, fuck him" -- so what can you do I guess?

(The difference between the two movies I suppose is that "there is something about America other than the raw number of guns that is leading to school shootings/violent crime" is a more interesting thing to notice than "living exclusively on burgers and XL helpings of fries and soda is bad for you".)

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