"That's healthy narcissism--really wanting those good things that babies demand, which is a person being so happy to see you that he just lights up when you walk in the room. When you don't get enough of that, you get the unhealthy narcissism: being contemptuous of other people, jealous. Health narcissism is [being] happy to be where you are." --Dr. Stephen Snyder, Manhattan sex therapist.The other Elle article you should read, and which I'll post when it becomes available, is the interview with Nathanael Johnson, in which he talks about finding balance--and thus sanity--in eating well/healthily/naturally. The bottom line is that it shouldn't be all or nothing; your choice is not all kale juice versus all twinkies.
Hey Rick Perry, I think the 3rd agency you couldn't remember in that debate was The Department of Shut The Fuck Up
— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) June 27, 2013
How certain carbs may trigger food addiction | http://t.co/8NFvyTmGZAThe science of pearls.
— TIME Healthland (@TIMEHealthland) June 27, 2013
Dear self proclaimed Christians: You know God can see your twitter feeds right?
— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) June 26, 2013
How can we be abortion worshiping leftists if we also spend all our time worshiping the God of two guys doin' it? #GetTheHateStraightApparently Melinda Henneberger hasn't considered the details of the proposed Texas law or public opinion, nor understood the heartbreaking stories of women with unviable fetuses. Also, Christina Hoff Summers strikes again.
— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) June 26, 2013
First of all, the "real food" we push includes—gasp—fat. "Many of the dishes glorified by the wholesome-food movement," Freedman frets, "are as caloric and obesogenic as anything served in a Burger King." He reports watching aghast as Bittman, appearing on the Today Show, whipped up a "lovely dish of corn sautéed in bacon fat and topped with bacon." He adds: "Anyone who thinks that such a thing is much healthier than a Whopper just hasn't been paying attention to obesity science for the past few decades."
And many were convinced Brookhaven scientists were using the cover of darkness to transport a UFO.
For decades, there has apparently been a persistent rumor that scientists at Brookhaven once responded to a UFO landing and have been secretly housing an alien spacecraft. The Muon g-2 ring, wrapped in white and covered in flashing lights, did nothing to dissuade these rumors.
“That’s a spaceship,” one man said. “I’m telling you. That’s a spaceship.” And he would hear no other explanation.
Never mind that Monsanto is a sponsor of the prize (and that the list of other backers reads like a who’s who of big ag and big food), or that we never get to know the names of either the nominees or the nominators. [1] Never mind that we’re not feeding the seven billion now, or that we’re sickening a billion of those with a never-before-seen form of malnourishment. Never mind that we already grow enough food to feed not only everyone on the planet but everyone who’s going to be born in the next 30 or 40 years. And never mind that, despite the hype, there’s scant evidence that the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture has done much to boost yields, reduce the use of chemicals or improve the food supply.and
“De Schutter’s promotion of agroecological solutions,” says Lappé, “is rooted in the understanding that the chemical approach breeds debt and dependency on costly inputs like fertilizer, chemicals or genetically engineered seeds. As he told me a few years ago, ‘We have failed to end hunger using the traditional recipe that saw hunger as a technical problem, requiring only that we produce more. We’ve failed because we’ve underestimated the need to empower people and hold governments accountable.’”
Speaking of Lappés, Tom Philpott, a food and agriculture writer at Mother Jones, brings up Anna’s mother, Francis Moore Lappé: “Her central insights in “Diet for a Small Planet” — that growing grain to feed animals for meat is grievously inefficient; that the world already produces more than enough calories and the real problem is economic inequality — have become so commonplace in alternative-ag circles, so accepted, that we forget where they came from. (Now if policy makers would only listen!) She is an unsung intellectual giant, and her work remains vital today.”Vernon Klinkenborg on why we can't afford to neglect the humanities:
That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language.and
Writing well used to be a fundamental principle of the humanities, as essential as the knowledge of mathematics and statistics in the sciences. But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.
No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.
I just realized that people are idiots >>> @Windica Lol and there IS a "Bring Back Paula Deen" FB page and they ARE boycotting SF now.I'm just looking at the bright side (i.e., people boycotting Smithfield).
— Vegan (@vegan) June 24, 2013
One of the biggest mistakes we all make with our money is that we fail to use it in ways that maximize the amount of time we spend engaged in activities that make us happy. Instead, we often accidentally use money in ways that seem like they will make us happy, but instead doom us to unhappy time.
Take buying a nice house in the suburbs. It seems like a great idea. In fact most Americans see owning a house as a key part of living the American dream. And when you buy a house in the ‘burbs, you’re thinking of all the family barbecues you’ll have on the lawn. But what you’re not thinking enough about is the fact that you’ve just doomed yourself to a two-hour commute—in heavy traffic—every day for the rest of your life. Would having a large house be enough to make you happy at the end of a long day when you’d spent two hours in standstill traffic?It's a trade-off, of course (not size vs. proximity, because that's an easy one; location vs. lower prices in general), but most of the time I feel that paying a crazy proportion of my income to live where I live is worth it.
But this does not feel like much of a victory, since the female subjects we meet in passing talk mostly about what is wrong with their relationships and feelings and partners. Surely women could have been found who were not so bored and miserable, and if they had been, the book — which is making a valuable point — would have felt more balanced.I know married (and otherwise partnered) women who are not miserable, who don't spend every waking moment complaining about their husbands. I also know guys who are not Junot Diaz characters or laundry-ad stereotypes of bumbling idiots. And I would argue that those stereotypes harm men more than they do women (even though there's a belief out there that women are deluding themselves if we don't see guys as naturally promiscuous, commitment-phobic, and shallow).
Moreover, the more scientific understanding the public has, the more sceptical they tend to be. This is because they have a sophisticated understanding of how scientific claims to certainty arise, and the more they know about science the more they recognise that it is not a simple process.
Debating science reveals the uncertainties that inevitably exist, and the public can quickly work out that there are social influences on how conclusions emerge. They recognise that who funds science, for example, will have an impact on its outcome. The results of clinical trials in medical research become biased if pharmaceutical companies don't publish negative results. Telling the public that industry-funded research finds GMOs are wonderful isn't going to convince them, because they recognise that they have every incentive to say that.
As a result, if you want to get the pro-science, technically sophisticated UK public to change its mind about a technology it is deeply sceptical of, you don't imply that they are stupid, unpatriotic Luddites who don't care that babies in developing countries will starve to death. By being so clearly in favour of a particular outcome, rather than being seen as an honest broker for a wider public debate, the minister may well have set the whole debate up to fail.
It is a bad idea to take a debate about the politics of food, and the politics of the global distribution of the risks and rewards of innovation, and narrowly focus on questions about risk. The issue isn't just risk, but about how risks and rewards are distributed. With medical genetic technologies there are obvious risks, but the public sees very obvious benefits for sick people and is very supportive of innovation. But with GMOs in agriculture, the social distribution of risks and benefits to the public and to farmers in developing countries is far less obvious. On the other hand, the benefits to large firms (whom the public don't trust because they made such a hash of the GM debate last time) is much clearer.Speaking of risks: something to think about before you indulge in that beef jerky.
Then perhaps we can push back against attitudes that women are “waiting too long” because they’re deluded or selfish or career-obsessed. That won’t be easy, though—there are comments even on Twenge’s piece like, “one thing is choosing not to have babies and another one is to wait too long and then complain that an IVF costs too much or think that your miscarriages are treatable with some sort of ‘cure’. Nope!”Who are these people? I think at least some of them must be like my coworker (see yesterday's post). I was thinking about how maybe she's reverse-projecting, since she's moving across the country to follow her husband as he takes a promotion. I don't have an opinion on her decision--who is anyone else to say what's right for someone else's family--but perhaps she's not thrilled with it, so one way of justifying it to herself is by feeling sorry for the single ladies, who don't have to move for a partner. I also, for example, didn't have to negotiate my location with anyone (for example, move to the exurbs because that's what a spouse might have wanted). I maintain that if you're happy with your life, you don't have to crap on other people (especially not on the internet).
A recent review of studies on conditions like addictions and other psychological problems that can have genetic causes found that such classification generally does reduce the blame heaped on people with the disorders, both by themselves and society. But the labels also increased pessimism about recovery, probably because people assume that as diseases with biological and genetic bases, they are immutable. One study on alcoholism, for example, found that the more people bought into the idea that addiction was a “chronic relapsing disease” over which they were “powerless,” the worse their relapses were. Although the label didn’t increase relapse itself, it made it worse if it did occur— and the majority of people with alcoholism will relapse at least once.Dunkin' Donuts doesn't care about people like me:
.@DunkinDonuts to offer gluten-free donuts. Screw that, we want egg-free! http://t.co/YHjaq0bIn7
— Vegan (@vegan) June 20, 2013
I'm much more concerned about hens in battery cages and male chicks in grinders than I am about gluten in my intestines. @DunkinDonutsAnother interesting comment on the science and humanities debate echoes what I've taken issue with: science may be a tool for understanding the world, "But while that tool can produce very good data, it can't really tell us exactly what we should do with that data, or how we should think about it."
— Vegan (@vegan) June 20, 2013
At the highbrow end, there are scholars and theorists that some have called the “nothing buttists.” Human beings are nothing but neurons, they assert. Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior. We will see the chain of physical causations that determine actions. We will see that many behaviors like addiction are nothing more than brain diseases. We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature. Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.
These two forms of extremism are refuted by the same reality. The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.
"It's absurd," said Amanda Hitt at the Government Accountability Project. She said she couldn't believe that an industry that has been so regularly recorded breaking the law "would then have the audacity to come to any state legislative body and say, 'Hey, we're sick of getting caught doing crimes. Could you do us a favor and criminalize catching us?'"Check this out:
But Berman's rhetoric comes off as positively mild when compared to the email Tennessee state Rep. Andy Hoyt sent the HSUS when his ag gag measure passed: "I am extremely pleased that we were able to pass HB 1191 today to help protect livestock in Tennessee from suffering months of needless investigation that propagandist groups of radical animal activists, like your fraudulent and reprehensibly disgusting organization of maligned animal abuse profiteering corporatists, who are intent on using animals the same way human-traffickers use 17 year old women. You work for a pathetic excuse for an organization who seek to profit from animal abuse. I am glad, as an aside, that we have limited your preferred fund-raising methods here in the state of Tennessee; a method that I refer to as 'tape and rape.' Best wishes for the failure of your organization and it's true intent."
You do know that well over 95% of GMO soy is fed to farm animals, not people, don't you? @JulianWarmeAnd in case you got bitten by the wrong tick.
— Vegan (@vegan) June 14, 2013
Government data collection, as such, isn't really the problem -- at least not in a world in which practically everyone is collecting data on practically everyone else. The problem, insofar as there is one, is not a privacy problem at all, but an accountability problem, and we reasonably expect our government to be more accountable than corporations. Given the current lack of transparency, we don't know what rules govern who can see what data, under what circumstances, for what purposes, and with what consequences. We don't know if this sweeping data collection has led to mistakes or abuses that have harmed innocent people, and we don't know what recourse an innocent person would have if harmed in some way.
It's reasonable to worry about those questions and to expect government officials to offer a little more clarity. (And, no, this won't somehow "tip off" the bad guys; the bad guys will assume the U.S. government's lying and doing far more than it admits anyway.) If there are innocent individuals who have suffered some real injury as a result of these government data-collection programs, there needs to be a mechanism to remedy the damage and impose appropriate consequences on government wrongdoers. If these data collection practices (or any similar past practices) lead to innocent people getting stuck on no-fly lists, or getting harassed by federal agents, or ending up wrongly detained, there should be a prompt, transparent, and fair means for them to challenge their treatment, see the supposed evidence against them, and get the problem fixed.Patton Oswalt on understanding rape culture:
The mere fact that large quantities of data are collected by the government isn't an outrage in and of itself, however, and it shouldn't be any more troubling than the fact that countless non-governmental entities also collect (or can gain access to) our "private" data. We should worry about how the data are used, not whether it's collected.
First off: no one is trying to make rape, as a subject, off-limits. No one is talking about censorship. In this past week of re-reading the blogs, going through the comment threads, and re-scrolling the Twitter arguments, I haven’t once found a single statement, feminist or otherwise, saying that rape shouldn’t be joked under any circumstance, regardless of context. Not one example of this.
In fact, every viewpoint I’ve read on this, especially from feminists, is simply asking to kick upward, to think twice about who is the target of the punchline, and make sure it isn’t the victim.and,
I’ve never wanted to rape anyone. Never had the impulse. So why was I feeling like I was being lumped in with those who were, or who took a cavalier attitude about rape, or even made rape jokes to begin with? Why did I feel some massive, undeserved sense of injustice about my place in this whole controversy?
The answer to that is in the first incorrect assumption. The one that says there’s no a “rape culture” in this country. How can there be? I’ve never wanted to rape anyone.
Do you see the illogic in that leap? I didn’t at first. Missed it completely...
...just because I find rape disgusting, and have never had that impulse, doesn’t mean I can make a leap into the minds of women and dismiss how they feel day to day, moment to moment, in ways both blatant and subtle, from other men, and the way the media represents the world they live in, and from what they hear in songs, see in movies, and witness on stage in a comedy club.
There is a collective consciousness that can detect the presence (and approach) of something good or bad, in society or the world, before any hard “evidence” exists. It’s happening now with the concept of “rape culture.” Which, by the way, isn’t a concept. It’s a reality. I’m just not the one who’s going to bring it into focus. But I’ve read enough viewpoints, and spoken to enough of my female friends (comedians and non-comedians) to know it isn’t some vaporous hysteria, some false meme or convenient catch-phrase.
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