For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
Pizza party, soccer practice, Christmas, whenever it’s served really
Used to believe that humanity would inherently self-improve, especially the more easily information became accessible.
People couldn’t read and write at first, and didn’t know much about the world, and now we have instant communication and access to vast repositories of knowledge.
I believed that people were naturally curious, and wanted to learn and figure things out. Education systems sucked, but with improvement it could foster that curiosity in everyone!
Turns out that was incredibly naive. Humans have an inherent ego that tries to make themselves more than reality. Their problems are more real than another’s. Their inconveniences are more important than anything bigger-picture. I thought religion were old dinosaur structures of primitive belief systems that lasted for too long, but humans will literally make shit up or believe in some made up shit from someone else if it helps them ignore the inconveniences of reality.
COVID-19 really helped sink that in.
People are naturally curious but we live in a system that punishes curiosity.
Oh man. Yeah, I remember in middle school reading about WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Civil War (USA) and thinking that thank god we’re smart enough to be past that.
Yes, also, COVID killed any hope I had left. I remember before the pandemic thinking that if aliens landed all of humanity’s petty bickering would end once we had something that united us all, and when COVID hit I thought “this is it, we have no choice but to come together as humans and face a challenge”…holy shit was I wrong. In the years since the pandemic I’ve had to actively try to forget most of what happened for my own sanity.
covid also shifted the anti-vaxers to the RIGHT.
Humans are smart.
But this isn’t our natural habitat. Its a laboratory and we are the lab rats.
Can you judge an animal’s intelligence if they are in a controlled environment and manipulated by mad scientists? (mad scientist = the 1%)
Kony 2012, not the genreal idea of raising awareness about Joseph Kony, but that it would actually lead to his capture.
Apple products through the 2010s.
I’d watch their WWDC presentations online religiously
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000
But he was a great tennisman ! Who wouldn’t vote for him ???
If only everyone else did.
I ran 5 km every day and ate very low fat, mostly plants. Ended up with non alcoholic fatty liver.
seems inherited, did you ever find a cause?
No one else in my family or extended family has had fatty liver. Fortunately yes, I reversed my NAFLD by eating a low carbohydrate high fat diet.
I actually genuinely believed for awhile as a kid/young adult that ADHD was a gift and that society wouldn’t try to strangle and kill me for having it in a million ways.
Ancient Aliens.
It was about 2002. I was 20.
Yes the internet existed back then but it just wasn’t so pervasive. As in I didn’t own a computer and that wasn’t uncommon.
I bought a second hand book called Ancient Astronauts (?) by a guy called Erik Von Daniken. He’s absolutely the 80s / 90s version of Graham Hancock. All the same pseudoscience strategies to popularise a bullshit theory.
I think I could best be described as a troubled young man. I drank heavily, smoked weed every day, party drugs on the weekend. When I was 18 I had left my home and a deeply religious background. I guess I was looking for some kind of secret arcane understanding of the world that wasn’t religion.
I honestly don’t know what I would have said if someone had have asked me directly - do you really believe that extra terrestrial beings have visited the earth in it’s distant history. Like I don’t know if I really truly believed it. I sure loved thinking about it though.
I changed my position over a decade or so. I went to uni, got a degree, started my career in accounting. Completely un-related to science or history or anthropology but, I certainly realised that people who have spent a lifetime studying to become experts in their field really know what they’re talking about. Like it’s just stupid to suggest that “every real archaologist in the world is stupid and only I can explain earth’s real history”.
I still am a weird guy but I don’t believe in weird stuff like that anymore.
Chariot of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, was actually published in 1968. The nonsense has been going on for quite a while.
I read von Daniken knowing he’d already been thoroughly debunked as a crank, it’s actually highly entertaining if you don’t take it too seriously.
Conspiracy nonsense is one of my favorite hobbies to the point where I read your first sentence and immediately thought ‘Erich von Däniken!’ and two sentences later he is mentioned, coincidence, I think not!
He is one of my favorite weirdos, humans developing through aliens fucking apes? That’s exactly the kind of freaky shit I’m in to chef’s kiss
Hollow earth is also great.
The extraterrestrials have visited earth. It was so long ago we have forgotten that we were the aliens. We were fleeing from a dying planet, which we killed. Rinse and repeat.
That could be me. I swapped christianity for the burgeoning new-age and neopagan stuff that was having a moment.
Calories in, calories out.
For years I believed that the only reason people got fat was because they ate more than they burned and ended up with an excess of energy. It was also the view pushed by the medical profession, by health education at school, and by society in general. I spent years trying to get my weight under control by eating less and moving more.
After a particularly strict period of literally weighing the margarine container before and after buttering toast so I knew how many calories of margarine I used I had gained weight rather than losing even with a 500kcal deficit. I listened to a podcast (Skeptics with a K) in which they interviewed Gary Taubes about the non-caloric hormonal model of obesity. It basically said that if your insulin level was up you couldn’t access body fat, so all the thoughts of that fat being available were flawed and you couldn’t really lose weight in that state. What ended up happening was a reduction in calorie burn and loss of muscle. Fixing the insulin is the first step to managing weight and if you do that you can access your body fat for energy.
It took another year before I actually tried keto and I lost 20kg in the first two months and another 10kg over the next few. It was a massive change but I didn’t sustain it given the environment I was in and ended up gaining a fair bit of the weight back (though not all).
Years later (over a decade, oh no, so old) and I have a much more comfortable body fat percentage and lots more muscle. I carry only a little more than I want and honestly it is too much effort to get down that last little bit, but I feel better now in my late 30s than I did in my early 20s in terms of movement, energy, and cognition. When i get injured I recover quickly, and when I get sick it is usually very short and then over. I used to get sick for weeks at a time and many times per year, now I have only been sick twice this year and both times in December (filthy children, gross but fun).
If you had asked me in 2010 how to manage weight I would have told you, nose firmly in the air, to eat less and move more. So glad to have been wrong.
Calories in / calories out works perfectly and predictably for fat loss as long as you’re measuring correctly and most people don’t. I used to follow it religiously in the run up to fights in order to make weight.
I would look at my weight, look at the weight I need to be 8 weeks later, figure the calorie hole I needed and follow it incredibly closely.
It worked every single time without fail. I always stepped into the ring lean as fuck and having lost zero muscle because I was training twice a day six days a week and keeping protein intake high. I allowed one maintenance calorie day per week on my recovery day.
There are other things that account for weight loss (e.g. loss of sugar from muscles and the associated water loss that comes with that) if you’re using keto but most people are after fat loss more than weight loss.
I mean, calories in/out is real, you can’t get fat if you’re eating less than what you’re spending. On the other hand you definitely can thin up eating more calories than you spend by for example going into ketosis where calories don’t matter all that much.
All of that being said, calories in/out is not the whole picture, like you mentioned there are plenty of other stuff that might make it so that two people eating the same and exercising the same amount get drastically opposite results. At the end of the day our bodies have a calorie budget they’re trying to stick to, eating less (or actually eating better) is the solution, exercising helps but not in increasing your calorie budget, only in directing your budget to be more healthy.
People are just very judgemental when it comes to weight. I think a lot of people like to believe that it all comes down to self-control, which is not the case. That can be very harmful. People are blamed for their own medical situations. Their self esteem is harmed and they are made to suffer through years and years of diets making the situation worse without getting the appropriate (medical) help they need.
We also judge people by their face all the time, and there is nothing they can do to change it.
And because of our animal side, we value beauty higher than almost anything else, which makes us stupid and easily manipulated.
I agree. That happens too. But I think the process of judging people by their face is largely an implicit and unconscious one. I do not think that many people will actually claim that they believe that you can decide whether someone is a bad person by e.g., the shape of their chin. (Although you always will have exceptions.) This makes it very hard to change.
Many people will claim that overweight is just the result of a lack of self control. This is something they believe explicitly and consciously. It is possible to change that believe and it should change as it is incorrect.
Even if it would be lack of self control, I dont see why people get to judge that person for it. The old saying that you need to walk in someones shoes to truly understand them is very true…
Why not support people who struggle instead of tearing them down? Specially now when we live in a society and a person being fat is no downside to the group. I can see how it could be an issue if you are a group in the forest and you have to walk long distances and the fat person slows everyone down and it endangers the group. But we dont have that situation today at all. So why not lift them up and help?
I agree with that. There is no reason to not just accept overweight people like anyone else.
To play the devil’s advocate, there’s some nuance to this. If someone is metabolically unhealthy and obese, they impose an on-going cost to society if only in terms of healthcare. It’s somewhat on the same lines as
the fat person slows everyone down and it endangers the group
Shaming fat people and blaming them for being fat surely isn’t constructive. It very rarely, if ever, is a lack of self control. But I also don’t think we should accept a metabolically diseased state as normal.
I think obese people should get the help they need, but we should accept them for who they are as a person. It is the same as with other physical or psychological issues or disabilities. It is very rude to keep reminding people that they cost a lot and are a burden to society because of their disease. People’s value as a human being should not be determined by that and it should not affect whether they are accepted.
While it is more complex, regarding how brains and other metabolic systems signal and process desire to eat etc., it IS calories in / calories out, I believe. If one eats a 500 calorie deficit, they will lose weight. It borders on impossible for some for completely understandable and forgivable reasons, but I’m sorry to say, I suspect you accounting of either calories in or calories out was mistaken.
Yes, there are differences in bioavailability across foods and people but still carbon goes in, breaks off, and is mostly breathed out.
To anybody that downvotes this, I challenge you to suggest what chemical atoms are you adding to your weight when you gain even while eating at a calorie deficit. Don’t mistake me for saying insulin and such don’t play a huge role; they do. But the role they play is in the delicate balance of calories in and out. So, too, does one’s microbiome, which weighs more than one’s brain; so who is doing the thinking. Complex processes that all affect calories in and out.
How dare you call out people for their bias. Lol
This assumes a whole bunch of things. First, do you actually absorb all of the calories through your gut? Does your body maintain the same base rate of expenditure (BMR) in both the short and long term of restriction?
When you look at people who did The Biggest Loser they did the exact thing you are talking about. They had a significant caloric deficit through eating restricting and massive amounts of exercise. In the short term they did lose weight but it also ruined their BMR. Years later they had mostly put the weight back on and had a lower BMR than at the start. It damaged them.
If you lose weight through caloric deficit you may not notice any change but your body will stop prioritising things like your hair and skin, muscle growth, and bone maintenance. All of those are low priority for an organism in caloric deficit. Instead your body will focus on the most important thing, getting more food. You become food obsessed, thinking about it all day, and you will eat almost anything you can access. You also end up with a lower body temperature, less immune activity, and lower drive for exercise and sex. It is an absolute nightmare.
The end result is that calories in calories out assumes a perfect and simple system. It does not take into account things like proton uncoupling in brown fat, differing levels of absorption through digestion, body temperature, hair growth, cell turnover, and tonnes of other things. It can appear to work for a short time but long term it breaks down and deviates more and more from the data.
You do not absorb all the calories. Those, therefore, are part of neither calories in nor out. I make no assumption here. BMR is a closely related topic but doesn’t change the calories in / calories out impact, which is what I am getting at and what most the remainder of your post says.
Nearly all of what you say here is correct and I wouldn’t dispute it. Except the last paragraph. It is, I’m sorry, categorically false. Calories in and out, in fact, simplifies nothing and does take things like brown fat and body maintenance prioritization into account; those simply change those two variables. I’m not saying the systems are simple. I’m saying the amount of carbon atoms absorbed into your body via energy stored in food and drink as one of a few macronutrients less the carbon atoms breathed out via respiration is a fairly accurate account of weight change. Everything else you’re saying is not in dispute. It isn’t easy and it isn’t simply, but calories in / out is not inaccurate, if still reductive.
I disagree, but I think we agree on a lot here.
Colorimetry measures calories in food by burning the food and measuring the amount of heat generated. This is different to what happens in cells for a huge number of reasons, so it isn’t really reasonable to think of it as a good starting point for nutrition. If you take a substrate, say for example a fat, and you use it to make a hormone it is not being burned for energy and thus breaks the calorie in calorie out model. That is a simple way it fails.
I am not saying the disconnect is 100%, I am saying it is not 100% accurate and depending on how disregulated your system is it may be more or less accurate. Someone who is super healthy and of a low body fat percentage with a reasonable amount of muscle mass would probably end up fairly close to CICO for the first few weeks of a dietary change. This is not really in dispute.
The dispute comes from the rest of the population. We have more deranged systems which are less in line with CICO due to metabolic issues like insulin resistance, gut damage, gluten issues like celiac disease, and so on. The more deranged the body the more CICO loses its predictive value and becomes a bludgeon.
When I went to the doctor about my weight they told me to eat less and move more. My insulin resistance was not measured and the dietary recommendations led to more muscle loss and body fat gain. I had tonnes of issues with acne, dandruff, terrible body odor, mild scurvy, and overall ill health. Adding more food that I could actually digest and switching from my broken glucose metabolism to a ketogenic metabolism allowed me to repair damage, absorb vitamins more effectively, and fix all sorts of seemingly minor but overall stressful issues. My caloric intake was higher but I lost excess weight first by dropping glycogen and associated water but then by dropping fat while also gaining muscle. I felt like moving, I wanted to move, so I moved, but it wasn’t willpower driving that like on CICO, it was hormones driving the change in output.
The calories being low led to conserving energy and being depressed and inactive. Adding good calories I could actually use led to more activity along with better mood and brain function. CICO is not a good model for making changes, it is just accounting. If you want to say “this many carbons came in, this many left” that is fine, but there is no why in that and no guidance on what to do from there. If you try changing how many calories go in or go out you shouldn’t be surprised when the self regulating system regulates itself and changes something else, such as making you burn less energy or eat more food.
I can tell we agree on a lot here too. I’m simply saying calories in and out isn’t wrong, it just isn’t the full story. And you’re right to be suspicious of anybody that says it is. It can be a good jumping off point. Like “eat less”. “Great, how do I actually reliably eat less, doc?” The answer there is the nuanced point you are making, about changing how the body responds.
And like you said, the “move more” thing goes out the window if you aren’t able to get your energy out of storage well. One just feels sluggish.
I lost about 30 kg, and that was primarily by just tracking what I ate. Even just knowing is helpful for accountability.
Yeah, it is like saying “Recessions are caused by GDP reducing for at least two consecutive quarters”. I mean, yes, that does describe what a recession is, but it says little about what the cause of a recession is. In the same way, having less fat in storage is the way you lose body fat, but the mechanisms of actually making that happen are way more complex and trying to reduce it to eat less move more is unhelpful.
It is inaccurate, food manufacturers are allowed about 20% error margin when measuring calories. Calories have nothing to do with what our bodies do with the material we eat, since everything is a chemical process and we aren’t closed systems. When we mobilize fat we create ketone bodies which are exhaled in our breathing, how do you propose to measure ‘caloric expenditure’ then? It is far too reductive.
Calories on a label are not the calories in the metabolic equation, so I don’t see how that is relevant here. Calories in are calories absorbed by the body, which is some subset of those taken in. Some come right back out the other side; we don’t count those. To say calories have nothing to do with it is bonkers to me. It is precisely the chemical process to which you refer. When we expend energy / heat / calories, we get that from food and drink. Yes, more immediate from one of the three major energy distribution mechanisms, but it all comes from what we put in. Then the carbon atoms stripped off of saccharides are bonded to oxygen and exhaled as CO2.
And all this to say, one cannot gain weight while eating fewer calories than being expended, reductive or not.
Calories on a label are not the calories in the metabolic equation
The calories on the label are what is used to make decisions when it comes to using CICO to decide what to eat, which is why it’s relevant. I see now where you are coming from though, because I’m speaking from a pragmatic stand point, but yours is a theoretical one.
We do however appear to be in agreement, too. Due to these chemical processes CICO is highly reductive and pretty pointless for losing body fat, because what our bodies do in response say to 100 kcal of sucrose and 100 kcal of protein is entirely different, and result in entirely different biological outcomes.
Yeah it definitely isn’t the whole story. And protein is a great example. It takes about 15% of the calories in proteins just to break down the protein, so you sort of get that as a discount. But that can be said as calories out immediately goes up by that 15%. :)
In college I fell pretty deep into the nopoo conspiracy, that shampoo manufacturers get you addicted to the cycle of stripping off your hair’s natural sebum and replacing it with conditioner that attracts dirt… literally rinse, repeat.
I think I was frustrated that I couldn’t figure out how to take care of my scalp and hair, and here was this social group with an explanation and a scapegoat.
I still think that shampooing every day is probably too much for me, and embraced mechanical cleaning, but I’ve relaxed the conspiracy thinking.
the nopoo conspiracy,
Wait, what the f…
that shampoo manufacturers
…oh, thank goodness.
I’m still in that cycle of thought with these influencers selling skincare routines. They’ll all just shill the latest thing theyre paid to, and tell you “its an essential part of their daily routine and they never go without it because its that good honestly guys” and before you know it you’ve got way more products than you need, that are likely interacting with eachother in negative ways making your skin worse. So you turn to your influencer of choice who has perfect skin and they have over a million followers so they must know what theyre talking about, and wouldn’t you know it they’ve got another essential cream to recommend you.
Well most manufacturers are definitely using the kinds of chemicals you would use to strip floors in industry. Not exactly the best stuff to put on your skin.
Not really. But that is the kind of conspiracy thinking that exists in the nopoo spaces.
Every conspiracy theory has truth to it. The truth is the chemicals they use to clean floors in industrial plants are the same that are in major shampoos.
Industrial floor cleaners and shampoos share key cleaning agents with personal care products, primarily surfactants like Sodium Lauryl Sulfate (SLS) or its ethoxylated cousins for foaming and lifting dirt, along with alkaline builders (like Sodium Hydroxide) for tough degreasing, and solvents/alcohols (like ethanol) for dissolving oils, all mixed with water and other specialty additives for different surfaces.
You could argue they are perfectly safe of course.
Yes, and it is also incredibly misleading to say that with no context. I often use the same chemical I use to clean tables and counters in my soups.
Acetic Acid 5% w/v.
Aka distilled white vinegar.
The truth is that shampoo companies are generally not using unsafe chemicals in unsafe amounts, because of the laws and legal processes that people in my country (USA) have fought so hard for over the years. There is no big conspiracy here, just normal capitalism and marketing BS.
Everyone is different though and IMO people generally do not need to shampoo as often as they do.
Actually it is not. If you understand history and the way these chemical were used in personal care you would learn some disturbing truths.
For instance, in the US the government uses an innocent until proven guilty approach whereas most of Europe uses a guilty until proven innocent to the use of chemicals when they come into contact with human beings.
This means a lot of these harsh industrial chemicals have actually not been tested safe for human use. This results in a lot of chemicals used in food and personal care products that will never be allowed in Europe.
We have some consumer safety laws from the era where companies literally put poisons in food, but today most of our protection comes from the threat of lawsuits.
It is not perfect, for instance Monsanto’s round-up was on the market for 25 years, presumably scientifically “safe” before a plaintiff was able to win a case proving they were harmed. This is why the culture-wars “litigious society” bullshit is so dangerous. The justice system is our last resort for protection.
There are problems in every system, but when people hear about problems in the USian system, for some reason they think the whole system is worthless vs. the very real protections we have, and the people who died before we got them.
I would love it if ingredients had to be proven safe before they were used. It would make us so much healthier. But like with Monsanto it is not the end-all-be-all, and we need lawsuits as well.
Everything you say is sane and accurate. The devil is always in the details. When when you dig down into these conspiracy theories you find surprising truths but also a lot of nonsense.
Once thought that Google eas a great company and earnt evil.
I gushed over them when Android Open Source Project, Chromium, and the Google summer of code were new. I still think the free and open source projects they maintain are positive things, but I’m disgusted with just about everything else they do.
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I drank the atheist nihilistic hedonism kool aid when I was a kid (Christianity is too contradictory and that soured my view on belief in general) and I didn’t get out of that “lol I just wanna have fun, what’s personal responsibility?!” Ideological hole until my mid 20s. 🥲
“Nothing matters so just have a good time” doesn’t necessarily mean you also can’t be a “good” person.
At some point your hedonistic desires clash with moral frameworks and you don’t do the wrong thing, best case scenario. “Nothing matters so just have a good time” erases that paradigm/doesn’t allow for one to exist in the first place. You’re going mostly on vibes and maybe more money means you could get nicer things and comfier toys and have more fun so you start your OF/sell drugs/scam your way into millions and now you scam more because you’re the prez of the free world (lol)… get it?
Don’t mix up optimistic nihilism with moral wrongness, you can be “nothing matters let’s have a good time” while at the same time wanting everyone else to also have a good time.
I’m glad you have an imaginary sky friend to prevent you to from being a bad person. /S Denjin is correct nothing matters do no harm is an option.
I get your point but being nice to people and acting in a fair and moral way feels good to most people, myself included so I don’t personally see nihilistic self fulfillment and moral behaviour as mutually exclusive (in most cases, billionaires not included).
But at some point, when virtue doesn’t taste as nice as forgoing it, you’ll fall. And you might have not had you had some form of moral framework in place and not just our inner “noble savage” nature.
I think you need to look up what the concept of noble savage actually means.
I know what it means but I’m repurposing it because, well, it sounded nice. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. 🤷
How do theists rationalise this when they do awful things like buggering children?
They don’t, those who transgress in those ways never believed in God’s judgment (or suddenly developed some brain tumor that radically changed their behaviour, but that’s mega rare, lol). They just say they do, and those who don’t know how to judge people (by their fruits!) keep getting swindled. I’m sure Trump has made allusions to being somewhat religious lol, you don’t think he believes in any of that, right?
So you’re claiming now that no Christian ever committed a sin because they weren’t really Christians anyway?
There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.
Musk’s “some kind of pedo guy” comment about the diver that dismissed Musk’s efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon’s embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon’s double Nazi salute on national television.
I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.
The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn’t touch anything of his with a 40’ pole.
Never liked the guy in the first place, but what really sealed the deal was when I heard him talk about the stupid fucking Hyperloop, and then later when he built the even more stupid Loop system in Las Vegas.
As a Swede who knows trains and remembers reading about Swissmetro, the Hyperloop system was not just a stupid idea, it was an old discredited stupid idea from the very start.
As for the Loop system, the less said about it, the more time is left to laugh at it.
Musk was already know for being a toxic asshole long before the pedo incident.
His was already establishing himself as anti-labor, a terrible leader and an asshole who screamed at employees and fired employees in front of other employees.
He only got into Tesla and spacex because he was able to establish himself as unremovable because every other company he had attempt to lead, fired his ass for being all of these things.
Absolutely, but little of that information was common knowledge at the time.
I’m not sure common knowledge is a appropriate here, most of what you and I listed still isn’t common knowledge.
I recall all of this being covered and discussed. The main difference was the type of excuses being made becuase believe wanted to believe he was saving the world.
There are definitely people who still believe. But there are now fewer people proclaiming it and the excuses are gone.
Now the argument is if he’s a Nazi or not. Few take his goals seriously, we’re in some weird state where people are gaslighting themselves for various reasons. A big one is to protect the massive amount of money invested in his worthless companies.
I tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.
It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn’t be the first person to fall in that trap.
I’ll append my confession here.
I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.
If it ruined him, it did so before he had anything to do with Tesla.
That Tesla started with reasonable (if misguided) intentions, I can believe. But only before Musk, who was born rich, got involved.
We must be twins!
Elon is a classic tale of surrounding oneself with sycophants and descending into the madness of their own bullshit. I think he started with pure-ish intentions.
I was a registered libertarian and a Ron Paul disciple. Easy trap to fall into as a relatively privileged white guy. Every self-described libertarian I meet now makes me ashamed of who I was then.
Capitalist oligarchs are the ones who rule society, and so if there are problems in society, the fault ultimately comes back to them as they are the rulers. They, however, will never admit responsibility to anything, and so they will always seek to shift to blame to other people, but they are the ones who rule, so their blame must be shifted to the non-rulers, i.e. to regular people. Shifting the blame to all of regular people would be vastly unpopular, and so they instead pick out a subset of regular people to blame. Whether it is Jews, Somalis, transpeople, immigrants, etc, it is always the fault of some minority group of people who have no political power, and it is never the fault of those who control everything and are in the position of power to make all the decisions.
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You couldn’t tell he was a maniac grifter? The fact that his money comes from family mines in South Africa and he didn’t renounce it but built upon it didn’t let you know he was a villain? 😕
PS: Weird post to downdoot. Explain yourselves, you cowards, lol.
He was a big figure before the Internet became what it is today. We only saw him through headlines, that he probably paid to have embellished in a positive light.
Before he started going on twitter and we all saw what a prick he was, he was Mr. Most-Likely-To-Be-Iron-Man-IRL. It’s a shame really.
I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes.
Understandable, lol.
haha excellent edit/ps.
I had no idea he came from SA with wealth from mining until after I figured out he was full of shit and and absolute dickhead, only after that did I realize where it all started.
So don’t blame people for not knowing what you knew at the time.
First of all, where’s the blame? Don’t get too emotional on me. Secondly, that’s like the easiest and quickest Google research you could’ve done, lol. Finally, does anyone who isn’t in the spectrum even have to Google anything related to him? The insanity and depravity was palpable, just like with Milei and Trump and the others. But if you are, then the little Google search would be absolutely necessary before you start praising him as if he’s some messiah and not just another selfish capitalist amoral prick. Haven’t y’all had enough experience with these folks to recognise it?!
Hang on, before I reply I have to research whether any people in this thread bought their computer with money earned through slavery.
This is where you put the blame in your comment:
The fact that his money comes from family mines in South Africa and he didn’t renounce it but built upon it didn’t let you know he was a villain?
This isn’t even general knowledge these days, and has only started spreading in the last few years, you acted as if everyone knew it from day one.
Pretty normal expectation from a rich white guy in South Africa at the time, ngl.
It took me years to learn that he was from SA
PS: Weird post to downdoot. Explain yourselves, you cowards, lol.
You’re not wrong, you’re just being a dick about it in a thread that is literally about the time one drank the Kool Aid.
Criticising people that have reflected their previous choices/views and are acting different now is unnecessary.
Where’s the criticism? Stop having an emotional reaction to my actual bewilderment (“you couldn’t tell…”) and just explain it to me (or don’t!). 🙃
Had I said something like “lol you fucking incompetent moron, you smoothbrain fucks”, I’d get it, certainly. But I didn’t.
You asked people to explain. People explained that you’re coming across as a dick, in a thread explicitly about regrettable, gullible moments. I don’t know what you’re having a problem with here but it seems like you’re the one having an emotional reaction, calling people cowards and refusing to hear people’s explanations.
I think the reason your initial comment comes across hostile is because of the way it’s written (chaining questions), and the way you’re asking things that have an obvious answer.
However, you didn’t write anything explicitly hostile. It’s a question that could come across either way, and if you genuinely had no mocking or hostile intent I would have suggested rereading and rewording your comment to make that clearer, as it’s tough to interpret that kind of thing through text. I’ve totally left comments that read hostile when I didn’t intend it to, it just happens sometimes! 🤷♂️
Now this is a proper reply. Fair enough. I wasn’t being hostile, more like 🤔😔, certainly not too positive. It’s annoying that people can be this blind, it’s a big reason why the world is so shit and why the West cranks and exports villains who are loved locally… it’s triggering, for lack of a better word.
Just when you exhibited a moment of possible self-reflection, you just threw it all away and reinforced every negative connotation your prior statements have held.
😔
Maybe the criticism is valid, you just don’t wanna hear it?
Not sure I got sucked into anything like conspiracy theories, but as far as “I swear this is my life now” I have quite a few. I have ADHD and with it comes the usual fleeting obsession with hobbies. It gets expensive and I always end up abandoning it for something else. Then I feel sad because I spent a ton of money that ultimately didn’t result in anything permanent.
When I was going hard with ham radio I dug a huge trench in my backyard and installed a grounding system connected to the house ground, now I barely use my radios. Same with the KX3 I bought. It’s an eye-wateringly expensive portable radio. My excuse was it was a reward for passing a difficult certification exam and I would use it all the time in the park near my house. That turned out not to be the case.
That sounds a bit like me. I haven’t gotten into anything terribly expensive, but I’ve come to terms with my pattern and now contend that my hobby is hobbies. I do something for a while, and then do something else. That being said, I’ve been between hobbies for a while now and am feeling a restless and bored. Now I just need to figure out what I want to try next.
Now I just need to figure out what I want to try next.
I’ve tried homelabbing, ham radio, fountain pens, DIY electronics, Python…
Some stuff is more expensive then others. amateur radio is stupidly expensive in every conceivable way. It starts out with a cheap RTL-SDR dongle. You set it up and start scanning around VHF and UHF to see what’s out there. Some stuff catches your attention and soon enough you want to transmit as well as receive. You buy the license manual and get your ticket (honestly not hard if you’ve passed high school science class) and you buy a cheap questionably legal Baofeng walkie-talkie. So far the 'feng, the SDR dongle, and the license manual and FCC testing fee set you back maybe $80 all in. Not bad for a few weeks or months of entertainment.
Then you look at what a “real” rig costs, thinking that the absolute pinnacle must be maybe $2000, like a good gaming PC. Nope, turns out the cheapest radio you can buy that’s considered ‘good enough’, the venerable Icom IC 7300, is $1000, and it swiftly climbs from there. Then you need an antenna. Surely an inert hunk of aluminum is cheap? Nope, also hundreds of dollars. If you want to cut your own you’ll need an SWR meter, and those are also hundreds of dollars. Now you need coax to connect that antenna to the radio, a way to get that coax from the inside of your house to the outside, etc. It’s all $$$.
That’s not getting into the non monetary expenses like space for your shack and antennas and time to actually use the radio when the ionosphere is cooperating and people are actually on the air.
Compare that to my other major pastime, conlanging and worldbuilding. You already have everything you need, just something to write with and time to daydream. Maybe that’s why this is the one thing I’ve stuck with for 25 years now.
