I'm no fan of hot pockets, but what exactly is the point here? That the list of ingredients is long?
Most of the list is regular food ingredients or vitamins/minerals added to the "enriched flour". The stabilizers and emulsifiers with scary chemical names are present in tiny amounts regulated by various health departments.
If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie; too much or too little of some nutrients. Not because of some magical consequence of being too processed or having too many ingredients.
> If hot pockets are unhealthy, it's because of the qualities they might share with a homemade meat pie
Sorry to pick on you, but this confusion that a Hot Pocket is the same as a homemade meat pie is a great demonstration of the food corporations' capture of nutritional intuition and discourse.
The public has been convinced that there's nothing concerning about increasingly replacing, for example, a nutritious, real meat or cheese (milk, cultures, and rennet) with cheaper analogues that are so empty that modified food starch, emulsifiers, and textured soy have to be added to the product for no other purpose than to masquerade as the texture you expect of real ingredients.
You're eating a replica of food and you've been persuaded that the only difference is some "scary chemical names".
The food corporation has a new breakthrough, figures out how five more cheap ingredients can be used to create the texture of some chicken, and you have somehow told yourself that it's the ingredient count that people must be making a fuss over rather than what the growing list represents.
I'm not confused about hot pockets being the same as honest meat pies. Insofar as they're even in the same category, hot pockets are a pretty sad alternative.
My point was that their nutritional value rests on the same qualities as any other food. Overabundance or lack of certain nutrients. Say lack of fibre, or too much saturated fat.
Excepting certain unequivocally harmful ingredients like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (which could just as easily be added to homemade meat pies in the form of shortening), I don't think the number of ingredients or processing steps will materially affects the nutritional value of a food independent of its nutrient quantities.
White bread: Ingredients: Unbleached Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Contains 2% or Less of Each of the Following: Calcium Carbonate, Soybean Oil, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Dough Conditioners (Contains One or More of the Following: Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Calcium Stearoyl Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Mono- and Diglycerides, Distilled Monoglycerides, Calcium Peroxide, Calcium Iodate, DATEM, Ethoxylated Mono- and Diglycerides, Enzymes, Ascorbic Acid), Vinegar, Monocalcium Phosphate, Yeast Extract, Modified Corn Starch, Sucrose, Sugar, Soy Lecithin, Cholecalciferol (Vitamin D3), Soy Flour, Ammonium Sulfate, Calcium Sulfate, Calcium Propionate (to Retard Spoilage).
And follow it up with a Fried Chicken Dinner:
Boneless Fried White Meat Chicken Patties (Cooked White Meat Chicken, Water, Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Mechanically Separated Chicken, Chicken Skins, Soy Protein Concentrate, Salt, Sodium Phosphates, Monosodium Glutamate, Dextrose, Spice Extract, Isolated Oat Product). Mashed Potatoes (Water, Dehydrated Potato Flakes (Potatoes, Mono and Diglycerides, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Citric Acid), Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Dried Dairy Blend (Whey, Calcium Caseinate)), Corn. Brownie (Sugar, Water, Enriched Wheat Flour [Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Cocoa, Eggs. Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Acacia and Xanthan Gums, Sodium Bicarbonate (Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil), Salt, Natural and Artificial Flavor [Water, Propylene Glycol, Ethanol, Natural and Artificial Flavor, Caramel Color, Vanilla Extractives]), Seasoning Sauce (Water, Sugar, Seasoning Sauce (Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness]), Water, Mono and Diglycerides with BHT and Citric Acid to Protect Flavor, Beta Carotene for Color (Corn Oil, Dl-Alpha-Tocopherol)), Salt, Vegetable Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [TBHQ and Citric Acid to Preserve Freshness])).
These weren't even picked for their egregiousness. This is the norm for the food culture of the working class in America. All of American processed food is like this. Add that it's packaged in frequently toxic plastics and contaminated with pesticides, and it's clear that this is the lead pipes of the American empire.
These aren't good examples though. You don't necessarily put all of those things into said muffins. Just the basic ingredients translate into a long list of things, because natural food contains a lot of different nutrients in them.
An apple by itself contains many different things.[0] I really encourage you to look at it. And an apple is just one simple ingredient.
I wrote this three years ago on reddit but no one read it. Ironic, I know. It'll happen again, seeing as how this is a two day old story, but posterity matters.
I'm really late to the party (and people probably won't see this), but I'm going to earnestly give you what I think is going on and why we desperately need to breathe new life into our idea of what civility is in this country or be ready to pull the plug and start anew. This is going to be meandering--just a warning.
The Weimar Republic was established in Germany after the defeat of the Central Powers in World War I. As most people know, this government fell within two decades into the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. What fewer people know is the cultural context before and during the Weimar Republic that made that ascension (of one revolutionary or reactionary stripe or another) generally inevitable.
From "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J. Evans
> These milieux, with their party newspapers, clubs and societies, were unusually rigid and homogeneous. Already before 1914 this had resulted in a politicization of whole areas of life that in other societies were much freer from ideological identifications. Thus, if an ordinary German wanted to join a male voice choir, for instance, he had to choose in some areas between a Catholic and a Protestant choir, in others between a socialist and a nationalist choir; the same went for gymnastics clubs, cycling clubs, football clubs and the rest. A member of the Social Democratic Party before the war could have virtually his entire life encompassed by the party and its organizations: he could read a Social Democratic newspaper, go to a Social Democratic pub or bar, belong to a Social Democratic trade union, borrow books from the Social Democratic library, go to Social Democratic festivals and plays, marry a woman who belonged to the Social Democratic women’s organization, enrol his children in the Social Democratic youth movement and be buried with the aid of a Social Democratic burial fund. Similar things could be said of the Centre Party (which could rely on the mass organization of supporters in the People’s Association for a Catholic Germany, the Catholic Trade Union movement, and Catholic leisure clubs and societies of all kinds) but also to a certain extent of other parties too. These sharply defined political-cultural milieux did not disappear with the advent of the Weimar Republic. But the emergence of commercialized mass leisure, the ‘boulevard press’, based on sensation and scandal, the cinema, cheap novels, dance-halls and leisure activities of all kinds began in the 1920s to provide alternative sources of identification for the young, who were thus less tightly bound to political parties than their elders were (emphasis mine). The older generation of political activists were too closely tied to their particular political ideology to find compromise and co-operation with other politicians and their parties very easy.
Now what Richard Evans doesn't consider salient enough to mention is that those same means and methods of creating mass leisure also allowed mass polarization. Those means actually rewarded the development of echo chambers amongst the elder political activists as well, furthering the break between activists. Why argue or listen to your opponents when you can just find people that think exactly like you already? Why spread your opponents message for them when you can just blanket them out with your propaganda?
Then you had the normalization of information cascade[^1] and social proof[^2] as behavioral strategies for survival. The rate and breadth for which these political groups demanded new tokens of loyalty became so rapid and outside your scope that it just made sense, that even if you felt, thought, or acted differently in private, to publicly go along with things with which you disagreed. With this kind of chilling effect[^3] on public dissent, eventually even silence becomes synonymous with complicity with the enemy. In the end, you can't be the last person to clap for Stalin[^4].
What assisted these elements in rising was the further degeneration of political discourse and a corresponding rise in political violence as a legitimate means of expression:
Ibid.
> The First World War legitimized violence to a degree that not even Bismarck’s wars of unification in 1864-70 had been able to do. Before the war, Germans even of widely differing and bitterly opposed political beliefs had been able to discuss their differences without resorting to violence. After 1918, however, things were entirely different. The changed climate could already be observed in parliamentary proceedings. These had remained relatively decorous under the Empire, but after 1918 they degenerated all too often into unseemly shouting matches, with each side showing open contempt for the other, and the chair unable to keep order. Far worse, however, was the situation on the streets, where all sides organized armed squads of thugs, fights and brawls became commonplace, and beatings-up and assassinations were widely used. Those who carried out these acts of violence were not only former soldiers, but also included men in their late teens and twenties who had been too young to fight in the war themselves and for whom civil violence became a way of legitimizing themselves in the face of the powerful myth of the older generation of front-soldiers (emphasis mine).
Now clearly, we're not quite there yet, but the rise of groups like Identity Evropa, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Rise Above Movement, Proud Boys, etc are all furthering the breakdown in political discourse and normalizing political violence. These group allegiances also act to politicize things that were previously entirely apolitical, simply through propagation.
The Internet, like the advent of pulp publishing, the cinema, and radio before it in the Weimar Republic, has enabled a fantastic amount of stimulus and incoherent messaging that can be directly, without any kind of curation, accessed directly by younger people. This easily leads to a state of "hyperreality"[^5] if you're a leftist neo-Marxist or Bezmenov's "demoralization"[^6] if you're a rightist neo-Fascist. The particular emphasis differs between the two concepts, but the fundamental point of both is that an individual can no longer determine what is actually real and what isn't (i.e. societal gaslighting[^7], which creates a sense of alienation and impotence that creates learned helplessness[^8]). This trend has really been ascendant for the last twenty years or so in youth culture.
This entire package overall creates a sense of cultural rootlessness amongst youth segments across all demographics. Note the simultaneous rise of "normie" and "cishet privilege" as insults towards majority culture in the background Internet cultural milleux by fundamentally opposing groups. The mass capitalization of culture has destroyed any sense of historical or cultural context for young people and the overall cultural and economic downturn since 2008 has also prevented their own integration into society in meaningful ways as individuals. They are plagued by impostor syndrome[^9] if they're inside groups and are plagued by fear of missing out[^10] if they're not. This psychological inferiority applies in every realm of their lives. They are buffeted from everywhere with contradictory messages. They are told by every form of media that they are inferior to an ever-shifting ideal. They are told that to exist socially as functional adults, they need to meet now-impossible cultural expectations--they need to be attractive, have lots of money, own houses, have high paying jobs, have great experiences all the time, etc.
Fight Club was really prescient in nailing that emerging pathos:
> Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
Even for those that somehow meet and exceed those expectations, they are so outside the norm that the success itself kind create a kind of survivor's guilt[^11] and alienation unto itself.
Now unlike in the Weimar Republic, youth in the United States don't really have public myths about frontline soldiers or the recent experience of the Bolshevik revolution to provide new forms of rootedness and resistance to the system that is perceptually ruining their lives. But they do have access to fundamentally off-limits cultural forms through the Internet that serve the same mythical function. They have access to historical information about systems that were ostensibly opposed to the current paradigm. In societal systems that are neither compassionate nor just, those suffering will look towards other systems to fulfill these ideals. While this is a major simplification, leftists have Communism and the rightists have Fascism. However, the United States state security apparatus was really, really effective at destroying the actual living cultural forms[^12] of these during the mid-60s and through the near present, and made their public social promulgation impossible (barring extremely insular communities like universities and prisons). The Internet has fundamentally changed this. Books that were previously impossible to find are publicly and immediately available digitally. Pamphlets, speeches, ideas, and memes that were publicly impossible to hold now have social venues. They have communities. They have reading groups. They have voluntary propaganda departments that are targeting people already ripe for indoctrination.
From Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes":
> Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action. We are here in the presence of an organized myth that tries to take hold of the entire person. Through the myth it creates, propaganda imposes a complete range of intuitive knowledge, susceptible of only one interpretation, unique and one-sided, and precluding any divergence. This myth becomes so powerful that it invades every arena of consciousness, leaving no faculty or motivation intact. It stimulates in the individual a feeling of exclusiveness, and produces a biased attitude.
The main bulwark against the integration of these digital radicalized personae into people's normal daily existence has been that the "adult" political discourse simply didn't allow for it. In the last two decades the 24-hour news cycle, the rise of popular think pieces over neutral reporting, and Super-PAC-indoctrination have stripped every notion of good faith between political actors, their constituents, and their rivals. This was a powder-keg that the election of Barack Obama sparked for the right-wing and Donald Trump sparked off for the left. Now yellow journalism, astroturfing, and echo chambers are in total control of where the discourse travels in either direction. Neither side has any incentive to reduce the invective lest the other side win. Both sides have villanized their opponents so much by this point that the social penalty for not displaying tokens of loyalty is the same as actually being a member of the opposite group, effectively creating an extremely narrow opinion corridor[^13] on anything if you don't want to be considered a gulag-sending Stalinist or a jew-baiting Nazi merely by association.
The truth is that all signs point to some form of despotism coming to America[^14].
A final quote:
From "They Thought They Were Free" by Milton Mayer
> National Socialism was a revulsion by my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government--against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man's repudiation of "the rascals." It's motif was, "Throw them all out." My friends, in the 1920's, were like spectators at wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and sweat, the match is "fixed," that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal "exposed" another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends. (One sensed some of this reaction against the celebrated Army-McCarthy hearing in the United States in 1954--not against one side or another but against "the whole thing" as "disgusting" or "disgraceful.")
> While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life-preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers; only the Communists and Nazi objected.
I'm not sure about the Internet and young people and groups. I think the internet may be magnifying the impacts more than we realise and that these political games are trends to be worn one day and taken off the next with not much fundamental change.
There certainly seems more polarization on Twitter for example but I wonder whether in reality it's like this. Loud people on Twitter make loud noises and newspapers hear loud voices. Most people can avoid joining sides quite happily, that they don't need to belong to any political club. I'm not American so it doesn't seem that polarizing where I am.
I think that on the Internet, we are not being taught skills for peace and co-existence. Ironically real tolerance and peace is not being promoted by any political group, mainstream or anti-mainstream no matter how much they are against intolerance. Seems like thats what religions used to do?
They are adults. They can make their own decisions. I'm not going to tell them what to do. I tried to teach them the right things to do when they were growing up. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. They have their agency and have chosen the path they want to take.
Blue herring n. 1. The intersection of shibboleth and affectation that signifies the tribal allegiance of the idea, anterior to the idea itself. 2. Rhetoric rooted in rambling obscurantism without intentional or explicit content, utilizing colloqualisms and complex grammatical jargon.
That these facts inhere in the physical world (and I don't disagree) does not directly correspond to the beliefs of the individuals living in said world. Language exists and is the vehicle used to transmit beliefs about facts.
This is why we speak of proof in the first place. The fact that person A died at another's hands does not directly correspond to the belief held by an individual that person X was the killer. This is why we have "beyond reasonable doubt" as a legal evidentiary standard.
I agree that factual axiomatic truths exist in the physical world and are evident to individuals as factual axiomatic truth. The problem is communicating these as such without granting license to counterfeits.
The most successful form thus far has been to let the facts speak for themselves to individuals as factual axiomatic truths.
The least successful has been to establish unassailable dogma concerning what is and is not factual.
The certainty that you and others present concerning your set of beliefs-as-facts-themselves is of the same species as other true believers throughout history. Historically, this has led to the suppression of the scientific method and an open society in favor of a prelatical and clerical class that determines by edict what truth is, often solely at the behest of the hegemonic power and not factual axiomatic truth.
This is why it is preferable to have minimal rather than maximal control over the exchange of ideas concerning the nature of what constitutes a fact, let alone what those facts actually are.
"Your pretended fear lest Error should step in, is like the man who would keep all the wine out the country lest men should be drunk. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy, to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition he may abuse it. When he doth abuse it, judge. If a man speak foolishly, ye suffer him gladly because ye are wise; if erroneously, the truth more appears by your conviction 'of him.' Stop such a man's mouth by sound words which cannot be gainsayed. If he speak blasphemously, or to the disturbance of the public peace, let the Civil Magistrate punish him: if truly, rejoice in the truth." -- Oliver Cromwell, 1650.
Within four years of this letter, Cromwell would essentially have to put these Presbyterian inquisitors down by force and assume guardianship of the country because these people never stop.
Coincidentally, Cromwell also held that the right to the liberty of conscience, a largely heretical view for another century, was a fundamental requirement of his Protectorate, which he had to personally safeguard against everyone.
"Is not liberty of conscience in religion a fundamental? … Liberty of conscience is a natural right; and he that would have it, ought to give it; having himself liberty to settle what he likes for the public. Every sect saith: “Oh, give me liberty!” But give him it, and to his power he will not yield it to anybody else. Where is our ingenuousness? Liberty of conscience – truly that’s a thing ought to be very reciprocal."
Around the same time that Cromwell penned these inspiring words, he was also busy killing off hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, amounting to maybe 40% of the population; perhaps as much as 80% in some parts of the country. I leave the reconciliation of his words with his actions as an exercise for the reader.
If you want to call Cromwell a hypocrite, the most tenable and intellectually honest but still ungrounded point of attack is that his support of liberty of conscience did not extend to Catholics.
His institutional anti-Catholicism and his suppression of the rebellion in Ireland were not aberrational by his context. That he was successful in achieving these objectives (e.g. defeating an insurrection and effectively criminalizing public Catholicism during the Protectorate) is the aberration. Cromwell was competent and that was his actual sin. He also happened to believe that self-directed (i.e. not dogmatic to a foreign power, e.g. Rome) conscience was a virtue to be established and maintained and for that should be seen as another facet of him as a human being.
That said, I don't disagree that the ethnically Irish have every reason to be livid that it happened, or that comparable events preceded and succeeded it through history, but to act as if Cromwell was categorically evil for what he did to the Irish is like saying America is categorically evil for firebombing Dresden in 1945. Yes, it was an atrocity given the perspective that distance and the luxury of time and peace provide, but it doesn't capture the whole provenance of the situation.
It seems to me you can find champions of liberty whose nice-sounding ideals don't have to be rigidly compartmentalized from commission of genocide and assumption of dictatorial powers.
Conversely, you can take writings from figures like Pol Pot that sound like the epitome of high-mindedness and self-determination - as long as you choose to regard those as a different facet from the genocidal totalitarian one.
Most, perhaps all, dictators have a likeable and reasonable aspect, and exhibit humor and benign intentions toward the mass of people that they consider to embody the national spirit. Likewise, most idealists who leave a stamp on history either commit or endorse acts that are at odds with their stated principles, but we can form some idea of their overall sincerity by examining the perceptions of their contemporaries.
Dorothy Dunnett is the hidden gem of historical novelists. If you mashed up the romanticism of Dumas, the Machiavellianism of Martin, and the polymathic nature of Joyce, you would have something approaching the Lymond Chronicles, a seamlessly interwoven exploration of 16th century Europe.
Dunnett is without peer, Mantel included. I cannot recommend her works enough.
Here is someone else's review that does her justice, unlike mine:
Ingredients: ENRICHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, COOKED BEEF PATTIE CRUMBLES (BEEF HAMBURGER, WATER, TEXTURED VEGETABLE PROTEIN [SOY FLOUR, CARAMEL COLOR], SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: SALT, SPICE, NATURAL FLAVORS, DEXTROSE, YEAST EXTRACT, ONION POWDER, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, SODIUM TRIPOLYPHOSPHATE), REDUCED FAT CHEDDAR CHEESE (PASTEURIZED PART SKIM MILK, SKIM MILK, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, CULTURES, SALT, FLAVORS, POTASSIUM CHLORIDE, ANNATTO, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, ENZYMES, INGREDIENTS NOT IN REGULAR CHEDDAR CHEESE), KETCHUP (TOMATO PUREE [TOMATO PASTE, WATER], CORN SWEETENER [HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP], VINEGAR, SALT, SEASONING [SPICES, SALT, NATURAL FLAVORS, ONION POWDER, GARLIC POWDER], DEHYDRATED ONION), VEGETABLE OIL (SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR CORN OIL), ONIONS, 2% OR LESS OF DILL PICKLE RELISH (PICKLES, WATER, DISTILLED VINEGAR, SALT AND NATURAL FLAVORS), NON-FAT DRY MILK, BUTTERMILK POWDER, MODIFIED FOOD STARCH, SUGAR, VINEGAR, TOASTED SESAME SEEDS, FRACTIONATED PALM OIL, YEAST, DOUGH CONDITIONER BLEND (CALCIUM SULFATE, SALT, L-CYSTEINE HYDROCHLORIDE, GARLIC POWDER, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, ENZYMES [WHEAT]), SALT, SOY LECITHIN, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, METHYLCELLULOSE, WHEY, SOY FLOUR, DRIED EGG WHITES.