Well obviously they’re garbage, they have boring hobbies like sewing while I have cool premium hobbies like writing bdsm erotica where AI dominates everyone at once.
Idk if I’m steeped in enough siskind lore. How did he frame it?
Also James Scott is not an anarchist, or at least wasn’t at the time he interviewed about writing “three cheers for anarchism” anyway. He is very sympathetic though as is typical in anthropology.
iirc he basically agrees with the tennents but thinks states are unlikely to be defeatable.
Yeah there’s a book I quite like called seeing like a state. The author is an anthropologist who spent a lot of time studying SEA people living in the margins of states and non state areas as the state tried to bring them to heel.
In this book he coins the term “high modernism” to talk about this style of thinking wherein problems are simply matters of technical expertise and can, and should, be solved by abstract design from the centre and this design should be inflexible (because it is ideal).
While this kind of eugenics and sundry stuff isn’t exactly the same I think it shares lots of characterists: The idea that you can solve real problems by sitting in a chair, the ignorance of how ideologically motivated you are and how heavily aesthetics features in your motivation (e.g. here they are far more concerned with the aesthetic of rows of healthy, pretty children doing well on tests than any of the messy details. Such as whether this is actually particularly useful in a world where many people suffer illness or disability merely because they are not given access to proper care), and the dismissal of other’s reservations as a sort of “peasant ignorance” which in this case is highlighted by the notion it’s merely the scary thoughts at the word holding people back, as if eugenics were some phantom we cower at in ignorance.
Anyway moral of the story read the book it’s good. Weirdly rationalists also sometimes read this book and take all the wrong lessons from it. Stuff like “wow it was bad to supplant traditional agriculture because it yielded just as well or better than western” instead of “Oh their obsession with rational farming made them completely blind to reality including the enormous human cost of their authoritarianism”
Starwars is RA Salvatore for people embarrassed about liking elves rendered into a film. All of the artistic stuff is just lifted from Kurosawa, watch those films instead they’re actually good.
Yeah it was uh, pretty degrading. I’m glad it’s messed up to bystanders, as a few people have told me I was being dramatic by finding it offensively degrading. One doctor kicked me out of his office after I asked him to just sign it (after showing all the surgeon’s documentation, scripts etc) for “insulting his professional ethics”
Fucking libs man, they’d line up to get recorded for a purge if the form looked official enough.
Yikes dawg. Don’t you guys have multi member seats in your legislative gov though? hopefully that protects a bit :/ Like they usually need to form a coalition to govern right?
This is the shit about “rational” thinking that pisses me off.
you start with a premise that sounds reasonable: “Wouldn’t it be good if future generations were better off than their parents?”
Then you throw out all the hard parts of the question like:
what does it mean to be better off?
would there be equal access to the technology?
what would the social consequences be if there isn’t?
could one group of people impose their designs for humanity on others?
have people tried this before? did anything go wrong?
Then you ignore all of history, pretend it’s just a surface level question of technical ability and the only objections people have must be because they’re stupid.
And voi-French noises you have yet another position to be smuggly superior in.
Like fuck, we do this to other animals and we get fucking sheep that die if you don’t sheer them and get infections around their bum, chickens with a fifth the lifespan of their ancestors, chickens that grow so fast their legs sometimes break, dogs so fucking inbred they are a mess of health problems.
Maybe you could take a lesson from this about how fucking awful we are at deciding what traits are desirable and how twisted the logic of capital is. Or nah? maybe people who think a few random rich shits deciding on the perfect human will go about as well as other high modernist ideas are just idiots. That must be it.
Australia, nsw mandates bottom surgery before document changes (or did back then at least). amusingly the federal government was much more lenient. The state is a federation though so states trump federal except where they have ceded power.
Technically I could have preserved cells for IVF or something but I’m not, and definitely wasn’t then, a millionaire.
Also since the law goes back before that was possible obvious eugenics is obvious.
I’m glad other nations are trying to make ammends in the beady-eye’d way of bean counters at least. Given that almost every traffic light here has surveillance cameras mounted on it and major political parties attend literal mask off Nazi rallies I suspect we’re a way off over here haha.
Well I fucking hate salads (although I suppose you could argue everything I eat is one :P) so you wont get much out of me on that front.
So you’re probably used to food that’s pretty meat and dairy heavy, at least in a global sense. In terms of plant based variations there are a couple of key ingredients to keep in mind:
Cashews when soaked and blended, mixed with other things such as Dijon mustard, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, salt, and MSG can be used as a foundation for many sorts of creams serving a similar role in food to diary based ones. Namely a rich fatty saucy thing, sometimes with sour or intensely savoury elements. You can even make true fermented cheeses using blended cashews + some extra fat. I’ve made a couple of killer blues! (it’s a giant pain though and takes weeks so YMMV)
Nutritional yeast: sometimes called nooch it’s yeast flakes usually from brewing yeast I think and enriched with a few things. It’s quite protein heavy at ~50% by mass and thus tends to have a thickening effect on foods. It has a very savoury and vaguely cheesy flavour that can be further accentuated with salt or spices. A common quick little hack is nooch, cashews, and salt (+ MSG if you are a fiend like me) coarsely ground as a topping on dishes similar to parmesan cheese. Slowly heating soy milk and nooch with maybe a dash of garlic and tumeric (mostly for colour) can form the foundation of cheesy sauces in pasta dishes or similar too.
MSG: Don’t be scared of it, it naturally occurs in lots of foods such as tomatoes and you likely have a lot in your diet as it’s responsible for a lot of the umami in things like parmesan and meat or fish sauce etc. Often when cooking plant based people feel like things aren’t quite hitting the spot unless they add a lot of salt. MSG is here to save the day! it’s also been found to reduce total dietary sodium by making people salt food less than with table salt. Always add it slowly though, too much MSG makes things taste wrong in a way that’s difficult to pin down. You can buy huge cheap packets in asain grocers or online.
TVP: This is a byproduct of soybean oil production, it’s the protein from soy beans isolated with a bit of fibre. Generally when using it you might toast it first, then you soak it a bit and then fry it. Or you cook it directly into something saucy like a tomatoey pasta sauce. It is almost a drop in replacement for beef mince in many recipes and a great way to make something filling and hearty, just remember it doesn’t have much flavour of it’s own so should probably be used alongside additions like soy sauce (for umami) “beef” stock or similar. It should be very very cheap, if you are buying it from a white person grocery or a health food store you will get ripped off. I buy it online for the equivalent of about 2-4 of your dollars a kilogram and that’s with the fuck you Australia tax.
Soy milk: It’s protein rich and thus when cooked into food works pretty similar to dairy milk in terms of roux/white sauce etc. A lot of people don’t like the taste so maybe use oat or whatever in your coffee but you can’t cook shit with almond milk or oat milk etc.
Lentils: There’s lots, a few quick tips. Red cook fast and can melt away into sauces or as fillings for pastries etc, green cook slow and add chew, chickpeas (and chickpea flour) are great for a vaguely nutty rich bite, black urad pair wonderfully with tomatoes for an earthy note.
Ok arcane secrets aside another principle is: make sure you include something rich each meal. If you do the arty-farty health food cafe “cauliflower steak” (retching noises) you will just be hungry and unsatisfied. You need to make sure you’re eating the same calories and hearty food. In general aside from light meals you should aim to include something from {tofu, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds, TVP, oats} or similarly protein and fat heavy foods each meal. Nuts and seeds are very very very energy dense so be careful there, beans and lentils are approx equivalent to cow meat in terms of protein and calories (less fat though) and so can be used in similar quantities. You’ll probably want to add a bit of oil to your cooking in various ways too when not using nuhttps://ohsheglows.com/ts and seeds to bump the fat up. Eat varied and you’ll trivially hit your mix of amino acids, it’s honestly not worth stressing about unless you have a vary narrowly focused diet.
Some blogs for your American palate:
lovingitvegan.com I love this lady, her food is practical and interesting, lots of american and a bit of tex-mex style stuff. Great starting point for more western recipes. Try her burritos or some of her pasta dishes!
ohsheglows.com very high effort arty farty food. Can be fun to experiment with or if you need to impress the inlaws. I usually find it too much effort
minimalistbaker.com traitor and renegade pitchfork waving but she has some more practical options for entertaining style stuff. Her 5 minute queso is delicious!
Further afield from what you’re used to:
www.veganricha.com practical indian style recipes. Her cookbooks are the best laid out I’ve every seen btw if you like physical books. Typically you would assemble a traditional spread by cooking like a dhal, a dry curry, and a wet curry and serving them together for a few days. I love her stuff, can recommend unreservedly if you enjoy indian food and have wanted to branch into cooking it.
I would be remiss to not recommend you check out biancazapatka.com/…/vegan-pierogi-with-mushroom-f… and generally her blog is great for euro food. Polish is very hard to veganise (diet is dairy and preserved meat, dairy and preserved meat, dairy and preserved meat with some veggies cooked in dairy :P) but she does a great job with a few recipes
I hope that’s useful! Plant based eating is a lot more approachable than you often think, it can just require a bit of time to learn some tricks.
My one final parting message is that beans blended to a paste with herbs and spices make very satisfying dips, and you can make sort of sandwich or wrap fillings that way for practical options during the week.