“Chemicals” in food. Literally every substance, every food and people are composed of them. The common usage has bastardized the meaning and latched on to the naturalistic fallacy. Snake venom is natural. Cyanide is natural. Arsenic and Uranium are natural. Botulinum toxin is natural. Something being naturally occurring does not automatically make it good for you just as something being made in a lab does not equate to being bad for you.
I feel like that’s one of those things where the conversational use of chemicals and scientific use has drifted apart
There’s plenty of examples but the only one I can think of is evolution, like In every terrible sci-fi movie ever using evolution to describe the individual evil monster gaining some change
Anyways 100% agree with you tho
The word theory is another one.
I find myself thinking this a lot. Someone goes; “and that’s my theory about…” And I’m like; that’s not a theory, that’s a hypothesis…
Like how some creationists try to dispell evolution by saying that it’s only a theory.
I just say “so is gravity”
Idk if that helps your point as it’s simultaneously one of the most studied and least understood things in physics. Although I doubt a creationist could mount that argument.
The point is it’s not just a guess with no evidence which is what they think a theory is.
If they came back with that you try and explain that’s why it’s called a theory and not a fact.
AI. In the real world, AI is any computer process that can make decisions as if it were smart. Expert systems, genetic algorithms, hell even fuzzy logic. A smart lightbulb is artificially smart. Artificially intelligent.
In movies and bad tech blogs, AI means a sapient machine and that’s why LLMs aren’t actually AI.
My least favorite is “it’s processed”
I can count the ingredients on my hands, and the “processing” is like 4 steps max.
“Unga bunga me invent new process for food. It called cooking. Make less parasites in meat. Very good.”
“Cooking bad, garg. We no want processed food.”
A guy at a deli counter slicing cold cuts and assembling them into a sandwich is “processed food”. Using the term as a health concern marker is meaningless.
Even Kraft Singles, the posterchild of “processed food”, famously disallowed to legally call itself “cheese” on its packaging, what is it made of? What hellish process hath humanity wrought? Cheddar cheese, sodium citrate (a mundane variety of salt), and water. That’s it.
It’s not forbidden from being called “cheese” because it’s a bastard concoction of mad scientist chemicals that approximate cheese to ruse consumers. It’s simply cheese, literally watered down to the point that you can’t call it cheese anymore.
All that the sodium citrate is doing in this situation is acting as a binder that helps the cheese solids hold on to the water. This action is what gives many dishes, sauces, and the like their smooth, creamy texture. But use the word for that – “emulsifier” – and suddenly people think you’re trying to poison them, because that’s a scary chemical word.
Why does this product exist? Because it offers a unique melty texture that people appreciate in certain contexts. It’s a niche product with a niche function. Treat it like one.
Cooking is processing food.
If you are not worried about the chemicals in your food, your long term health would like to have a word with you.
Being overweight or obese, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, prolonged sitting, loneliness will all kill you way faster than all those “chemicals” in your food that you are so terrified of but no one really cares about any of that because its much harder to lose that extra 30 pounds and break up sitting every once in a while with light exercise than it is to act like a picky 5 year old and eat nothing but organic food satisfied by the false notion that you did something of consequence for your health.
I fully agree on those other factors you mentioned some of even higher importance.
Water is a chemical. Salt is a chemical. Everything is a chemical.
Absolutely, but not at all chemicals are the same as you know. Some are harmless and some are not.
Have you heard about the chemical dihydrogen monoxide?! It’s 100% fatal! Too much causes death, too little, death! Massively addictive.
Women.
Misogyny is extremely widespread and socially acceptable.
Add men to the list.
Misandry is also extremely widespread and socially acceptable.
IMHO both groups have bad apples. In conservative societies, women are often mistreated. In modern/contemporary societies men are often misstreated.
adult men are treated fine in modern societies, it’s boys/teenagers who are feeling increasingly out of place and are turning to misogyny as an outlet
I’d say modern being wealthy modern people.
IMHO both groups have bad apples
Oh bad people can come from anywhere, what a salient observation.
By every important measurable standard, women are still treated worse in contemporary society. The fact you would respond with this nothing take when someone brings up misogyny is incredibly telling. Wishing well to any women unlucky enough to be in your life.
- The homeless
- Children
- Chronically ill
- Disabled
- Sex workers
Reading this not as a list but as a sentence makes it crazy specific.
Wow. That is dark as hell.
But I laughed at your comment.
deleted by creator
Oh… Oh nooooo.
Nuke the unborn disabled child sex workers for world peace!
deleted by creator
I know you probably already hate me for mentioning it, but foot fetishes. It’s a very common fetish people have and I don’t think people should be ashamed of it. It’s not even the weirdest fetish out there when it comes down to it. I understand the stigma comes from weird dudes asking girls for feet pics in creepy ways and I feel like that’s reasonable. But most of us are just regular people just trying to live our best life. I used to feel comfortable telling women I’m with that I have a foot fetish and most of them were even down to give it a try. Nowadays I’m too embarrassed or ashamed to even mention it and when I do I get shot down more often than before because of this stigma. I’m more comfortable these days telling someone that I’m bisexual than telling someone I like feet. Which I guess is a win for the gay part of me, but it still sucks.
You should avoid judgemental sexual partners anyways. Foot fetishes are considered “weird” if that’s how you phrase it. Generally speaking, it’s not that uncommon. Don’t open up with a partner about kinks unless you trust them not to run their mouth.
In that regard I definitely agree with you. It could even just be the people I associate with. If anything the people that have given me the most shit for it are other guys that I have as friends.
I’m not into that at all (tbh I find feet kinda disgusting) but I’ve never seen it as something really weird because it really isn’t that weird.
I spent some time explaining amputee fetish to my CW the other day (which is actually called body identity integrity disorder). I’m just glad there are people who like their limbs and appendages attached.
Caring about people who are different from yourself
trans people
Comic sans.
It is literally a font. Sometimes when some corporate partner is annoying me I will pdf lock a document, with a signature, to them in comic sans.
It’s also supposed to be an accessible/helpful font for dyslexics.
That’s a happy accident not an intentional feature of the font. I think modern fonts that specifically target dyslexia are preferred, I’ve heard good stuff about https://opendyslexic.org/
Ugly-ass Nancy and Sluggo looking shit, what are you, five? Take that comic sans tf out of here.
His point demonstrated.
Possums. They are immune to rabies and eat disease-spreading ticks. Salute your local possum
Australian possums in NZ destroy the ecosystem. North American possums in North America are cool though
Opossum
Both are correct.
But one is ambiguous.
U mean o-mbiguous hehe
Satanists get persecuted a lot; although, they do a lot to protect religious freedom.
It’s important to note that when you hear a story about Satanists using freedom of religion to install a statue of baphomet in a public space, or citing religious freedom acts to protect safe access to abortion, you’re hearing about the Satanic Temple. When you hear about Satanists practicing “chaos magick” or talking about how liking blue cheese means you’re gay, you’re hearing about the Church of Satan. Here’s a handy reference from TST:
I really should get around to setting up a recurrent donation to TST at some point. Especially with the recent stuff they’ve done to oppose fundamentalist religions being given special privileges in state government and education, they deserve more ongoing funding.
most satanists are just cute in personality lol
Lucifer was kinda right ngl
And most of them are just trolling-atheists/agnostics.
Socialism/Communism/Anarchism. Barely anyone who actually understands them and the theory supporting them hates them, but tons of people have been fed Red Scare propaganda on the matter.
Maybe because most real life examples of those systems haven’t worked out great.
I think most real-life examples have been plagued by corruption to the point that they fall into a different category altogether.
Historical examples, like Revolutionary Catalonia for Anarchism, and the USSR, Cuba, Maoist China, Vietnam, etc. for Marxism-Leninism, absolutely count as Socialist and should be learned from, both the good and bad.
If you dismiss them as “not real Socialism,” you fail to learn from what did work in those instances, like literacy rates and life expectancy skyrocketing. If you dismiss the bad, you make the equal mistake of not accounting for the flaws in systems like Soviet Democracy, which resulted in a corrupt Politburo with outsized power.
Study them in detail and find what to take and what to leave behind.
communism is a classless stateless moneyless society. is that how you’d describe any of those societies? i wouldn’t. because it’s not true. but there are certainly anarchist and communist societies that have existed.
That goes for anything, every system ever made by humans. Even the first forms of democracy, including direct democracy, falls under this umbrella. After all in the theory-world, where everything is ideal, humans do behave good so communism (but any form of good government is possible, even anarchy or a good autocracy).
In the real world, though, humans behave like humans so you get corruption and weird power play. So even if you got a nice working system where every human support society, it will inevitably fail under corruption after the first generations of those who put in place such a system die; which is exactly what happens throughout history each time, even in Athens.
Tldr: theoretical perfect system cannot exist in practice since we are flawed creatures
I think we should learn from that. Maybe all forms of power solely resting within the governing function invites corruption.
I haven’t given up yet on it because capitalism is definitely not working right now but there is a form of communism that you can have an informed and rational fear of.
Generally, if you have a system where more powerful people are more influential, you invite yourself to corruption.
In Capitalism, this expresses itself in Capitalists buying politicians.
In Marxism-Leninism, this is expressed in the upper Soviets becoming more entrenched and corrupt.
The solution for Socialism is to make the upper rungs directly accountable to the masses. The solution for Capitalism is to abolish Capitalism.
The solution to corruption is to stop being human. There, I said it.
Nah, just make systems that are resistant to it and more accountable to the masses. Simple.
Like ancient Athens! It failed obviously.
Or like Ancient Rome! It failed, obviously.
Or like any modern democracy! It failed, obviously.
The problem is that “masses” are truly a reflection of their government and vice versa, more so in a democracy. You take for a given “the mass” takes good decisions but this, again, works only in the ideal world.
And if you think things are better than the past, think again: internet and social media spread so much crap and allowed people to talk too freely, so now you get Joe the Farmer believing he is some sort of genius cause he knows that there is big plot and the corps are covering it up; you get Dalila the economist believe she knows anything about software development; you get Dario the cheese eater believe he is a medievalist just because he read (and ate) “the cheese and the worms”. And all of this people wouldn’t give shit about the “so-called” experts, cause they studied it on eatashit.altervista.org so they must know better than the college-cuck
Cuba, a poor blockaded small island nation, has a higher life expectancy than the global hegemon and richest nation ever
The USSR went from a monarchist backwater to a industrial society, defeating the nazis and sending the first satellite into space, in the span of 40 years.
China, under socialism, is now on track to shatter US hegemony through the power of socialist economic management and mutually beneficial cooperation.
Why?
yes, they have
Name one that didn’t end with a dictator or mistreat/scare its citizens into submission.
the swamp maroons
Well, those who most benefit from the status quo also understand those concepts quite well, but oppose them.
If only there wasn’t a wealthy, parasitic, world-dominating country which would violently overthrow (or at least try) any country which didn’t kowtow to capitalism, and the Parasite Class.
Socialism
Our road system, retirement benefits, health system (except USA), public school system, national parks are all socialist.
True, but they also mixed into comunism
You know socialists want to take away everything you own and install a dictatorship right? /s
The ironic part is that actual socialism is actually pretty popular. It’s the violent revolution and ensuing dictatorship which turns most people off to the Marxist Leninist ideals, which takes up most of the oxygen in that room these days.
Fucking commie! /s
MSG
I always hear this one, it really isn’t bad for you it seems
I learned the hatred/fear of MSG comes from white supremacists feeling threatened by Asian food, so they demonized what made it awesome.
MSG is an objectively good flavor.
The idea of using public transportation. It’s something for “them” (the poor), not for “me” (rich). Changes significantly from country to country, I suppose, but it’s a prevalent thought here.
Public transportation is good. Sanitation on public transportation in America is bad.
I got very adept at touching nothing while riding a bumpy subway car in New York, but even that couldn’t always save me from the puddle of piss that ran like a heat seeking stream from the legs of the mentally ill.
Idk at least in the US, riding a train is a nice experience. I liked it. But riding busses is often rather unpleasant. But I only have limited experience to only a portion of the US.
I am by no means poor and I save a lot of money by not having a car, but the fact of the matter is that people give me rides more than I would like. Even in Portland, a city with relatively good transit for its size given that it’s in the US, most of the city is still quite inaccessible.
I noticed in the States that if its a bus, its a chariot for the poor. If its a train, its for everyone.
TBF considering how slow/unreliable and infrequent it tends to be, it’s hard to believe anyone would use it if they didn’t have other options. Even in my city (where buses run 30 minutes instead of every hour as is common elsewhere), it takes an hour and 15 minutes to get somewhere that’s a straight 15 minute freeway drive by car. And it’s worse in larger cities where buses are delayed by traffic such that you miss your transfer.
And it’s not like improvements like BRT or light rail will change it much considering how often they run in boulevards with 35mph speed limits and stop lights vs the 65mph grade separated freeways. Even a grade separated subway would be slower than driving unless it had spaced out stops, but then walking to said stops would take a lot of time (plus we couldn’t afford one, especially not one that actually serves the sprawl).
Under these conditions, it’s understandable to not even bother considering it as an option.
Male abuse/SA victims. It’s already not taken seriously enough when it happens to women, but when it happens to a guy they get put down even more and told to “man up”, sometimes even by people who’d support them if the sexes were swapped.
Even more so, it’s turned into a hot button topic where people will be actively pissed of at you if you try to bring it up in discussion, calling it a “dog whistle” for nazi / anti-women ideology.
I’m a female queer SA survivor if they ever try that bullshit on me lmao.
I’m a cishet white male feminist and proud ally… And it took me years to process my own sexual assault as an assault. I was supposed to be happy that it happened and I got to fuck a pretty girl, right? So my confusing feelings about it must have been stupid and out of place, even though I was drunk and having an emotional breakdown when it happened. Even later on, I considered it a “bad decision” until a woman I was with challenged me to reverse the genders. She said something like “Imagine I’m drunk, having an emotional breakdown, abandoned by my friends and end up at the apartment of a man I barely know because they left without me and no one made sure I got home OK. This man starts kissing me, undresses me, lays me in his bed, starts going down on me and then puts his penis in me… with NO protection or discussion. He never asks if I’m OK with it, never asks if I want to, he just does this to me. What just happened to me??” And I was like “Oh yeah! That IS what happened to me!”
But NOW I frame it as a way toxic masculinity / patriarchy is bad /harmful to men and when I frame it that way I get ZERO hate. Toxic masculinity told me I was supposed to want that to happen to me, supposed to brag about it to my friends, supposed to collect the memory as a notch on my belt. The patriarchy told me it was my right and privilege to have a woman fuck me and take care of me like that. Toxic masculinity also told HER her behaviour was OK, that OBVIOUSLY a man would be into it, that I was getting lucky and I should be happy and excited a hot girl like her would want to do that to me. I forgave her easily, because I’m SURE she didn’t process it as SA either… for the same bullshit cultural reasons.
Male SA survivors get hate because they they get pedestalized and used by MRA assholes as reasons to “bhut whut about…” at feminism. And THAT is unfortunately real. I don’t think people hate Male SA survivors, I think they hate MRA bullshit and with good reason.
Fat people. There, I said it.
I think the issue is with normalizing unhealthy bodies. idc how you look as long as you’re healthy, but society is becoming increasingly accepting of obviously unhealthy lifestyles and bodies. It’s no better than anorexia.
Unhealthy bodies like how? What dobyou mean by that? How can you know someone’s health status and or lifestyle by the way they look? If that were true, blood Labs and other tests would be useless.
You can get the rough strokes from looks. Blood tests give you more specific information on what is wrong, if anything.
Meh, that is lazy medicine IMHO and at the same time, it says a lot about the health system and its practitioners. We need better educated more empathetic doctors who go beyond looking at someone to make assumptions about someone’s health.
I would say that this is a problem of lacking resources, not laziness. I’ve never met a doctor that didn’t have a constant stream of patients and non-stop work to do.
ask any doctor, being overweight is unhealthy.
I’m not saying we should be assholes to fat people but we should still teach kids that being overweight is unhealthy
If your eyeballs are missing, I can make an assumption that your vision isn’t great just by looking at you. That’s not a moral judgement.
Doesn’t mean blood tests are useless, and in fact it means we have some idea where to start investigating a potential health problem.
Yes, I agree that there’s bias against folks who are overweight, and also that there’s a range of risk associated with being overweight. It’s pretty clear, however, that obesity is a health concern that we should take seriously. If someone smokes five pack of cigs a day, I’m going to make an assumption about their lung health. There’s always outliers that live to 100 smoking and not doing exercise, but it would be a shit doctor if they didn’t tell folks not to follow their example.
Ime fat people are pleasant to hang out with.
Yeah, being fat shouldn’t be a qualifier for anything IMHO. Like, let people live their lives in peace! There are pleasant and unpleasant fat people, as there are thin, so why does weight have to do with anything?! It is baffling to me we have to work so hard to humanize fat persons. Fat bias is so ingrained in our culture people think is ok.
Some of the fat people I’ve worked with were so much more hard working than others. But on other hand some customers I’ve dealt with were the worst customers. There was a notorious mother daughter duo that my co workers labeled the “Thunder Cunts”. The sad part is they had kids that probably.lived a life of hell.
Yeah, child abuse is no joke. I bet you also had non fat customers who were a pain in the ass too, so it is not about weight, but about being an insufferable tw4twaffle.
Yeah I worked in a really shitty area. It was heartbreaking seeing how shitty people were.
Oh I feel for you. It is never easy to witness some stuff.
If I’m ever trapped on a deserted island I hope it’s with a fat person.
removed by mod
I can run faster scared than they can hungry.
removed by mod
You aren’t seeing the big picture.
And very cuddly and squeezable. I like touching fat folks as much as I like touching for folks. All bodies are nice.
