whedonesque: "So we’re watching that Joss Whedon Facebook Live Q&A from yesterday and he says he wrote most of Stanley Tucci’s dialogue for Captain America. And we’re like oooooh."
Wednesday, September 28, 2016
"Mispronouncing a student's name constitutes a microaggression..."
Education Officials: Mispronouncing Students' Names Is a Microaggression - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Writes Furr:
"Mispronouncing a student's name truly negates his or her identity, which, in turn, can hinder academic progress," according to Yee Wan, SCCOE's director of multilingual education services.
Rita Kohli, assistant professor of education at the University of California at Riverside, says it is a sign of "microagression" when a teacher mispronounces, disregards, or changes a child's name, because "they are in a sense disregarding the family and culture of the student as well."
So far, 528 school districts have taken the pledge to try to get names right—which you'd think most teachers would do without a pledge.
But if they never quite get the accent right? Is that really a diss or simply the fact that with a melting pot like America, some names are going to be (am I microaggressing?) harder to pronounce?
But Furr quotes a former teacher writing in the Cult of Pedagogy (what a perfect name!):
"mutilating someone's name is a tiny act of bigotry. Whether you intend to or not, what you're communicating is this: Your name is different. Foreign. Weird. It's not worth my time to get it right….
"And before you get all defensive about the bigotry thing, let's be clear: Discovering that something you do might be construed as bigotry doesn't mean anyone is calling you a bigot. It's just an opportunity to grow."
Agreed: You should try to pronounce everyone's name right. The "Pedagogy" piece suggests asking the student how it's pronounced, which I think most teachers probably do. But there are many ways to show respect, and if those are present, mispronunciation shouldn't negate them. Singing off key doesn't mean you hate a song."
"Have you been microaggressed? Are you a victim of people holding opinions other than your own?"
"Or worst of all, have you experienced bad thoughts from bad people? Are you tired of being heterowhitemansplained to?"
"In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality."
What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR: "most of us wouldn't expect an argument denying the reality of the objective world to come out of evolutionary biology. After all, doesn't evolution tell us we've been tuned to reality by billions of years of natural selection? It makes sense that creatures that can't tell a poisonous snake from a stick shouldn't last long and, therefore, shouldn't pass their genes on to the next generation.
That is certainly how the standard argument goes. But Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist, isn't buying it.
For decades, Hoffman, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying the links between evolution, perception and intelligence (both natural and machine). Based on that body of work, he thinks we've been missing something fundamental when it comes to fundamental reality.
Fundamentally, Hoffman argues, evolution and reality (the objective kind) have almost nothing to do with each other...
In other words, evolution couldn't care less if you perceive objective reality. It only wants you to have sex successfully. As a consequence, your apprehension of the world is tuned to whatever allows that to happen. Thus, your perceptions at the root level have nothing to do with some fundamental physics upon which the fundamental nature of objective independent reality is constructed. Hoffman then builds something even more radical out of his broken link between objective reality and evolution. He calls it conscious realism, and it's based on the premise that "circuits of conscious agents" are what end up defining experienced reality. While there clearly is a world separate from us, Hoffman says, evolution does not give us access to that. Instead, he claims, it's our interactions as conscious agents that give shape to the reality we experience. "I can take separate observers," he told Quanta Magazine, "put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It's conscious agents all the way down." This is a pretty head-spinning stuff. Our perceived reality has nothing to do with the world in and of itself? That's the kind of thing that's bound to piss off a whole lot of people in a whole lot of fields. I asked Hoffman about the reaction to his work. "All over the map," he replied. "I'm either a genius or an absolute stupid idiot. The emotions are pretty strong.""
"...facts don’t influence decisions. Humans decide first, then rationalize their irrational choices with cherry-picked data."
Adams has had the most interesting, and seemingly accurate, take on the whole Trump phenomenon.
Why I Switched My Endorsement from Clinton to... | Scott Adams' Blog: "Pacing and Leading: Trump always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading.
Trump “paces” the public – meaning he matches them in their emotional state, and then some. He does that with his extreme responses on immigration, fighting ISIS, stop-and-frisk, etc. Once Trump has established himself as the biggest bad-ass on the topic, he is free to “lead,” which we see him do by softening his deportation stand, limiting his stop-and-frisk comment to Chicago, reversing his first answer on penalties for abortion, and so on.
If you are not trained in persuasion, Trump looks scary. If you understand pacing and leading, you might see him as the safest candidate who has ever gotten this close to the presidency. That’s how I see him. So when Clinton supporters ask me how I could support a “fascist,” the answer is that he isn’t one. Clinton’s team, with the help of Godzilla, have effectively persuaded the public to see Trump as scary. The persuasion works because Trump’s “pacing” system is not obvious to the public. They see his “first offers” as evidence of evil. They are not. They are technique. And being chummy with Putin is more likely to keep us safe, whether you find that distasteful or not. Clinton wants to insult Putin into doing what we want. That approach seems dangerous as hell to me...
In summary, I don’t understand the policy details and implications of most of either Trump’s or Clinton’s proposed ideas. Neither do you. But I do understand persuasion. I also understand when the government is planning to confiscate the majority of my assets. And I can also distinguish between a deeply unhealthy person and a healthy person, even though I have no medical training. (So can you.)"
Trump’s African-American Reframing | Scott Adams' Blog: "Emotions matter in the real world because they drive behavior. Facts, not so much. Trump doesn’t ignore facts because he is dumb. He does it because facts don’t matter. Every trained persuader knows that. In the 2D world, where people think that facts and reason matter, Trump’s claim that life is worse than ever for African-Americans is an absurd lie. But in the third-dimension of persuasion – where Trump operates – it was brilliant. In case you are wondering, this is a known persuasion technique. You agree with someone harder than they agree with themselves, and it forces them to argue against their own point. Trump did that in part to dilute racial tensions (that he partly caused) and also to put himself in emotional harmony with the African-American community. Persuasion-wise, and strategy-wise, what Trump did was a base-clearing home run…that you thought was a dumb mistake."
Blowing Your Mind -- as Promised | Scott Adams' Blog: "Smart, well-informed people disagree on nearly all major issues. So being smart and well-informed doesn’t help you grasp reality as much as you would hope. If it did, all of the smart, well-informed people would agree. They don’t...
Trump says lots of things that don’t pass the fact-checkers’ tests. His supporters don’t care because facts don’t influence decisions. Humans decide first, then rationalize their irrational choices with cherry-picked data. You see this all the time with the people who disagree with your brilliance. Just remember that they see the same irrationality in you that you see in them."
And the mainstream is finally catching on. 'Believe me': People say Trump's language is affecting political discourse 'bigly' - LA Times: "But Trump is more than just a free-style rambler. Experts say he employs a very deliberate, effective communications approach unlike any other presidential candidate in memory. The Trumpisms — “Believe me,” “People say,” “Sad!” — have become so well known they are the subject of spoofs. But like a savvy salesman or break-through advertising campaign, Trump’s techniques carry a quiet power...
The art of the insult
Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Crooked Hillary. Even in the rough-and-tumble world of presidential politics, Trump has taken the art of the insult to a new level.
Trump’s name-calling may sound like simple bullying. But labeling his opponents with cutting nicknames also creates simple frames — catch phrases — that stick in voters’ minds, often because they reinforce existing perceptions.
George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at UC Berkeley who has written extensively about political speech, says studies show that 98% of thought is unconscious. Creating those nicknames is a way to make the broader message resonate with voters long after the rallies have ended — like a good advertising jingle.
“Even if he loses the election, Trump will have changed the brains of millions of Americans, with future consequences,” Lakoff writes on his blog.
As a businessman, Trump learned that speaking in an irreverent, shock-jock manner often won him free media attention. Now some Trump supporters are cheering that same willingness to give voice to politically incorrect opinions that they may secretly share, but would never say out loud."
Shaming works.
See also anti-smoking and drunk driving campaigns. This mum lost 10 stone after her son drew her as a BLOB at school - Wales Online: "But the turning point came in February 2014 when her son Thomas proudly came home with a picture he had drawn at school.
The picture that Thomas drew at school of his family
Meryem added: “It was a family portrait with all members as stick figures except for me who he’d drawn as a round blob.
“It really upset me when I saw it but I didn’t have the heart to tell Thomas, I just went upstairs and cried.”
That, combined with an incident on holiday when Meryem couldn’t take part in activities because she was too out of breath, inspired a change.
She said: “My children called me ‘fat’ because they couldn’t fit their arms around me when giving me hugs. It was very upsetting."
Gorillas too masculine, triggering, not inclusive.
I'm having a hategasm, I swear. KU bars gorillas from jungle-theme decoration due to 'masculine image':\
"The invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. Rommel and all those tank commanders were high."
High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history | Books | The Guardian: "“I guess drugs weren’t a priority for the historians,” he says. “A crazy guy like me had to come along.” Still, crazy or not, he has done a remarkable job.
Ian Kershaw, the British historian who is probably the world’s leading authority on Hitler and Nazi Germany, has described it as “a serious piece of scholarship”.
Unlikely as it sounds, it was Ohler’s friend, the Berlin DJ Alexander Kramer, who first put him on to the idea. “He’s like a medium for that time,” says Ohler. “He has this huge library, and he knows all the music from the 20s. One night he said to me: ‘Do you know the massive role drugs played in National Socialism?’ I told him that I didn’t, but that it sounded true – and I knew immediately it would be the subject of my next book.” His plan was to write a novel, but with his first visit to the archives that changed completely.
There he found the papers of Dr Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, previously only a minor character in most studies of the Führer. “I knew then that this was already better than fiction.” In the months that followed, supported by the late, great German historian of the Third Reich Hans Mommsen, Ohler travelled from archive to archive, carefully gathering his material – and how much of it there was! He didn’t use half of what he found. “Look at this,” he says, jumping up. When he returns, in his hand is a copy of a letter from Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, in which he suggests that the “medication” Morell is giving the Führer needs to be regulated for the sake of his increasingly wobbly health...
Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned. At a company called Temmler in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild, its head chemist, inspired by the successful use of the American amphetamine Benzedrine at the 1936 Olympic Games, began trying to develop his own wonder drug – and a year later, he patented the first German methyl-amphetamine. Pervitin, as it was known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train drivers (initially, it could be bought without prescription). It even made its way into confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,” went the slogan. Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which they would be able to get through their housework in no time at all – with the added bonus that they would also lose weight, given the deleterious effect Pervitin had on the appetite. Ohler describes it as National Socialism in pill form."
Doping in Sport - Benzedrine: "Benzedrine is a trade name for amphetamine. The Council of Europe says it first appeared in sport at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. It was produced in 1887 and the derivative, Benzedrine, was isolated in the U.S. in 1934 by Gordon Alles. Its perceived effects gave it the street name "speed". British troops used 72 million amphetamine tablets in the Second World War and the RAF got through so many that "Methedrine won the Battle of Britain" according to one report. "
"In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors, recommending that soldiers take one tablet per day, two at night in short sequence, and another one or two tablets after two or three hours if necessary. The Wehrmacht ordered 35m tablets for the army and Luftwaffe, and the Temmler factory increased production. The likes of Böll, it’s fair to say, wouldn’t need to ask their parents for Pervitin again. Was Blitzkrieg, then, largely the result of the Wehrmacht’s reliance on crystal meth? How far is Ohler willing to go with this? He smiles. “Well, Mommsen always told me not to be mono-causal. But the invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: it’s not possible, at night we have to rest, and they [the allies] will retreat and we will be stuck in the mountains. But then the stimulant decree was released, and that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights. Rommel [who then led one of the panzer divisions] and all those tank commanders were high – and without the tanks, they certainly wouldn’t have won...
When Hitler fell seriously ill in 1941, however, the vitamin injections that Morell had counted on no longer had any effect – and so he began to ramp things up. First, there were injections of animal hormones for this most notorious of vegetarians, and then a whole series of ever stronger medications until, at last, he began giving him a “wonder drug” called Eukodal, a designer opiate and close cousin of heroin whose chief characteristic was its potential to induce a euphoric state in the patient (today it is known as oxycodone). It wasn’t long before Hitler was receiving injections of Eukodal several times a day. Eventually he would combine it with twice daily doses of the high grade cocaine he had originally been prescribed for a problem with his ears, following an explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, his bunker on the eastern front. Did Morell deliberately turn Hitler into an addict? Or was he simply powerless to resist the Führer’s addictive personality?
“I don’t think it was deliberate,” says Ohler. “But Hitler trusted him. When those around him tried to remove Morell in the fall of 1944, Hitler stood up for him – though by then, he knew that if he was to go, he [Hitler] would be finished. They got along very well. Morell loved to give injections, and Hitler liked to have them. He didn’t like pills because of his weak stomach and he wanted a quick effect. He was time-pressed; he thought he was going to die young.” When did Hitler realise he was an addict? “Quite late. Someone quotes him as saying to Morell: you’ve been giving me opiates all the time. But mostly, they talked about it in oblique terms. Hitler didn’t like to refer to the Eukodal. Maybe he was trying to block it off from his mind. And like any dealer, Morell was never going to say: yeah, you’re addicted, and I have something to feed that for you.” So he talked in terms of health rather than addiction? “Yes, exactly.”"
"The effect of the drugs could appear to onlookers to be little short of miraculous. One minute the Führer was so frail he could barely stand up. The next, he would be ranting unstoppably at Mussolini..."
"...taking Halloween costume options away from kids who are expressing an interest in other cultures is such a weird hill to die on."
Disney Pulls Moana Costume, Apologizes for Cultural Appropriation, Saddens Children - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Little boys will no longer be able to dress up as the banished demigod Maui—a character in Disney's latest film, Moana—thanks to all the people (some of them Polynesian) who complained about cultural appropriation...
Disney has been criticized for not having a diverse enough roster of characters and films—too many rail-thin white princesses—and Moana is an attempt to address that. But Disney's filmmakers are damned if they do, damned if they don't. When Disney uses merchandise and costumes to make a minority culture accessible to non-minority children, the studio gets accused of cultural appropriation. When it sticks to stuff for white audiences, it's accused of racism. When Disney's protagonists are good-looking and thin, it's accused of promoting unrealistic and unhealthy beauty standards. When it includes a plus size protagonist, it's accused of fat-shaming Polynesians. People are free to work themselves into a frenzy over whatever they want, of course, but taking Halloween costume options away from kids who are expressing an interest in other cultures is such a weird hill to die on."
"Trigger warnings imperil academic freedom and further infantilize a cohort of young people accustomed to coddling by their helicopter parents."
If You Need a Trigger Warning, You Need P.T.S.D. Treatment - NYTimes.com: "Proponents of trigger warnings point out that many students have suffered trauma, exemplified by alarming rates of sexual assault on campus. Accordingly, they urge professors to warn students about potentially upsetting course materials and to exempt distressed students from classes covering topics likely to trigger post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., symptoms, such as flashbacks, nightmares and intrusive thoughts about one’s personal trauma.
Proponents of trigger warnings are deeply concerned about the emotional well-being of students, especially those with trauma histories.
Yet lost in the debate are two key points: Trauma is common, but P.T.S.D. is rare.
Epidemiological studies show that many people are exposed to trauma in their lives, and most have had transient stress symptoms. But only a minority fails to recover, thereby developing P.T.S.D. Students with P.T.S.D. are those most likely to have adverse emotional reactions to curricular material, not those with trauma histories whose acute stress responses have dissipated.
However, trigger warnings are countertherapeutic because they encourage avoidance of reminders of trauma, and avoidance maintains P.T.S.D. Severe emotional reactions triggered by course material are a signal that students need to prioritize their mental health and obtain evidence-based, cognitive-behavioral therapies that will help them overcome P.T.S.D. These therapies involve gradual, systematic exposure to traumatic memories until their capacity to trigger distress diminishes.
Rather than issuing trigger warnings, universities can best serve students by facilitating access to effective and proven treatments for P.T.S.D. and other mental health problems."
"America is experiencing a bizarre disconnect between real and perceived danger when it comes to kids. But why?"
Breakthrough Study Explains Why We Arrest Moms for Putting Kids in Nearly Non-Existent 'Danger' - Hit & Run : Reason.com: " Why are we arresting moms for putting their kids in "danger" for doing the things our own moms did without anyone batting an eye, like letting us walk to school, or play outside, or wait at home a short while? Recall that just recently a mom was arrested for letting her kids, 8 and 9, wait at the condo for under an hour while she went to pick up dinner.
Well, a new study by researchers at the University of California-Irvine may have figured it out. "Our fears of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades—not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable," as the university put it in a news release. In other words, the only socially acceptable mom has become a mom who never takes her eyes off her kids. With that in mind, whenever we see an unsupervised child, we automatically assume the child has a bad mom. And once we are harshly judging that mom, our minds unconsciously judge her "crime" extra harshly, too. We believe it to be more dangerous than it actually is. So it's a feedback loop: unsupervised kids have terrible moms, terrible moms endanger their kids...
But our perceptions have nothing to do with the world actually becoming more dangerous (crime is at a 50-year low), or even the legitimate fear of children getting overheated in a car (moms get yelled at for leaving their children for the few seconds it takes to return a grocery cart). Instead, our perceptions have everything to do with our seriously screwed up "moral intuition."
Cops seeing kids at the park think the mom is negligent. Child Protective Services represenatives over-estimate the danger to latchkey kids. The result is arrested parents, and arrested development of the kids. "People are very attached to the idea that they are rational beings," says Sarnecka. But as the study shows, they aren't. They are swayed by unconscious judgments. "It would be really great if people could be rational about their irrationality." Until that happens, we cannot have open-ended laws that defer to an authority's spidey sense. Instead, we must insist that a child be in provable danger of immediate, indisputable, statistically likely and egregious harm before parents be judged negligent. Because otherwise they'll just be judged, period—especially the moms, and especially the moms with fewer resources. And that harsh judgment will suffice for a verdict of guilty."
Former Latch-Key Kids Who Are Now Parents, Unite! - Hit & Run : Reason.com: ""People don't only think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral," the researchers write. "They also think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. That is, people overestimate the actual danger to children who are left alone by their parents, in order to better support or justify their moral condemnation of parents who do so." The result is a feedback loop that increases the legal and social penalties for leaving kids alone and reinforces the belief that even the briefest parental absence amounts to child abuse. These beliefs don't just affect busybodies. They lead police, prosecutors, judges and jurors to overestimate risks...
While not exactly new, this trend has been intensifying over the past two decades or so, lurching from isolated scares about poisoned Halloween candy in the 1970s and child abduction in the 1980s to a generalized calculus that places perceived harm to children at the center of seemingly every discussion. The tendency is ubiquitous enough to be fair game for parody. On The Simpsons, for instance, one character routinely asks at any public gathering, "What about the children?" In that nearly 20-year-old story, I pointed to parenting styles and social obsessions prevalent among baby boomers as informing the bizarre mismatch in kids' better-and-better situations and parents' greater-and-greater anxiety about the safety and well-being of their offspring. Read the whole thing for the detailed causes, though a short list includes a decrease in the number of children per family, an increase in the personal and social investment in children, a warped understanding both of how trauma affects kids and how widespread trauma really is, and a media-informed desire to give your kid an advantage in all sorts of activities. Snowflakes aren't born, they're made. And now we have entered a phase where our overactive imaginations about threats to children have been institutionalized into really bad legal, educational, and social-work systems."
"Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia."
How To Be At War Forever / Boing Boing: "First, you'd need an enemy, of course, but that part would be pretty straightforward. After all, if the US government could convince the citizenry that Iraq was the 9/11 enemy but that Saudi Arabia was our friend when nineteen out of the twenty 9/11 hijackers were Saudi, it's fair to say that just about anything is possible. But the next part would be harder. On the one hand, you'd have to claim progress in the war so that the citizenry would maintain its support for the war. On the other hand, you couldn't actually defeat the enemy, lest the war end. That is to say, you'd have to maintain a longterm, delicate balance: we would always be winning in the war, but would never actually win the war...
With that balance in mind, your propaganda would likely be some version of, "Today, our military forces have achieved a significant victory. Of course, the enemy is insidious and resilient, and there is much hard work still ahead.""
"The new findings challenge the “food desert” hypothesis..."
Fat Head » Food Deserts and Grand Plans: "An analysis of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults reveals that access to healthy foods in a supermarket does not hinder Americans’ consumption of empty calories. In fact, the study found, U.S. adults buy the bulk of their sugar-sweetened beverages and nutrient-poor discretionary foods at supermarkets and grocery stores.
The new findings challenge the “food desert” hypothesis, which posits that a lack of access to supermarkets and grocery stores in some communities worsens the obesity crisis by restricting people’s access to healthy foods...
As part of their never-ending quest to create a better society by spending other people’s money and/or restricting other people’s freedoms, The Anointed decided to take on the (ahem) “problem” of food deserts some years ago. And boy, the Grand Plan they came up with to fix it is such a fine example of The Anointed in action, I decided to write a full post on the topic. I haven’t discussed The Anointed for a while, so I’ll start with a brief review of how they operate. This is my crib-sheet version of Thomas Sowell’s terrific book The Vision of The Anointed: The Anointed identify a problem in society. The Anointed propose a Grand Plan to fix the problem. Strangely, the Grand Plan nearly always requires spending other people’s money and/or restricting other people’s freedom to make their own decisions. Because they are so supremely confident in their ideas, The Anointed don’t bother with proof or evidence that the Grand Plan will actually work. In fact, they cheerfully ignore any evidence that the Grand Plan won’t work. If possible, The Anointed will use government coercion to impose the Grand Plan on other people (for their own good, of course). Because the problem they’ve identified is The Bad, The Anointed assume whatever Grand Plan they design to fix it is The Good. Therefore, anyone who opposes the Grand Plan is opposing Good itself … which can only mean those people are either evil or stupid. If the Grand Plan fails (which it usually does), The Anointed will never, ever, ever admit the Grand Plan was wrong. They will instead conclude that 1) the plan was good, but was undermined by people who are evil or stupid, or 2) the plan didn’t go far enough … which means we need to do the same thing again, ONLY BIGGER...
In other words, the Grand Plan isn’t working for the same reason those wunnerful, wunnerful fruits and vegetables weren’t available in “food deserts” in the first place: THE LOCALS AREN’T INTERESTED IN BUYING THEM. HOW DID YOU NOT SEE THIS COMING A HALF-BILLION DOLLARS AGO, YOU @#$%ING MORONS?! Here’s the really fun part: The USDA is aware of research negating the hypothesis that people don’t buy fruits and vegetables because they “struggle” to find them. "
"I’m keeping this short. You don’t have a slow metabolism. Let’s move on."
You're Not losing Fat Because You're Eating Too Damn Much. Even When You Don't Think You Are. Let Me Show You. - Physiqonomics: "Starvation mode [sometimes referred to as metabolic damage] is the idea that if you eat too little an amount of calories for an extended period of time, your body stops burning fat; in fact, it starts doing the opposite – you start gaining weight ‘even when consuming 800 calories’. Sound familiar?
So, how much truth is there to this?
Well, see, Starvation Mode is an odd one. Odd because, while it’s not entirely correct; it’s not entirely incorrect either.
The correct part: When you reduce calories, more specifically as you begin to get leaner, there is, in fact, some slowing of metabolic rate.
The incorrect part: Due to this low-calorie consumption your body just decides HA, fuck you. And proceeds to enter this phantom zone of otherworldliness where the laws of thermodynamics cease to exist; resulting in no fat loss and even gaining fat on some absurdly low number of calories.
What’s really going on: As you start to lose body fat and weight, there’s less of you. This ‘lessness’ means your body doesn’t require as many calories to keep you alive...
I wrote damn near an essay on the last point so I’m keeping this short. You don’t have a slow metabolism. Let’s move on. Ok, sheesh, man. Fine. Two people of the same size [height, weight] and age, have around a 10-15% variance in basal metabolic rate. This amounts to an average of 200-300 calories. Yes, but, I’m a female s – no, stop. Gender will impact metabolism, however, it’s less to do with women’s metabolism ‘being slower’ than their Male counterparts, and more to do with the physiological differences; Men carry more muscle and less fat at a similar body weight. The difference, all things considered (muscle mass, hormones etc.), is a whopping 3%: If we had a guy and a girl who both maintain their body weight at a calorie intake of 1800 calories; the difference between the two would be around 54 calories per day or, the equivalent of one medium-sized apple. So, not much. Well, unless you really, really like Apples. As I discussed in this post and this post, the majority of the differences between two people of the same height, weight, and age is due to exercise, good nutrition, and increased activity in general.
So if you aren’t in starvation mode and you don’t have a slow metabolism: What exactly is going on? There are two factors at play here. Misreporting Intake & Calorie Ignorance..."
"There is a feeling ‘they have been the oppressors, and now it’s our turn’. Some prefer to step on men in the process."
The Red Pill: the movie about men that feminists didn’t want you to see: "A feminist filmmaker has re-ignited the gender war by daring to make a controversial movie about the Men Right’s Movement.
As part of her research for The Red Pill, American film maker Cassie Jaye spent hundreds of hours with the internet’s most notorious Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) over a two-and-a-half year period. For balance, she also interviewed some of their fiercest critics – such as Katherine Spillar, Executive Director of the Feminist Majority Foundation. Cassie Jaye
Jaye began the process as a feminist, but she ended up not only sympathising with the MRAs, but fundamentally questioning the “aggressive” ethos of modern feminism.
For her efforts, she says she has been smeared, threatened with “career suicide” and even saw her funding dry up – to the point where the movie was unlikely to see the light of day...
"When I started this project, my perception of MRAs was definitely negative,” she tells me. “I thought they’d say shocking things and it would be a peek inside this mysterious, misogynistic community. All I knew about them was the cherry-picked, shocking comments used on feminist websites. “But when I started to really listen to them, I started to empathise with a lot of their issues. Our cultural conditioning is that women have been oppressed and men are the oppressors. But I saw that wasn’t so. “Within the feminist community, there is a level of dismissiveness and a lack of compassion. There is a feeling ‘they have been the oppressors, and now it’s our turn’. Some prefer to step on men in the process. Even when men were suffering, like falling behind at school, I heard a lot of talk about ‘toxic masculinity’ – that it was somehow the fault of the patriarchy, that men caused their own problems. “But the MRAs weren’t loners or misogynists. Most of them are in loving relationships and have children, and that was shocking for me.” "
"...a movement built around freedom from speech can't help but defeat itself."
Is the Campus PC Movement Dying? - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "...a movement that gives so much normative weight to subjective triggers cannot be harnessed for constructive purposes because it has as many fissures points as it has members. Furthermore, everyone has an incentive to weaponize their personal angst, turning each against the other, which is why the movement has reached a point where it is devouring its own ideological kin and threatening to finish off the progressive project."
Is Political Correctness On Its Way Out On College Campuses? - Reason.com: "If you want to see campus political correctness run amuck, look no further than the this front page story in The New York Times describing programs by Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, to
Fostershastio via Foter.com
warn college freshmen against microaggressions. For those living under a mushroom for the last few years, microaggressions, along with trigger warnings, are part of a diversity movement to create "safe spaces" on campuses by eliminating any actions that could be remotely offensive or upsetting to minority (or even majority) groups. As the term suggests, these hurts are considered tantamount to physical assault...
This absurd movement is showing signs of collapsing from the weight of its own internal contradictions. A lot of the advice colleges like Clark are dishing out is either too obvious to be worth mentioning ("You are a credit to your race") or so hypersensitive as to be overwrought, likely to paralyze more than enlighten the uninitiated. Some administrators go so far as to caution against statements like "America is a land of opportunity" or "if you work hard you can succeed" because they "microinvalidate" (yes, an actual word!) the experience of marginalized minorities. Clark even wants to push back against nonverbal microaggressions (such as when white women clutch their purses in the presence of black or Latino men) and environmental ones (like when a science class displays only pictures of white male scientists, making female students feel inferior).
These overly idealistic, zealously evangelized "no offense" policies offer a window into the impatience of campus warriors to ferret out every last vestige of sexism, racism, and all other -isms lurking in the deep structures of the human mind. But this progressive push doesn't avoid culture clashes—it heightens them. The growing and ideologically eclectic list of campus speakers who have been disinvited in recent years because some student group found them offensive has become a flashpoint in the culture wars. This is not to say that subconscious bias and bigotry don't exist or should be left unaddressed. But it needs to be tackled by reaching a higher level of mutual understanding, not shutting down speech—and minds.
Some colleges are beginning to push back. The University of Chicago got the ball rolling this year when it sent its entering class an "academic freedom letter" noting that it should not expect "trigger warnings" in classes. If individual professors want to alert students to potentially provocative or upsetting course material, they are free to do so. But there is no university policy of creating intellectual "safe spaces" on campus. Columbia, Brown, and Claremont McKenna have also publicly committed to protecting freedom of expression on their campuses. Columbia President Lee Bollinger, who, during his stint as president of the University of Michigan vigorously and successfully defended his school's affirmative action policies before the Supreme Court on diversity grounds, made college censorship the thrust of his remarks to incoming students. He pledged not to ban speech, calling on students instead to use the power of speech to effect change...
It is too early to tell whether the tide has finally begun to turn on it. However, what's clear is that a movement built around freedom from speech can't help but defeat itself."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)