Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
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User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test
Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
A little project I want to do this year is try cooking an "Acherburger", that is, a meal that breaks the most kosher laws possible. There's some discussion about doing that online, but it's mostly low-effort stuff like "bacon-wrapped shrimp" etc. Lame! One can do so much more.
Here's the initial plan:
For the meat patty, combine as many treyf animals as I can. The supermarket in my city has a whole bunch, e.g. rabbit, kangaroo, alligator, even bear. I'd put a little of a bunch of them in, with the bulk being pork just so It doesn't taste too weird. Animal blood is forbidden as well; so I add a little bit of that too.
Onto this we'll add cheese, of course.
For frying, one can use suet instead of oil/butter, as that's forbidden.
Produce must be tithed before consumption, and you can't eat fruit during the first three years after planting. Outside of Israel, this isn't necessary unless you know for certain that it is the case; luckily I have a relative with a lime tree I know isn't that old, so I can add lime to the sauce and break that commandment.
Produce that may contain insects must be checked, or it is not kosher. Thus we don't do that for the lettuce, deliberately closing our eyes before putting some on the burger.
We'll eat it during the passover sabbath, so the fresh bread we'll buy is Chametz, Pat Akum, and Chadash (and of course the entire preparation of the meal is forbidden due to the sabbath). Naturally none of our utensils will be kashered either.
For the drink, we'll have wine. I have a bottle of Château Musar 2015. In addition to it being not kosher, 2015 was a Sabbath year in Israel, and since the wine is from Lebanon which counts as "Eretz Yisrael", it's not allowed. We'll also make it yayin nesech by pouring a little bit of it out in dedication to Baal. Before drinking it, I'll take a Nazirite vow to abstain from alcohol just to deliberately violate it.
The one rule I have some problem with breaking is Kil'ayim, that is "the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards [...]". This applies to Israeli produce only, and buying anything like that to make sure the seed were mixed during planting seems difficult. Sure, I can get spice mixes grown in Palestine in my local spice shop, but how can I be sure it actually broke any rule when it was grown?
Anything else I've forgotten about?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.
The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
That'd be forbidden, but it doesn't have anything to do with the actual food specifically so I don't consider stuff like that.
Also Allah, being the/a monotheistic god, is less bad than paganism! E.g. if an idol worshipper touches kosher wine it needs to be destroyed so it doesn't benefit anybody; not so if a Muslims does.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Quite right, apologies for forgetting that. I haven't yet decided on whether to post about it whenever I've finished, but if so I'd probably mention the Baal thing without actually performing it. Another good reason is that it would also be the least kosher meal that'd nevertheless be permitted to eat if it would save one's life, and involving idolatry would mess that up.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
My new-years resolution is to lose weight. I've been a bit overweight all my adult life, except when I participated in slimemoldtimemold's "only eat potatoes" community trial which worked really well. This year I'm doing it again, but just by myself. (One also saves a ton of money doing it, which helps!) The plan is to not eat anything except potatoes and vitamin supplements until Easter – except for important celebrations, like birthdays and such.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1mo ago
How about Cargoes, by John Masefield?
It has, I think, two interpretations. The first one is fairly boring – taking it "seriously" as a romantic look back at history, where he is describing two past ages filled with fanciful wonders and contrasting it with the dreary modern world
The Straussian reading is IMO vastly superior. Take the first verse, describing a ship in antiquity filled with "ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine". It's all luxury goods; pure consumption, skimming from the top without improving anything in the long run. It represents a society unwilling (or worse, unable) to reinvest its surplus wealth into growth, to actually improve itself, instead opting to spend it on awful signalling games among the elites that will lead nowhere.
The second verse is similar, but about a cargo of gemstones during the ~17th century. The same critique applies to it – it's all still signalling, with no real productivity involved.
When we get to the third verse about the modern world there is an abrupt change in mood, now ostensibly negative. What are the items the ship is carrying however? "Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays". No more useless bullshit, this is goods from a society that is actually getting its shit together. It symbolizes reinvestment, growth, and actual strength, the kind of strength that will save billions from crippling poverty, eliminate famine, cure diseases plaguing humanity for millennia and bring education to everyone.
The third verse is so overwhelmingly good that it completely destroys the veneer of negative sentiment that it's described with. Consider if the poem instead was about people and not societies: The first describing an extremely rich man hosting an opulent party, and the third about a poor boy studying and working hard to improve his life. Wouldn't it then be completely obvious who you were supposed to think was better, even if the boy was described as dirty and hungry?
What's more is that the Industrial Revolution was real. How many boats in antiquity actually carried things like "apes and peacocks"? It's certainly not representative, and the places mentioned doesn't even make sense (Nineveh wasn't coastal, a Quinquereme is Hellenistic and from the wrong period, and even so you're going to have a hard time rowing it from Iraq to Palestine!). The second verse is more "real" in that there really were treasure galleons, but again not very representative. If you want an actual cargo you'd have to describe tobacco, sugar, or, you know, slaves.
In contrast, in the third verse there really were tons of ships carrying coal and road-rail! Not only is it enormously better, it actually happened.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1mo ago
Much better than I anticipated!
I've figured that Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" could work as a Sabaton song, and it's indeed not bad.
(Also in Motown form, or 80's synth)
It it's intended to be a straightforward action/suspense movie, then it's not very good.
If it's intended to take the piss out of such movies, it's better. It's basically a John Wick type of story, but all elements being sufficiently shitty so as to just be above blatant parody. For example, there is a narration throughout the movie where the protagonist justifies his actions and puffs himself up with a sort of sophomoric "cool assassin guy" / "nothing personnel kid" persona (he literally calls civilians normies) as well making mildly unfunny quips. It's long unclear if it's just shitty writing; but in one scene his monologue is abruptly interrupted when somebody talks over him, so it becomes obvious that it's his actual internal monologue and just him being a blowhard. It just never actually blatantly winks at the audience, so you'll have to realize this yourself. (Another thing that points to this is that he constantly fucks up, especially when doing "cool ruthless assassin" things; like when he shoots nails in a guys chest during an interrogation and has an internal monologue calculating how slowly he'll die, but none of that works and he just dies instantly instead.)
Similar things are going on with the plot and character motivations; he wants to kill the people responsible for assaulting his wife (who is given the minimal amount of screen time to establish a motivation for the protagonist, and then is basically never thought of again). He leaves a pile of dead people in the wake, executing even innocent people without mercy to not leave evidence, but then in the end when he meets the big boss responsible for everything the guy gives him a piss-weak excuse of having no idea what is going on, and the protagonist just buys it instantly and lets him go.
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