Still on a magical quest to find out who the hell I am.
I've made talking to myself an art form in the meantime.
I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up so I'm actively hiding from middle age, whatever that's supposed to be.
Gamer girl book nerd with a mortgage, a kid in college, and a to-be-read list that will outlive me.
Don't expect much wisdom. I don't know what I'm doing here either...
There is no way for a human being to be born innately, inherently, ontologically, “a bad person”. There is no mental illness that makes a person innately, inherently, ontologically “bad”. There is no “abuser gene”. There is no “abuser disorder”. Whether or not someone is abusive, manipulative, and cruel, is based entirely on the behaviors they choose to engage in. How they choose to see people and treat people. What thoughts they choose to entertain.
If you immediately “morally diagnose” someone based on their mental illness, that they did not choose to have, you are choosing to engage in a cruel behavior. I don’t care if you believe you’re “empathetic”, you do not have a “good person” gene, or some sort of “good person” condition. Whether someone has high empathy or no empathy, all people are individually responsible for their own behaviors. There is nothing innate about you that absolves you from being responsible for abusive behavior.
Stop demonizing personality disorders, and start actually holding abusers accountable for their choices. End of argument.
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
“Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.
A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.
Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.
Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.
“Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.
Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.
Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.
MSG is not bad for you at all.
The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.
I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.
So I’ve literally done this twice before and so have several other people but here are sources on all of these, most of them fairly recent academic studies or otherwise the most up-to-date I could find:
Anyone who thinks that doing something the hard way with “willpower” instead of the most effective and efficient way with whatever tools you have at your disposable is a fucking dipshit, and likely an ableist too.
I’m so so so tired of the “meds as a last resort” mentality.
If I get a migraine, could I rub peppermint oil on my temples and lay in a dark room and suffer along until the pain abates and I can take pride in surviving on my will power alone? Sure, I fucking guess. Or I could take my fucking meds and have a functional day.
And the same goes for my damn Adderall. Clearly, I can *survive* without Adderall for my ADHD. I did it for my entire life up until I FINALLY got diagnosed earlier this year. But guess what? I dont NEED my meds. I COULD go without them. I don’t fucking want to. I am so much more functional with them, and there is no honor in unnecessary suffering.
Medicine isn’t a moral failing and there isn’t a specially little corner of heaven reserved for folks who took the fewest number of pills in their life.
