I swear I’m not Jessica

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Obesity itself is probably too vague and non specific to be usefully called a disease. The basic measurement for obesity, BMI, would classify bodybuilders or strengthen based athletes as obese. Bodybuilders and strong people can often be unhealthy, but it’s not quite the same as someone with high body fat.

    Even then, people who are obese because of high body fat might have their lives shortened through multiple mechanisms. It could be heart disease that kills them, skeletal problems due to weight, immune issues, digestive issues, practically every organ can be affected. Any or all of these things could occur in a chronically obese person, so even if pathologized, obesity is less useful as a diagnosis.

    Excess weight is bad, but you can calculate weight/height without a doctor. Focusing on better nutrition, eating habits, and exercise is the solution, even if you’re young and have a high metabolism. That sugar in our food needs to be taxed or regulated, as economic incentives drive obesity rather than people being uniquely stupid or culturally degenerate.


  • That’s honestly kind of insulting to say that, and it shows a lack of awareness on your own part. You’re making one hell of an assumption that people aren’t informed and that they’re making a diagnosis without putting any thought behind it.

    I’m not out of line in thinking that people can’t diagnose Joe Biden of being mentally unfit. People couldn’t definitively diagnose Trump with narcissistic personality disorder, and he didn’t have a known disorder that could interfere in a diagnosis. Biden has a well documented stutter, making it hard for any observer to parse his communication disorder from cognitive impairment.

    People who are informed would recognize this, and even those willing to diagnose politicians from TV appearances would need solid examples of abnormal behavior that could only be explained by cognitive impairment. I don’t take armchair diagnosis seriously because I have some expertise in psychology. People want a reason to have someone other than Biden, so they assume mental disability can be determined by the public. I don’t think we can with the info available. Gut feelings will just reinforce your biases.


  • I get the physical part of Biden being unfit, but not the mental part. I’ve not seen any evidence of his age making him less intelligent or mentally. He’s not physically well, but whenever someone says he’s senile, I automatically assume they don’t know what they’re talking about. “Senile” is not synonymous with “out of touch.”

    With the recall, concern wasn’t just coming from some rando or only Democratic partisans. I heard it from respected political scientists. They thought Newsom was likely to win, but there was still great risk of a Republican governor getting elected without popular support. It’s how Arnold Schwarzenegger, a moderate Republican, managed to get elected. The Governator never could have won a Republican primary, and didn’t even win the popular vote. If it weren’t for serious campaigning in the last few months, the recall could have been close.

    Newsom always had majority approval, but the concern about the recall came because people were only lukewarm on him. He isn’t an exciting candidate, which is what the left claims to want. Like I said before, Biden seems more genuine about his morals and principles than Newsom. Newsom is more of what the left hates than Biden.


  • Newsom hate isn’t new. There was genuine worry he was going to lose his recall election, replaced by a radical Republican with a plurality of support from only those that voted for his removal. Left wing Democrats who were critical of Newsom united and organized to prevent a fascist rising to power. We put aside our gripes with corpocrats to prevent someone even worse from winning.

    California is guaranteed for the Democrats in the modern era, so we usually sit on the sidelines of the fight for the presidency and hope other states make the right call. However, the recall race showed that we were also willing to hold our nose and vote for the lesser of two evils.

    That’s part of why I get so frustrated by the anti voting shit. Biden is more of a genuine human being than Newsom, yet people fall for accelerationist propaganda. They delude themselves into thinking that not voting will strengthen the left when the opposite is true. The unreliability of young, left wing voters reinforces the establishment bias of not appealing to them. If they won’t even turn out for Bernie in the 2020 primary, why rely on them?


  • As someone who grew up with the goofy Toho movies, I felt like the Americans used that formula more than the Avengers formula.

    The human characters have little control over the monsters, relying on Godzilla or Kong to win fights and only being able to help them do what they already wanted to do. That’s fairly in line with what the Japanese movies did.

    Marvel movies have more quipy heroes with emotional backstories who rise to the occasion and save the world. There are some comedic human characters, but they’re sidekicks to the monsters and aren’t self aware like in Marvel movies. The monsters sometimes do silly things, but they don’t quip and aren’t sarcastic because they can’t talk. There’s tragedy in them being the last of their kind, but that’s never the focus.

    I really think the Monsterverse has carried on the legacy of Japanese monster mashes fairly well. They’ve actually been on the better end of the spectrum.




  • That’s what most Japanese Godzilla movies are like if we’re being honest. If you’ve only seen the original, I get why you might think Godzilla is usually a villain, but even the direct sequel had him fight another, more evil monster. Let’s be real, the human characters in most of those sequels were awful and boring. Those movies exist mostly for the monster fights.

    If you’re unaware, just look up Godzilla’s dropkick to understand what I’m talking about. That scene might be the pinnacle of the silliness, but it was by no means an outlier.

    Compared to the goofy trash that encompasses 90% of Godzilla movies, the 2019 Godzilla movie where Godzilla goes super saiyan was one of the best Godzilla films ever made. Big fights, badass moments, and human characters that exist to compliment the monsters. The original Gojira, Godzilla Minus One, and even Shin Godzilla aren’t comparable to or representative of most Godzilla movies.



  • America isn’t that free of a country. Democrats were always going to run their incumbent. The time to choose a left wing candidate was the 2020 primary, which is why I was devastated when Biden won. I knew we would be stuck with him for 8 fucking years. The left didn’t turn out enough in that primary, and the establishment went with one of the worst choices.

    The fact that there isn’t some popular Democratic alternative at this point means it will not happen. Biden has been the most left wing president in over half a century, and none of his shitty decisions have been due to his age. Organize with the DSA or promote left wing Democrats if you’re fed up with the establishment. Recognize that becoming cynically apathetic makes you a pathetic asshole, not a person who’s better than those that try.



  • Leftists famously don’t have uniform views and bitterly disagree on important topics. Some leftists aren’t reasonable in my opinion, with many non leftists having better reasoning behind their beliefs. Too many leftists are purity testing assholes, treating leftism with the same elitism that people on Lemmy treat using Linux. I hate elitism, even if you want to limit how big a community is. It’s just an unpleasant attitude.



  • I don’t get this under estimation of humanity. If 99% of humans died, the planet became 3-5 degrees warmer, and all computers literally popped out of existence, we’d recover a ton of technology within a few centuries. We’d use a strange mish-mash of old and new tech, but people would write down a ton of information from the generations that remember the before times, and using previously learned principles, new generations would reverse engineer a ton of useful things.

    Radio communications would be relatively easy to remake and will almost always exist in some form. A ton of useful developments like agricultural technologies and energy technologies would be too valuable to be lost for long. Gunpowder and firearms aren’t going anywhere. All of these bedrock technologies would never totally disappear as they’re too useful.

    Even in a world constantly at war, these technologies would be essential to winning those fights. If you forget how to make guns, a group that didn’t will conquer you. If you rediscover an old technology, it could give you an upper hand. If there isn’t perpetual war, the risk of it and the benefits of trade will allow even more development and rediscovery.

    The biggest reason for you underestimating humans is that you forget that most of our technology isn’t physical. A boat may decay and become inoperable within a few decades, but the engineering principles that allow for the boat to function are unlikely to decay and fall out of disuse. Engines are useful. Boats are useful. Construction of high quality versions of these things won’t happen overnight, but low quality and functional versions will get built.

    People, even without writing, are exceptional at remembering useful ideas. With writing, we can store information outside of our minds and write out more complicated ideas than our working memory can handle. You think everyone is going to forget how to write mathematics? Hell no. We’ll never lose written language, and that will allow us to find knowledge that no one alive remembers. The necessity of learning unknown concepts alone will ensure people would remember how modern languages are written.

    The most impressive technology humans have is language, ideas, forms. Without forms, we’d never have built the most impressive physical structures and technology we have. Every advanced building began as a blueprint, and even Stonehenge required planning and communication. If every physical technology we’ve ever made disappeared at once, we’d rebuild many of those things by writing down what we remember and sharing knowledge with eachother.

    TLDR: Ideas can outlive physical technology, and we’ll never stop using useful tech in any apocalyptic situation. Only the Planet of the Apes neurological disease would stop humans permanently.


  • It’s a problem for everyone because the societal changes that would adjust for a population decline and inverted population pyramid aren’t favored by the upper class.

    We’d need to invest in doctors and nursing staff properly, something a ton of places are struggling with. We’d need to make the job more appealing by both increasing pay substantially and improving conditions. We need to get rid of student debt overall, but definitely for medical professionals that care for the elderly.

    We also need to decrease inequality and use redistributed wealth to fund the retirements of younger generations, but that’s more complicated and the more uphill battle.