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On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated.
The whole concept of existential vacuum seems like a myth that I have not yet seen any good argument for. It is the same thing as old people complaining how young people these days are terrible. Old people were saying that for ages and for ages there were people warning us of society coming apart and becoming unhealthy by projecting whatever personal fears they had. I am not saying you are necessarily wrong, but that if you are right the effect seems currently negligible and the concept needs more empirical backing in the first place.
As for you second point, that is one that interests me much more philosophically and empirically. It is interesting question how fulfillment of basic material needs affects individual and society. Unfortunately speculations are the best we can do at this point.
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On November 27 2013 05:28 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated. Never have individuals been more connected to one another, nor had so much to engage their interest. Your idealisation of the past has no basis in reality.
On the contrary, yesterday we all collectively agreed that we could have no useful discussion about freedom, because no one knows what it means, or to what it is supposed to relate. It may be true that most people in the world are still capable of maintaining a sense of locality to their expression, of placing their perceptions within the limitations of discrete experiences, but that is not the tendency towards which we are collectively marching.
In the broad that we are more connected to each other is true in a brute, mathematical sense, but only by way of inflation. Take a look at Tocqueville's chapter on "Of Individualism In Democratic Countries." It is fairly prophetic nearly two centuries on.
If words were food, your posts have already brought me dangerously close to daily caloric intake. If you don't see the use in having forum discussions or enjoy smugly pointing out smug, then you should probably attempt to put that burdensome syntax to use in something more productive. All of a life is a facade, life's a garden, dig it, etc.
Of course I see the point. Why do you think I bother to use peoples' own reasoning against them? I merely twist other people's thoughts into poison. That is my way of being smug.
The whole concept of existential vacuum seems like a myth that I have not yet seen any good argument for. It is the same thing as old people complaining how young people these days are terrible.
Old people always have a point, because there is no fixed point of reference for our values, we experience generational shifts where the goalposts are being constantly moved. That old people experience an irreparable cultural and moral loss when they look at the younger generations is not merely some stuffy nostalgia to be hand-waved away. The thing to do with foreign generations, as with foreign cultures is to listen. Our generation is particularly bad at doing that.
Your disbelief in the existence of existential vacuums lie on the same order of conviction as someone's disbelief in love, asexuality or altruism. It's projection based on the limitation of personal experiences, and that, my friends, is my final word on the internet as to why internet arguments are a waste of time.
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On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 13:56 Wegandi wrote:On November 26 2013 12:45 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 12:23 IgnE wrote:
[quote]
Laws are manifestations of some other's power. Slave-slaveholder relations can also outwardly be pretty peaceful. Funny how all extreme views always seem to try to equate modern society with slave-holding society on some level at least to make their tortured point. Heard it from anarcho-capitalists asking what is the difference between taxes and slavery, heard it from communists saying any hierarchical ownership is equal to slavery. Now we have this equation of laws and slavery. People love their black and white views and flawed analogies. Master-Serf makes no difference. The problem with the 'law' as is, is both the perception of the people that it is codified social engineering instead of recognition of justice and liberty, and that it is highly hypocritical (e.g. The State determines itself a monopoly on a wide range of services, but then 'outlaws' what it believes to be monopoly (having a certain % of market share), then there is the legalized thievery and barbarism of so-called Police who can beat you, kill you, etc. without provocation and then be heralded as hero's...Miriam Carey anyone?). The former is probably a bigger problem than the latter. Society today has become a cesspool of petty tyrants all wanting to legislate their personal preferences - are you the nanny-state socialist, the bible-thumper, the inquisitor, the real petty tyrant who just wants to tell others what they can do, or are you the idealistic type who wants to mold everyone into his/her version of ideal, etc. The recognition that we own ourselves, and thus have inalienable liberties that have no justification to be aggressed against is hardly to be seen in the fabric of society. The Marxists say homesteading and the liberty of trade and contract is slavery, the Socialists say you the individual are a nuisance and the collective must be served (though the collective is always headed by an individual...who usually enjoys all the benefits at the expense of the lay people), the Bible-thumpers say the Kingdom of Heaven must be brought to Earth and any transgression should be highly penalized and outlawed, and here the libertarian sits and says, hold on, none of you have any right over the body and actions of another, that the law must be for the upholding of justice as defined as a violation of individual liberty, and shut the fuck up and start worrying about your own life instead of being busy-bodies and moral-do-gooders in everyone elses. We're at a point in society where we just need to say Fuck you, your imposed systems, your hypocrisy, we're going to live our own lives and if you want a fight, we're more than ready. At least America has a tradition to look back upon...maybe we'll find that spirit once more. We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. ![[image loading]](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2013/11/oecd2.png) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free.
Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity.
On November 27 2013 05:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
You both have a point. Food companies aren't out there to make you as healthy as possible, but that's in part because of preferences for unhealthy food. Poverty used to mean not getting enough calories, now its about managing the number of calories you eat along with the satisfaction of a full stomach and yummy food.
"Preferences for unhealthy food" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210
This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942
So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process.
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On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 13:56 Wegandi wrote:On November 26 2013 12:45 mcc wrote:
[quote]
Funny how all extreme views always seem to try to equate modern society with slave-holding society on some level at least to make their tortured point. Heard it from anarcho-capitalists asking what is the difference between taxes and slavery, heard it from communists saying any hierarchical ownership is equal to slavery. Now we have this equation of laws and slavery. People love their black and white views and flawed analogies. Master-Serf makes no difference. The problem with the 'law' as is, is both the perception of the people that it is codified social engineering instead of recognition of justice and liberty, and that it is highly hypocritical (e.g. The State determines itself a monopoly on a wide range of services, but then 'outlaws' what it believes to be monopoly (having a certain % of market share), then there is the legalized thievery and barbarism of so-called Police who can beat you, kill you, etc. without provocation and then be heralded as hero's...Miriam Carey anyone?). The former is probably a bigger problem than the latter. Society today has become a cesspool of petty tyrants all wanting to legislate their personal preferences - are you the nanny-state socialist, the bible-thumper, the inquisitor, the real petty tyrant who just wants to tell others what they can do, or are you the idealistic type who wants to mold everyone into his/her version of ideal, etc. The recognition that we own ourselves, and thus have inalienable liberties that have no justification to be aggressed against is hardly to be seen in the fabric of society. The Marxists say homesteading and the liberty of trade and contract is slavery, the Socialists say you the individual are a nuisance and the collective must be served (though the collective is always headed by an individual...who usually enjoys all the benefits at the expense of the lay people), the Bible-thumpers say the Kingdom of Heaven must be brought to Earth and any transgression should be highly penalized and outlawed, and here the libertarian sits and says, hold on, none of you have any right over the body and actions of another, that the law must be for the upholding of justice as defined as a violation of individual liberty, and shut the fuck up and start worrying about your own life instead of being busy-bodies and moral-do-gooders in everyone elses. We're at a point in society where we just need to say Fuck you, your imposed systems, your hypocrisy, we're going to live our own lives and if you want a fight, we're more than ready. At least America has a tradition to look back upon...maybe we'll find that spirit once more. We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. Moreover, "unhealthy preferences" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process.
You are responding to someone else I assume as I never said what you attribute to me. If you read my post I said that food industry practices are not enough to say that we are worse off than in the past as we actually are getting healthier and live longer. We could probably be better off, but that is not argument that it was better in the past.
I have a strange feeling that you are not actually arguing with what I wrote, but with some imaginary adversary that you attributed some opinions that you want to debunk. Because more than half of your replies to my posts are not really related to what I wrote.
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United States43280 Posts
On November 27 2013 05:48 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:28 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated. Never have individuals been more connected to one another, nor had so much to engage their interest. Your idealisation of the past has no basis in reality. On the contrary, yesterday we all collectively agreed that we could have no useful discussion about freedom, because no one knows what it means, or to what it is supposed to relate. It may be true that most people in the world are still capable of maintaining a sense of locality to their expression, of placing their perceptions within the limitations of discrete experiences, but that is not the tendency towards which we are collectively marching. In the broad that we are more connected to each other is true in a brute, mathematical sense, but only by way of inflation. Take a look at Tocqueville's chapter on "Of Individualism In Democratic Countries." It is fairly prophetic nearly two centuries on. Show nested quote +If words were food, your posts have already brought me dangerously close to daily caloric intake. If you don't see the use in having forum discussions or enjoy smugly pointing out smug, then you should probably attempt to put that burdensome syntax to use in something more productive. All of a life is a facade, life's a garden, dig it, etc. Of course I see the point. Why do you think I bother to use peoples' own reasoning against them? I merely twist other people's thoughts into poison. That is my way of being smug.
You are such a garbage poster. Nothing you say has any meaning. You don't even quote the things you elude to, you never bother to frame an argument or show what you mean. You just lay on layer after layer of utter absurdity, claiming people feel more isolated than ever in the age of facebook and mass communication, that people feel more bored when they have the internet at their disposal if a hundred tv channels wasn't enough. It's just bullshit. Yes, some people feel isolated and adrift but that is not a modern condition, that is the human condition and the reason why our society has created the connectivity and content that it has. For every lonely person writing a blog about their life now there was a lonely guy a hundred years ago feeling the same way but with nobody reading his diary. Just total nonsense, like every other post you make.
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On November 27 2013 05:59 mcc wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 13:56 Wegandi wrote:
[quote]
Master-Serf makes no difference. The problem with the 'law' as is, is both the perception of the people that it is codified social engineering instead of recognition of justice and liberty, and that it is highly hypocritical (e.g. The State determines itself a monopoly on a wide range of services, but then 'outlaws' what it believes to be monopoly (having a certain % of market share), then there is the legalized thievery and barbarism of so-called Police who can beat you, kill you, etc. without provocation and then be heralded as hero's...Miriam Carey anyone?). The former is probably a bigger problem than the latter.
Society today has become a cesspool of petty tyrants all wanting to legislate their personal preferences - are you the nanny-state socialist, the bible-thumper, the inquisitor, the real petty tyrant who just wants to tell others what they can do, or are you the idealistic type who wants to mold everyone into his/her version of ideal, etc. The recognition that we own ourselves, and thus have inalienable liberties that have no justification to be aggressed against is hardly to be seen in the fabric of society. The Marxists say homesteading and the liberty of trade and contract is slavery, the Socialists say you the individual are a nuisance and the collective must be served (though the collective is always headed by an individual...who usually enjoys all the benefits at the expense of the lay people), the Bible-thumpers say the Kingdom of Heaven must be brought to Earth and any transgression should be highly penalized and outlawed, and here the libertarian sits and says, hold on, none of you have any right over the body and actions of another, that the law must be for the upholding of justice as defined as a violation of individual liberty, and shut the fuck up and start worrying about your own life instead of being busy-bodies and moral-do-gooders in everyone elses.
We're at a point in society where we just need to say Fuck you, your imposed systems, your hypocrisy, we're going to live our own lives and if you want a fight, we're more than ready. At least America has a tradition to look back upon...maybe we'll find that spirit once more. We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. Moreover, "unhealthy preferences" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process. You are responding to someone else I assume as I never said what you attribute to me. If you read my post I said that food industry practices are not enough to say that we are worse off than in the past as we actually are getting healthier and live longer. We could probably be better off, but that is not argument that it was better in the past. I have a strange feeling that you are not actually arguing with what I wrote, but with some imaginary adversary that you attributed some opinions that you want to debunk. Because more than half of your replies to my posts are not really related to what I wrote.
There, I fixed it for you. I wouldn't want to attribute to you any opinions to you that you don't explicitly assume.
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On November 27 2013 06:11 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:59 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:
[quote]
We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. Moreover, "unhealthy preferences" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process. You are responding to someone else I assume as I never said what you attribute to me. If you read my post I said that food industry practices are not enough to say that we are worse off than in the past as we actually are getting healthier and live longer. We could probably be better off, but that is not argument that it was better in the past. I have a strange feeling that you are not actually arguing with what I wrote, but with some imaginary adversary that you attributed some opinions that you want to debunk. Because more than half of your replies to my posts are not really related to what I wrote. There, I fixed it for you. I wouldn't want to attribute to you any opinions to you that you don't explicitly assume.
What did you fix ? Do you mean the bolded part hidden deep in the quote history ?
How do you go from the bold text that to me claiming that "food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings" ?
EDIT: Btw apart from the first post you completely abdicated on arguing the original point, which is that we are better off now. You did not post one argument that would even touch that topic. The only thing you are doing is that you are pointing out that there are problems that might not have existed before without even trying to show how are they offsetting all the positive changes.
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I put the quote from Jonny above the part that's relevant to Jonny?
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On November 27 2013 06:21 IgnE wrote:
I put the quote from Jonny above the part that's relevant to Jonny?
Ah in the original post, I was looking at the quote.
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On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 13:56 Wegandi wrote:On November 26 2013 12:45 mcc wrote:
[quote]
Funny how all extreme views always seem to try to equate modern society with slave-holding society on some level at least to make their tortured point. Heard it from anarcho-capitalists asking what is the difference between taxes and slavery, heard it from communists saying any hierarchical ownership is equal to slavery. Now we have this equation of laws and slavery. People love their black and white views and flawed analogies. Master-Serf makes no difference. The problem with the 'law' as is, is both the perception of the people that it is codified social engineering instead of recognition of justice and liberty, and that it is highly hypocritical (e.g. The State determines itself a monopoly on a wide range of services, but then 'outlaws' what it believes to be monopoly (having a certain % of market share), then there is the legalized thievery and barbarism of so-called Police who can beat you, kill you, etc. without provocation and then be heralded as hero's...Miriam Carey anyone?). The former is probably a bigger problem than the latter. Society today has become a cesspool of petty tyrants all wanting to legislate their personal preferences - are you the nanny-state socialist, the bible-thumper, the inquisitor, the real petty tyrant who just wants to tell others what they can do, or are you the idealistic type who wants to mold everyone into his/her version of ideal, etc. The recognition that we own ourselves, and thus have inalienable liberties that have no justification to be aggressed against is hardly to be seen in the fabric of society. The Marxists say homesteading and the liberty of trade and contract is slavery, the Socialists say you the individual are a nuisance and the collective must be served (though the collective is always headed by an individual...who usually enjoys all the benefits at the expense of the lay people), the Bible-thumpers say the Kingdom of Heaven must be brought to Earth and any transgression should be highly penalized and outlawed, and here the libertarian sits and says, hold on, none of you have any right over the body and actions of another, that the law must be for the upholding of justice as defined as a violation of individual liberty, and shut the fuck up and start worrying about your own life instead of being busy-bodies and moral-do-gooders in everyone elses. We're at a point in society where we just need to say Fuck you, your imposed systems, your hypocrisy, we're going to live our own lives and if you want a fight, we're more than ready. At least America has a tradition to look back upon...maybe we'll find that spirit once more. We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
You both have a point. Food companies aren't out there to make you as healthy as possible, but that's in part because of preferences for unhealthy food. Poverty used to mean not getting enough calories, now its about managing the number of calories you eat along with the satisfaction of a full stomach and yummy food. "Preferences for unhealthy food" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process.
How does that conflict with what I wrote?
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2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
In an aggressive move designed to crack down on free-spending outside political groups, the Obama administration is proposing strict new rules curtailing nonprofits like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS and the pro-Obama Priorities USA. The draft proposal, released Tuesday by the Treasury Department, would keep so-called social welfare 501(c)(4) nonprofits from getting a tax exemption if they engage in too much “candidate related” political activity. The groups were at the heart of this summer’s scandal over Internal Revenue Service targeting of tea party and other conservative groups seeking tax exemptions. The proposal is the first major response to a Treasury inspector general report in May blasting the IRS for added scrutiny of tea party conservative groups seeking tax exemption — a major scandal that led President Barack Obama to fire the acting IRS commissioner and other officials to exit the agency. The inspector general report recommended the IRS tighten its rules. The new regulations would affect a broad swath of political nonprofit groups that have come to play an outsized and influential role in federal elections. Crossroads, founded by George W. Bush adviser Rove, along with its sister super PAC together spent $325 million in 2011 and 2012 against Obama and Senate Democrats. Priorities, set up by former Obama aide Bill Burton, raised $10.7 million in the 2012 cycle. Dozens of these political nonprofits have used 501(c)(4) tax status as a way to shield their donors. These groups can spend millions to back federal candidates and run issue ads because of ambiguity and uncertainty about the current IRS rules governing political spending by 501(c)(4)s. Current IRS rules require that these groups be organized for the purpose of “social welfare.” The new draft Treasury and IRS regulations would explicitly exempt certain political activity on behalf of candidates as counting toward the promotion of “social welfare.” For example, candidate-related political activity includes communications within 60 days of a general election clearly identifying a candidate or party. The IRS and Treasury are also taking comments on how much of a political nonprofit’s activities must be geared toward “social welfare” in order to receive tax-exempt status. Right now the definition is murky. Many of these political nonprofits — major players in campaigns in the past few cycles — have argued that as long as their political spending is less than half of total spending, they are in the clear under IRS rules. Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/11/obama-pitches-new-rules-for-political-nonprofits-100401.html?hp=t2_3
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On November 27 2013 06:02 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:48 MoltkeWarding wrote:On November 27 2013 05:28 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated. Never have individuals been more connected to one another, nor had so much to engage their interest. Your idealisation of the past has no basis in reality. On the contrary, yesterday we all collectively agreed that we could have no useful discussion about freedom, because no one knows what it means, or to what it is supposed to relate. It may be true that most people in the world are still capable of maintaining a sense of locality to their expression, of placing their perceptions within the limitations of discrete experiences, but that is not the tendency towards which we are collectively marching. In the broad that we are more connected to each other is true in a brute, mathematical sense, but only by way of inflation. Take a look at Tocqueville's chapter on "Of Individualism In Democratic Countries." It is fairly prophetic nearly two centuries on. If words were food, your posts have already brought me dangerously close to daily caloric intake. If you don't see the use in having forum discussions or enjoy smugly pointing out smug, then you should probably attempt to put that burdensome syntax to use in something more productive. All of a life is a facade, life's a garden, dig it, etc. Of course I see the point. Why do you think I bother to use peoples' own reasoning against them? I merely twist other people's thoughts into poison. That is my way of being smug. You are such a garbage poster. Nothing you say has any meaning. You don't even quote the things you elude to, you never bother to frame an argument or show what you mean. You just lay on layer after layer of utter absurdity, claiming people feel more isolated than ever in the age of facebook and mass communication, that people feel more bored when they have the internet at their disposal if a hundred tv channels wasn't enough. It's just bullshit. Yes, some people feel isolated and adrift but that is not a modern condition, that is the human condition and the reason why our society has created the connectivity and content that it has. For every lonely person writing a blog about their life now there was a lonely guy a hundred years ago feeling the same way but with nobody reading his diary. Just total nonsense, like every other post you make.
Actually, up to about three centuries back we do have some useful gauges of how ordinary people lived, and the relative vexations they experienced in their common lives in contrast to our own, because of the advance of the novel as a modern literary genre. We know that people used to fall in love differently, and make love differently as well. We know that their perception of time and the effects of the seasons upon their humours differed. We have a rich canvas upon which to play out our investigations.
But as I have learned from our fellow Kwark, there is no need for any of that. We know exactly what a governess in Belle Epoque Rouen was like, without reading, and almost without thinking: they were exactly like us except they didn't play video games or take daily showers or use flush toilets.
I am going to summarise this in a Kwark-thesis, so that everyone can understand: Boredom existed in 1913 as well as in 2013. The causes and manifestations of each however are not comparable, and therefore no qualitative equivalence can be established. The problem as we face it must be judged on its own gravity.
Anyway, this is a very strange outburst from Kwark, since it does not relate to anything I have actually said. What matters though is not what he is saying but the attitude with which he says it. I believe Kwark feels that I am that prude in the bar who keeps blocking him when he is just trying to score. He doesn't see that I am trying to save him from scoring with a very ugly hag.
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United States43280 Posts
The effect of the seasons upon their humours?
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
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3 Ways Obamacare Is Changing How A Hospital Cares For Patients
...
1. Checklists
Surgeons and nurses at the hospital now carry around a sheet of paper listing every simple step they're supposed to perform.
Did the patient get her antibiotics on time? Check.
Did the catheter come out on time? Check.
Research has long shown that documenting simple steps can significantly reduce medical error. Yet hospitals have a hard time implementing checklists, because doctors don't really like them.
"When we came up with this, I kind of felt a little silly for the first few weeks following a sort of checklist or menu," surgeon Eric Espinal says.
But, he concedes, pilots and NASCAR drivers use checklists because they reduce complications. So checklists could be better for patients — and, in the new system, the hospital's bottom line.
2. A Team Mentality
Traditionally, Medicare paid hospitals separately from doctors. But in the experiment at the Akron hospital, Medicare will pay the entire team together, so everyone will share in the savings or costs of each surgery. It's meant to foster a culture of collaboration.
Berkovitz, the cardiologist, says this change hasn't been easy.
"Physicians are a dedicated, strong-willed independent lot, and many of them went into the practice of medicine because traditionally you've been able to be the captain of your ship, and that's not always equated to good care," he says.
3. Helping Patients After They Go Home
Before the ACA, doctors didn't have a financial incentive to prevent patients from being readmitted to the hospital.
Now, once doctors discharge someone, it's in their financial interest to make sure their patients stay healthy even when they're at home. In some cases, that means sending nurses from the hospital to check up on patients once they've gone home. Link
aka, 3 things I like about the ACA 
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I'd like some pop corn. And an explanation of what Kwark meant here, but I have little hopes :
I mean the vast majority of potential freedoms could be done away with without making society significantly worse. Many can be done away with making society better.
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On November 27 2013 07:12 KwarK wrote:
The effect of the seasons upon their humours?
This is exactly what I'm talking about.
If popular attitudes towards jagged, wintry landscapes had not experienced a gross paradigm shift in the past three centuries, Switzerland would not have a massive tourist industry today. I am not talking about voodoo. The shifting sensations of contact with our environment, through which much of our values are derived, are created, experienced, and fade out of history. A dogged "presentism" in this context is a contraction of the intellect.
In other words, I am inviting you to take a tour of the world before you settle for the village wench.
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On November 27 2013 07:06 MoltkeWarding wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 06:02 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:48 MoltkeWarding wrote:On November 27 2013 05:28 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated. Never have individuals been more connected to one another, nor had so much to engage their interest. Your idealisation of the past has no basis in reality. On the contrary, yesterday we all collectively agreed that we could have no useful discussion about freedom, because no one knows what it means, or to what it is supposed to relate. It may be true that most people in the world are still capable of maintaining a sense of locality to their expression, of placing their perceptions within the limitations of discrete experiences, but that is not the tendency towards which we are collectively marching. In the broad that we are more connected to each other is true in a brute, mathematical sense, but only by way of inflation. Take a look at Tocqueville's chapter on "Of Individualism In Democratic Countries." It is fairly prophetic nearly two centuries on. If words were food, your posts have already brought me dangerously close to daily caloric intake. If you don't see the use in having forum discussions or enjoy smugly pointing out smug, then you should probably attempt to put that burdensome syntax to use in something more productive. All of a life is a facade, life's a garden, dig it, etc. Of course I see the point. Why do you think I bother to use peoples' own reasoning against them? I merely twist other people's thoughts into poison. That is my way of being smug. You are such a garbage poster. Nothing you say has any meaning. You don't even quote the things you elude to, you never bother to frame an argument or show what you mean. You just lay on layer after layer of utter absurdity, claiming people feel more isolated than ever in the age of facebook and mass communication, that people feel more bored when they have the internet at their disposal if a hundred tv channels wasn't enough. It's just bullshit. Yes, some people feel isolated and adrift but that is not a modern condition, that is the human condition and the reason why our society has created the connectivity and content that it has. For every lonely person writing a blog about their life now there was a lonely guy a hundred years ago feeling the same way but with nobody reading his diary. Just total nonsense, like every other post you make. Actually, up to about three centuries back we do have some useful gauges of how ordinary people lived, and the relative vexations they experienced in their common lives in contrast to our own, because of the advance of the novel as a modern literary genre. We know that people used to fall in love differently, and make love differently as well. We know that their perception of time and the effects of the seasons upon their humours differed. We have a rich canvas upon which to play out our investigations. But as I have learned from our fellow Kwark, there is no need for any of that. We know exactly what a governess in Belle Epoque Rouen was like, without reading, and almost without thinking: they were exactly like us except they didn't play video games or take daily showers or use flush toilets. I am going to summarise this in a Kwark-thesis, so that everyone can understand: Boredom existed in 1913 as well as in 2013. The causes and manifestations of each however are not comparable, and therefore no qualitative equivalence can be established. The problem as we face it must be judged on its own gravity. Anyway, this is a very strange outburst from Kwark, since it does not relate to anything I have actually said. What matters though is not what he is saying but the attitude with which he says it. I believe Kwark feels that I am that prude in the bar who keeps blocking him when he is just trying to score. He doesn't see that I am trying to save him from scoring with a very ugly hag.
Except that using Jane Austin as a reference for how people lived in the 18th century is about as useful as taking 50 shades of grey as an accurate representation of modern society.
Boring people leading boring everyday lives didn't get written about then, just as they don't get written about now (although for some reason they do get televised in reality shows). And boring people leading boring everyday lives are the VAST majority of people. While I don't have the statistical evidence to back it up, and am still unsure about whether the average lower class citizen of Rwanda is better off now than he was 100 years ago, I am willing to take the evidence given by mcc and Johnny (which is actual data, rather than anecdotal evidence based on ficticious novels) and say that all around the world, the standard of living has improved.
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On November 27 2013 06:18 mcc wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 06:11 IgnE wrote:On November 27 2013 05:59 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:
[quote]
I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since.
Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs.
Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. Moreover, "unhealthy preferences" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process. You are responding to someone else I assume as I never said what you attribute to me. If you read my post I said that food industry practices are not enough to say that we are worse off than in the past as we actually are getting healthier and live longer. We could probably be better off, but that is not argument that it was better in the past. I have a strange feeling that you are not actually arguing with what I wrote, but with some imaginary adversary that you attributed some opinions that you want to debunk. Because more than half of your replies to my posts are not really related to what I wrote. There, I fixed it for you. I wouldn't want to attribute to you any opinions to you that you don't explicitly assume. What did you fix ? Do you mean the bolded part hidden deep in the quote history ? How do you go from the bold text that to me claiming that "food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings" ? EDIT: Btw apart from the first post you completely abdicated on arguing the original point, which is that we are better off now. You did not post one argument that would even touch that topic. The only thing you are doing is that you are pointing out that there are problems that might not have existed before without even trying to show how are they offsetting all the positive changes.
I posted arguments that were directed at clarifying the bolded part in your first post. Obviously, as I said, there have been positive changes to the public health since the 18th century.
On November 27 2013 06:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 05:52 IgnE wrote:On November 27 2013 05:39 mcc wrote:On November 27 2013 04:59 IgnE wrote:On November 26 2013 23:55 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 21:14 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 19:17 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 14:47 stroggozzz wrote:On November 26 2013 14:06 mcc wrote:On November 26 2013 13:56 Wegandi wrote:
[quote]
Master-Serf makes no difference. The problem with the 'law' as is, is both the perception of the people that it is codified social engineering instead of recognition of justice and liberty, and that it is highly hypocritical (e.g. The State determines itself a monopoly on a wide range of services, but then 'outlaws' what it believes to be monopoly (having a certain % of market share), then there is the legalized thievery and barbarism of so-called Police who can beat you, kill you, etc. without provocation and then be heralded as hero's...Miriam Carey anyone?). The former is probably a bigger problem than the latter.
Society today has become a cesspool of petty tyrants all wanting to legislate their personal preferences - are you the nanny-state socialist, the bible-thumper, the inquisitor, the real petty tyrant who just wants to tell others what they can do, or are you the idealistic type who wants to mold everyone into his/her version of ideal, etc. The recognition that we own ourselves, and thus have inalienable liberties that have no justification to be aggressed against is hardly to be seen in the fabric of society. The Marxists say homesteading and the liberty of trade and contract is slavery, the Socialists say you the individual are a nuisance and the collective must be served (though the collective is always headed by an individual...who usually enjoys all the benefits at the expense of the lay people), the Bible-thumpers say the Kingdom of Heaven must be brought to Earth and any transgression should be highly penalized and outlawed, and here the libertarian sits and says, hold on, none of you have any right over the body and actions of another, that the law must be for the upholding of justice as defined as a violation of individual liberty, and shut the fuck up and start worrying about your own life instead of being busy-bodies and moral-do-gooders in everyone elses.
We're at a point in society where we just need to say Fuck you, your imposed systems, your hypocrisy, we're going to live our own lives and if you want a fight, we're more than ready. At least America has a tradition to look back upon...maybe we'll find that spirit once more. We live in times where you are more free and more prosperous than any other time in history in any reasonable objective measure you might choose. People claiming how bad things are compared to imaginary period in the past simply do not know the past. Things can be better and we should try to make them better, but saying there was point in a past where they were better is just either ignorance of that past or completely skewed perspective. I don't think we live in the most prosperous time. Real wages have stagnated over the last 35 years, working hours have gone up. Third world diseases that were eradicated are returning. More children are starving. there is also less democracy(labor unions have been destroyed) and a more atomized society. I'd also argue that western culture peaked in the enlightenment when science and philosophy was like pop culture today, but it has been on the decline ever since. Also on your earlier point, i'd point out that our current system was called wage-slavery and was a mainstream position by american factory girls in the 19th century. There are also arguments by good writers/historians that note that slavery for black people never really ended until after WW2, as black life was criminalized after they were freed-leading to a life that had just as little freedom as slavery. Being poor has been criminalized again over the past 35 years under the neoliberal period with the war on drugs. Language and political power has an amazing amount of delusion to it though. It sees itself as logical, objective and fair. It's oppression is paternalistic, as it sees its subjects as inferior, stupid people. When it's subjects call their oppression wage slavery, they will change the name to wage labor. When it's subjects call their journalism propaganda, they change its name to public relations. Minor fluctuations of wealth in last 30 years are not what my post was concerned with, even if I agreed with you that real wages are good sole measure of prosperity when comparing different periods. And obviously my post was concerning modern first world countries, I hoped I would not have to spell that in full. Since we were discussing political system in US/West I thought it was clear. As for amount of democracy if you find some measure of it that you can quantify and compare different periods please show me how it declined. Claiming that western culture peaked in the enlightenment is exactly the lack of knowledge of the past that I was talking about. Enlightenment was important period, but science and philosophy was not like pop culture today. It was enjoyed by the privileged and wealthy and most of the population was living in conditions none today experienced. The rest is a rant not related to my post, as I specifically said things are not all perfect today, so I will ignore it. I was talking only about America and the western countries that have undergone very similar political changes. When i was talking about third world diseases, the ones such as Rheumatic fever, that didn't used to exist in the west, now does exist-at least in New Zealand. poverty has risen everywhere, i believe in America its something like 50million people going to bed hungry. Your right that real wages is not 100% reliable. government social spending has also been repeatedly cut as well. Families with 1 adult on min wage used to be able to survive, but now they cant. not everyone is poorer though. CEO's managed to increase their salaries from 30x the average person to over 300x the average persons income. You might argue that only the wealthy could enjoy philosophy and science in the enlightenment, but a historian-Jonathan Rose, wrote a good scholarly account of how 19th century British working class was full of 'proletarian autodidacts with a passionate pursuit of knowledge'. Dickens, Tolstoy, ect was all very popular at the time. todays culture is mostly driven on profits and seduction. The fact that tv shows will only enter the production phase if they are able to gain viewers already dramatically narrows the spectrum of mainstream culture that we will see. i think image based mediums are just very seductive. For example Cicero noted that the Colosseum drew the plebs attention away from political affairs. New diseases appear, question is are we living longer and healthier ? Longer definitely, most likely also healthier. Every trend points to it except our lack of exercise and too much food. But lack of exercise and obesity are results of this unprecedented freedom and prosperity we have and that is what I claimed. Standard of poverty has also risen. Today's poor live in luxury compared to poor in 19th century. Of course some things are missing, especially in US, like universal public healthcare system, reasonably priced or "free" education, better safety net, but even lacking those people are still better off than they were in the not-so-recent past. And as far as freedoms go, there is no comparison with any point in time in the past at all. EDIT: as for the 19th century culture, it is telling that even though not completely bad, a lot of people could not even read, there is absolutely no comparison today. And popular culture at that time was the same, driven by "profit and seduction" as you call it, you just see it differently from your vantage point in the present, because of course most of that crap did not survive, but it does not mean it was not there. What survives a time period culturally is not necessarily good representation of popular culture of the time. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/11/21/the-u-s-ranks-26th-for-life-expectancy-right-behind-slovenia/There is a huge gap in the life expectancy between the rich and the poor. The number one predictor of obesity in the United States is income. Saying something like "obesity is a result of lack of exercise and unprecedented freedom and prosperity" is just dead wrong. Obesity is highly correlated with poverty, and is a product of an agricultural and food industry that maximizes profits rather than health, and starts with the decision to grow massive monocultures of corn, grown with oil-based products, and turned into processed sugars for sale at the lowest possible price to those who can't afford any better. No one is disputing that life expectancy and healthcare is better now than it was in Enlightenment Europe where the poor, prostitutes, and other oddballs were thrown in asylums and doctors were still talking about yellow bile and black bile. But it's absurd to blame "unprecedented freedoms" for the distasteful side effects of the current system. Poor in US and even more in Europe fall under the category of prosperous in the argument I am making. I know that low income families are the ones eating shittiest food and having least exercise. But they are still prosperous compared to anything but the highest classes of previous centuries. They do not suffer from hunger and actually have more food than they need, leading to obesity. The freedoms that I meant that lead to the lack of exercise are not the ones from political proclamations. I meant the tangible freedoms that modern society affords us (apart from the political ones), like freedom of free time, that we have much more today than previous generations (there are exceptions), freedom from hard manual labor, and so on. Those allow us to avoid involuntary exercise and that is what I meant. Voluntary exercise is not enough to offset it. Of course there are problems like shittier food, if you are not careful and similar stuff. But they do not tip the balance enough to proclaim that there was time in the past where we were more prosperous and more free. Having too many twinkies to eat doesn't really seem like a healthy surplus to me, and stretches the meaning of prosperity. On November 27 2013 05:13 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
You both have a point. Food companies aren't out there to make you as healthy as possible, but that's in part because of preferences for unhealthy food. Poverty used to mean not getting enough calories, now its about managing the number of calories you eat along with the satisfaction of a full stomach and yummy food. "Preferences for unhealthy food" are shaped by unhealthy eating choices. It is known that people who suffer from diabetes also lose the ability to taste sweetness, and find unsweet things very unpalatable. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1079210409006210This happens in normal people too. Sartor et al.found that obese subjects had a -23% reduced sweet taste perception (compared to normal weight controls), but also that normal weight, "lightly active" adults developed a similar reduction in sweet taste perception and a 2.3-fold increase in sweet preference after only one month of soft drink (~760 ml/day) "supplementation." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21600942So don't give me this bullshit about how the food industry is just fulfilling unhealthy cravings that would exist independently of their production of shitty food products. They create demand for their own product by hijacking normal human gustatory feedback with unnatural products, breaking normal metabolism in the process. How does that conflict with what I wrote?
I suppose it doesn't literally contradict anything you wrote. I was responding to this:
Food companies aren't out there to make you as healthy as possible, but that's in part because of preferences for unhealthy food.
Because why would you say that unless you were implying that food companies were simply fulfilling a demand that has existed and will exist, independent of them. You seemed to be strongly implying that food companies aren't out there to make you as healthy as possible, because they are just trying to make money on people's own natural proclivities for self-destruction or something to that effect. Hence the perceived conflict.
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United States43280 Posts
On November 27 2013 07:21 corumjhaelen wrote:I'd like some pop corn. And an explanation of what Kwark meant here, but I have little hopes : Show nested quote +
I mean the vast majority of potential freedoms could be done away with without making society significantly worse. Many can be done away with making society better.
Some examples from my country.
To take an obvious limitation on freedom people generally agree on, prisons. It's forcibly detaining a human against their will but we don't care because we need it to make the system work and we value the system over the freedom of people, and with good reason, society and the happiness of all of us are built on the system.
A more ambiguous one would be the limitation on speech inciting racial violence. To advocates of free speech it's a slippery slope that bars people from saying words that don't harm anyone directly but in practice it impacts the freedom of a tiny minority of people who want to incite racial violence because again, racial violence undermines the system. So we throw away the principle of free speech and it doesn't really change anything because the freedom to incite racial violence wasn't actually a very important and useful freedom.
Then we look at Germany and the banning of neo-Nazi parties, along with thought crime legislation against Holocaust denial and the rest of it. Surely here the line must be crossed? But no, the Germans seem to get along alright without the freedom to vote for any party they want, believe what they want and form any political organisation they want.
My point here is that the freedoms that we actually use, the ones we really care about, are the little freedoms that exist within the bounds of the society we have collectively created. The big freedoms, the absolute ones, to not be imposed upon against your will under any circumstances, to say anything you want, to believe anything you want, these can be disregarded without making society worse (indeed generally making it better). The freedoms we actually value are over the little things.
Now obviously society very often gets things wrong, for example legislation against homosexual relationships, and as it evolves the narrow band of protected freedoms changes. Some things, like gay marriage, become fine while other things, like the freedom to fly on a plane without having your junk patted, are lost but the principle doesn't really change. We exist with a fairly narrow band of freedoms, if viewed from absolute terms, but the system works because those freedoms cover what most of us want to do most of the time. And the system working is what counts because our ability to feed ourselves, exchange goods and services, argue on the internet and all the rest of it is built on that system. The real threat is from idealists who believe they have the right to fight against that system in the name of the big freedoms for themselves because the rest of us are just collateral damage to them.
In short, enjoy your little freedoms, they include where you live, where you work, who you marry, how you spend your free time and that is enough.
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On November 27 2013 07:48 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On November 27 2013 07:06 MoltkeWarding wrote:On November 27 2013 06:02 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:48 MoltkeWarding wrote:On November 27 2013 05:28 KwarK wrote:On November 27 2013 05:20 MoltkeWarding wrote:
What about overeating as a symptom of the boredom of the isolated individual in modern society? Addictions and unhealthy habits have a tendency of forming in an existential vacuum, and that may or may not be exacerbated by a condition where basic material needs have been saturated. Never have individuals been more connected to one another, nor had so much to engage their interest. Your idealisation of the past has no basis in reality. On the contrary, yesterday we all collectively agreed that we could have no useful discussion about freedom, because no one knows what it means, or to what it is supposed to relate. It may be true that most people in the world are still capable of maintaining a sense of locality to their expression, of placing their perceptions within the limitations of discrete experiences, but that is not the tendency towards which we are collectively marching. In the broad that we are more connected to each other is true in a brute, mathematical sense, but only by way of inflation. Take a look at Tocqueville's chapter on "Of Individualism In Democratic Countries." It is fairly prophetic nearly two centuries on. If words were food, your posts have already brought me dangerously close to daily caloric intake. If you don't see the use in having forum discussions or enjoy smugly pointing out smug, then you should probably attempt to put that burdensome syntax to use in something more productive. All of a life is a facade, life's a garden, dig it, etc. Of course I see the point. Why do you think I bother to use peoples' own reasoning against them? I merely twist other people's thoughts into poison. That is my way of being smug. You are such a garbage poster. Nothing you say has any meaning. You don't even quote the things you elude to, you never bother to frame an argument or show what you mean. You just lay on layer after layer of utter absurdity, claiming people feel more isolated than ever in the age of facebook and mass communication, that people feel more bored when they have the internet at their disposal if a hundred tv channels wasn't enough. It's just bullshit. Yes, some people feel isolated and adrift but that is not a modern condition, that is the human condition and the reason why our society has created the connectivity and content that it has. For every lonely person writing a blog about their life now there was a lonely guy a hundred years ago feeling the same way but with nobody reading his diary. Just total nonsense, like every other post you make. Actually, up to about three centuries back we do have some useful gauges of how ordinary people lived, and the relative vexations they experienced in their common lives in contrast to our own, because of the advance of the novel as a modern literary genre. We know that people used to fall in love differently, and make love differently as well. We know that their perception of time and the effects of the seasons upon their humours differed. We have a rich canvas upon which to play out our investigations. But as I have learned from our fellow Kwark, there is no need for any of that. We know exactly what a governess in Belle Epoque Rouen was like, without reading, and almost without thinking: they were exactly like us except they didn't play video games or take daily showers or use flush toilets. I am going to summarise this in a Kwark-thesis, so that everyone can understand: Boredom existed in 1913 as well as in 2013. The causes and manifestations of each however are not comparable, and therefore no qualitative equivalence can be established. The problem as we face it must be judged on its own gravity. Anyway, this is a very strange outburst from Kwark, since it does not relate to anything I have actually said. What matters though is not what he is saying but the attitude with which he says it. I believe Kwark feels that I am that prude in the bar who keeps blocking him when he is just trying to score. He doesn't see that I am trying to save him from scoring with a very ugly hag. Except that using Jane Austin as a reference for how people lived in the 18th century is about as useful as taking 50 shades of grey as an accurate representation of modern society. Boring people leading boring everyday lives didn't get written about then, just as they don't get written about now (although for some reason they do get televised in reality shows). And boring people leading boring everyday lives are the VAST majority of people. While I don't have the statistical evidence to back it up, and am still unsure about whether the average lower class citizen of Rwanda is better off now than he was 100 years ago, I am willing to take the evidence given by mcc and Johnny (which is actual data, rather than anecdotal evidence based on ficticious novels) and say that all around the world, the standard of living has improved.
He's not talking about the standard of living. He's talking about the anomie and disillusionment within the modern world. He is making a valid point. Kwark's argument is borderline ridiculous, as he seems to be unaware of the widespread socio-structural changes that have occurred with the advent of modernity. Yes, people have 200 friends on facebook, but they also have fewer roots in the community in which they live and work. The nuclear family, a tiny, anomalous conception of family which had already replaced a larger conception of family beginning after WW2, is itself increasingly fragmented. People increasingly have to uproot themselves from their friends and communities multiple times in their life in order to go where employers are hiring. And traditional forms of social solidarity have been dissolved in place of commoditization of social transactions.
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