All this talk about the influence of Russia & unions on politics, and yet absolute silence regarding the influence of corporations

— syd🌹🌱 (@SydneyAzari) August 9, 2018

She is the smartest person I’ve found on Twitter lately. And shares the moniker of my favorite fictional spy. I don’t agree with all of her ideas or positions, but dammit, at least she’s thinking. That is much more than I can say for the vast majority of my fellow humans.

The conventional wisdom is that you cannot tickle yourself. Yet, I can do this pretty easily. I don’t seem to have any enormous neurological deficits (despite what some ex-girlfriends might say) so I am not sure what that means, exactly.

Well, yes, that was the whole point of the entire movie, really.

What’s odd about that movie is really not a single neoliberal standard issue pseudo-feminists understood it. I am not sure what that means, fully, but it was clarifying.

Of course, most people’s analysis is shallow because most people are pretty shallow. This willful misunderstanding was something different, though. Narrative lock-in is interesting, and it explains a whole lot about our current predicaments and our inability to solve them.

That film is a good assay if you are capable of thinking on your own or not. Better than most, that’s certain.

The below screenshot is why you must learn to think for yourself. Not only is it more fun (if more work) but it’s also far more profitable. I bought AMD 80% ago, as I documented here.

When you follow the herd, all you see are asses. It’s too late when Goldman or some other analysis firm “upgrades” a stock. The action’s already done, most likely, and smart players have already made their money.

BTW, I also bought Amazon before it went up 915% when literally everyone said it was a bad buy. I love bad buys like that! Plan to make many more in the future.

Proof (highlighted in yellow) from the ol’ stock tradin’ account:

If you’re following the herd, you’re too goddamn late.

The left’s obsession of late with transgender people and trans issues is worthy of study. Trans people constitute about 0.6% of the US population — so are a tiny minority.

Obviously, they deserve the same rights as everyone else, but why this obsessive focus on such a small population where any gain in rights will have only minimal effect? If you’re thinking it has something to do with the ideology of neoliberalism, you’re heading the right direction. Increasingly granular “choices” must be defended at all costs under such an ideology, and all of life treated as a consumer behavior. This includes not only the supposed choice of deciding one is not the correct gender but that there must be such a strong delineation of gender in the first place, and that altering it is just a matter of changing one’s mind and then buying all of the accoutrements associated with the “opposite” gender.

Perversely, this also means that neoliberal feminism recognises gender inequality while simultaneously denying that socioeconomic and cultural structures shape our lives. In an article I can’t now find, there was also the perspicacious observation that there is a double movement where gender is blurred together or sharply delineated, depending on which approach allows for the most profit under the neoliberal order.

All of the strange concentration on transgender issues when much of the rest of the world is literally burning down around them, then, is an ideal focus from a marketing and profit perspective — it concentrates attention (as with the plastic bag and straw ban) on politically and socially inconsequential areas, while the great crimes go unexamined and uncontested. Additionally, it increases profits as consumption is doubled or tripled for a class of people that, while small, receive enormous attention thus further strengthening the ethos that ideology is most properly displayed and declared in the form of consumption preferences.

Well, here’s a total retcon. The Ford Mustang was originally heavily targeted at women. There’s a reason why in the old ad they’ve actually included with their text that the woman is gazing admiringly at the Mustang while the man looks at the woman:

If you don’t believe me check here — there are many, many other sources if you don’t like that one.

That’s the reason that still today, the Mustang is the only sports car of which half the buyers are women.

I see fat celebrationists cite the Minnesota Starvation Experiment all the time on Tumblr and other eating disorder apologist sites* and of course their understanding of it is completely wrong or utterly misleading as the conclusions they think have been reached were not what they study actually found.

Like this garbage.

First of all, the participants were fed a very restricted diet — and I don’t mean (just) calorically. They were fed bread, potatoes, turnips and food like that to match what the people in the throes of WWII had available to consume. In case you don’t know, that means that they were not getting adequate basic nutrients and thus would experience enormous nutritional deficiencies due to lack of protein, niacin, etc. And what does your body do when it lacks protein? Shockingly, it breaks down your muscles to subsist.

Second, the participants were expected to walk or run 22 miles a week (in addition to their normal routine) and burn at least 3,000 calories a day. I know that no house-sized tumblrite re-blogging this burns 3,000 calories a day or walks 22 miles a week. Maybe 22 miles a year. So how is it relevant to them?

Look, I know everyone wants to be considered a perfect little paragon of virtue after eating a whole ice cream factory and dying of diabetes-related gangrene and sepsis at 53, but the world won’t work that way and in my opinion it should not. Citing studies you don’t understand and have hardly read anything relevant about won’t help your cause. It just makes you look like an idiot outside of your little group.

Also, I eat somewhere between 1,200 to 1,400 calories a day and have for many years now (about 10) and I am just fine — because unlike the participants in that study, my diet is fairly well-balanced and I don’t generally burn 3,000 calories a day (which is a huge amount, by the way).

Tumblr FA types are like the flat-earthers of nutrition and diet, but actually have less understanding comparatively.

*Weighing 300+ pounds is an eating disorder just as much as being anorexic.

Researchers suggest we could tip into a hothouse Earth—here’s what that means.

It means bad things, man.

When I was younger, I had little sympathy for nor understanding of religious or even spiritual people. I just couldn’t grasp why someone would want to contaminate their minds with such obvious falsehoods.

But life asks so much and takes so much along the way. In the end, it takes everything. Now I understand more the spiritual urge. No, this isn’t some conversion. Religion wouldn’t have comforted me when I was young and it’s never something I’ll be involved in. All of the people who tormented me when I was young claimed to be Christians. Every single one. Religion and spirituality in general is simply not for me for that and a host of other reasons.

I can comprehend now, though, why someone would be interested in those things. Even more so now that I’ve gotten past the scientific attempted obfuscation and normalization of just how strange our universe is and realized how nonsensical is its actual operation (and no, STEM types, just because the universe might be deterministic doesn’t mean that it’s any less weird). When you understand quantum mechanics and related, the universe is unbearably odd, even absent any mysticism.

With what life demands and the explanations it gives (none), seeking for something comprehensible that is more than the howling void makes sense to me. I have doubts of finding it, but I see why you’d want to look.