Crowstep
8mo ago
I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.
Crowstep
12d ago
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Crowstep
8mo ago
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
Crowstep
5mo ago
'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.
If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.
Crowstep
8mo ago
Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.
I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Crowstep
7mo ago
It's a shame you can't read the article, because yes, the accuser handed over her file from the rape crisis centre to the Times.
All the factual claims in the article (except the he said she said stuff obviously) has been verified by the journalists as far as I can tell.
Crowstep
11d ago
I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I wonder if part of the strategy is just making (remaining) Gaza even more densely populated. We know urban living reduces birth rates. A more densely populated strip should spend up the birth rate decline.
Crowstep
8mo ago
'Eat more and move less' doesn't actually work. We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work. If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term. Just Google 'long term weight loss study' and you'll find pages and pages of evidence showing that even among the small number of people who successfully lose weight, almost all of them gain it back. Dieting and/or exercising for weight loss does not work. Cruelty is pretending that fat people lack the moral fiber necessary to lose weight when actually, nobody can do it (barring a tiny number of outliers).
We do not control our appetites, we do not control our metabolisms, we do not control how our body partitions nutrients. We can temporarily override our appetite and consciously try to burn more calories through exercise, but ultimately the body's lipostat wins. Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control. If self-control were really the issue, then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.
Or, it could be because we introduced massive amounts of an agricultural waste product into our diet in the mid-20th century that doesn't have the same nutrient profile as anything humans have eaten in our evolutionary history.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Putting on my lateral thinking hat, couldn't you just...cheat on her?
Obviously, breaking up with her would be dumb and you would regret it. But you also say that you're currently long distance. Some carefully planned infidelity could scratch your casual sex itch and hopefully make you realise how little you're missing out on.
Of course, you would be betraying your girlfriend's trust, and there is a risk that you get caught even if she doesn't live near you. I suspect that your 'sleepy conservative hometown' isn't overflowing with loose women, and if you are religious then, as you say, the Bible is pretty clear on infidelity.
It goes without saying that if you do listen to the suggestion from the devil on your shoulder some asshole on the internet, you should never tell her or anyone else.
Crowstep
6mo ago
I was speaking more in the HBD-sense. Hong Kong and Singapore have Chinese people, with an average IQ of ~110. Levant Arabs have average IQs in the low-80s. Maybe the Gazans would be able to carve out a niche like some of the Gulf states have, but they'd have to do it without oil and gas wealth to kickstart the process.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I think they're the cause of the obesity epidemic and the main cause of chronic disease.
Crowstep
7d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents
Looks like the present tense to me. I assume that you're retreating from your original claim then? Unless you're willing to be even a tiny bit specific about who you're talking about I can't see how it is possible to have a meaningful discussion.
Crowstep
8mo ago
You're not really addressing the argument I'm making. If weight loss is simply a case of choosing to eat less and choosing to move more, why does all the literature show that dieters regain their weight in the long term? According to your model, they must be choosing to lose weight through dieting and then choosing to regain more than they lost? Why do people who lose significant weight have permanently lowered metabolisms, and burn fewer calories than we would expect for their size? Why did the entire planet suddenly start getting fat in the 70s?
Calories in, calories out isn't a prescription for weight gain or loss, it's a description of it. It's like someone asking why the bar gets full on Saturday night and responding with 'more people enter than leave'. You're describing weight gain, but you're not explaining why it happens.
Look at this chart, what do you think caused the massive inflection?
Crowstep
8mo ago
If you look at the chart Trends in Daily Calories from Major Food Groups on this article, you'll see that vegetable oil consumption per capita has almost tripled since the 1960s. There are dozens of other sources online saying the same thing. Literally nobody is arguing that vegetable oil consumption has fallen. The only debate is whether the gigantic increase in vegetable oil consumption has anything to do with the gigantic increase in obesity that happened at the exact same time.
Meanwhile both sugar and grain consumption has actually been falling since the late 90s.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I personally agree with Richard Hanania. I think unions are just another form of cartel that we tolerate because their average member is poorer than the average CEO. But much like rent control, allowing unions is a policy that has greater costs than benefits.
No, he's not, he's an object lesson in why you don't go to a corrupt shithole under military rule by Nazis and start advocating for the country they're in a state of total war with.
Nazis? Do you believe that Zelensky is a Pythonesque Jewish Nazi or are you using the Russian government's definition of Nazi?
Crowstep
4mo ago
They're fighting to not be genocided
Crowstep
7mo ago
False rape accusations certainly happen. A schoolfriend of mine had one made against him before the judge threw it out of court, as the accuser kept changing her story.
But you don't need to have a strong opinion on whether false accusations are common or rare to examine the merits of this case. We can just look at the specifics. And based on the Times article linked, I think that most or all of the accusations are true. Specifically, the woman who attended a rape crisis centre immediately after the alleged assault (which can be verified). If her accusation was false, you would have expected her to make the accusation at the time, rather than only revealing it when interviewed by a journalist years later.
Brand is a (self-confessed) sex addict, and has slept with a lot of women. It's easy to imagine him getting so used to women saying yes that he crosses the line into sexual assault.
Crowstep
6mo ago
By the by, Latinos hate the use of the x suffix. If you're looking to speak on their behalf, you'd best start with not using a meme that is essentially an implicit attack on their language.
Crowstep
7mo ago
I'm pretty sure this is just secure signals getting around his ban. OP hasn't responded to a single comment on his post, and the post bears the hallmarks of trying to smuggle in pro-holocaust messaging without explicit calls to action.
Seriously, who here cares that pre war Slovakian Jews were an economically dominant minority?
If they say "I prefer Whites to Asians and Asians to Africans", it requires a lot of mental gymnastics to explain how that's not just racism.
You're making the worst argument in the world.
The central example of 'racist' is a neo-nazi who yells racial slurs and innocent passers-by. You're purposefully conflating this (terrible) behaviour with the far more reasonable behaviour of having a preference over the type of immigrants ones country imports.
Crowstep
7d ago
Well, we don't live in pods, nor do we eat bugs. I'm not sure how being able to walk to work counts as a 'cage' but whatever. Falsified, I guess?
But you haven't answered the key question. Who are these malicious actors? What evidence do you have for their exitence or motives?
I wondered how long it would take for this to be about Jews. You never fail to disappoint.
As far as I can tell, you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt, despite his noble physiognomy and the fact that they are 'short, weak, ugly nerds'. Am I getting that right?
I would worry about this being an uncharitable take, except for the fact that you cannot stop posting about how Jews are bad.
Have I misinterpreted the post? Could you summarise your thesis in a sentence?
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