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Crowstep


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 06 08:45:31 UTC

				

User ID: 832

Crowstep


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 08:45:31 UTC

					

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User ID: 832

I recall an investigation in Australia where of the 200 or so alleged druggings, none of the women actually had rohypnol in their systems. What they did have was alcohol and other recreational drugs.

We also had a moral panic in the UK a few years ago about needle spiking (rapist stabs a woman with a syringe containing a sedative). The police confirmed there were no confirmed cases at all.

That said, our country's most prolific rapist actually did rape hundreds of young men with the drug, so it has been used for that. But I think in most cases, it's an explanation/excuse for women who get black out drunk and get taken advantage of.

People may gamble more, or less than they have done in the recent or distant past. Certainly the recent SCOTUS decision has made online gambling far more popular compared to the recent past, but thinking of men drinking in taverns in frontier, it wouldn't shock me if gambling was far more common then. Historic moralising certainly focuses on gambling to a degree which seems weird to my modern ears.

However, your point didn't argue that advertising has increased gambling rates relative to some counterfactual. You argued that:

Americans buy lotto tickets and gamble on their phone because of advertisements. Americans buy overpriced shoes and other items because of advertisements.

In contrast with:

[Engaging in] consumer activity for purely rational reasons, after a full assessment of the merits of the activity compared to alternatives, and with full knowledge of which activities produce the most happiness

Which to me implies that if it weren't for advertising and marketing, this is what they would be doing.


I'm not a sports guy myself, but aside from the gambling aspect, I think collective entertainment is basically a good thing. It's good when you and your neighbours like the same things and have a common identity and basic understanding of the world. It's good when people socialise together in person, even if it is just to watch big men throw and kick a ball. Church would probably be better for aggregate happiness and sense of community, but we work with what we've got.

Americans buy lotto tickets and gamble on their phone because of advertisements

People have been gambling since before recorded history, all across the world.

Americans buy overpriced shoes and other items because of advertisements.

People have also been engaging in conspicuous consumption since before recorded history.

I'm tempted to say 'never'. Clothing has always been an expression of identity, whether the identifying characteristic is ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, wealth, profession, religion or any others you can think of. A muslim woman who wears a headscarf does so as her everyday dress, but it is also explicitly religious/ethnic dress.

The Scottish highlanders wore kilts for hundreds of years because they were practical, but they were also aware the entire time that the lowlanders didn't wear kilts. The identity around the kilt was no doubt strengthened during the Jacobite rebellion and during its aftermath (when it was banned by the government in order to suppress highland identity). So if you want a a particular date for when the kilt became more symbolic than day-to-day, I'd say then.

I mean, you can frame national dress and national identity that way, sure. But it seems awfully uncharitable.

Is every Bavarian wearing lederhosen or a dirndl thinking about how unlike the Berliners they are? When the Japanese wear kimonos to weddings and festivals, are they mainly thinking about they're not like China or Korea?

Or is it only Scottish national dress that gets defined in this way?

Scots wear the national dress the same way every country's national dress gets worn. I can't think of a single country where the national dress is worn as everyday clothing. We all wear blue jeans and business suits as part of global culture.

Scotsmen wear kilts now, unselfconsciously and unironically. There are three main cases where they are worn:

  1. As formal dress, usually with black tie accompaniments like bow ties. Think weddings, graduations, proms, formal birthday parties.
  2. For things related to Scottish heritage, i.e. Burns Night, Hogmanay (New Year's), ceilidhs (group folk dancing)
  3. For sport, usually with thick football/rugby socks and boots, plus team jerseys

Now of course, that doesn't mean that Scotsmen wear them every day. The only guys who do that are really into their Scottish nationalism, and usually members of the underclass or hippies. I suppose because they lack status in regular society, they attach themselves to their national identity more strongly. Typically they wear something like this.

In the lowlands, kilts were never everyday dress. They were highland dress that was only adopted by lowlanders after the military threat from the highland was vanquished and the kilt was safe to become an expression of Scottish identity more broadly.

From a gut feeling, collective bargaining feels more acceptable if exploited factory workers do it than if a cartel does it. But messing with the forces of a functioning market is rarely beneficial.

A trade union is a cartel, it's just a cartel of individual employees rather than individual CEOs. The goals are the same (artificially raise prices by limiting competition).

A world without trade unions is a world where average wages are higher, employment is higher and consumer goods cost less.

I realise that I'm basically agreeing with your larger post, just pointing out that you shouldn't be afraid of taking your ideas to their logical conclusion. If rent-seeking is bad, then it's bad even if the guys doing it have working-class authenticity.

Back in my single days, I would pay for the first round of drinks, for the mating ritual.

80% of the time, she would offer to pay for the next round, which I was fine with. I don't think it was a political thing (it was too common for that). Rather, I think she was trying to avoid me thinking worse of her, which I may do if I thought she was a gold-digger or whatever.

Interestingly, if she didn't offer to pay for the next round, that was a pretty reliable signal that she'd say no to a second date.

The Motte loves long form posts about niche interests, I'm sure it would go down very well.

Well there are tons of weight loss groups full of women who do actually want to lose weight. Something like Weightwatchers comes to mind. And it's not as if fat women are turning down Ozempic and all these new drugs.

But I agree, there is something strange about approaching it like this. I would guess it's simply that most women in these groups have tried to lose weight and failed. Rather than simply resign themselves to a life of not being pretty, they'd rather try and enforce consensus in such a way that favours them.

Unfortunately, while the 'in this house we believe' approach may work with regards to public morality, it is puny in the face of human sexuality. Nobody, men or women, likes looking at fat people. And you can't shame men into finding you hot.

You will start losing weight if you calorie restrict below your consumption

Start, but not maintain, which is what we actually care about.

There is no such thing as CICO advocacy

There absolutely is, there are people engaging in it right now in this very thread, arguing that fat people are fat because they lack discipline and not because of metabolic dysregulation. You're doing it yourself (I think, your prose is a little too poetic to draw an actual position out of cleanly).

Are humans a special sort of animal? Does not every other animal gorge themselves in times of plenty and starve in times of lack?

Yes, and then they rapidly return to their weight set points, as do humans outside of the developed world. Only in the developed world do we exceed our set points and then stay there. That is the problem we're trying to solve.

As a species, we have engineered ourselves a constant state of endless plenty

'Plenty' has nothing to do with it. Look at the table here. Chinese office workers in 1983 had the same amount of plenty (that is to say, the same amount of calories) as much heavier, fatter and taller Americans in 2016. The Americans should be eating way more, or the Chinese should weigh much more. They don't because the CO part of the equation is massively out of whack among the Americans.

In Britain, the last famine was in the 1840s. After that, the country had 'engineered plenty' and yet obesity was non-existent until the latter half of the 20th century, 3-4 generations later. If obesity is caused by having too much food, what took obesity so long?

which allows us to indulge in the incredibly silly idea that eating has nothing to do with weight loss

This is an uncharitable strawman of my position. I'm not arguing that somehow the calories in obese people are being obsorbed from the air, I'm arguing that CICO is a symptom of weight gain and not a cause. You seem to be equivocating between the two positions within the same paragraph, arguing on the one hand that CICO is an immutable law of physics, and on the other that obesity is caused by humans choosing to eat more food.

To avoid us talking past eachother any more, I'll ask you this directly:

Do you think it is possible for the average obese person to return to a healthy weight and stay there by consciously limiting their calories?

That answer is not even wrong.

The problem with using the CICO tautology as weight-loss advice is that an individual cannot control calories-out (if you exercise, the body will reduce your non-exercise caloric expenditure to compensate) and cannot control calories in either, at least over the long term. People eat because their appetites tell them to, and stop eating when their appetites tell them to stop.

Going outside of this is essentially impossible in the long term for 95% of the population, which is why Biggest Loser contestants, Minnesota Starvation Study subjects and prison weight gain study subjects returned back to their set-point eventually. This is also why the entire developed world is getting fatter. We're not deciding to eat more collectively, it's that something is messing with our lipostats. I personally think it's vegetable oil, but I wouldn't be too shocked if it was microplastics, xenoestrogens or some other environmental stressor.

CICO is either one of two things:

  1. A tautology that is axiomatically true
  2. A weight loss protocol that can be tested

If it's 1 then there's no point even discussing it, tautologies cannot be wrong, by definition. If it's 2, then we can test it. We have done so, and it has failed those tests completely.

What we usually see with CICO advocates is the fallacy that this site is named after. The bailey is telling fat people 'just to eat less', the motte is retreating to the tautology when someone points that that calorie-restricting diets don't actually work.

I wasn't making a claim about the detail of the theory, merely pointing out that some version of it is the consensus among nutrition researchers, as opposed to the 'fat people decided to get fat by eating lots of food and can get skinny again by deciding to stop' which is popular among laymen.

This was the part I was referencing:

But there's a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.).

This study suggests that in 2011, about 31% of white men working in 'computing and mathematics' were obese, which is actually higher than the obesity rate for white men overall (28%).

But that's missing the point that it isn't just individual groups of people getting fat, it's the entire developed world. Look at a list of the fattest countries, does this look like a list of laziest to most disciplined countries? Are the Italians really skinny because they work harder than Chileans or Finns?

One metric that does vary massively is the proportion of the diet that consists of processed food, which is another name for food that is full of vegetable oil.

I think our positions are pretty close, although I'd be more specific. After all, tasty food existed before the mid-20th century, and any food is 'fattening' tautologically if eating it leads to obesity. People in the past ate vast amounts of calories, but their bodies handled it. Even processed food existed for hundreds of years before the obesity epidemic.

What distinguishes the modern western diet is vegetable oil. All the data on 'processed' or 'junk' food is really just looking at foods with lots of vegetable oils. Consider a big mac meal with a shake from McDonalds. There is nothing modern about minced beef, bread or pickles, nor about fried potatoes, milk or sugar. What defines it as fast food the fact that everything is fried in, or contains vegetable oils. The same is true of essentially all processed food.

The fact that vegetable oil turned up at the exact time that the obesity epidemic kicked off makes it the most plausible candidate in my mind.

It may well be embraced by fat acceptance activists, but it is also embraced by most of the field of nutrition science.

CICO, meanwhile, is only popular with laymen (who very often pair it with moral condemnation of fat people).

I don't think it's possible to look at a chart like this and conclude that what's really going on is a linear increase in laziness starting in the mid-C20th for no reason. Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population. While there are entire premodern cultures where nobody is fat at all.

CICO feels better than set-point theory in the same way that complaining about greedy landlords feels better than campaigning for YIMBY zoning reform. Most people will choose righteous outrage over real explanations if given the choice.

Has there actually been a recent resurgence in interest in astrology? Or is my gut feeling actually mistaken, and interest in astrology has actually been constant over the past twenty years?

Google Trends to the rescue!

Looks like it's been more or less flat since 2016. There was also a massive decline from 2004 to 2008, followed by a smaller decline between 2008 and 2016.

Although this survey suggests that (in America) it's more popular among young people, and that older men are particularly likely to reject it (maybe they think it's girly?). So I guess that does support your suggestion that it's having a moment among young women.

My guess is that what with all the 70s fashion (moustaches, flares, long skirts) this was only a matter of time.

Well the way to increase earnings is to get a better paying job or a promotion, there's a whole ecosystem of advice on how to do that.

If you focus more on the 'least effort' part then the answer is usually to put your money in a low-fee stocks & shares index fund, like Vanguard.

The third part, which admittedly wasn't part of your question, is to spend less money. That way you have more to invest or pay off debts.

Can you give us any information about your personal circumstances, goals, abilities etc?

I think you're talking past me. The sole point I was making was that Jews are not part of the progressive stack of oppressed identities among Cultural Marxists. Whether the Jewish-Israeli lobby is particularly powerful in the US is irrelevant.

It's possible for Jews to be considered an oppressor class by these people and also have the US government be very pro-Israel, because most Democratic congressmen are not hardcore wokes, even if they do tolerate it as an ideology.

You clearly think that Jews are too influential in American politics, fine. You're not the only guy on this forum who doesn't like Jews. But your statement that they are considered part of the progressive stack with all the other intersectional identities obviously isn't true.

The opposite, among those who play oppression games, Jews, who are a key progressive associated group and strongly as a pattern, especially the most influential Jews supporters of cultural marxism might even be the champions of being oppressed and deserving superior treatment because of this.

That was a confusing sentence to read (grammatically, I mean). But I think you meant that Jews tend to support the oppressor/oppressed dynamic, is that right?

In the latest year the powerful jewish organisations, and stakeholders have been pushing the mighty and powerful to intimitate opposition and to promote an one sided story of Jews being oppressed in the American congress.

Jewish organisations may be lobbying for their group to be considered part of the 'oppressed' coalition in America, but it isn't working.

67% of 18-24 year olds answered yes to the question 'Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?'

60% of the same age group answered yes to the question 'Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of another 250 civilians can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?'

And crucially, 79% of this cohort agree with the statement 'There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?'

That is to say, among people who believe in the progressive stack of opressor and oppressed (young people), Jews are considered more as oppressors than oppressed.

I would say that cultural marxists are those who are biased in favor of progressive favored groups, of intersectional alliance, such as blacks, Jews, women, LGBT, and more, are identitarians in favor of such groups, on the basis of deeming them oppressed.

Based on the last year's events, I can think we can comfortably say that Jews don't fall into that list. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jews haven't been on there since what, the 60s?

Among those who play the oppression olympics game, Jews are super-whites.

Pop culture is definitely much more atomised (at least for men, apparently Swiftdom has taken over like 80% of the female population). I assume it's a case of there simply being far more media, and with the distribution channels changing from central to algorithmically personal.

Young people don't build their identities around music any more. When I was a teenager, what you listened to mattered in a social sense. Now kids just have their own perfectly-tailored Spotify playlist with songs from many eras and genres.

Cinema is dead as the medium of importance, replaced by TV. But even TV is much more atomised. I'm trying to think of pop-culture quotes from the past five years that I could say in a crowded room and assume that everyone would understand. All that comes to mind is 'Hi Barbie'.

Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.

Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.

Almost all of their hard news comes directly from the newswires. They are no more or less reliable than any other paper that gets their news from the Associate Press et al, which is most of them, most of the time.

Their reputation comes from their populist-right editorials and trashy features like this. Right-wing politics plus celebrity gossip puts them in the firing line of the British PMC.