A ramble on the interwebs

There are 4800 calories in a kilogram of dry sawdust even though wood is completely indigestible to humans, because calories don't measure nutritional value, just how well something burns

Prefer reading? The sources list for that episode is full of goodies:

History of the Calorie in Nutrition

Caloric Equivalents of Gained or Lost Weight

The Foreign Policy of the Calorie

Why the most popular rule of weight loss is completely wrong

The energy balance model of obesity: beyond calories in, calories out

“Calories in, calories out” and macronutrient intake

Calories on food packets are wrong—it’s time to change that

Why Does the FDA Recommend 2,000 Calories Per Day?

Who Actually Needs a 2,000 Calorie a Day Diet?

The Nutrition Facts Label: Its History and Updates

It doesn’t stop there though, almost everything we think we know about nutrition is kind of bullshit.

You need 2000-2500 calories a day? There’s no evidence to support that claim. It’s fully a made up number.

Calories in - calories out = weight gain or loss’? Absolute bullshit. No credible scientist believes this anymore. Your body compensates for dieting in like a billion ways to the point where reducing calorie intake often results in long term weight gain.

2 liters of water per day? Again: a made up number. ZERO evidence.

The BMI? Not remotely based on science. Absolute bullshit.

Being ‘overweight’ or ‘obese’ is bad for you? Heavily disputed for all but the highest weight categories.

And of course: there is no evidence based way to lose weight and keep it off. The idea that people can decide to be thinner if not supported by evidence. Almost every study shows that almost all humans just keep returning to their set weight again and again.

Vitamin supplements? We still don’t really know why they sometimes work and sometimes don’t. Your body seems to decide whether to absorb them pretty much on a whim.

If this makes you angry, you don't understand what I'm saying.

The dumbest possible interpretation of CiCo, "If the number I put into my food tracking app is smaller than the number I put into my fitness tracking app, I'll lose weight." is obviously false. What is true is that your body obeys the laws of thermodynamics.

If you claim CiCo is false, you are wrong, not in the sense that you are immoral, but in the sense that what you say is incorrect, not true and a statement that is not in line with reality.

This is not about good or bad, it is about atoms and wether their position in spacetime intersects with your body.

What you can say about CiCo is that it is "reductionist", "impractical" or "not a good model for organisms more complex than amoebae". I don't think many people would disagree with you there.

Kallitsounaki and Williams found that transgender participants did in fact report alexithymia symptoms at an elevated rate, compared to their cisgender peers. This effect also held strong when eliminating all Autistic participants from analyses, which indicates that even non-Autistic transgender people are worse at naming and recognizing their feelings than non-Autistic cisgender people are. The study’s authors concluded from these findings that non-Autistic transgender people appear to exhibit “subclinical” Autistic traits. “Future studies mighty usefully examine whether alexithymia is a potential “marker” of autistic traits in transgender people who do not meet full criteria for autism,” they write. To put it another way, they believe the alexithymia that non-Autistic trans people report is still caused by (mild) Autism. But this conclusion carries with it a faulty and as-yet untested assumption: that alexithymia must be caused by Autism directly, when in reality it could just be a natural consequence of living in a marginalized and othered body.  Just because a transgender person struggles to name and recognize their emotions doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Autistic. It could very well be the case that both Autistic people and transgender people struggle to understand our feelings, because we have experienced a lifetime of questioning and invalidation. And if we look to the broader research literature on alexithymia, we see even more evidence that this might be the case. … It’s not just Autistic people who have been found by researchers to experience alexithymia. Sufferers of trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling, have repeatedly been found to be alexithymic too. Some research also links alexithymia with early exposures to trauma and abuse. People who do not know they are pregnant (also known in the literature as pregnancy-deniers) tend to be alexithymic, for instance. They also tend to be victims of childhood sexual assault. These two things are not unrelated. We know that when vulnerable people (particularly children) are sexually assaulted, their minds tend to dissociate from that upsetting reality. Their consciousness “floats away” to a point elsewhere in the room, or they pretend the abuse isn’t happening to them or that the world around them is not real. Additional research has also found that alexithymia is associated with early childhood abuse, especially emotional and physical neglect. It makes sense that a mind that’s well practiced in the art of detachment might stop checking on its internal states entirely. A body that has often been the site of your abuse is one you can’t dwell in comfortably. If you can’t count on your caregiver to provide you with regular nourishment, there’s little reason to make note of your own feelings of hunger. And if your cries for help or comfort are never heard with sympathy, you may quickly learn not to even recognize sadness within yourself at all. These findings also dovetail with an observation that Kallitsounaki and Williams make in their paper, but don’t take much time to dwell on: they found that the cisgender men in their sample were significantly more alexithymic than cisgender women. This finding also suggests that there are environmental and social factors that contribute to a person’s awareness of their own emotions — and populations that are discouraged from sharing how they feel are far worse at understanding their feelings as a result.

Women aren’t innately more attuned to emotions than men are. They’re simply expected to be more emotionally aware, and given more tools to make emotional recognition and expression possible. Men, on the flip side, are denied the freedom to be openly emotional, and also relieved of the responsibility to look after their own or others’ feelings. This results in them understanding emotions a whole lot less. If we can’t assume that the alexithymia of men is innate, then we shouldn’t assume it’s innate in Autistics or transgender people either. For just as men are discouraged from openly crying, asking for help, or showing other signs of supposed “weakness,” both transgender people and Autistics are actively discouraged from expressing discomfort or seeking emotional aid for ourselves.

People tend to take cues on what is real from other people around us, particularly very trusted people like your parents when you’re a child. (Or people who have a lot of power over you. Ditto.) When subjective experiences like physical pain, psychological pain, hunger, cold/heat, sensory overload, etc get treated like they’re real, people take them more seriously than when they’re either treated like they’re not real or like a thing that is real but which you should ignore.

If a parent or similar thinks that you covering your ears and screaming is a proportionate response to a fire alarm, you believe it is a proportionate response and are more likely to notice similar sensations in the future. If a parent or similar thinks you covering your ears and screaming because a clock is ticking at a normal-to-allistics volume is “being dramatic” or “being too sensitive” or similar, you might try to not notice that sensation going forwards. Because you were just told that you should not notice it.

It's also important to note that I omit them for stylistic reasons quite often, in particular because if I included words like this everywhere that I think they should logically be, my writing would become like, unreadable. So I try to structure things whereby I set the reader up with reasonable assumptions about what generalizations are absolute, which ones are statistical but high confidence, which ones are very loose and so on. So for instance I'll often set up the appropriate way of understanding a generalization in the first paragraph in which it is introduced, and then make it clear from context that the reader should carry this through when I talk about it going forward. Maybe I don't always do a good job.

But like, consider this recent post. I first say that "I’m comfortable taking it almost as an axiom that no one should ever get kicked out of where they are living". And when I say almost, you know, I mean almost! Idk if other people's writing has this quality. Almost is not there for metrical shape, it's there for content! Anyway, later say something like "an ideal housing policy should respect this axiom", and this is meant to mean... well, I'm not sure really how to say it other than how I said it, it's meant to mean "an ideal housing policy should respect this axiom". A very important part of the semantics of this sentence is that I am invoking a sort of fundamental property of ideals, which is that you usually can't achieve them in actual practice but you should try to get close, modulo whatever constraints you are under. Maybe it's not clear that these constraints are the same constraints imposing exceptions to the axiom; that seems like a genuine ambiguity. Well that's on me.

(Sorry, that was a joke.)

government considers you able to work if you can give anything more than 0%

let me give you a cute tip ok? ready?

you don't have to do things as fast as possible

ok i know that this is jarring to read, but stay with me. you may be having the realization at this very moment that every single task that you have ever undertaken in your life, your goal was to complete it as quickly as you possibly could. and maybe you're medicated now or maybe you aren't. but this has always been your philosophy.

this is not actually necessary and not how neurotypical people view things like tasks or responsibilities

a real life example of how this information has changed the way that i behave and has had a positive effect on my mental health:

i noticed that when getting ready to take my dog for a walk, my primary goal has always been to get the harness and leash on her and get out the door as quickly as i can. for no reason other than i was lead to believe as a kid that faster = efficient = better. however, there are other factors, such as: i sweat very easily and moving around at a fast pace trying to collect all of the things i need to rush out the door exacerbates this. these combination of factors results in me getting highly irritable and overstimulated.

i later realized that this is the way that i get ready to leave the house no matter what i am doing

now, when i am getting ready to take my dog for a walk, i purposefully do everything at half speed. i gather stuff slower. i move through the house slower. i put the harness on slower. i clip the leash slower. i open the door slower. i make a conscious effort to do everything almost in a way that feels like slow motion to me.

and you know what? applying this behavior to almost every single task or activity that i have to do results in me having a significant magnitude less anxiety than if i am in my usual "do this task as if you are racing against an invisible clock" state of mind.

This isn’t perfect, and many of these only have one article, but here is our list of countries we have written about. We are hoping to one day have at least one article for every country in the world but as @every-book-has-a-secret there is a lot of work still to do.

Europe

Albania Austria Belgium Czechia Czech Republic Denmark England Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia Scotland Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland

Africa

Algeria Cameroon Egypt Kenya Morocco Nigeria Senegal Sierra Leone South Africa Uganda

North America

Canada Costa Rica Crow Nation Cuba Grenada Jamaica Menominee Nation Mexico Puerto Rico United States of America

South America

Argentina Brazil Chile Colombia Guyana Peru Trinidad and Tobago Uruguay

Asia

Afghanistan Bangladesh China Hong Kong India Iran Israel Japan Pakistan The Philippines South Korea Sri Lanka Syria Turkey

Oceania

Australia Māori Nation New Zealand

Antarctica

They said "that sounds like a really unhelpful and distressing thing that your brain is making you think about All The Time. How about when that happens you try to think about something that makes you happy instead"

(My dad carried a picture of me at age 4 with a large inflatable dinosaur in his wallet for this purpose) (hard to ruminate about past failures when looking at a picture of your kid enjoying a large inflatable dinosaur)

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.

Yup, basically. (In fairness I yoinked that term directly from @disir-ex-machina​) Get yourself an official name on your ID if you need, but don’t let it stop you from having other names. Get yourself a gender you put on for work or the general public, but don’t let it stop you from having the true gender you feel yourself to be in private.

Some of my SANDMAN commissions. Above, Sandman and Thessaly, though if memory serves, this was actually done for a 25th anniversary SANDMAN exhibit.

Death and Delirium. Private commission in pencil.

DEATH cover sketch commission.

Destiny. Brush and ink on mulberry paper, I think. Can't recall.

Lucifer. Brush and ink.

Sandman. Brush and ink on antique paper.

Sandman. Brush and ink.

lizard brain

questions: do i have food, water, and safe shelter? 

solutions: drink more water. drink things with electrolytes. make and stick to a food schedule that works for you. clean your room. if you are in an unsafe situation, talk to someone trusted about creating a plan to get out 

toddler brain 

questions: have i had enough rest? am i been getting what i need to be healthy? am i cared for? am i frustrated? 

solutions: make sure you’re getting enough sleep on a schedule that works for you (people naturally sleep better at different times and need different amounts of sleep. if youre young you will need to sleep more than 7 or 8 hours). make sure you have varied nutrition in your diet. make sure your medications and supplements are working for you and take them on schedule. work on developing a support system that meets your needs. take breaks from things if you feel burned out, even if it’s only for a day 

monkey brain 

questions: have i had enrichment in my life? am i stuck in a rut? have i had socialization, entertainment, and creativity? has anything challenged me lately? 

solutions: limit your time on social media. make an effort to be in new environments - even if its another room in your house or backyard. examine what is or isn’t working in your routine. pick up a new hobby (if you’re more physically active, consider a hobby like writing or coding. if you’re more mentally active, consider a hobby like woodworking, bookbinding, or a sport). write stories, make art, and write analyses (if you haven’t tried original work - focus on that for a little while). try new music. try a new food. build something with legos. consume a new type of media even if you’re not sure you’ll like it (like graphic novels, radio plays, or watching ballet). take on a long term project and set aside time to work on it on a schedule (whether its every day, every few days, or specific days each week) 

human brain 

questions: do i feel loved? do i feel understood? am i existentially fulfilled? do i have a sense of purpose? do i have a sense of meaning? am i contributing to the lives of the people i care about and are they doing the same for me in return? 

solutions: reach out to friends and loved ones, and do activities together, like play a game online or walk in the park. talk to safe people about things that upset you, such as a trusted friend or a therapist, and find steps to improve your mental health. interrogate whether your religious beliefs are working for you, and if they are, make an effort to practice your faith, whether that is attending services (including digitally if they have them), reading and discussing your religious texts, or following holidays. read self help books or blogs from trusted professionals. read about philosophy and interrogate your own understanding of things. learn how to communicate your needs, thoughts, and desires to people who will listen. be active in your community (whether in community service, activism, or getting involved in local politics). adopt a rescue animal. give money to causes you care about. make an effort to learn about points of view and lived experiences that are different than your own. challenge assumptions about how you are expected to live your life and decide whether you want those things or not. express love for the people you care about - through kind words, good acts, crafts, or otherwise. if there are steps in your life you have been afraid of taking, make a plan to take them 

Shame on America and shame on most of Europe for abstaining

when this post was first going around, i went and read the U.N.'s report on the debate, and a bunch of different articles on it, and wrote a long rebuttal, explaining that this was russian state propaganda intended to try and get international support for a proposed invasion of ukraine by claiming that ukraine was full of nazis

(this is not me telling you how clever I am, I was just repeating back information from other people who know a fuck of a lot more about international politics than me, because the people who know about that shit all knew what this was)

[the tldr for anyone who didn't see a rebuttal is that the bill was basically just the words 'nazis=bad' not any kind of attempt to combat nazism, a lot of countries abstained because they thought it was stupid, the usa voted against because any condemnation of free speech is considered unconstitutional, and ukraine voted against because they were 100% aware of why russia proposed the bill in the first place]

mostly it was ignored, and the responses i did get were from people like the ones above, telling me i was shilling for capitalism or whatever

because this doesn't look like what people in left-wing online spaces expect right-wing propaganda to look like. it says nazis are bad, how can it possibly be pro-facist? it's reporting accurate facts, how can it be propaganda?

because it is technically accurate. this bill was proposed, it was voted on, and the usa and ukraine were the only countries to vote again. that's all true

it's just also only a tiny part of the picture, selected to make people who don't like nazis (also do note it's specifically neo-nazis not white supremecists or facists - russia has major problems wth the last 2 but historically hasn't been a big fan of nazis, hence the very specific wording) think russia is good and ukraine is bad.

when you're used to shit like prageru it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking right-wing propaganda is just really obvious lies, but prageru is 5 dipshits with access to powerpoint (they're 5 dipshits being funded by oil barons, but the point still stands) of course the stuff they make is going to be obvious bullshit. the tweet at the top of this thread is propaganda by people who actually know what the fuck they're doing and have spent a very long time getting extremely good at it.

if they just lied, people would notice. not everyone, obviously, the internet left contains people who thought wayfair was selling kidnapped children locked in overprice wardrobes ffs, but enough people

so they share what is, very technically, the truth. they edit it to fit their needs, they obsfucate the background, but they tell the truth. and it works. thousands upon thousands of people shared this. people who quite rightly view the invasion of ukraine as absolutely monstrous went to the matt for russian state propaganda over and over. they drowned out anyone trying to add the context back in

this is what effective right-wing propaganda looks like. this is why people yell about reading beyond the headlines, doing research, and most importantly, applying common sense!

I didn't go and read up on the context of this people i'm cleverer than you. i noticed germany was on the list of people who abstained, and i know enough about germany to know they have very strong opinions on nazis, and that made me think probably it was bullshit, so i went and did some research.

if i didn't know that about germany, i might have shared this uncritically, because it's really fucking easy to hit reblog and a lot harder to go and read reports on united nations debates (it's actually surprisingly easy to do that, but they're mostly boring as shit)

but the existence of this post, and the sheer number of notes it has and the number of retweets the original had, are a reminder that doing that extra work is very very important. there are people in left-wing spaces right now loudly supporting the invasion of ukraine, because they read shit like this uncritically, and that's really fucking bad! i hope we can all agree that the invasion of ukraine is bad, and supporting it is a sign that something has gone very wrong.

and i want to say that i'm different, i'd never drink the cool aid, and on this specific issue, no, i probably wouldn't. but i've done it in the past, on less important issues, because it's easy. the internet makes it easy. propagandists who know what they're doing make it easy

-J.R.R. Tolkien

"Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers."