133arc585

133arc585 , 11 months ago

They once tried to say eating red meat is “possibly” cancer-causing as well.

Because it is. Whether the effect size is significant to you or not is one thing, but there is good evidence that it has a nonzero effect. Which is similarly the case here: there is evidence of effect of aspartame, but whether the effect size is significant is up to you to decide (or legislators).

133arc585 , 11 months ago

They’re about to declare it as possibly cancerous. Not fully cancerous.

What do you mean by this? Everything that can cause cancer is declared “possibly cancerous”; it depends on dose and exposure. Nothing is “fully cancerous” for whatever that might even mean. You can be exposed to radiation and either get cancer or not; it depends on the dose. Would you call radiation “possibly cancerous”, or “fully cancerous”?

Analagously, most bacteria can cause infections but they don’t always in everyone. So to label a bacteria as purely benign or purely dangerous is just as silly as trying to make a distinction between “possibly cancerous” and “fully cancerous”.

Aspartame is in a lot of things, mainly sodas and gum, but you’d have to consume a lot of the stuff beyond a human limit really.

And if someone wants to minimize their risk of cancer, they should be able to make informed decisions. Knowing that at particular food-additive has higher-than-baseline chances of causing cancer allows someone with a different risk-aversion profile to make decisions wisely. If you don’t mind the incidence rate at the dose you consume it at, that’s fine as well. But it is useful to have it be public knowledge if something is potentially cancer-causing.

133arc585 , 11 months ago

And more importantly, ignoring the validity of the claims. It’s not a court, you can’t get it thrown out on a technicality; either the claim is valid or it’s not and, although the way the claim is conveyed can be worth mentioning, ignoring the claim itself and only assessing the conveyance method is just useless. @mykhaylo

133arc585 , 11 months ago

Xenophobic fearmongering serves nobody.

Should we also avoid the Linux kernel, since it’s Finnish, and Finland participates in the largest global surveillance apparatus with the USA? There’s absolutely no reason to assume the distribution is any less secure or any more likely to be malicious simply due to it being developed in China or by Chinese.

Moreover, it’s open-source. Use the same logic you should apply to open-source software before you accuse it of being malicious: look at the code and prove it.

133arc585 , 11 months ago

Of course there’s not. It’s a reflex: China → malicious. It doesn’t require evidence and, since it’s not normally questioned in daily discourse, the person saying it seemingly never questions whether it makes any sense to make such a baseless claim.

133arc585 , 11 months ago

My statement above was not meant to come across as xenophobic, but wary considering, historically, how involved China’s government is with local tech companies and entities that would contribute to a project like this.

This right here is where the problem is though. Simply being associated with the Chinese governement is not sufficient to assume malfeasance. Just as any of the large USA tech giants that take various forms of government funding aren’t automatically assumed to be malicious simply by being associated with a “malicious” government. Hell, the Linux Foundation (Linus’ employer) is almost entirely funded by really creepy USA-based tech companies that themselves receive government money for various projects or products. I don’t assume baselessly that Linus would make the distribution insecure simply because he’s funded by people who might want that.

Obviously, more data needs to be evaluated, but I think it’s fair to be cautious.

It is only fair to be exactly as cautious as you would be to run any other random Linux distribution: say, some random person’s fork of Debian. Again, unless you have actual reason to treat it differently, doing so baselessly is rather lame and doesn’t serve anyone. Of course it’s fair to be catious of something as critical as an operating system; but viewing it through a biased lens doesn’t make you more secure.

SIGs (special interest groups)

I’m not sure the precise definition for what counts as an SIG here, but it could mean something analagous to the Linux Foundation. It isn’t necessarily suspicious. I think, from context, it’s used in contrast to “enterprises”; that is, I take it to include any volunteer or not-for-profit contributions.

133arc585 , 11 months ago

What an insane take. Plenty of police shootings are on unarmed individuals. Moreover, having an unarmed populace wouldn’t prevent police shootings when the core cause of police brutality isn’t addressed. They demand control and obedience; you being unarmed doesn’t make them any less likely to shoot you if you’re not being obedient.

133arc585 , 11 months ago

It’s used as an excuse. If people weren’t armed, they’d find another excuse. That’s what I mean by not addressing the underlying problem of police brutality and abuse of power. Also, they’ll always say they thought someone had a gun even when they know almost for certain the person didn’t, because they know you’ll buy it.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

Nobody in their right mind is hating on the USA for not being world police. It’s just White Man’s Burden in disguise. Oh dear me you’re so burdened by having to civilize the rest of the world, boohoo. Nobody asked them to, people even push back against it, and yet they do it anyway and then have the gall to complain about how much doing so is inconvenient. Then, two minutes later, the USA will complain about “sovereignty” and pretend they aren’t encroaching on sovereignty every time they pretend to be world police.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and western capitalists. **The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.**State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing, and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and no one was denied medical attention.

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds, 1997.

Improvement of living conditions in the USSR for example happened not just for a massive number of people, but at a pace not seen before.

In the USA, a prime example of capitalism gone wrong, there’s poverty so bad that it’s the 4th leading cause of death (and worse, the poverty may even be underreported). There’s rolling back of social programs, overturning of child labor protections, destruction of the public education system, over-incarceration and for-profit slave labor-driven prison systems[^1]. Try to make me a similar list of government-backed initiatives in the USA that are intended to lift people out of poverty rather than put them there or keep them there. There’s a lot of effort being spent on making sure people can’t get themselves out of poverty. The USA is much more interested in punishing and continuing to exploit the impoverished than helping them–helping them isn’t profitable.

Another thing you’re conveniently overlooking is the destruction of the rest of the world, that is, the ones not being supposedly lifted up in those capitalist states. Even if everyone in the capitalist states was lifted out of poverty, if the cost of that was destruction of other country’s economies and lives of the people therein, effectively putting them into or keeping them in poverty, then it’s a wash at best. Capitalism is great at externalizing negative costs: externalizing it not just onto consumers, but onto citizens of the world, and, worse, onto the future stability of the planet and its ability to host life.

If you take into account the number of people forced into and kept in poverty worldwide and compare that to the number of people truly lifted out of and kept out of poverty due to capitalism, I don’t think you’d be able to assert what you have.

[^1]: And if you’ll remember, the only reason most of these social programs ever existed in a somewhat-useful manner in the first place was because the USA had to convince its populace that the existing capitalist system was better than the competing socialist/communist states it was waging economic and ideological war on. Once it was able to destroy the ideological competition, it could change its narrative as well: now, the failure of those socialist/communist states was due to inherent failures of the underlying ideology and not due to a concerted external effort to defeat it. Once there was no competition on the “treating-your-citizens-better-and-like-humans-deserving-of-empathy” front, tearing down of these programs sped up, and the money that was taken out of the taxpayer’s pocket that should have funded those programs was not returned to the taxpayer but instead funneled cleanly upwards.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

Is that data supposed to go back before 1990? Because it doesn’t on my end, and as such that data isn’t going to prove your point or disprove mine.

North Korea is confounded by the fact that Western sanctions are in large part responsible for famine: the region is notorious for not being very arable, and the USA’s meddling with the South Korean puppet state actively worsens the situation. Similarly in Cuba: not every fault can be blamed on the USA, but if you don’t think the continuous trade embargos aren’t partially at fault for the situation, I don’t think you’re honestly evaluating the situation.

Cuba may have free education and healthcare but it’s shit compared to any western European country

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. I would much rather have access to any sort of free healthcare than not have access to any, as is my current lot in life. I don’t care how good certain exclusive healthcare is, when the majority of the population has no access to healthcare. But frankly I think you have an unjustly negative view of the Cuban healthcare system:

Quoting Ileana Morales from the Cuban Ministry of Public Health,

Cuba has the highest ratio of doctors per inhabitant in the world. We have more than 100,000 doctors for a population of 11 million – 9.2 for every 1,000 inhabitants. We also have the highest ratio of health workers per inhabitant – 500,000 overall. But it’s not that we have leftover professionals. We don’t have so many doctors because we like training them, but because we have a health policy that employs all of them. This includes those who are in management positions and those who are committed to our international solidarity missions, our collaboration in health.

… and Cuba doesn’t hoard its medical professionals …

We do a lot of international collaboration. Cuba has been there to support others during all the major health disasters. During the Ebola crisis, Cuba was one of the very few countries that sent medical brigades in Africa. We are always present during earthquakes, fires, and floods. And we always favor communities where most of the time there are no health workers, or we go to places that lack healthcare services. This is the vision of Cuban medical collaboration, which is implemented through two main channels: health workers’ training and provision of care.

Notice that healthcare works differently when it isn’t purely profit driven. It works differently when incentive structures favor patient health over profit.

I mentioned this later in my comment: if you look at the suffering caused externally by capitalism, it’s at best a wash with the benfits caused internally by it. You’re also pointing to examples where things aren’t great because of USA’s interference. It’s disingenuous.

The USA loves to wage economic and ideological war and, when it makes some progress in tearing down its target, point to the downfall of the target and pretend that the downfall is purely due to internal conflict. And you’re buying in to that narrative.

The latter part of my comment was, in my opinion, more important than the first part. The proportion of the world’s population being hurt by capitalism, compared to the proportion of the world’s population helped by it, is massive; the fact that you’re putting more value on small benefits conferred to a small proportion of the population at the expense of the rest is unfortunate but to be expected in a defense of capitalism.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

Who is surprised by this? She’s xenophobic and racist. This is the same “Law and Order” nonsense as in the USA. Look at who is the primary target of this legislation to get an idea of her real intentions.

Suella Braverman has said people who enter the UK illegally after crossing the Channel on small boats “possess values which are at odds with our country” as well as “heightened levels of criminality”.^1

She’s not wrong that the people coming over likely do have values which are at odds with hers and those in power: these people are coming over to better their lives, which is something those in power absolutely do not have as a goal.

Last year, the UK agreed to send tens of thousands of people more than 4,000 miles (6,400km) away to Rwanda as part of a 120-million-pound ($146m) deal.^3

Mind you, she’s also a hypocrite who definitely understands what she’s doing:

In her maiden speech, she recalled how her father, Christie Fernandes, had fled tensions in Kenya to seek a new life in the UK. “On a cold February morning in 1968, a young man, not yet 21, stepped off a plane at Heathrow airport, nervously folding away his one-way ticket from Kenya. He had no family, no friends and was clutching only his most valuable possession, his British passport. His homeland was in political turmoil,” she said.^4

How can you believe that her actions here are for the greater good, when she repeatedly proves she’s not able to do good things? How can you not believe that this is yet another angle in her policy push that disproportionately hurts the already disadvantaged.

These sorts of quasi-legal police stops are already used to enforce “pre-crime”: simply being caught with rope, or spray paint, or various other items is in itself enough to be detained and questioned for an extended period of time, if not charged. These are violations of rights, plain and simple, and yet instead of correcting them, people like Braverman are pushing to make them more defensible within the existing legal framework.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

It should be worrying to people of USA, and the world, to see USA giving platform and support to extremist nationalists and ethnostate-advocates:

Human rights defenders this week condemned President Joe Biden’s upcoming state dinner for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi—who was once banned from entering the United States for supporting violent Hindu supremacists who massacred Muslims—as part of an ongoing U.S. “whitewash” of the right-wing leader’s extremism.

“For almost a decade now, human rights activists and others have regularly brought to the White House—Democrats or Republicans—that Modi’s regime is authoritarian, it’s right-wing, it’s anti-Muslim, and it’s anti-minority” Suchitra Vijayan, author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India, told Huff Post.

“To fail to note Modi’s violent, anti-minority, authoritarian tendencies, and his corrupt mismanagement of the Indian economy, is not only to ignore the U.S. government’s own findings but a strategic blunder with the potential to jeopardize global stability,” IAMC said.

Human Rights Watch published a letter to Biden ahead of the visit, critizing the disregard for human rights by Modi’s government:

There are numerous areas of concern. Increasingly in recent years, BJP leaders have used toxic and hateful speech targeting religious minorities, inciting violence or discrimination against them. BJP-led authorities have tightened restrictions on free speech while ramping up censorship and using overbroad and vague laws to investigate and prosecute critics. Modi’s government has also demonstrated blatant bias in protecting BJP supporters and affiliates accused in a range of crimes, including murder, assault, corruption, and sexual violence. At the international level, Modi’s government has often proven unwilling to stand with other governments on key human rights crises, abstaining or refraining from condemning grave human rights violations elsewhere.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

If we’re going to do this whole “your source is unreliable” nonsense, can we at least get some consistency? Attack the BBC for outright lies and misinformation and siding with moneyed interests at the expense of the rest of humanity; attack CNN for the same; attack The Economist for the same; attack NYT for the same; attack the Washington Post for the same.

Also, just because their editorial opinion differs from yours doesn’t mean they’re unreliable. Just because they “defended Bashar Al-Assad” doesn’t mean they are “fake news”. There are plenty of people in the world whose world-view does not align with yours, and they aren’t all lying and wrong. It should also be noted that if an article links out to other sources, then even if you don’t agree with the article’s editorial opinion, you can still gauge the truthfulness and form opinions on the subject by following to the sources.

Edit to add: In this specific case, we saw several news sources you are unlikely to call ‘fake news’ all report the same lie with tiny variations: NYT, CNN, and Politico, among others. What they said was so blatantly false, even the Pentagon denounced it. Cuba condemned the reports, saying:

Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said the accusation is “untrue and unfounded”, arguing that the articles were “promoted with the malicious intention to justify the unprecedented reinforcement of the economic blockade, destabilization and the aggression against Cuba”.

Why would the USA do such a thing? Perhaps it’s because The Pentagon Is Freaking Out About a Potential War With China (Because America might lose.). Have we seen similar actions from these untrustworthy news sources in the past? Absolutely, NYT published an article in 2020 that, while demonstrably false, was still cited by the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and used to extend the war in Afghanistan; the Pentagon even admitted the report was false only a couple weeks later.

Before you get all up in arms that a news outlet from another country or side of the political spectrum must be spewing 100% lies, you should ask yourself why you are willingly to blindly believe the entrenched western media outlets, who have proven time and again that they are used to manipulate world events, manipulate public opinion, and are overall a blight on the average man’s wellbeing.

133arc585 , 1 year ago

archive.is/j7NqS if you don’t want to be assaulted by cookie notices and paywalls and more.

Edit to add: I find it absurd how this logic is used so often:

He insisted that Russia was justified in starting the war because Ukraine was run by “Nazis”, even though its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.

It’s logical nonsense to think the two are mutually exclusive. Moreover, it ignores the very real issue of Nazis in Ukraine. We even see this “don’t believe your eyes” nonsense, trying to convince people open and proud Nazis aren’t in fact Nazis.