It feels dirty when some people wrongly appropriate other's historical, horrifying suffering to justify their struggles.
I really sympathize with overweight people who struggle with losing weight. I myself mostly had the opposite issue (maintaining and gaining weight was my issue), but it's really slimy to try and connect your struggles to that of what is probably the most horrific slave practices in human history.
Academia in general has a problem with shameless self promotion, the professors with the best ideas are rarely the ones who spend the most time in front of cameras. I live down the road from fired Cornell professor Brian Wasnik who faked food studies. He loved to be on camera, he did not love getting the details of his research right as much as he loved being on TV
Problem in fields covering the history of certain ethnic groups is you get a boost by telling stories of extreme abuse. For example a white guy pretending to be Indian named Ward Churchhill made up the idea that Native Americans were purposefully given "smallpox infected blankets." Jason Arday is a more recent example, with his stories of not being able to read until 18 and other nonsense.
I mean thats humanity in general. In the free market at least there is some kind of profit pressure that sometimes pushes really shitty products out no matter how good the owners are at hype, but theres a reason advertising is so lucrative.
Most academic fields are not particularly "sexy" or exciting to laymen. You should always be a little careful about trusting the kind of research that makes its way to the news.
I suspect if you traveled in time and studied slavery in America it would be horrifying in a much more ordinary way. They would be treating slaves in a similar way to how they treated livestock, which would be violent and inhumane, but it is unlikely to be full of the sensational elements that some people like to focus on. It would probably be a pretty good example of the banality of evil. Since it wasn't shocking, and the actions aligned with people's views of slaves, people went along with it.
There is a lot of things like that in history, that someone put out misinformation and then it just becomes this “fact” like women burning bras is completely made up. Concept of hippies is skewed, there wasnt this big movement until after woodstock. Adults didn’t attend concerts prior to that, then it became cool years after woodstock where adults would dress like hippies and go to concerts. The doors for example never sold out shows until after they were past their prime. The entire Charles manson lore was invented by the DA to sell a book. They had a drug dealer that was locked up and they wanted him out to get drugs so they did a similar crime in hopes they would release him as the real killer was free. The idea of summer of love etc is completely made up. Boomers unleashed a crime wave that wasnt seen before or since in the late 60s and 70s. There were so many serial killers operating independently that police were confused because there were so many of them, along with other general murders. There is a pretty solid case to be made that the zodiac killer wasnt even real , it was multiple people doing murders and claiming the zodiac to throw police off or the police lumped them into the zodiac, which modern investigators are careful to avoid. To put in perspective there were 70 something murders around San Jose in one year during zodiac. Boomers continued this crime wave until the 90s until they got too old to stop committing crimes that’s why crime really began to drop.
Academia also has a problem with "social scientists" pushing political activism (almost always of the far left variety) and disgusting their political activism as "scientific research".
You don't see that in the hard sciences to anywhere near the same extent because hard sciences are actually quantitative and bullshit can be called through experimentation.
The links you posted all just refer to the same single incident in 1763. There is not any documentary evidence that spreading smallpox intentionally ever happened besides that one time.
Nice try, but you have no idea what you are talking about. Ward Churchill exaggerated and propagated this false claim. Outside of the singular instance cited above this was not known to be a real thing that occured. Your own articles even agree with this by saying "perhaps just once" in the literal opening paragraph.
"
Abstract
In this analysis of the genocide rhetoric employed over the years by Ward Churchill, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado, a "distressing" conclusion is reached: Churchill has habitually committed multiple counts of research misconduct—specifically, fabrication and falsification. While acknowledging the "politicization" of the topic and evidence of other outrages committed against Native American tribes in times past, this study examines the different versions of the "smallpox blankets" episode published by Churchill between 1994 and 2003. The "preponderance of evidence" standard of proof strongly indicates that Churchill fabricated events that never occurred—namely the U.S. Army's alleged distribution of smallpox infested blankets to the Mandan Indians in 1837. The analysis additionally reveals that Churchill falsified sources to support his fabricated version of events, and also concealed evidence in his cited sources that actually disconfirms, rather than substantiates, his allegations of genocide.
"
And the counter argument to that is that fighting fascism (real fascism is mean) requires you to be healthy and in fighting shape. We introduced school breakfast and lunches in the US after WW2 because a ton of men were malnourished most of their childhood and couldn't fight in adult hood.
They'd actually be closer to the truth if they said wearing a black shirt made you fascist. They'd still be wrong, of course, for lacking nuance, but at least there's be the inkling of something to work with.
It has its roots in militarism or even some forms of authoritarianism, but while these things are certainly components of fascism, it's not their sole characteristic
Because people constantly drag the worst possible historical events into their own little agendas to try and validate them. Extremely counterproductive.
Edit: Like the opposite of slavery is stuffing yourself with food where nutrition is replaced with the same stuff used to fatten cattle just so the food industry can save a buck or two and big pharma has a guaranteed clientel. Dillusional.
Because they are either too stupid or too lazy to do it. Or both. So they make up things on the fly because that's what vibes tell them.
You can't expect any deal of honesty from someone who created their entire identity around grievances for something that happened long before they were born.
It doesn't hurt them when racists kick off, there's a symbiotic relationship there.
So they can give fascists all the ammo they need to make life hell for the rest of us while bigging up their comfy jobs in academia or "activism"... Remember how that BLM person got a mansion out of the deal?
Gotta make everything about racism and slavery. It couldn't possibly be because obesity is, by far, the largest preventable health condition in the world.
CIA doesnt even have to do anything to make leftist look bad anymore. They just post the most stupidest comments on line and 30% of leftist will start defending the comments while calling any other leftist racist and counter revolutionary. The cia are now just doing there daily reward and logging off as the leftist fight among themselves.
When did i said the right was any better? Modern day right and left on the internet are both stupid and just uses buzzword all the time. They just accuse each other of being goy and using slurs.
The probelm is alot of this stuff starts as fairly complex intellectual theory that requires alot of prior foundation to make sense.
But when you're an activist that doesn't understand any of that you take one little thing like caloric intake being pioneered by slave owners to figure out the bare minimum food required to get the most labor, and you then wrongfully apply that to modern ideas of healthy eating and call dieting racist.
Yeah. Kind of needed a calorie counter to get back to a somewhat reasonable weight this year, dropped 15kg, way, way more effective than trying eyeball what might help you lose weight (and nicer to, could have junky stuff I liked if I budgeted for it, occasionally).
I mean if you take it to the extreme it is but taking anything to the extreme is bad. taking care of your body is a very important thing to do. Especially as you get older. People should be encouraged to eat more healthy.
No, diet culture has nothing to do with being healthy, its a culture based on stigmatizing fruit and counting calories.
It only promotes eating disorders, which arent healthy.
The whole clip/video is insane if it’s what I think it is. Basically socialists saying health is far right and that there should be more fat people to destroy the nuclear family.
The concept of calories was barely even established before the end of slavery, and according to Google wasn't applied to human nutrition until like 25 years after the Civil War was over.
Left-wing politics sometimes attracts people who really just want to mould the world in a way that would eliminate their own personal issues. All their politics flow solipsistically from their own experience. So being a fat, Black guy, and feeling bad about it, is the lens through which he criticizes capitalism. Likewise the quote-tweeter has an eating disorder, so their entire worldview is about fighting the historical and economic trends that made them feel bad about being fat.
Actual socialism becomes ancillary to their own need to use politics-as-therapy. An age-old problem: George Orwell, himself a socialist, lamented that the cause has been taken up by middle-class people with their own ideological niches or just outright health-based delusions:
Modern socialism, at least in the west, has nothing to do with the economic system. Its only focus is on constantly demonizing the west, and use socialist policies like Medicare for all to placate the masses as they try to turn the country communist.
I wish I was joking, but meeting any person from the DSA party in the US quickly makes this obvious.
No, they block anyone with opposing views or see them as evil so dont listen to them. Means they are extreeeeeemly deep in a circlejerking echo chamber
Not only is it false, but daily caloric intake is like, actual science, is it not? Even if it was true and it was discovered by slavers, it’s still real
Its amazing the amount of shit people make up now and they say it with such much confidence. Then when presented with facts that opposite it they just start making up more shit, moving the goal posts or changing the topic. Its so exhausting but I still to this day cannot help calling it out. To then to remember that I'm trying to play chess with a pigeon.
Why can't we ever have nuanced discussions any more?
BMI isn't a perfect system, like any measurement system that attempts to compress a complicated and individualized interplay of connected systems down to a single number, it is a lossy measurement.
But no, we can't say that. Instead we have to say that BMI was the foundational bedrock principle of the Nazi Party, personally invented by Adolf Hitler himself, and anyone who (like Michelle Obama) suggests that people should, broadly speaking, try to eat healthily as opposed to unhealthily because of the many well known negative effects of obesity - is actually a literal nazi trying to usher in the 4th Reich.
Also, when the left wonders why calling people a fascist doesn't seem to do anything any more - this is why.
"Exercise is fascist. Math is fascist. Punctuality is fascist. ICE is fascist". One of these things is not like the other, but you can see how it gets lost in the noise.
Wilbur Olin Atwater first applied the calorie to human food and nutrition in 1887. 22 years after slavery was abolished. Calorie-counting for weight loss did not become popular until the 1920s. and inversely using caloric intake to measure minimum nutrition wasnt popular until around that same time.
Daily caloric intake is a very basic measurement straight for thermodynamics. I'm sure slavers did awful stuff with it but they definitely didn't invent it.
This is an annoying characteristic of leftist spaces. In this case there’s a real problem: BMI is biased toward smaller framed, less muscular people which means in a way it is* kind of racist. It’s also very flawed measure for any *individual for that reason, as anyone who’s ever put on a lot of muscle will tell you. Also, racist stereotypes about bodies are a thing.
Someone takes that real problem and either to please their audience or probably to work out of their own insecurities turns it into what most listeners outside of that room would consider hyperbolic nonsense. (And make a career out of it.) A white person smelling clout dives in and just starts making stuff up to score more anti-racism points. The right wing propaganda machine discovers this small leftist circle jerk and tries to misrepresent anyone who cares about racism as these two crazies. (Based on the right wing reaction you would think this was the Democratic Party’s version of the midterm convention.)
What might bother me most is that it’s all based in a sort of condescending indulgence from the white audience. “It doesn’t matter whether or not your takes are half-baked nonsense. Our job isn’t to question and help refine your ideas but to nod along so we can all feel anti-racist. Besides, if we did push back some ego boosting loser would probably try to cancel us and the point of anti-racism is to feel good about ourselves, not to do the difficult work of finding real solutions to real problems.”
I'm sure the british used the slaves' rations as a basis for calculating caloric requirements when arranging for the rationing system and the requirements for the Berlin Airlift.
They forget that slaves were legally property (they forget the whole Three Fifths Compromise which is due to that connundrum)
That being said since slaves, especially after the importation of slaves was banned, that they had enough value as property that there was a perverse incentive to not let them die of starvation since it would reduce their productivity and time they could work before dying. They were malnourished and at poor quality food but it was a waste of money to let your property, whether it was a workhorse or a slave die from starvation.
This is largely consistent throughout history outside of instances of genocide and extermination where the end goal was working them to death
The original assertion, about “policing black fat flesh” is foundational to broader “entire systems of governance”
I’m following that just fine. I think there’s something to that. Industrial food complex is real. And the “industrialization” of food has its roots in slavery where it’s “how can we make these mfs feed themselves without it costing us anything”.
Now the slave masters never went all the way thru with it cuz it was always “make them feed themselves” which is how we got a lot of aspects of soul food. Which traditional soul food is actually tasty and nutritious, but I do think it would be possibly spiritually degrading for individuals to realize that they’re eating masters scraps.
The full on industrialization of nutrition is when u take away ppls control to feed themselves. Think like McDonald’s, its expansion across the United States, it’s a stark pre and post arrival difference every single region it hits, every fatness related health problem skyrockets.
So yea I would need to read Harrison’s work more but it says he got a book called “Belly of the Beast” about anti fatness anti blackness, maybe I will read it
It doesn't make sense to starve your labor force that you had to pay for. You can do that with immigrants because if they get sick, you don't have to pay them and you can replace them. That's one reason the north was more developed than the South.
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