The FA community of clowns likes to make a big deal about how sometimes when someone gets sick and they lose a great deal of weight, some clueless lummox says something like, “Wow, you look so great now!”

Supposedly this “proves” how weight loss is unhealthy.

Nope.

What is proves is that being skinny — no matter the proximate cause — triggers an evolutionarily-primed (but not 100% innate) response where in the simian brain skinny == health*.

Of course this is invalid in the case of, say, a leukemia patient but your tiny simian brain doesn’t know that. Can’t tell that thing nothin’.

In reality the person saying that — though not very tactful — is having the correct response.

Weight loss 99% of the time is a good thing and leads to improved health and for nearly all of our evolutionary history (including now) that has been true.

*It should be noted that to most people now “skinny” is what many people would have called overweight/fat when I was a kid. For instance, people call me skinny at work. Though I am not fat or overweight, I’m not really skinny at all. Just nearly everyone else there is unhealthily large.

This is a good French proverb: “Les grands diseurs ne sont pas les grands faiseurs.”

Most translations aren’t very good. The best one I’ve come up with that actually feels in English like it feels in French is, “Big talkers aren’t big doers.”

As usual, I am completely divergent from my peers.

Most people my age won’t or don’t listen to newer music. And I find it increasingly difficult to listen to anything but music made in the last 10 years or so.

What have the Smashing Pumpkins or the Rolling Stones got to tell me?

Nothing. Fucking nothing. They were ascendant in a time where hope was still possible. Where it wasn’t yet obvious that we’re living in a long slow irreversible apocalypse.

Lorde and Marian Hill and the Railway Gamblers have so much more that’s relevant. To now. To me.

I don’t need nostalgia. I need the truth.

“The men up on the news
They try to tell us all that we will lose
But it’s so easy in this blue
Where everything is good”

Though I agree with nearly all of the goals of the SJWs, the reason that term has rightly become a pejorative is that there is no way to do anything correctly in their ideology.

It is at heart a religious movement, but unusually for religion one where salvation for “sinners” is not possible.

Offend — and nearly anything offends — and one is branded irredeemably evil for life, with no atonement possible and all protests of innocence or of a simple misunderstanding merely further proof one deserves still more denigration and disapprobation.

Not really my scene, thanks.

I wish I could have some Firefox extension that would somehow automatically detect if a writer lived in Brooklyn, and if so it could alert me so that I could not read that piece.

Anyone who moves to Brooklyn to be a writer is almost assuredly not a writer I want to read.

0-day attack on Firefox users stole password and key data: Patch now!

You heard ’em. Get to patching.

Science and fundamental research budgets should be much larger, and at least 20% of those funds should be spent on things that most experts assure us are “impossible.”

It is today these “impossible” technologies that we use daily.

Electricity, LEDs, lasers, airplanes, solar power, nuclear power and the internet entire among them.

When people tell me that things like AI are not possible, I just laugh because I know the history of science very well. The vast majority of people — even experts — said the same things about the technologies I listed.

After all as physicist Max Tegmark said, “Our brains are a bunch of particles obeying the laws of physics, and there’s no physical law precluding particles from being arranged in ways that can perform even more advanced computations.”

Anything that doesn’t directly violate the laws of physics I wouldn’t count humans out of being able to do at some point.

It’s strange that we’ve come to the point that many people now argue that because something is hard that it is not worth doing. Making strong AI is hard. Fixing global warming is hard. Halting senescence is hard. Averting an asteroid before it wipes out life on earth is hard.

Me, I like doing things both because they are worth doing and because they are hard. Otherwise they usually aren’t worth doing anyway.

I just can’t understand the, “Well, it’s hard therefore it’s impossible so I’ll just do nothing” mentality.

I have this strange desire to read a book I have called Computational Methods in Reactor Shielding.

Someone send help.

The fat acceptance/fat celebration and MRA/Pickup Artist communities really are remarkably similar.

Both believe people should be attracted to them no matter their horrible qualities, their disavowal of reality, or their unrealistic assessment of their own worth.

Furthermore, both subscribe to the notion that if someone is not attracted to you, you are being discriminated against somehow — and both putrid parties wish to legislate attraction even though this is doomed to failure on so many axes it would take books to write them all out.

Attraction just does not, cannot, work like that.

I’m only attracted to about 0.25% of women alive from what I can tell. That doesn’t mean that I’m discriminating against the rest in any way that they should care about. (By the same token, if a woman doesn’t like me for a partner? So what. Such is life.)

Call me picky, whatever you like, but that’s my right and anyone’s right in a sane world.

Perhaps the MRA/Fat Celebration communities could go buy an island together somewhere and fuck off from the rest of us.

As I’ve said many times before, I hate what the internet is becoming.

But as more stupid and clueless arrive and thrive, this was a predicted and predictable result.

I remember talking with a friend of mine in 1996 or so — before the DMCA, before Netflix, before most things we take for granted — that it wouldn’t be long before the internet was corporate-co-opted, sterilized and made into cable TV.

Didn’t take a Nostradamus to see that. Just a clear head.

I suspect that the internet is no longer a net force for good in society. Would society be better off it were eliminated? Probably not. But now it’s something that just is, rather than what could have been and was willingly given up.

A general rule is that when regular people start using something en masse, it’ll become terrible.

Facebook and its rise not surprisingly corresponded to the decline and fall of the useful internet.