I feel like they imposed “democracy” in a way that allowed them to use that country as a puppet for material and strategic gain. Real lasting change has to be from the bottom up.
I come from a country, Portugal, were the people conquered Democracy from the Fascists by force (though it was mainly a peaceful affair).
In next door Spain some years later the Fascists passed some laws to give themselves immunity and keep the wealth they stole from the rest and then left power, which is how they became a Democracy.
Portugal has none of the problems of regionalist breakaway movements that Spain has, the Far Right is more recent smaller and way milder than in Spain (were even the mainstream Rightwing-party has always been far more to the Right than the equivalent one in Portugal).
(Portugal is a far … far, far … from perfect country, but at least in this things seem to have been done right)
Whilst indeed it’s anecdotal, this and what I’ve seen over the years when it comes to foreign interventions to “bring democracy”, leads me to believe that Democracy, to be stable, has to be won, not “gifted” by a dictatorship (and even a foreign invader which is a democratic country is de facto a dictatorship for the locals of the occcupied country as they don’t get to vote in that country’s elections and are quite literally being governed by dictat).
I googled it, results vary from 250k to 500k, so not quite a million but still, that’s a lot of deaths. Either way, the US government’s real reason for that war was not to save the country from dictatorship …
I’m a fat guy currently going to a gym where nearly everyone is fit and built, and everyone has been nothing but kind and supportive. I’ve even had people come up to me and say they’ve noticed my progress and congratulated me (I’ve just hit 10% body weight weightloss if anyone’s interested).
Always love hearing people found supportive gyms! Congrats on the progress and keep at it dude, soon enough you’ll be on the other side supporting those in your shoes now!
True in the U.S. Except, of course, in Alaska. Somehow in Alaska, very red state Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, every state resident gets a dividend from the oil revenue. Not that I approve of the reason why considering no one should be making revenue by fossil fuels, but somehow Republicans are fine with that exception. I wish they were pressed on it occasionally.
That’s the point. It’s entitlement when poor people do it. It’s “the fair share that they deserve” when they do it. If conservatives didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have standards at all.
Conservatives love telling people that winning or losing is a personal failure, and hate government interference, but also love to make life as easy as possible for large corps.
They clearly understand that regulation works, and that governments working to stabilize a country can be really powerful, and then they go and do entirely the wrong shit about while swearing that regulation is evil and governments are evil. It’s all just feelings and whatever they hear first/whatever is oversimplified and yelled.
I’d like to upset some niblings with “fr fr, ong”… Does anyone know if “fr” is pronounced as one word like in “from”, or if I’m supposed to just say “eff arr”? Same for “ong,” please.
Don’t listen to them. The year is a write off. Take the opportunity to start drinking before 9am, binge eat, stop talking to family and friends and start calling in sick to experiment with drugs. You’ve got nothing left to lose
Until by the next year rent has universally increased by the UBI.
I’m fully in favor of UBI, but unless we can get a government that will actually crack down on price gouging all it will do is funnel right back to the crooks at the top.
I’d be fine with starting with it, though people seeing prices rise right after will be really disheartening. I’d rather start with actual legislation to punish price gouging. These companies posting record profits while the rest of us struggle more and more is absurd, and I would want to root out that greed first so any UBI can actually help the people at the bottom.
Of course, I don’t expect the American government to do either of these things. Three Republicans will call it the work of Satan or something crazy like that and the Democrats will say they’re all for it until they actually have the means to do it, then suddenly it’ll be too much to handle.
Yea, just start them. People are so conservative that doing anything different from the status quo scares them, but once we have social policies in place, people like them. Libraries, national parks, paved roads, garbage trucks, conservatives fought against every positive social policy, medicare, but then appreciated them once they were enacted.
I don’t mind people possibly being surprised at inflation if their basic financial expenses are covered.
We haven’t tried it yet, it works as expected in all the trials so far, just do it.
The mechanics of sensible ubi are straightforward: enough money or money/housing to ensure survival, public education, pay more to those who contribute more to society.
Nothing is perfect, but ensuring the health of the population and investing in their success is a much better model for progress and growth than the ridiculous she damaging disparity the states is investing in at the moment.
We need public universal medical with no private option in order to create full price regulation of medical, we don’t want the government doing any more than we have to have them do though, because of corruption and lack of input from the populass. (Well almost no real input) We need the military budget and all the wasteful spending on secretive spy programs and BS to go away. Minimize or dissolve the NSA for example, and direct all that money towards social services, accountability, and a UBI or something near it. With AI exponentially progressing we might want more of a giant divided. Then everyone’s wealth could potentially skyrocket in unison, without the top heavy distribution. So really what I’m saying is we need to own the means of production collectively. Lol
And yet I can understand the skepticism and fear. We have not had yet a big scale “experiment” (i.e. a whole country implementing it). It will have bigger yet to resolve implications (e.g. what’s the effect on migration etc.).
(And I’m a big proponent of UBI)
But I think it’s just a matter of time that this will become reality, we’re to rich (in the western world) to fiddle around with “annoyances” like poor people, and I strongly believe that it will increase creativity, innovation and thus also GDP which may be probably the biggest argument for policy makers.
That’s precisely why I’m not there. I’m too fat for the gym. There are women and Children present. I’d scar them for life.
ETA:
To clarify: This is not what happens, this is my own self conscious, self loathing behavior giving me excuses for not bettering myself. I am aware of my mental health problems, I’m just not dealing with them.
Aside from the fact that no sane person would mock you for trying to better yourself, you could also start smaller and just, say, go for walks or swimming at a local pool or other not-gym forms of exercise.
I can’t wait until we have good exoskeleton tech. You could reduce a person’s felt weight by 50%. Like those pull-up bar machines with a platform you can stand on. You can develop the muscles even if you’re too weak to do a single rep un-aided.
A great alternative would be an o’neill cylinder or a spaceship under thrust, so you could control the gravity. Like imagine a big o’neill cylinder that was for helping people escape the pit of morbid obesity. People could start out living at 0.1 g, just to sort of remember what it’s like to dance and jump and be nimble. Over the course of a year you could spin that cylinder a little faster and a little faster and the gravity would gradually increase, and people’s bodies adapt to it as it goes.
You could even go beyond 1 g. People could slowly and steadily increase it up to 1.5 or 2 g, and come back to earth strong as fuck.
Nah bruh, most gym communities are pretty welcoming places. I love seeing fat folks making an effort - how the hell are you going to give someone a hard time for trying to make themselves better? That’s pathetic and I don’t think that happens much at all. I’m on the other end being a wimpy twig, I step on machine that a 50yr old woman just steps off and I cut the weight in half of what she had it on and start grunting. I’d be an easy target I guess if people wanted to be jerks, but I’ve seen nothing but respect thankfully.
Building muscle is hard for some folks and it takes time. The biggest dudes at most gyms are the nicest folks. The “big guys” that make fun of people… Get eaten for breakfast by the real gym kings. You don’t get huge by being full of yourself, you get that way through a ton of hard work and learning to humble yourself.
I knew a dude that was a pro wrestler, huge AF. Had the world’s biggest comic collection in his basement, total sweetheart. He played a heel to further add insult to injury lol
No bullshit my homie, a good gym, one that’s more focused on strength training in specific, is the best place to start. I can’t promise there won’t ever be assholes, but even the fairly generic gyms that do more aerobics and cross fit type of stuff are good about it. And the typical weight room, even when it’s body builders rather than folks that are strength focused are often going to be more than welcoming.
You have no idea how many really big guys didn’t start out that way. A lot of them started lifting because they didn’t have a good foundation in physical fitness as a youngster (myself included). So I can promise you that assholes making fun of you are extremely rare.
So, if you ever manage to get past the self consciousness enough to try it, I think it would be the perfect start. Even if all you do at first is go in, do some curls on a machine and walk back out, I promise you that you’ll start to see improvement from it in a few weeks at most. And once you see that first little bit of change, it’ll help your brain realize that the rest can change too. It’s your body, and you can own it the way you want it. It’s hard fucking work, every single time, and it never really stops. But it’s there when you’re ready to do that work.
I can’t think of many things that shut up the inner critic more than physical fitness efforts. For me, it was lifting and then marital arts that made things work. Dealing with that kind of self esteem and doubt and fear is a giant barrier for sure (again, I’ve been there), but if you can get that first step taken, it’s worth it.
I’ve been considering it more and more. There’s a gym nearish with a pool, and I’m a very strong swimmer, and it’s one of the few exercises that isn’t physically painful because of my bad back and feet. But for real, I know no one is actually making fun of me or other heavy people in that environment. It’s more my own brain narrating the worst possible opinions and applying them to everyone I meet. Which, funnily enough, is me doing to everyone else what I fear they are doing to me: being unkind.
Oh man! Water exercise is so sweet when you’ve got a bad back and/or joints. Being able to get a decent workout without being laid up for two days is a beautiful thing for me :)
But, I feel you. I’ve got that same inner critic sniping away. As I’ve gotten older, it’s less about physical things and a lot more about mistakes made, things that were hurtful that I didn’t have the ability to see as hurtful when I said or did them.
But along that, I did figure out that the old truism about having to give yourself something first, before you can really give it to or get it from others holds up. If I’m not kind to myself, if I can’t forgive myself, and love myself (at least a little), it’s nigh impossible to genuinely give those things to someone else.
I don’t know if that actually applies to everyone or not; maybe other people can give truly of themselves without accepting good things from themselves first, but it seems to be the case.
I went to one of those ninja warrior gyms. Called Ninja Nation, and you do all the stuff from the Ninja Warrior game shows.
I couldn’t do anything there.
Only reason I’m saying this is about the painful joints thing. One of the simplest things I tried to do there is just hang, from my hands, from a bar. I found I could hang for about five seconds.
The other thing I found is that there a sharp pain in my shoulders when I hung from my hands. I thought this was evidence of my shoulders being fucked up. In fact, my self image for years had been “I’ve got bad shoulders”.
But my friend who’s a massage therapist just said “You know you can get rid of that stuff. It’s just because you haven’t hung from your arms since you were a little kid”.
And he was right. I kept just putting my arms into whatever position would cause that sharp pain (a duller pain would have worried me more) and eventually that pain just went away. It was like cobwebs that had built up from the narrowed range of motion I was using my shoulders for.
The whole reason I’m saying this is for your physically painful exercise. Some of that may just be your body sort of shrinking its range out of non-use.
Pain isn’t always evidence that a body part is “bad”. Like if you were on a plane in a tiny spot for twelve hours, your legs would hurt as you finally stretched them out again. But that pain doesn’t indicate your legs are “bad” and it definitely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stretch those legs.
OP is lying, probably never seen a gym in person. This literally never happens. Many/most gym goers started overweight or at least nervous, intimidated. Everyone is very sympathetic for this situation and if anything, you will get encouragement and genuine help if you need. But most like, people will just mind their own business, unless you muster up the courage to ask them to show you how that machine works.
Literally no one makes fun of overweight people at the gym OP probably never stepped foot in a gym in their life. People are too busy doing their own thing to care. Plus gym goers are supportive people who would respect you for trying to better yourself anyway
Definitely was one of my biggest fears growing up. People absolutely make fun of people at the gym, just not to their face and normally not about their weight. They normally just make fun of your form and stuff like that but only when they’re slackin.
I might quitely make fun of the form of muscular gym bro who is displaying a smug attitude and clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing, despite going there for the last five years. But never a fat person, never a beginner taking their first steps.
I’m not dragging down his day. I’ll make a mental note like, wow his form is terrible and yet he poses for the camera lol (because of course he records it). I don’t know why you consider this hate.
The simplest way to condition your body is temperature. Just running cold water over your body provides physical benefits, including toward mental health.
Don’t let yourself slide. It only gets darker and darker if you let yourself go downhill.
My company sent me a fishing test email from a “no-reply@companyname.com” email address. I sent it to our security department and asked if I would ever get legitimate emails from that address. They never responded except to say that I passed the phishing test, so I set up a filter to automatically forward emails from that to our security department with a message questioning its validity. Let’s security tell me if emails are legit or not.
My normal method is I will hit the phishing attempt icon that IT Security added to our Outlook on anything that I did not request or sign up for.
I’m sure the IT Security person who saw all the “free gift card” emails had a great Christmas if they claimed all the gift cards emails they deem legit.
There is, but if one gets through, they want us to forward it to this account that will be used to train, fine tune and improve the scanner for all mailboxes, as well as security training for employees.
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