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Notes -
So Morgan Spurlock has died of cancer. I don't mean to "speak ill of the dead" but is it not widely known that his biggest splash, namely the documentary Supersize Me, was based on fudged data and is considered fraudulent? Probably some obits include this, but the few articles I read were all just praise. I certainly didn't wish the man ill and I am sorry for his family.
I guess it's bad form to criticize people when they've died relatively young of a horrible disease. I just think of the legions of people who continue buy into popular pseudo-smarties like Spurlock and Malcolm Gladwell and whoever is currently big on TED, and it seems wrong to just ignore the shoddy thinking.
Even putting aside fudged data, I struggle to see what the point of Supersize Me was, other than being an anti-corporate applause light. Trying to prove that you can't live healthily on McDonalds alone is arguing against a point pretty much no one made (I know, the documentary grasps at straw to try to show otherwise, but come on). And even if someone makes it, it would have been a lot better an argument if he wasn't making up rules or making decisions during his "experiment" to guarantee he got the result he wanted. McDonalds had salads already at that time, but of course he had to get burgers all the time. Yes, sure, people don't go to McDonalds for salad, but what was his point again? Him proving that people often don't make great decisions when it comes to their nutrition wouldn't please his audience as much as "proving" giant corporations are making it impossible to eat healthy.
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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