Instead of the death penalty their should be uber austere and cheap to run prisons for serious offenders with no hope of rehabilitation. I would call these prisons harsh pounds.
I want a family and children, Bod, and there's a duty to posterity to ensure that some materialism is retained or else they'll starve. I can't go and navel gaze in the woods as too many billions depend on at least some of us making an active contribution to the material world. It is a privilege that some can afford to abscone from this physical duty.
I'm not totally against Buddhism, but I don't like its isolation and its out-of-touchness with the real world(which for many is Buddhism's great escapist appeal).
Religion from tradition is about authority, continuity, identity, loyalty and stability. It's a communal thing which makes the in-group more cohesive and the out-groups more distinctive. It's an "Us" and "Them" thing.
Nowadays religious belief is more about adopting whichever beliefs your parents don't belong to. It's self-promoting, asocial and wants nothing to do with the past, the tradition or the people around them. They're thoroughly atomised beliefs despite(or even because of)being incredibly samey. There's certainly a crass spiritual populism that sounds vaguely Eastern in origin - e.g Karma et al. It's a LOOKATME and how unique I am(not)thing.
And I don't mean self-love as commonly practiced and definitely preached in the m**turbatathon which is the modern day. I mean the distinct opposite of being obsessed with yourself or your own behaviour - the greater sense of mission, a someone or a something you'd die for, high ideals which stand head and shoulders above a worthless and pathetic life of self-indulgence.
I find the world largely meaningless and the people in it a bore(with exceptions), and for as long as I can remember I've had the romantic streak of longing and yearning for life to mean something more than it does. Love is my answer as the only thing left to believe in.
The obesity-poverty link is strongest in the US, then the UK and then in continental Europe.
They call it a paradox but it's clear that it is arising wherever a society does have money but it does not class/culture/sophistication/taste etc, whatever you want to call it. It's arising amongst a people with means but without style.
Pressure them, yes. This is what Oprah and the womanly dominion should be about: Social policing of the right kind.
I'm a being knee-jerk libertarian on this when actually there are things that the regulators could do to curb obesity, at least technically if the political will was there(it was in the UK). You could have broad strategies in place which incentivise healthy living in addition to saving fat people one person at a time through shame.
Not that fat-shaming doesn't already exist, thank god. Can you imagine how fat people would be if it wasn't for this last line of sane social defence? But we need to amplify the shaming. If it's not ok to live and look like a pig then most people won't do this no matter how near Mcdonalds is or how many social networking sites they are on.
I know it'll be hard for the fatties in the beginning - just as it was for smokers when the smoking ban came in - but they'll adjust and be happier in the end. Then after this we may even believe it when a fat person say it's glandular.
Most fat people are poorer people, and this is what I've said. But don't make excuses for decadent slobs poor or otherwise. 95% of tubsters could do something to be healthier, but they can't be bothered.
The reason why they can't be bothered is because it's too comfortable to be fat, and it's too comfortable because the rest of us are too tolerant/self-interested to police the milieu - on most things, however, we had little reservation shaming smokers out of their unhealthy lifestyle, and if social shaming works on smokers then it will on fatties, too. If nothing else they should be slimming down to lower their carbon footprint, we seem to conveniently ignore what a drain on the earth fat people are.
Nah, the obese mostly come from the lumpenlumpentariat. Quality trumps quantity if you have wealth AND class and quantity being a quality of its own was an old Soviet saying.
In western europe we'll quite easily say that eastern europeans make better workers than us, but the truth is that they are more competent at every level only our middle class don't like to admit it.
The Soviet system created so much potential in people which planned economics could create no opportunity for. The West has no substitute for their upbringing.
Obstinance_Works Forum Posts (3,514)
RE: Death Penalty
Disgraceful