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Incredulity

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Posts posted by Incredulity

  1. 3 hours ago, retread said:

    Can we get a Cliff's Notes of the vile, racist, anti-American comments made by any of the four women? I know Omar made a comment about foreign money influencing American policy/elections. So anti-Semitic. What were the others?

    Talib: The Holocaust gives her a “calming feeling”.

  2. 12 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

    As has been mentioned many times, it is based on classic literature. That classic literature reflects the ideas and beliefs of the era it is written in and the eras it covers. So it's interesting to see old modes of storytelling mixed with newer modes. Old stories that venerated the Divine Right of Kings (not necessarily Hamlet itself, though...) had the purpose of upholding/reinforcing/teaching that social order to prevent unrest, so when you adapt those stories to modern, Democratic times, it creates an anachronistic value set trying to fit in with modern value sets.

    The white/black coding of the characters in The Lion King is debatable, of course, and is an element of that transition from pre-modern to modern era storytelling. When the older stories were written, it was an in an all-white context so the delineations were primarily class-based. But in modern America (and the modern West in general, so much as "the West" means anything (it doesn't)) race and class are inextricably linked so it is virtually impossible to tell a class-coded story without making it racially coded as well.

    And the creators of the Lion King didn't work very hard to try and separate those things, choosing minority actors for the bad guy's voiced underlings (along with one mentally retarded underling) and a feminine/gay-coded male as the main bad guy.

    It's interesting if you aren't (1) stupid and/or (2) strangely emotionally invested in believing that art is entirely without context or message.

    It's fine to enjoy The Lion King while acknowledging what it is.

    Facts don't care about your feelings.

    Brain Worms 1

    bad_teammate 0

  3. 30 minutes ago, Lobo said:

    It's a little different with food since there are legitimate "grades" to produce and meet and dairy.  But more and more in-store brands are buying up the foodchain and offering those better quality foodstuffs at a significant discount.  

    What should have always been apparent to consumers, but thanks to slick marketing, it's not---is that consumer perishables, dry goods, etc.  Those generic brands are the exact same fucking thing as their premium brand colleagues.  Do you really think the Gap has three separate and distinct factory complexes spread throughout SE Asia.  One with highly paid, skilled craftsmen making Banana Republic chinos from only the best materials.  And then another more modest facility with great raw materials and content talent making great Chinos for the Gap.  And then a subpar shithole with crappy thread making chinos for Old Navy?  Do you really think that's the case?  It's one big complex, and they just smack on different labels at the very end because Americans are fucking dumb.  

    There is one factory, but it is perfectly capable of producing different levels of OBJECTIVE quality.

    Stitch counts and the like actually make a difference.

  4. 10 hours ago, RamjetFDO said:
    11 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:
    Ice, cause hail hurts but rain don’t. 

    But what if it's hard water?

    Chubby Rain

     

     

  5. 2 hours ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

    Anne Frank didn’t die in the gas chambers. She died of typhus due to overcrowding and neglect in a concentration camp. 

    Just saying.

    Well thank god the camps aren’t on the streets of Los Angeles.

  6. 7 minutes ago, Jiggy-Z said:

     

    You seem to short on suggesting any solutions that have not already been tried and failed.  What is your new solution?

    Hell, for all I know we are just a bunch of lazy fat asses and there is no solution and no matter what tax we put on sugar, no matter how many subsidies we  take away, no matter how much labeling we put on products, and no matter how much we invest in education, we will still be in the same boat, but these things must be tried due to the ultimate cost. 

    underwrite health insurance individually.

    It's a whole lot better than creating another pile of funds for the government to mismanage.

  7. 10 minutes ago, Jiggy-Z said:

    But it can be part of the solution to this problem without some groundbreaking tax policy or overreach.  We know what the problem is (over consumption of an addictive and unhealthy product) , our solutions thus far have failed to even slow its rise, and the costs of prevention is minuscule compared to the costs to treat.  We have done it with tobacco and alcohol.  We have done it with occupational work safety and  environmental pollution.  Start with truthful labeling and remove the low hanging fruit subsidies to start. 

     

    We don't even need to know what the definition of good food is, just the bad for now, and we know what that is.  Fat is still bad when you combine it with lots of sugar.

    What about current food labeling is not truthful?  There are already in fact thousands of pages of regulations that mandate "truthful labeling" for food products.

    Is honey a bad food?  It is an "added sugar" as classified by the new nutritional labeling laws.

     

  8. 19 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

    It's a very interesting issue.  I think once you decide to be part of civilization, everything is arguably prescriptive. 

    I remember listening to a podcast about how French elementary schools put so much into the lunches they feed their students.  It's part of acculturating them into French society, and the food was pretty healthy and pretty good. From the get go, there seems to be French policy that both promotes French culture and health.

    If bad food habits are measurable in terms of rising health costs and thus costs to the taxpayer, I don't have any problem with intelligent policy that counters those affects.  It's not an issue of freedom in the sense of the Bill of Rights.  It's an issue of managing the costs and revenues of the government. 

    If I can tax the the folks who produce goods that cause health problems (fast food, polluters, etc.) I can use that revenue to counter the health problems or pay off poorer people who get unfairly hammered by the tax policy. 

     

    The government, specifically through social engineering tax policy, shouldn't be the solution to all problems.

    More specifically, what is the specific definition of a good food?  As mentioned up thread carbs were good and fat was bad 25 years ago.  Also, from up thread there are already federal subsidies for the corn and sugar industry that bastardize incentives.  More of that isn't the answer.

  9. 30 minutes ago, tantric superman said:

    Do you consider some kind of tax on producers of say, alcohol or tobacco, or in the future, marijuana as government prescription of what you should eat?

     the current taxation levels of tobacco are definitely prescriptive.

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