If only we knew exactly what in the culture we need to fix. There are a lot of theories. Something in our environment has broken the homeostasis which worked for the last million years.
What kind of food is available, and in what quantities eould be a place to start.
I'm not a US resident so I can only give a view from my trips there, so forgive my limited nuances. Also I speaking generally, culturally, individuals can (and do) behave counter-culturally.
A) there's a general focus on money. Sure money is important everywhere but in the US its different.
B) Time is money. I've heard that a lot too, and seen the effects. Longer working hours, very limited holidays, working on weekends and so on.
C) this leads to "convenience" and "labor saving " as key priorities. So supermarkets (are big so you can get everything, and also have the illusion of choice) stock a lot of "convenient" foods - typically processed and high in sugar. (Factory food is cheaper, see A)
D) Americans are trained young to like "sweet" and lots of things have lots of sugar. It starts with drinks (sodas, coffee), and then things like candy [1], bread, microwave meals, restaurants, salad dressings, and so on. If the French can be said to add butter, well Americans add sugar.
E) walking. Is slow, takes time, costs money. Better to drive. Which means everything is optimised for driving. Which makes it hard to walk anywhere.
None of this is easy to change at a cultural level. It's literally baked into every part of society and the environment.
[1] chocolate is an interesting example. In Europe 75% cocoa chocolate is common, 95% sells enough that its easy to get. The really cheap "dark" chocolate is around 45%. Whereas in the US its "candy" - pretty much all sugar, coloured brown occasionally. Same with coffee - of course lots of people drink coffee with sugar here, but small, strong, no sugar is also very much a "thing". Those who take sugar seem to take "less".
Maybe we could punish the bad actors who spent decades lobbying so they could sell more and more addictive food products to our population, or maybe at least we could stop subsidizing them so much?
The incentives are so fucked. Now we have basically the entire healthcare industry and the entire pharmaceutical industry relying on the food industry to keep us loaded with addictive garbage that wrecks our health. There is to much money to be made in the US by keeping people unhealthy which is probably the main reason we're not getting universal healthcare any time soon.
Countries with better healthcare actually have an incentive to keep their population healthy. In the US, it's the exact opposite.
IMO food companies should be allowed to sell addictive garbage to people who want it, but they should also be on the hook for paying for treatments. Then maybe we'll start seeing treatments that actually cure rather than address symptoms short term. The same should really be true for every industry that sells addictive crap.
Can and bottle deposits are older than the general recycling push, at least where I live. It was more about keeping trash off the road sides than re-use.
My wife had bad palpitations and tachycardia after both shots for a week, too. So, I'm not sure why these are not listed among common side effects. Other people I know had high blood pressure (without having a history of such), and many other things they haven't experienced before. I suddenly got severe skin dryness on my knees - something I've never ever had, so, again, this is not like the tetanus shot or any other vaccine I've had before - even the BCG was less noticeable. Not to mention the extreme pain in the are of the shot - both couldn't sleep during first and second shots due to waking up from pain in the arm. I'm waiting for Novavax or others for my kids or newer variants. I'm not doing an mRNA again, sorry. I am not doing an adenovirus vector one either - the virus is well-known for causing blood cell issues leading to blood clots. And those giving the shots should learn to pull first, and if they don't see blood, then inject it - it's the old forgotten practice for giving shots in the muscle tissue, and avoid the blood stream!
It only depends on what's the status of the pandemic. At this time, with the delta variant raging, I'm not gonna stop wearing in closed spaces or when speaking to people in close proximity for more than a minute. My kids are not vaccinated and I don't wanna give it to them. At this time, I'm NOT gonna vaccinate them as no option seems safe.
I'm not sure there is a mainstream American right. There are several threads that appear to have incompatible ideas. Then the politicians try to give lip-service to all of them, which makes it impossible to actually deliver on any of their promises without pissing off the rest of their supporters.
I think there did used to be a main-stream of conservative thought, from Buckley through Reagan. But they are just one of the threads, now.
This was inevitable. For a long time, they could win elections by catering to the strong, white, male breadwinner and those in his orbit. One identity. One politics.
The left, in contrast, has been working on a kind of "big tent" politics for a long time, packaging reproductive rights (women) with immigration reform (hispanics) and welfare (low income blacks). Each of these stances required the right to come out hard against these things, alienating women and minorities. That necessitated more inflammatory politics to rile up the white male base: the immigrants are taking your jobs, welfare queens are taking your tax money, feminists are destroying your livelihoods, etc... ideas which seem plausible and scary at first but upon investigation are not actually causing the problems they purport to be. Immigrants are growing the economy, welfare queens are mostly white and not nearly expensive as aircraft carriers and old people, and feminists are still largely shouting in the wind.
But the demographics just aren't in their favor. To me, the turn to nationalism is an act of desperation. In the face of "the party of Everyone" they had to go hard into the fear-based "Them is taking over, and they're against you" message. It worked in 2016, but I don't see it carrying the decade.
But regardless, we're past the time where there is a single conservative ideology that can garner 50% of the vote. It's a big tent on both sides now. It's "The party of Everyone" vs "The party of Jobs, I mean small government, I mean Tax Cuts, I mean Deficit Spending, I mean The Military, I mean... God! Yeah, The party of God. And putting Hillary in jail."
Personally, I have drunk the "we live in a time of plenty" Kool-aid, so I think the Republicans will fail. But we'll see. They're doing their darndest to destroy the environment, and cause a resource crunch which would the necessitate the violence and protectionism they seem to enjoy.
1. Most or all of the mummies studied were from neolithic societies, not paleolithic. The only one that might be considered paleolithic is the Unangan, but even these are from decades after they were conquered by the Russians. So they may very well have had white flour and processed sugar in their diet. I couldn't find information about their diet during this period.
2. The time needed for natural selection to work. I'm not convinced by this one. The examples that were given would have had higher selection pressure on the young during their child-bearing years. I would guess that the selection pressure from diseases of old-age would be much less, and would take many more generations to be felt.
Still some good points to be made about the naturalistic fallacy.
Seems like even scientists don't have a good understanding of diet. I just watched a show that mentioned Henry VIII's diet. They mentioned how it made him fat because of all the meat he ate. I thought "that doesn't sound right" and looked it up. He didn't eat vegetables (considered peasant food at the time) and ate a lot of meat. What probably made him fat though was all the bread, desserts, ale, and wine mixed with sugar. If he stuck to meat and added some vegetables, he would have been fine.
Not entirely market forces. City zoning often requires housing over there, shopping way the hell over that way, and your work miles away in a different direction. Which means that you have to drive to go anywhere. So everything is built to move cars around as quickly as possible, at the expense of making walking so unpleasant that nobody wants to go out there. There are a lot of intertwining forces here that have nothing to do with the market.
Well, for one thing, the school is an arm of government, not a private party. We allow private parties to do all sorts of things we don't allow governments to do.
This doesn't change the legal issue in dispute -- whether someone can be compelled to give up a basic civil right in exchange for attending the school she wants to attend.
Is it a basic civil right? To not be monitored in school? Schools have cameras, they have security guards, they have teachers watching you constantly, they have screen monitoring software on the computers, they have locker searches, and all of these have been upheld as Constitutional because in a school, students have no right to privacy.
Whether this particular case (which admittedly is different from other privacy cases I've seen), the girl is choosing to be at this school. The school gave her the option to opt out of the program and just have a normal card, and she refused. The school then gave her another option, which is to return to the school she is legally required to attend rather than the one she is choosing to attend. That seems more than reasonable to me.
A very good question. The answer is that courts decide this sort of thing, and the notion of "civil rights" is a moving target over time.
But if her civil rights are violated, then the fact that she volunteers to be there instead of another school should not be allowed to interfere with the judgment.
How am I so sure? Well, as one example, African-Americans must be allowed to attend the school of their choice, and the argument that they have alternative schools is (in the eyes of the law) insufficient. The south famously argued that African-Americans had their own schools and shouldn't be arguing for admission to other schools. The Supreme Court disagreed.
> The school then gave her another option, which is to return to the school she is legally required to attend rather than the one she is choosing to attend. That seems more than reasonable to me.
Read the history of the U.S. Civil Rights movement, from beginning to end. Then ask yourself whether what you've just said is fair and reasonable.
I agree that I would like the courts to decide on this. We're all armchair observers just making our commentary the way we see it.
I'm not certain that the Civil Rights Act comes into play here, though. The problem there is that the government were mandating that people had to go to different schools just based on their skin color. On the other hand, magnet schools are inherently and legally discriminatory; they discriminate on talent. You're legally required to attend school, but you can qualify for attendance in a magnet school. They're not telling the girl to go back to the girl's school, or back to the black person's school, they're telling her to go back to the same school everyone else goes to, the normal school, the regular school, the legally mandated school. High school is not an alternative school, magnet high schools are. It's not discrimination to make someone go to a school everyone else goes to. Not everyone gets into a magnet high school; she did, and now she's been disqualified. Magnet high schools are not a right.
> I'm not certain that the Civil Rights Act comes into play here, though.
But it does. This person wants to attend a particular school, but that school violates her civil rights as a precondition for attendance. It's a clear violation of the civil rights rulings that were handed down in the 1960s. It would be like requiring people to take a literacy test before voting, but only in particular places. Beyond the civil rights implications, it violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution.
> The problem there is that the government were mandating that people had to go to different schools just based on their skin color.
Yes, but that's coincidental to the legal issues. If the people in question had been women, or another minority, or of a particular religious persuasion, or any number of other traits, the same laws would apply. Race has always been coincidental to the legal arguments.
> On the other hand, magnet schools are inherently and legally discriminatory; they discriminate on talent.
Sometimes true, but a red herring in this case, because the girl is qualified to attend. Because she is qualified, her civil rights become the issue.
> Magnet high schools are not a right.
Actually if it's a public school, yes, it's a right. The reason? If a particular person is qualified to attend this publicly funded institution, then any other equally qualified person should be able to attend also, and if not, the school had better have an excellent reason why not.
If it were a private school, the rules would be different, but this is a publicly funded school, therefore constitutional protections are in force.
I would love to see this kind of back and forth in the opinions of the Supreme Court. You're making some interesting arguments I haven't thought of. Unfortunately with the religious freedom claim, I doubt we'd see this come up.
