It is a key thing I do wish Americans understood—many of the urban things they like in European cities come in part from social welfare regimes that enable people to be less frantic about owning property and defending its value than Americans are.

— Dr. Boss Ladyshark 🧙‍♀️♿️♏️🐶🍿🚠👩‍🌾🚞 (@drschweitzer) February 12, 2021

That’s absoulutely the case. Many Americans have most of their wealth in a (shoddy, poorly-constructed) house and this is why they will defend it to the death.

Change those incentives, much else can change.

Why 1,200 Calories IS Enough for Some People.

I’m male, and I eat in this range — most likely closer to 1,400 calories a day but it varies a lot by day.

I’ve also increased my strength by more than double in the past two years and added in the neighborhood of twenty pounds of muscle (though my bodyweight only increased by eight pounds or so because much muscle replaced fat, changing my body composition enormously).

Trust me, if I can eat 1,200-1,400 calories a day working out harder than most people ever do in their lives, someone who is being a damn lump on a couch can do fine on that much.

“Starvation mode” and the Loch Ness Monster are very similar: things often discussed, but never actually seen.

i’m still mad about this

“this is why” my fucking ass. if you torture people with isolation then they go crazy. you don’t need a fucking scientific paper to tell you this. your experience of your own suffering doesn’t need to be mediated through Science to be legitimate https://t.co/G10ZdtmjhY

— QC (@QiaochuYuan) February 10, 2021

It’s crazy the kind of stuff the quant types get up to. I won’t make fun of her again because I like her, but one Twitter user I read was feeling the effects of altitude sickness but denied her own experience because her cheap-ass pulse oximeter showed some number on a screen that to her meant she was fine.

That’s taking the denial of one’s own reality very damn far in service of quantification — but it’s not uncommon for certain “smart kids” brought up in our poor education system.

But when you see it, from the outside, it just looks so bizarre. “Oh, I’m good, the knife only penetrated 10 centimeters and Wikipedia says my heart is at least 30 centimeters beneath the chest wall, no reason to rush an ambulance here.”

Them: Listen to doctors
Doctors: Lockdowns are unscientific, unconstitutional and harmful
Them: Not those ones, they’re “conspiracy theorists”

Them: Listen to public health officials
PH officials: Schools are safe to reopen
Them: Not those ones, they’re “conspiracy theorists”

— Kulvinder Kaur MD (@dockaurG) January 29, 2021

It has been interesting to watch so much that actually happened or is just a point of disagreement labeled as “conspiracy theory.” What a weird and bad world we’ve created.

Some people whose whole personality during the pandemic was righteously scolding people are gonna have a hard time in the next few months.

— Angie Schmitt🚶‍♀️ (@schmangee) February 10, 2021

Nah. They are going to keep scolding. Many of them will be pushing for continued lockdowns next year, and the year after that too. Will probably get their wish. They are absolutely loving this. It’s their dream, presaging us encased in pods, not emitting carbon, subsisting on bugs and cockroach milk while they merrily scold those of us who don’t like it as “gramma-killers.”

So no, this will be a strain of thought and being for a while. They will argue that while any Covid (or whatever excuse they find next) exists in the world, we must remain at home, terrified, for everyone else’s good.

No thanks. We must resist and shame these people and resist lockdowns in general.

I cannot emphasize enough how fucking detrimental the liberal “even after the vaccine, everyone still must hide away from the world forever” doomsaying is to vaccine uptake.

It’s not even true. But it sure sounds good to prove your “hide inside forever” bona fides.

Most people want the vaccine so the world can return to some semblance of normal. Absent that, why fucking bother?

Maybe the reason Joss Whedon ever seemed “feminist,”
the reason he was writing “feminist” stories that seemed visionary, is because his worst impulses sounded a lot better when Sarah Michelle Gellar said them.

— H Kapp-Klote (@pizza4justice) February 11, 2021

This is just a completetely ahistorical and ignorant take. The main difference is just cultural change. I’m no huge fan of Whedon, but what made Whedon seem feminist in the late 1990s and early 2000s is that he was completely channeling mainstream feminism at the time, and the method of storytelling that was prevalent then. He was more creative than most and a bettter dialog writer, but that’s essentially true.

Now that culture has shifted significantly, he has become some demonic figure who secretly hated women (despite having more of them in his shows than any person before him), and uniquely deserving of ridicule.

This more deeply is about who gets to control the narrative and if characters are allowed to be complex. These days, characters must parrot woke slogans like some robot, and if you’re a man who writes any young female character or anyone who is not exactly like you, it’s considered abuse. Whedon’s characters had convoluted motiviations, didn’t always do what was best for themselves or others, and didn’t necessarily hold all the latest (especially for now) bien-pensant opinions. And when they got power, they abused it, as people do, even if they were young and female.

Unlike now, all that was not a huge offense during the late 90s and early 2000s. Now that we’ve launched into re-segregation, except from the left direction, these are huge blunders to most. I do truly miss when characters could be complex and not woke-bots, though. Most art is now is dreadfully boring since the woke pseudo-revolution.