In Norwegian they are called Klypedyr. Literal translation is pinching-animal (although we call it an insect). I always though that was scary as a kid, but I see now my trauma is tiny compared to ear-infesting-wig-wearing thingy. I still don’t like them, but I tolerate them
If you want to lose the solace that fact has provided you, here’s another possibly also false but no less comforting bit of trivia:
spoilerLeeches after feeding would love nothing more than a dark, somewhat moist, somewhat warm, somewhat tight environment. Which a human has and is probably something you don’t want a leech to get anywhere near, be glad there’s no such thing as a Analwig. Oh and land leeches exist.
There's some incredibly impressive megalithic structures in India. Look up Ajanta and Ellora caves. I believe the Ellora temple is the largest monolithic structure ever created
the Ellora caves deserve to be their own post. Idiots think aliens mustve built it because theres no debris field… I’m pretty sure its more likely that pilgrims took home small pieces of carved rock for centuries.
The Indian region has historically has been pretty resilient to famines, the exception to that is during British rule there were several famines leading to the starvation and deaths of millions. The consensus seems to be that these famines were a result of British policy. I've never heard of this unsustainable growth and famine argument I'd love to read more if you can provide sources
I looked this up on Google and several sites say that you can tell what color eggs a hen will lay by looking at their earlobes… I didn’t even know chickens had earlobes lol
When the Democrats decided they wanted to be the “Urban Elite Party” and paint the Republican party as the “Rural Uneducated Party”, they basically threw away Iowa. Iowa is as middle class plain-folk as you can get, so they will naturally align in opposition to the Urban Elite. That was a tactical error in how the Democratic Party formed its identity.
100 percent spot on. It’s also a huge part of how they lost such a ridiculous chunk of blue collar workers in spite of labor leadership being solidly Democrat for decades.
Poor whites and rural hicks became the only working-class people it was still socially acceptable to openly mock in public. This was noticed and exploited by the right with dire consequences for our current political landscape.
Of course, a ton of other variables were at play as well, but the certainty that so-called “coastal elites” held them and everything they valued in contempt played a huge role in convincing blue-collar and middle-class rural whites to vote against their economic interests.
“According to the American Lung Association, the use of menthol cigarettes is highest among Black, brown and LGBTQ+ communities. Medical groups like the American Lung Association have long advocated for menthol cigarettes to be banned because they can make it easier to start smoking and disproportionately affect minority communities.”
Gonna save the minorities from the opression of racism and homophobia by specifically targeting them with a ban.
I’ve never really understood references to “the left eating itself” until I hit that paragraph. The absolute irony of the anti racist/homophobe sentiment being so overtly racist/homophobic kinda made the light bulb come on.
This adverse thing is adverse, so in order to reduce adversity among minorities, we’ll target the specific option they tend towards… to reduce discrimination against them, by discriminating their specific choice. Discriminating against them… to reduce discrimination…
And then you publish that shit? That’s kinda fucked IMHO.
It’s racist to specifically target a type favored by minorities if your intent is to target minorities, and the stated intent is specifically to target minorities with a ban… ironically, to protect them from being discriminated against by their chosen type of cigarettes.
They published that… they very publicly are saying that they’re going to protect these minorities by directly targeting them with a ban. It’s not me saying it’s a racist/homophobic ban, it’s the published premise itself. The entire basis of the ban is published as being to keep cigarettes from affecting blacks, browns, and LGBTQ+ people by eliminating their preferred type.
How on earth are there people who don’t understand this? Are you so tied to the politics that you cannot or will not see this objectively? It’s blatant.
Targeting something based on race and minority status is not necessarily racism. That’s kind of a bizarre jump.
The groups being targeted with the ban are, coincidentally, the groups for whom smoking rates are highest.
If you want to have the biggest impact, it makes sense to target the groups that are A) the majority of smokers and B) those least well-protected against starting smoking by current initiatives.
FWIW I’m against this ban on pure “people should be allowed to do what they want” grounds, but your specific angle of attack seems ill-informed.
It’s not a false analogy, it’s just brutally logical and completely disregards the merits of the situation…
Logging is the deadliest occupation on earth. Banning minorities from the logging industry would greatly improve their odds of survival. It’s exactly the same as banning their chosen cigarettes.
I don’t really have a preference on tobacco bans at all tbh. I do think people should have options, but I don’t disagree with the intent of smoking bans either… the issue here is, it’s not a choice between those two for everyone, it’s a selective ban that removes the options from a singular group, and the selection is based on race and orientation.
The merits of the ban are, in my opinion, not all that relevant. I don’t disagree with banning cigarettes entirely, I don’t disagree with onerous taxation as an incentive to reduce sales, I don’t object to any measures that are indiscriminate, because I don’t really care that much tbh, I switched to vapes in 2012.
I object to the specificity.
From another perspective, were talking about a ban on tobacco that selectively preserves tobacco use for straight white people… does that make it more clear why I object?
No it’s totally unrelated to the discussionl. I think your objection is very poorly thought out.
I used to smoke menthols and I’m white as the driven snow my man. Nothing racist about targeting the cigarettes preferred by the people who are majority smokers by percentage.
I also think “this doesn’t effect me so I don’t care” is a poor way of looking at governance.
Huh I mean I get what you’re saying but can’t we just take this potential win? I’m a cancer survivor and it just seems weird to complain about legislation that will reduce cancer. Menthol cigarettes just make it easier to get cancer than plain ones. That’s how I see this. Just because minorities and lgbtq are more likely to use them doesn’t mean it’s racist.
No you don’t lmao the FDA is kind of the authority here. There’s nothing on store shelves that you can choose or not choose to put in your body that wasn’t already cleared by the FDA. You have an illusion of choice.
Also my opinion, and the outcome of prohibition would suggest that society at large generally believes this as well.
…with an obvious exception for minorities…
Which was my point. Apparently the politics of it, and decades of anti tobacco propaganda (and I dont intend the normally negative connotation the word has, it just is what it is) have made this acceptable somehow… for an obviously racial/homophobic exception to just be openly declared and apparently acceptable… it’s kinda weird to me.
Menthol makes it easier to start smoking, to continue being a smoker for longer than the person would have done otherwise, and to smoke more, because it makes smoking less irritating and tastes better. You are correct in that the menthol molecule itself is not a carcinogen.
No it doesn’t. It’s purely a preference. There are tons of smokers who can’t stand menthols but love regular cigarettes. I even know someone who smokes menthols because he said it makes people less likely to bum cigarettes off of him.
I even know someone who smokes menthols because he said it makes people less likely to bum cigarettes off of him.
That’s why I switched to menthols back when I smoked. That, and I just liked them more. I didn’t like the ultra menthol ones like Kools or Benson & Hedges, but Marlboro Milds were just about perfect, and the amount of “Oh…those are menthol? Nevermind” was the cherry on top.
Do you have a source for these claims? No one is smoking cigarettes for the taste, nor is “bad taste” a common reason for anyone to quit. Smoking is both a chemical addiction (nicotine and such) and a psychological habit (place and timing, having something in the mouth, forced breathing exercises, etc).
If we really wanted to hinder big tobacco, they’d start requiring producers to document all their ingredients, additives, and processing methods.
Exactly. It’s all about money & control and it always has been. If they wanted to get people to stop smoking, they’d mandate that the tobacco companies remove all of the chemicals from cigarettes that make the nicotine a free base form to increase their addictive properties.
Nic Salts are the free base equivalent of cigarettes for the vaping world, but I agree that it’s a lot less harmful. The government would endorse vaping if they truly wanted to end smoking, since it has an incredibly high success rate as a smoking cessation device, like orders of magnitude higher than any other form. All of the other cessation methods (which are owned by the tobacco companies BTW), have a max success rate of about 3.5%. Vaping has a success rate of almost 70%! So yeah, their opposition to vaping makes my point even more clear.
Menthol cigarettes just make it easier to get cancer than plain ones.
Were you a smoker, and did you ever smoke menthols? Menthols give a bit different feeling, but I wouldn’t say it’s that much “easier” to smoke.
The EU did the same thing to ban menthols a couple years ago, and yet I can still go to the store and buy cigarettes with menthol taste. These new fake-menthols surprisingly feel even smoother to smoke than classic menthols, but it’s still not a big difference compared to unflavored cigarettes IMO.
what a wanker take on it, cigarettes should be banned period, they do nothing good for anyoneand are an absolute blight for public health. Any step in making cigarettes worse for accessibility, as marginal as it is, is a step in the right the right direction. People who smoked in France had the same take when they upped the cigarette prices “ooooh it won’t stop the poor people smoking blah blah” “they’re just doing it for the money they don’t care about poor people it will just hurt the common man more”. Welll cookie it turns out that 10€ has forced a lot of people to stop and greatly reduced young people who start smoking in the first place. Granted now people have shifted to vaping but compared to cigarettes they’re heaven. You can’t even compare vaping to smoking.
So it’s totally fine to target minorities with a ban if it means forward progress in disincentivising tobacco use? I disagree on the ends justifying the means in this case.
No arguments at all on the merits of reducing tobacco use, just an objection to throwing minorities under the bus in pursuit of it. I would not actually object to taxation as a means. I wouldn’t object to an outright ban even. My objection is to the specificity to minorities… that’s not cricket…
imagine a situation women drank more alcohol than men and then the government banned alcohol for everyone. So you would consider this bad because it’s immoral to impose any kind of ban on women?
So what then? Ban it for the rich, the middle class and white people and let the people at risk smoke themselves to death ?
Where are your morals in this ? Put down your ideologies for one second and be pragmatic.
If they banned all alcohol for everyone, its indiscriminate, and I would not consider it to be discrimination (I’d consider it a bad idea based on the obvious). In your example, a ban on wine, but not whiskey, with the publicly stated intention of reducing alcohol intake among women, would be the equivalent, and I’d absolutely consider that misogynistic. In the case of a wine ban, yes, it would be immoral to impose that ban, because it would be targeted at women specifically.
They aren’t banning cigarettes. They’re banning menthols, and the publicly stated intent is to affect use of cigarettes among minorities. The policy is specifically intended to affect a demographic. Not because I say so, or because I think it does… it’s what they’re citing as the basis of the policy… they published it as such.
The pragmatic solution is to ban cigarettes. That would still affect the minorities disparately, but it’s no longer an inherently racist proposal at that point, because it’s about tobacco use period, not just the tobacco use specific to the minorities.
Well agreed that they should ban all cigarettes. in the end this is a half arsed solution that they came up with to “help” minorities.
But to be honest, I’ve seen too many people die to tobacco. I don’t care if the proposal is racist or not. Anything that can merely annoy a smoker’s smoking habits for me is a step in the right direction.
It's the present in the US. Many people own personal train cars, and you just contract with Amtrak to hook you up and you're off on vacation. You can even bring Babu. You can rent personal cars as well, though you probably should make sure yuor ocelot is housebroken if you're taking a rental.
Now, I say "many" but what I means is that's more than a few. Many is still probably in the 3-4 digit number (I'm guessing). And you'd be correct in assuming that it's not a luxury most people can afford. But it does exist.
DO they still? Last I heard Amtrak was no longer taking private train cars as too many were not in good mechanical shape and thus a large cause of their delayed trains.
I was just googling around, and it looks to me like a private rail car costs something like a 2nd home, storage fees similar to property tax, $4/mile to have Amtrak haul you around. Basically a vacation home, but mobile. Definitely a 1% thing, but not billionaires-only. Probably way more prestige in saying you’ve got a private rail car than a beach house. At least among a certain segment.
My parents almost did this in India a few years back. They have travel agencies that plop you in a couple of nicely-appointed rail cars that you stay in for a month while they’re attached to different trains every night. You wake up each morning in a new city - basically a land cruise.
Railroad suburbs exist! Streetcar suburbs as well. Was actually the norm outside of the city core until they started ripping up all the rail lines to build highways.
You can do the same in some stores. They put out some ripe and some unripe. Just grab a couple of each. And don’t fall for the guilt of breaking up bunches. You are allowed to do that. You don’t have to buy the whole bunch. Unless you go to a store that unnecessarily puts then in plastic containers/wraps.
And you can still rinse the banana off to get rid of any germs from inside the store if that’s the fear. It won’t damage it. But do it when you are ready to eat it otherwise if you use mild soap it can reduce the life of the banana by making the skin less protective.
Only because I like to avoid getting herbicides and pesticides on my hands which then might touch the banana flesh when pulling out the last part. I don’t use soap, but some do. I rinse all of my fruits and veggies when possible even if I remove the peel.
Yeah, but over time the damage builds up. Some of the currently popular pesticides are linked to both chromosome damage and neurological degeneration which are both cumulative.
Sure the chances of that alone causing cancer or something like Parkinson’s disease are very low. But there are lots of things around us that have similar effects. Off gassing plastics on new furniture and clothing, heavy metals in water and food, certain diseases like COVID, radiation for airplane rides and x-rays, etc. Each on of those are minuscule alone, even over a lifetime, but together they can cause issues. So things that are easily avoidable, may as well avoid. Pesticides and herbicides are mostly water soluable, so a little water can reduce the exposure significantly. And a lot of products that have peels that most people don’t eat and aren’t in the ground, so they don’t get dirty, don’t get rinsed by the growers. Some grocery stores do rinse them to make them more presentable, but not all.
Still you’re right that the only way to get toxic exposure that alone could cause cancer, Parkinson’s, etc., is if you work in the fields and aren’t given a mask. Especially if they are spraying while people are out picking. And with grocers often rinsing them, it’s not necessary.
It does also reduce your likelihood of catching COVID or other diseases from people who don’t know how to wash their hands, which we found from COVID is disturbingly common for an educated country. But again, that risk is very low.
I just feel the effort is minimal, and the possible reward is high enough that it’s worth it for me. It’s of course also a privilege of living in a place where clean water is plentiful.
Just like me trying to avoid sweeteners for decades now because I suspect they might turn out to be bad for you (and noone has ever tried to suggest they are actively good for you…) If it turns out you’re wrong, you’ve lost very little, if it turns out you’re right then there’s no way to retroactively undo the harm.
I have a fairly sensitive sense of taste and if I eat an unwashed fruit with a rind and manage to touch the actual fruit without washing my hands after touching the rind, I can often taste a bitter chemical flavour that otherwise isn’t there. How harmful those chemicals may be and how exposed I’d be without directly transfering them to the food or to my mouth (or eyes or whatever) I’m unsure (and, tbh, while I always wash oranges and stuff, I often eat bananas unwashed as there’s no need for the outside to come into direct or indirect contact with the actual fruit itself.) I’d still prefer to just not eat whatever it is if I can trivially avoid it (both for possible safety reasons and just not having my food taste like bitter chemicals reasons.)
mildlyinteresting
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