Funny Events of the "Woke" world

[Trunkage]

Cultural Marxist, yeah. Nobody seems to know what that means. But capitalist, eh, that one is easier to apply to people.

Nominally, Capitalists are meant to hold the means of production but also likes to go on about fair rules (Rules of Law and Property Rights). So anyone trying to warp the laws to their own favour aren't actually Capitalists

Eg. Disney warping IP laws to their own benefit. Or Musk getting billions in government contracts. Bezos changing workers rights. These are not Capitalists.

Igor et al just claim they are Capitalists so no one looks at what they are doing. It's like the opposite of claiming someone is Comminist and is generally as false.

It's just people playing Identity Politics to score extra money

 

[Ag3ma]

They are facts.

They are not.

For instance, you eat sugar. I eat sugar. Everyone eats sugar. There is sugar in plants - veg and fruit and grains, and fungi, and meat, fish, milk, eggs, dairy. It is all but impossible to eat a meal without consuming sugar, which is true for us and all our ancestors going back millions of years, and our pre-human primate / mammal ancestors going back millions of years before that. You are effectively saying we are all, and have always been, poisoning ourselves, because we eat sugar.

It is a fundamentally stupid argument.

By the same token, you can also kill yourself by drinking too much water. So water is a poison. So why not go around saying water is a poison as well? Not just water, but fats, and carbohydrates, and proteins, and vitamins. They're all poisons. Our entire diet is nothing but poison. It's even worse than that, because oxygen is a poison, too. So every breath you take, you absorb poison as well.

 

[Gergar12]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/12/us/joel-osteen-lakewood-church-shooting-monday/index.html

While I generally don't believe mass shootings are the best way to solve political problems, I am glad only a few people were hurt here, and I am even gladder that organized religion is getting less, and less power.

Again organized religion is a cope. There is no afterlife, and there is likely no simulation, you die, and the church/mosque/whatever scammers who scammed you to go to church will have their children inherit their property from your time and money. I do love the community aspect of it, but they should be replaced by community centers.

If you are a young stupid person and you fall for this you are either an idiot or indoctrinated by your friends and family.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Nominally, Capitalists are meant to hold the means of production but also likes to go on about fair rules (Rules of Law and Property Rights). So anyone trying to warp the laws to their own favour aren't actually Capitalists

I can honestly say that I've never heard that one before.

 

[Ag3ma]

I can honestly say that I've never heard that one before.

I think the idea here is that "capitalist" can have a dual meaning as a) one of the economic elites who owns companies, and b) someone who ideologically believes in capitalism as an economic system. Then we get into the fact that what is good for a business is not necessarily good for capitalist, free-market practice and vice versa. Therefore, on numerous points, (a) and (b) may tend to have divergent opinions.

As an example, a capitalist businessman would likely favour removing regulations that impede his business's ability to money, but would support regulations that form barriers to competition to his business. A believer in the free market might favour some of the former regulations to avoid abusive and exploitative market practices, and be against the latter regulations to help spur competition.

 

[Thaluikhain]

I think the idea here is that "capitalist" can have a dual meaning as a) one of the economic elites who owns companies, and b) someone who ideologically believes in capitalism as an economic system. Then we get into the fact that what is good for a business is not necessarily good for capitalist, free-market practice and vice versa. Therefore, on numerous points, (a) and (b) may tend to have divergent opinions.

As an example, a capitalist businessman would likely favour removing regulations that impede his business's ability to money, but would support regulations that form barriers to competition to his business. A believer in the free market might favour some of the former regulations to avoid abusive and exploitative market practices, and be against the latter regulations to help spur competition.

Oh, right, that makes sense.

Though, I've not spotted any business owners that support the free market when it works against them. Maybe they exist roaming somewhere in the wilderness away from built up areas.

 

[tstorm823]

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/12/us/joel-osteen-lakewood-church-shooting-monday/index.html

While I generally don't believe mass shootings are the best way to solve political problems, I am glad only a few people were hurt here, and I am even gladder that organized religion is getting less, and less power.

Again organized religion is a cope. There is no afterlife, and there is likely no simulation, you die, and the church/mosque/whatever scammers who scammed you to go to church will have their children inherit their property from your time and money. I do love the community aspect of it, but they should be replaced by community centers.

If you are a young stupid person and you fall for this you are either an idiot or indoctrinated by your friends and family.

I'm a pretty pragmatic person, I'm inclined to look at the results of things. The religious people I interact with would all say that mass shootings just aren't a way to solve political problems. If their beliefs lead to that conclusion, and your beliefs lead to whatever you just said there, I'm inclined to see our beliefs as 1000x more rational.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

They are not.

For instance, you eat sugar. I eat sugar. Everyone eats sugar. There is sugar in plants - veg and fruit and grains, and fungi, and meat, fish, milk, eggs, dairy. It is all but impossible to eat a meal without consuming sugar, which is true for us and all our ancestors going back millions of years, and our pre-human primate / mammal ancestors going back millions of years before that. You are effectively saying we are all, and have always been, poisoning ourselves, because we eat sugar.

It is a fundamentally stupid argument.

By the same token, you can also kill yourself by drinking too much water. So water is a poison. So why not go around saying water is a poison as well? Not just water, but fats, and carbohydrates, and proteins, and vitamins. They're all poisons. Our entire diet is nothing but poison. It's even worse than that, because oxygen is a poison, too. So every breath you take, you absorb poison as well.

Eating more than a rather minimal amount of sugar per day does slowly kill you. Sugar from an orange vs orange juice are quite different for how you body processes it.

 

[Ag3ma]

Eating more than a rather minimal amount of sugar per day does slowly kill you. Sugar from an orange vs orange juice are quite different for how you body processes it.

Consuming an excess of sugar is a risk factor for numerous health problems, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc. These then to be considered in conjunction with other factors (genetic, environmental, lifestyle / activity, diet, etc.)

Typically, organisations suggest no more than 10% (some as low as 5%) of calorie intake to be "added sugars" - so 200 calories (~50g) for an average woman and 250 calories (~60g) for an average man daily. Mileage may vary, depending on various factors such as the aforementioned.

Contextually, a 330ml can of Coke is ~40g sugar and a 50g chocolate bar ~25g sugar. So there's plenty of room to enjoy a bit of sweet stuff in moderation, and I wouldn't worry about the occasional (like, weekly or rarer) sugary blow-out.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Consuming an excess of sugar is a risk factor for numerous health problems, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease etc. These then to be considered in conjunction with other factors (genetic, environmental, lifestyle / activity, diet, etc.)

Typically, organisations suggest no more than 10% (some as low as 5%) of calorie intake to be "added sugars" - so 200 calories (~50g) for an average woman and 250 calories (~60g) for an average man daily. Mileage may vary, depending on various factors such as the aforementioned.

Contextually, a 330ml can of Coke is ~40g sugar and a 50g chocolate bar ~25g sugar. So there's plenty of room to enjoy a bit of sweet stuff in moderation, and I wouldn't worry about the occasional (like, weekly or rarer) sugary blow-out.

That's like double what you should have. The problem isn't the recommendation, it's the people don't follow it because other recommendations are contrary to that and they think they are actually eating well (if you can't have fat, then where do you think the flavor is gonna come from?). People drinking their morning cup of coffee (AKA dessert in a cup) is already flying past the recommendations and they haven't even had a meal yet in the day. The combination of tons of sugar and tons of polyunsaturated fats (standard American diet) is a disaster waiting to happen with a decades of one of more chronic conditions on the road there.

To keep all of this in perspective, it’s helpful to remember the American Heart Association’s recommendations for sugar intake.

-Men should consume no more than 9 teaspoons (36 grams or 150 calories) of added sugar per day.
-For women, the number is lower: 6 teaspoons (25 grams or 100 calories) per day. Consider that one 12-ounce can of soda contains 8 teaspoons (32 grams) of added sugar! There goes your whole day’s allotment in one slurp.

 

[Ag3ma]

That's like double what you should have.

Should... in order to accomplish what?

The problem isn't the recommendation, it's the people don't follow it because other recommendations are contrary to that and they think they are actually eating well

Sure. Getting people to eat healthily is often difficult. Getting people to eat healthily in a society that vigorously opposes government intervention even harder.

 

[crimson5pheonix]

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Should... in order to accomplish what?



Sure. Getting people to eat healthily is often difficult. Getting people to eat healthily in a society that vigorously opposes government intervention even harder.

To not get insulin resistance, diabetes, inflammation, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, etc.

Government intervention is the problem. If you do the opposite of what the government says, you'll eat healthy.

 

[Ag3ma]

To not get insulin resistance, diabetes, inflammation, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, etc.

This is a numbers game. Let's imagine John Doe has a 2% chance of developing diabetes (T2) by 60. Eating 60g of added sugar a day instead of <30g will increase his chance of diabetes by 10%. Which means John Doe will have a 2.2% chance of developing diabetes instead of 2%. John Doe might well decide he prefers his daily can of Coke... and who can blame him?

Government intervention is the problem. If you do the opposite of what the government says, you'll eat healthy.

No, the problem is exploitative companies that fill their products with mildly addictive fats and sugars, or more harmful fats and sugars than alternatives (because they are cheaper), and then advertise the living crap out of them to get people to buy them. They know perfectly well the diet they are pushing is ruinous to public health. They then heavily lobby the government to not apply sugar taxes, fat taxes, or even to prevent clear nutritional guidance labelling for consumers, and they do this because it gets in the way of their profits.

And every time the government thinks to do something to improve health, it's always the same voices: "nanny state" telling free people what to do accusations from the right, bogus bullshit think tanks and "science" invented on the back of junk food money to pretend a McDs every day is totally fine. When your government decided to call pizza a vegetable (well, had toppings equivalent to a vegetable portion) it did so because companies lobbied the crap out of it to do so. You need to ignore your government only in the sense of needing to prevent gross distortions caused by the outsize influence of the rich and corporations. If you actually let the do-gooders legislate, you'd probably be much better off.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

This is a numbers game. Let's imagine John Doe has a 2% chance of developing diabetes (T2) by 60. Eating 60g of added sugar a day instead of <30g will increase his chance of diabetes by 10%. Which means John Doe will have a 2.2% chance of developing diabetes instead of 2%. John Doe might well decide he prefers his daily can of Coke... and who can blame him?



No, the problem is exploitative companies that fill their products with mildly addictive fats and sugars, or more harmful fats and sugars than alternatives (because they are cheaper), and then advertise the living crap out of them to get people to buy them. They know perfectly well the diet they are pushing is ruinous to public health. They then heavily lobby the government to not apply sugar taxes, fat taxes, or even to prevent clear nutritional guidance labelling for consumers, and they do this because it gets in the way of their profits.

And every time the government thinks to do something to improve health, it's always the same voices: "nanny state" telling free people what to do accusations from the right, bogus bullshit think tanks and "science" invented on the back of junk food money to pretend a McDs every day is totally fine. When your government decided to call pizza a vegetable (well, had toppings equivalent to a vegetable portion) it did so because companies lobbied the crap out of it to do so. You need to ignore your government only in the sense of needing to prevent gross distortions caused by the outsize influence of the rich and corporations. If you actually let the do-gooders legislate, you'd probably be much better off.

Again, there isn't a massive increase in diabetes because people are drinking a single can of Coke a day. People are consuming so much sugar, they have basically a 100% chance of developing diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is a completely avoidable disease (outside probably very rare circumstances).

The government was the one that told them to remove fat. Thus, to make food taste good, they had to put sugar in it then. Why do you think there's skim milk at all? It's an unhealthier milk that people were told is healthier. I'm not saying the food companies are innocent by any chance, but it was the government that started it by telling them fat is unhealthy and thus we got tons of added sugars and companies started using trans fats (the fake butter was said to be healthier by the government, not food companies) and vegetable fats/seed oils. The heart healthy checkmark on foods is a joke, the foods that get it are the opposite of heart healthy. This was all done by the do-gooders. Also, the food pyramid that I grew up learning was basically the opposite of what to eat.

And the do-gooders are trying to say that the beyond/impossible meats are healthy alternatives to burgers. It was like impossible to make the standard fast food combo meal less healthy, but the do-gooders found a way somehow by replacing the one good thing in the whole meal with something that's super horrible for you.

And yes, I know, the food companies do lobby for worse school lunches and all that. But again, it was the government that started it all. The message for eating healthy is actually super simple, just eat real foods, that's all whether it's a burger or lettuce or an egg. 2 of those 3 things got vilified as unhealthy by the government.

 

[Silvanus]

People are consuming so much sugar, they have basically a 100% chance of developing diabetes.

That's odd, I could've sworn quite a few people don't have diabetes.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

That's odd, I could've sworn quite a few people don't have diabetes.

Really? That wasn't me saying literally everyone eats too much sugar. But there are tons of people that do and are on track to get diabetes if they don't change their diet. There's about 120 million people in the US with diabetes or pre-diabetes, that's over a 3rd of the population. It's a disease (Type 2) that is completely avoidable too.

 

[Ag3ma]

The government was the one that told them to remove fat.

The government told them to cut out fats ahead of sugar because an arrogant nutritionist (Ancel Keys) and his proteges had managed to install their (inaccurate) fat-centric hypothesis as pre-eminent in nutritional circles, and so when the government checked about what should be done about diet to help improve heart disease outcomes in the 80s, that's what the science pointed to at the time.

That's just not the fault of the government.

Now the wheels of science have turned (i.e., Keys' proteges have retired or died and lost their grip over the field), governments have duly noticed and switched attention to sugar. This is all as it should be.

Again, there isn't a massive increase in diabetes because people are drinking a single can of Coke a day.

Right. But there's a lot of sugar in Coke. And if it's okay to chug a can of Coke every day, you surely understand what I mean when I say there is actually significant tolerance for sugar consumption and calling it a "poison" is misleading and an exaggeration.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

The government told them to cut out fats ahead of sugar because an arrogant nutritionist (Ancel Keys) and his proteges had managed to install their (inaccurate) fat-centric hypothesis as pre-eminent in nutritional circles, and so when the government checked about what should be done about diet to help improve heart disease outcomes in the 80s, that's what the science pointed to at the time.

That's just not the fault of the government.

Now the wheels of science have turned (i.e., Keys' proteges have retired or died and lost their grip over the field), governments have duly noticed and switched attention to sugar. This is all as it should be.



Right. But there's a lot of sugar in Coke. And if it's okay to chug a can of Coke every day, you surely understand what I mean when I say there is actually significant tolerance for sugar consumption and calling it a "poison" is misleading and an exaggeration.

That's not really what the science said back then either when you actually looked at everything. Keys just like most people like to be right about things and cherry-picked data that agreed with his stance. It was the government and/or those people (Keys and Co.) that caused the food companies changing their food. They were the do-gooders, both Keys and the government intended to do good. People to this day still think fat is bad for you (my mom's doctor told her to not eat eggs when eggs are super healthy). Just yesterday at work, a BBQ place was brought up as a lunch option and one of the guys commented about wanting to eat healthy, and I'm like a BBQ place is one of the healthiest choices. Then they proceeded to get stuff like fried chicken, fries, and fried oreos whereas I just got half a pound of pulled pork (no bread) and a soup.

They have generally said sugar is bad but so many foods have added sugars (because of the war on fat) and people have no clue. Or the fact that anything grain-based is most likely worse than sugar (but cereals get the heart healthy checkmark) as refined grains are higher on the glycemic index than table sugar. Here's the AHA telling people that saturated fat is still bad for you and to eat grains and to get low-fat diary. They are telling people to eat very unhealthy still. They are so obsessed with cholesterol as well when that was Keys' flawed hypothesis.

The American Heart Association Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations

A healthy diet and lifestyle are the keys to preventing and managing cardiovascular disease.

www.heart.org

Saturated Fat

Eating too much saturated fat can raise the level of LDL(bad) cholesterol in your blood.

www.heart.org

The American Heart Association recommends limiting saturated fats – which are found in butter, cheese, red meat and other animal-based foods, and tropical oils. Decades of sound science has proven it can raise your “bad” cholesterol and put you at higher risk for heart disease.

Overdosing on sugar is super easy with the standard American diet. A can of Coke a day isn't killing people but just the average fast food combo is a Coke larger than a can (with free refills) plus the bread from the burger and the polyunsaturated fats from the fries (super dangerous combo). Then people usually have a "dessert in a cup" coffee in the morning as well. And we haven't even touched what they drink the rest of the day or foods from breakfast or dinner. A large percentage of the population is consuming poisonous levels of sugar everyday.

 

[Silvanus]

Really? That wasn't me saying literally everyone eats too much sugar. But there are tons of people that do and are on track to get diabetes if they don't change their diet. There's about 120 million people in the US with diabetes or pre-diabetes, that's over a 3rd of the population. It's a disease (Type 2) that is completely avoidable too.

OK, so some context for this. Firstly, about 38m Americans have diabetes (~36m type 2, ~2m type 1). That's just over 11%.

About 98m Americans have pre-diabetes. That's about 1 in 3. About 5-10% of those with prediabetes will progress to becoming diabetic. It is (usually) reversible and calls for changes in diet.

Link for diabetes rate.

Link for pre-diabetes rate.

Link for conversion rate from pre- to diabetes.

So yes. There's a major issue with sugar consumption, and diet in general, in the United States. But none of this is helped by inane statements like Americans are "basically 100% sure to get it", or just ridiculous absolutist stuff about sugar in general. Let's talk without hyperbole and with accuracy, eh? It's an important enough topic to warrant it.