Can you expand on your point about American pharmaceudical consumption? It reeks of the naturalist fallacy but I realize you were mainly mentioning it as part of a broader statement so I'd like to hear more.
Stuff like "well I'm getting on a flight, time to pop a couple of xanax" seems much more common in films/TV that America exports than, say, real life in the UK.
I know plenty of people who use illegal drugs but still have that perception of America thanks to Hollywood/etc.
Personally, I don't know the data between countries, and while I've been to the US a bunch of times I've never tried to obtain medicine there legally or illegally. But I have found a big difference between UK ("You want valium? Are you sure? OK, here are 4x 2mg pills") vs France/Belgium ("Do you mean 10mg, I don't think valium comes that weak..." before realising they could prescribe 2mg indeed, and multiple times I've asked for a controlled drug in FR/BE and had the doctor reply "how many boxes" without even asking why I wanted it. Purely anecdotal, though.)
Even for non-pillpopping writers, I imagine it's often more interesting to make a character take drugs/medicine than not.
Ultimately, a lot of the world's views of America are shaped by the versions we see in fiction - I've been to the US from Europe more than most people I know, and I have plenty of American friends/colleagues. But still, I spend more time watching fictional versions of America on my TV than I do experiencing America myself.
The naturalist fallacy is often actual empirical reality (sometimes natural states are better).
It's just the fact that it's not always the case, which makes it a fallacy.
But in the case, overloading on drugs for every BS annoyance, and having them needlessly pushed by doctors on payola and gifts from pharmaceuticals, is worse than not doing it.
Normalizing obesity because you can take some drugs to stay alive (artificially lowering your cholesterol, blood pressure, etc) might not be the smartest idea ever. But yeah, maybe it's the naturalist fallacy. To each their own.
Would those obese people be better off with bad cholesterol, blood pressure, etc.? It seems like you're trying to avoid outright saying we should just let fat people die as an example to everyone else.
What? How on earth would you conclude this from that I wrote?
I was replying to the idea that it is the "naturalist fallacy" to say that it is better to be develop good habits (in this case, eat better), than to just take some drugs and maintain the bad habits. Obese people should take the drugs, I don't wish for anyone to die. Even better for them would be to lose the weight.
The US has a huge (pun intended) obesity problem, and it seems related to worse health outcomes across several dimensions. This is just a fact.
I don’t have any special insight, but in my part of the world that’s definitely a common perception of the USA, usually attributed to lax regulation around what kind of pharmaceutical advertising os permitted.
It's an interesting topic because I've heard a South African joke that every American has a pharmacy in their house (talking about over the counter meds in that case) so I guess it's a common perception around the world. It's funny because most Americans have the opposite view (except regarding mental health medicine for some reason), if I had to summarize the attitude it's essentially "I hate being sick and I've got shit to do".
It's not so much about 'hate being sick and got shit to do' and more about 'I hate feeling sick but going to the doctor will cost me a small fortune, so I'll stick to over the counter medicine until I feel so bad I can't avoid it'.
- the municipal water supplies are full of pharma drugs, as is our meat supply
- UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos, yet over half of Americans today. As a result, a huge number are on blood pressure and other drugs, which also end up in the water supply.
> UCSF, the paper author, consider HFCS to be a poison and likely explains why there was no obesity in 60's photos
I presume you're referring to Dr. Lustig of UCSF's research on sugar, or more specifically his position that fructose is a toxin akin to ethanol due to how similarly they're processed by the liver.
If so, Dr. Lustig is careful to point out that this is not an HFCS-specific issue. Sugar and HFCS both contain fructose, and are essentially identical in this regard. This kind of misinformed demonizing of HFCS results in people thinking sweets are perfectly safe as long as they contain sugar and not HFCS, UCSF does not back such a position AFAIK.
I'm not missing that point, and actually agree with you re: HFCS replacing fat in processed foods.
You're just being harmfully imprecise with your claim, because it implies non-HFCS sweeteners aren't poison - according to UCSF no less. The fructose is the poison, and it's not HFCS-specific. It happens that HFCS is the thing that's everywhere thanks to corn subsidies, sure, but there's still plenty of non-HFCS fructose sources on the shelves of stores that are equally harmful. You're not in the clear by specifically avoiding HFCS.
I observe overweight strangers in the grocery store checkout isle extolling the virtues of eating sugar but not HFCS as they toss candy on the conveyor about once a month. It's rather depressing.
Edit:
BTW I suspect you're shadow-banned in case you didn't know, as your comments in this thread have been immediately [dead]. Looking at your general comments history there's a lot of [dead].
If you haven't seen/heard any of Lustig's talks on the subject, he makes a very compelling argument re: fructose being a toxin. They're readily available on youtube.
Excess fructose consumption is implicated in causing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, which affects about 20-25% of people in Europe, and 30-40% of adults in the US. [0]
This statistic alone gives me cause for grave concern WRT covid-19 outcomes for those 30-40% of American adults should they get infected.
As a small-time landlord, it's more complicated than that because the dynamic changes based on neighborhood and city. Filling is not a challenge for me specifically because I'm in California in one of the major cities, the reality of the locale is that there's always /somebody/ seeking (I suspect this is the case in most big cities) and while I try to help my tenants by being a little laxer than some owners I still have to pay property tax if nothing else (this is more complicated currently but it's still a presence). I'm also not some mega complex with a war chest though, I'm eight units with a revenue of 120k. Thankfully so far none of my tenants have been totally shut out from their work, there's been a few months some needed extra time but they've all managed to spring back.
Thanks, guess if you're in a position where you're oversubscribed then you have the option. Out of interest, how would you look upon a prospective tenant from somewhere else who was evicted over non-payment during corona? I guess I am asking if all evictions are equally bad or if you would care less about the last few months?
For Corona it's hard to say because it's unlikely someone would move to my neighborhood in such a situation (we're not ritzy but there's low-income areas that are 3/4 the price a 30 minute drive away). In general all evictions are the same because there's a ton of regulations in the state about what I can ask and what I can use as a reason to reject an applicant. If you're persuing a zero risk strategy then you get whatever is volunteered during a call to confirm their previous address and what's provided in a background check. The catch is that you can be persued legally for saying something that can be demonstrated to have resulted in an unfair rejection, so the safest strategy is to simply volunteer nothing while hoping the other party has a gabby manager. In parallel, California is really landlord hostile. That's not totally bad because we have the leverage but it means for example that even if I reject a tenant they could in theory sue me if I couldn't adequately demonstrate the rejection was part of a consistent policy (which is hard to do for a pandemic scenario). That's sort of a longshot situation but California judges also tend to side with tenants when they can so as a small landlord for whom court is expensive it's safer to have a policy towards evictions that is agnostic to the specifics.
Is there no grace period while properties are vacant? In the UK the tenant is responsible for paying the equivalent of city taxes, the landlord only needs to pay if it's vacant for more than 6 months. The only other taxes you need to pay are income tax on the rent you receive.
California will charge you no matter what normally. The logistics vary by region a little and to some extent you can claim losses as a business expense but in the covid era the end result is still that the grace period for paying rent is more generous than the graces I get for paying property taxes. I do get some amount of relief but that relief isn't comprehensive to the point that I wouldn't be ahead if I evicted someone who had completely lost all work and was unlikely to find new work for half a year. Hopefully more aid will come but the state government is still in denial about the whole situation around covid (I strongly suspect our infection rate is radically higher than reported) so I'm not gambling it'll be soon.
It seems like the interesting question is what happens after total authoritarianism. I know many here find the news out of China nightmarish but most of China is on the mainland and the mainland Chinese, while by no means flourishing in utopia, are pretty content on average compared to where they were in the past. This isn't meant to endorse China by any means but if the west is going to keep espousing the uplifting effects of democracy they're going to need some actual benefits to point to eventually since right now the main perk is friendlier trade relations. Latin American democracy is a joke because they love populists (no one actually studying them blames the intervention memes), the EU is rife with corruption and the U.S. is strong but you can be strong without being a democracy. So why should an aspiring African government, for example, strive for Democracy rather than persuing the Chinese model?
Democracy developed in a world of totalitarian regimes, and mostly thrived because having officials vulnerable to election cuts down on corruption and incompetence while building government legitimacy and stability.
Totalitarian states tend to have a good run, where they have a good leader and energetic administration, then they become lethargic and dysfunctional, and because there's no mechanism to correct this, they start falling apart. (However, this can take centuries).
As an aside, I don't think the West has ever been particularly keen on democracy. I think Israel is the only democracy that has ever received substantial military and economic support. For dictatorships, this kind of support is basically routine (see Egypt, for a typical example).
Those democracies didn't just emerge in spite of totalitarians though, they emerged because of them and the stability they established. Stable conditions historically lead to democracy but democracy in uncertain circumstances segues into stability much more rarely. Yes corruption is a problem for totalitarians but cracking down on corruption has been a growing aspect of the Chinese model for exactly that reason (whether or not they'll succeed is another matter but it's incorrect to automatically assume that a totalitarian state will be blind to the problem by default). Further, those democracies emerged in a wildly different power climate. A modernized military operating without any rules of engagement is not going to get overthrown by its people when over half the population is content.
I think the precondition for stability is a strong civil society, and clear traditions about what constitutes legitimacy. Democracy fosters both of these. Dictatorship can foster both in the case of an 'enlightened despot', but it's often the case that the despot is incompetent, or worse.
If you look at transitions like the english civil war, or the french revolution, the clear precondition of revolution is not 'stability', as you think, but rather systemic dysfunction compounded by incompetent leadership. This kind of situation is one which democracies, in theory, should be much less vulnerable to.
Your ideas about the relative balance of power between state and people make some sense, I think, but they only matter when the threat is internal dissent. Most of the states in modern europe had a form of republicanism enforced on them by the French, who were able to invade all their neighbors because their republican government was (while very dysfunctional) more efficient and able to field talented officers and large armies.
A modernised military, moreover, consists of normal people - and they will also feel the disillusionment and apathy that grips really dysfunctional regimes. Saudi Arabia, for example, fields armies of terrible soldiers, using the most advanced weapons available.
China is an interesting and very weird state, because it's a very old civilization with deep roots, with very different basic ideas to the west, and they have turned marxism into a kind of managerial culture for an extremely capitalist society. I don't know if they will follow any of the typical patterns that totalitarian states follow. You can't really use the USSR as a point of comparison, because the USSR was a very European project, coming directly out of the enlightenment, and the western political tradition. Nor would Korea make sense, since they were colonized, and both North and South represent different reactions to colonial subjugation.
Well that's certainly one take. Charles had a bit of a complex sure but you have to understand the context of the time in that Cromwells foreign co-conspirators were demanding nothing less than his head.
The precondition of the English civil war in my opinion was more the funds that facilitated it promised by financiers from Amsterdam who ultimately went on to be granted charter to found the BoE.
As you know the result of this civil war was to wreck the fine castles, history and heritage of the English. Destroy many a dynasty and teach the Irish to hate the Brits for all eternity.
Issac D'Israeli produced a worthwhile read on Charles [1] if you'd like to know more on his character and quarry.
The democracy of Britain was foisted upon us by D'Israeli following his deposition of Robert Peel.
The teeth was taken from all monarchies, or BDFLs, after Bolsheviks were sent from Germany to murder Tsar Nicholas and his family in an act that ultimately condemned 66m Russians.
In my opinion if you want a stable democracy you enfranchise those who would look to a future beyond their own. e.g. one vote per family. If you franchise those who live for today with not a stake in the future democracy becomes not a viable form of governance.
I think it's much more likely that the desirable properties of crypto-currencies will be baked into government issued psudo-coins that retain the desirable parts of bitcoin while discarding the inconvenient parts. The only people who hate on fiat money are people who don't understand why backed currencies suck or why it would be bad if every country used the same currency. What doesn't suck though is money that essentially tracks itself and baking that self-tracking feature into an existing fiat currency via some kind of pseudo-coin would make regulatory enforcement wildly easier without the downsides of a backed currency.
Not trying to nitpick but I had trouble following some of your wording. What would the international incident be over if it happened during a fight? I get that blinding civilians by accident during a training exercise could blow up but blinding targets with a high powered laser doesn't seem that different from using flash grenades when storming a building. I was also unsure because you mentioned it happening during a fight and it seems like if you can already lock onto a target to fire a laser into their eyes it'd be more efficient to skip blinding them and just shoot or bombard them.
I didn't know! Thanks! But is permanent blindness actually a moral hazard if you're using that blindness to create an immediate opportunity to shoot the subject? I'm not a soldier so I might be way off but I'm assuming being totally blind for even a few seconds is a massive handicap in an engagement.
Depending on the philosopher or politician, soldier or commander you ask, it's purpose is fairly varied. Resource burn, attrition, making the other poor bastard die for his country... However, in general, the international community has tended to favor diplomacy favoring modalities of war. By diplomacy friendly, of course, it's still lethal, and loved ones are not at all guaranteed to come back home, but it should result in "a warrior's death". It's frankly stupid, but psychologically, to the political classes, and to the civilian classes there is just some grim acceptance of the necessity of conventional warfare and conflict. Conflicts constrained by laws of war seems to be considered somehow "cleaner", and overall more preferable to the industrial scale manufacture of blind, blistered, or diseased cripples out of the young men and women of both sides.
There are, of course, dissenters to this type of thinking, one of which was Lincoln's War Secretary Edwin Stanton if I recall, Douglas MacArthur and Sherman may also have been counted amongst the numbers of those that advocate the practice of no holds barred, total war, where anything and everything goes, since the only moral outcome of an armed conflict is to end it as quickly, brutally, and decisively as possible. To that end, any restraint in application of force is seen as a sin or needless cruelty in prolonging the conflict.
It was and remains a rather controversial view, especially given the destructive potential most first world nations are now sitting on has led to somewhat of a retirement of the philosophy; at least as long as MAD holds out.
Ask a soldier if they'd rather be dead or blind and they'll often choose blindness; however, can society handle a million corpses or a million blind dependents they feel obligated to take care of? That's a much harder question to answer, but the purely pragmatic perspective will choose the former.
It's sad to say, but many families taking care of gas attack survivors after WW1 grew to resent or even hate the victims because taking care of the victim cost the families the ability to live their lives. What is the quality of life for a victim stuck in a long-term care facility for the rest of their life to be alone and miserable for the next 50-60 years praying for an end they know is far off?
Experiencing the horror of war and seeing the sanitized depiction in Hollywood or games must be very different. After two world wars within 25 years, EVERYONE knew people crippled and ruined by war, so they set out with the idea to ensure it wouldn't happen to their children as well. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren growing up in many places today seem to not really understand.
We need to accept that they knew what they were talking about else we run the risk of bringing those monsters back to life.
I kind of see it but it still seems like a stretch since lots of companies take legal action against governments for a variety of reasons. At face value the company is airing a legitimate concern/grievance and they're using the EU's own courts to explore the legitimacy of that grievance so it's not like they're subverting the rule of law somehow.
The problem is that whatever you'd search for, that term could and eventually would, by any means necessary, be found in "employees’ health information, performance evaluation and even job applications to the company". Then again you can't not see the irony of the situation where FB is complaining that someone is requesting too much data from them.
> Facebook is also seeking interim measures at the Luxembourg-based General Court, Europe’s second-highest, to halt such data requests until judges rule
Having participated in such investigations I can tell you one thing for sure, whatever the final outcome of their initiative FB can only win from the respite this would provide. Evidence gets old and data retention policies just happen to kick in, evidence gets lost, evidence gets moved to another jurisdiction, etc.
I am taking the uncharitable interpretation because it's the most realistic.
I'm inclined to take the realistic approach: It's in their best interest to fight any anti-trust investigation, regardless on whether their denial is legitimate or not. A successful anti-trust suit could cost FB billions of dollars, which is well worth some overtime for a few lawyers to delay-delay-delay.
It's their lawyer's role to make every step of the legal process as painfully slow as possible.
