Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Danielle,
No, we want you to eat up your sardines like a good girl.
Oh, and you have to eat your toast with a knife and fork too. That way you won't end up on dialysis.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
I vote for Friday Night, canned sardines on wholewheat toast night! But I won't do it until my hot chips are taxed into oblivion, because, unfortunately, it will also be Friday Night, timeout and bedtime without any dinner night for both kids. By their own choice, probably.
Ironically, I personally eat quite a lot of canned fish, because it really is cheap protein, and those gourmet cans can be quite tasty. 85 cents a can is hard to beat. Sardines are even cheaper - I bought a whole bunch of cans on a parsimony trip. I ate one, and the rest are sitting there waiting for the zombie apocalypse. They're sprats! Ews!
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It's probably the biggest win ever made by neoliberalism that it's turned left wing people into social conservatives.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Back before the libertarians got a monopoly on the word liberal and fucked it, so that progressive people are somehow forced into authoritarian social viewpoints just because ACT.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to ,
the libertarian argument that everyone has the right to choose to eat addictive formulations of sugar, salt and fat
It used to be called a liberal argument.
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Speaker: Are there opportunities within…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
a punitive tax seems to be the only thing we haven’t tried thus far
Floggings? We haven't tried those yet.
It's a complex issue. Oversimplifying it isn't really that helpful. We could simplify things even further to make this plain by pointing out that for the most part gaining weight involves a calorific surplus, and losing it involves a deficit (with maintaining happening at the balance point, and basic minimums of a bunch of key macros being met - enough protein, fat, vitamins, water, etc). The only sticking point is between the saying and the doing. And there's the rub. This straightforward fact about any physical system that exerts work, the way a human body does, has been known for a long time. But that in itself is not enough to understand why this equation gets out of balance, or how that is best changed.
Few people really dispute that you can lose weight by eating the right amount of food and doing enough exercise*. The dispute is all about how we get people to do that, and about whether we have the right to compel people to do it who don't want to.
Both of those issues are extremely complicated. On the first issue, if we happen to have struck a winning formula for ourselves and our families, the best we can do with that is say it worked for us. It won't work for others, they just won't do it. Something else might work, though. On the second issue, I honestly feel that we really don't have the right to compulsion in this. It's as simple as that. I have a moral problem with it. It's not the only thing I feel that way about - for consistency I also feel the same way about tobacco. In fact, I feel that way about tobacco because I feel this way about food. It seems like tobacco was at least holding a line of defence of the right to personal stupidity that is now sitting wide open to the next personal liberty. The next liberty happens to be one I personally partake of, even though I'm (currently) not overweight - I still like to eat "bad" foods quite a lot. It's one of the best things in my life, the delicious tasty treats that I'm still allowed to eat, and the right to have them unmolested by the state is comparatively important to me. Even if it kills me, which it probably will one day. At least, in the meantime, I'll have lived as I chose to.
*When people do dispute it, it's usually because they have narrowed the range of discussion about the limits of possible intake and exercise and BMR output, either making the caloric deficit impossible, or so ridiculously OTT that it's not sensible to discuss.
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One thing a friend brought to my attention yesterday about this particular victory is that it is especially sweet since no one can say we got a cheap shot pass through the tournament. We literally had to play every single one of the best teams in the world, all of our traditional nemeses.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to Bart Janssen,
but I don’t think the overall win percentage is a good measure.
Yes, I don't even know what we're measuring. "Dominance" is what the speaker called for. Define dominance and we get somewhere. We also need to define which subset of all sports competitions we're comparing to. In the end, I'm sure we can find a statistic that makes the All Blacks the most dominant team, if we narrow the definition tight enough. "Games played in international tournaments with an ovoid ball involving tackling, by men". Or we could have just settled for saying the All Blacks dominate men's rugby, and not gotten sucked into the need to compare apples and oranges.
Which makes me wonder about the motivation to find this spurious statistic. Is it to justify why we love the All Blacks so much? Does that really need a justification? I know why I like them - because I was brought up that way. I don't really have to look deeper.
In fact, since were pretty much behind in the RWC success stakes until 2011, and then we were only first equal with 2 other teams, most of my life of supporting the All Blacks has been during a period where their dominance was constantly in question. It was really only on Sunday that I felt about the All Blacks as I used to in the 1980s, that they clearly are the best team in the world. Currently.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to Ross Mason,
And this is a sport?
One of the oldest. It's not safe, certainly. Rousey scores most of her wins by virtue of her judo skills, rather than brain beating, though. Mostly arm bars, typically set up by dazzling throws, and contortions on the ground. Never seen such an amazing array of moves in a single fighter. Probably because it's not possible for men - if you try to do all that, you end up substandard at everything. There's always going to be someone better at some aspect of the play when the competition is so tight. Full spectrum dominance is probably only possible for Rousey because there are so few women in the sport. OK, and she has the perfect build for a female fighter.
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Polity: The pantheon of sporting dominance, in reply to BenWilson,
She’s also great to watch, a technically excellent competitor.
I mean seriously, any fight where her extremely experienced opponent comes flying in the first second with a knee, takes her down, and then we witness her escaping the takedown by somersaulting with a backwards cartwheel off her head to reverse and gain rear control, which she neatly turns into an armbar that has never been seen before, all in 15 seconds, is a competitor you have to give a lot of credit to. I was like WTF? She's some kind of freaky wrestling snake. Definitely my favourite fighter to watch, although some of that is because she demolished 3 fighters in a row in under 60 seconds in total. That's never happened in men's MMA or boxing. Ever. You don't get a protracted game dragging on and on like often happens with the guys, you get non-stop action, with a result. She's also a very amusing trash talker, which is an important part of any fighting sport. Scary tough woman. The crowd goes berserk over her.
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