Year: 2019

Ording

Chill Uncategorized

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but agreed. Countries aren’t the same as homes, but in many important senses they are. I’m wary of analogies that conceal more than they reveal but in this case it works. Open borders is an idea that can only function non-destructively with roughly similar cultures, level of development and social welfare systems. Otherwise, a lot of that will get destroyed.

Shifting It

Chill Regular-ass Post

A lot of people lately are thinking about what I call “new minds” and what Aurora Asknes calls “a different kind of human” and others are calling “radical cultural change.”

Despite the name, we’re all pondering the same shift. It’s necessary yet inobvious to most, despite other radical cognitive transmogrifications in human history. There’ve been 5-6 of these re-alignments by my count, with the last one being 50-100 years after the advent of the printing press.

Of course, some academic fuckwit 50 years behind the times will in the judgment of history get all the credit for “discovering” this shift, while Aurora and I will get nothing. But still, I like being right more than I like being recognized.

Pushback

Chill Uncategorized

I like that in this article there is some pushback to the Fat Acceptance child-harming trend of, “It doesn’t matter that little Sally is the size of a house. Let her ‘intuitively eat’ 20 slices of cake so she has to be rolled to the school bus every morning.”

Dr. Elsie Taveras, the division chief of general academic pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital and a specialist in childhood obesity, warned against a “none of this works” approach, asking, “What are we supposed to do with this large number of children who not just have obesity but severe obesity and its associated chronic diseases — do we not think that some changes in their nutrition are warranted? Wouldn’t you call that unethical to not offer treatment and support?”

The Fat Acceptance people, sponsored of course by the food industry, are literally criminal because of what they do to children and the vast harm they cause there, and are immoral and unethical in other ways that doesn’t stray into brute abusive criminality. The food industry execs, as with the execs of most major corporations are more to blame for their destruction of society and culture, but the FA types also bear some blame, too.

It was good to see one article not just buying into the absurd FA/food industry claims.

See Culture

Chill Uncategorized

Something that really emphasizes the impossibility of truly comprehending other cultures is that modern technologists and those interested in that area can’t even understand the culture of BBSes and shareware that existed in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. They haven’t a clue, and that was very recent and in the same field as they are currently interested in and/or working.

I lived through and participated in that BBS and shareware culture and am a current technogeek so I know just how skewed most representations of that era are. At the same time, I have no interest in writing a history of the era as that’d take just too much effort and research and I don’t have the necessary levels of nostalgia to turn it into a passion.

My larger point is that if people in the field can’t even understand something nominally in their same domain that happened less than 40 years ago, what hope do we have of understanding how the Romans or the ancient Mayans thought and lived?

My answer is that, truthfully, we do not.

Centristic

Chill Regular-ass Post

Something else that centrists said was impossible. It turns out centrists don’t know a damn thing, unsurprisingly. All that centrists believe is based on anything at all changing in any way that might inconvenience them. The rest is just rationalization.

Realizing Fit

Chill Regular-ass Post

Realizing how comparatively little work it took to propel me into the top 10% of fitness levels of my age group is a bit sad. Like, I worked hard but it wasn’t absurdly hard. Anyone without a disability (and many with one, depending) could have done this.

We expect so little of ourselves, our world, our environment, and that’s exactly what we get.