> Comics were never supposed to be educational or have any non-entertainment value and primary tarted at hormones soaked male teens.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.
Really? Try to imagine a world where EVERY guy resolved to ask 1 pretty girl a day for her phone number to improve his own self confidence. Now imagine being a pretty girl in such a world. Now try to figure out what purpose the pretty girl is serving in this self help exercise and if she had the option to opt out?
"What he's really doing is using interaction with women as practice to be better at interaction with women.
"
Specifically, by learning to not care about the women in question or the interactions.
This is why comparing talking to people with shooting freethrows is goddamn weird. People are not basketball rims. The basketball rim lacks subjective experience.
> Specifically, by learning to not care about the women in question or the interactions.
Well, at least some fear of rejection is fuelled by caring too much. 'If I ask her out and she says no then she'll hate me and they'll hate me and I'll hate me and I'll want to die and I'll curl up into a ball and retreat from the world and die!'
Sometimes one does have to learn to care a little bit less, in order to get the chance start to learn how to genuinely care for the real person, not the made-up person in one's mind.
I'd argue what he did was learn not to care about his own natural reaction to the situation, which is different. He also set ground rules to avoid making the women uncomfortable.
So what exactly is SeanDav caring about again? In the case where a girl did give him a phone number, assuming that number is real, what is the expectation of the girl giving him a means for further contact? Did he go into this exchange making sure she knew he had no intention to call her? Something here obviously doesn't mesh. In all other cases, as someone else pointed out, the discomfort threshhold has loooong been passed by the time the girl has said anything. He's learned jack all about her view.
e: The reliable indicator that you're weirding out some random woman is that you're not in a single's bar and acting like your trying to have sex with her.
> The latest fads of Fat Acceptance and Healthy At Every Size show the trend quite well.
Fat acceptance is not a fad as you put. It is about people being able to accept and love themselves as they are. Fat people are bombarded with messages that they are not acceptable and they should not be exist. Fatness is described as a thing to be exterminated, which implies that fat people should be exterminated. This is not hyperbole, you can see this message reflected in advertising, media portrayals, and what people say (your own post has elements of this).
> Finally we have far too many people inactive in this country and many others because government benefits programs are sufficient to allow them this lifestyle. Simply put, if you keep paying and feeding people not to work just what do you expect them to do? Idleness is not a good state, its worse when we institutionalize it.
Have you even ever lived on an assistance program like food stamps? The amount of money given is never enough to completely cover's one's needs, folks are constantly looking for and finding ways to raise money by working, whether its official employment or grey market.
> Anecdotal but I am sure many have the same experience, there are two groups of co workers who are out the most, very obese people and smokers. Why should either be acceptable?
Nobody is obligated to live their life if a way you find acceptable. Nobody is obligated to be healthy or to drop unhealthy habits like smoking. Health systems that seek to punish people will not produce good health outcomes, it will simply drive those people away from seeking out medical care when they need it. Accusatory and attacking beliefs about health are what cause doctors and medical professionals to blame health outcomes on that status even when it is unrelated.
> Daily hard exercise - the panting, heart-pounding, drenched in sweat kind of exercise - increases your metabolism.
This is not true for all people and can be highly variable between different people, let alone not necessarily possible for folks with metabolic disorders.
> I believe that most "normal" people are capable of doing enough exercise (combined with good eating choices) that they can lose weight.
The point is there is there no set point of "enough" exercise to induce weight loss. It is highly variable between people and it is very unlikely that any individual can keep weight off in this fashion over a period of time. Linking exercise and weight is a time waster and, more importantly, can dissuade people from exercising when they don't achieve an impossible standard for weight loss.
> For example, say you have a 1-hour lunch break each day. During that lunch break, you could easily go for a 6km run (30-40 minutes), as well as have time for a shower, and grab food. If you're prepared to have a faster shower, and eat a quick snack, heck, you could even make it a 10km run (50 minutes).
First of all, the majority of workers do not have hour long lunch breaks. Second, that exercise during the middle of the work day sounds like a great way to ratchet up stress rather than be relaxing since now you are stuck in a time management game. This isn't an appropriate approach for everyone.
> Either way, I personally know many ordinary people who manage to get a healthy amount of exercise, and achieve their weight goals.
Again, this notion of a "healthy amount" of exercise is a fiction w.r.t. weight loss.
> I also have a friend who quite honestly, eats what seems to be an incredibly unhealthy mix - think large amounts of junk food and deep-fried fast food. However, they manage to stay reasonably slim (think BMI 18) by doing insane amounts of exercise (several hours a day). So it's definitely achievable, assuming you have that sort of willpower.
This person would likely still be a low BMI even without exercise.
> What studies are you referring to, that show that "normal" exercise will not cause weight loss? I'd be very curious to see them.
For a compilation of study data about weight loss, see the first half of Health at Every Size [1] (this is not an endorsement of a HAES lifestyle, but this book does collect the evidence).
To be honest, I find exercise during the day to actually be helpful - it gets me out of the office, and lets me recharge.
However, you do need to find an activity that you enjoy - if it's running 10km, then do that. If it's swimming 2km, do that. Or maybe you like doing weights, then do that. Or rock-climbing after work. It can't be something that you hate. (There are days you just don't feel like it though - sometimes you just need to grit your teeth and do it).
Also, what is a "healthy amount" of exercise?
I argue that it is possible to combine good food choices with a reasonable amount of exercise that will help you lose weight.
The below calorie burn numbers are from myself, using a HR band and a sports watch.
E.g. your lunchtime run/swim will burn say 300-350 calories.
If you jog or cycle to work, you can easily burn another 100 calories each way, so 200 calories both ways.
And maybe after work, you go to the gym, or do kickboxing, or play a sport you enjoy (e.g. touch footy, hockey, water polo etc.) - that's another 300-500 calories. (I don't wear a band during my sports though, since it'd come off - so these are rough guesses). You might only do that 2-3 nights a week though.
Either way though, if you choose to, you can be very active.
> Acting like regular college students don't have classes that are super simple to game and pass
Oh, I know they exist. I just wouldn't write about them in the admissions brochure or an op-ed touting their supposed value.
> Saying life moments like dating/flirting aren't important (what exactly are students supposed to do between classes anyway!?!)
I suppose some people consider them important (I don't), but that doesn't mean the taxpayer should be footing the bill.
> Saying being an actor does not require intellectual or academic ability (hint: it does)
Maybe for better actors it requires some intellectual ability, but I'm unconvinced that most of Hanks's community college classes had any impact on his career.
> Has no idea what FAFSA is like or what it's like to navigate that mess
I'm in college right now, on financial aid. I'm well aware of the complexities of the FAFSA and probably filed one much more recently than you. But it's nowhere near challenging enough that a bright, motivated student would find it a hindrance.
> Pretending that they aren't already indirectly paying for people to "get easy As, ogle girls, and pursue unintellectual careers"
Oh, I know we are. I'd just prefer to not pay for more of it.
The point I'm making is that we expect people to continue living their lives while going to school, that doesn't change. Getting financial aid isn't a contract to live a strict monastic life nor should it be. Also, the fact that not every single person who gets aid goes on to use it for some optimal standard doesn't mean that it is a waste or that we as a society shouldn't do it.
> I'm in college right now, on financial aid. I'm well aware of the complexities of the FAFSA and probably filed one much more recently than you. But it's nowhere near challenging enough that a bright, motivated student would find it a hindrance.
It wasn't very long ago when I did FAFSA and I knew quite a few bright people who struggled with the process. FAFSA is not a perfect process and leaves a lot to be desired as I'm sure you are aware of.
> Maybe for better actors it requires some intellectual ability, but I'm unconvinced that most of Hanks's community college classes had any impact on his career.
This is an arbitrary thing to say, as clearly to Hanks some of the things he's recalling were significant to his life and his career. We don't get to make decisions for what is important to someone's development, that is up to individual people. There were many experiences that I've had that make me how am I today as a person and professional and I'm sure some folks may want to write that off.
You must be living under a rock to not have read one of the bazillion of stories about policing and racism that have come up since last fall, but for a great overview of the subject I highly recommend The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [1]
We're talking about SWAT team raids. I am interested if the rate of raids is higher for a specific race compared to other types of arrests.
Also to be intellectually honest in the subject, one can't use media coverage as a proxy for actual data. Lots of anecdotes doesn't necessarily provide evidence. There are thousands of arrests daily. I haven't seen thousands of news stories -- generally only when there was an angle that would elicit ratings. A white man getting shot by the cops doesn't generally make national headlines just like the over 2000 shootings of (mostly) black victims in Chicago barely warrants mention.
My point isn't to argue if cops are racist. My point is that knee-jerk claims of racism ought to be quantifiable.
Police need to try harder to ignore the statistics of who commits crime. Just because one group is statistically committing more crime that should not affect their dealing with an individual who is innocent until proven guilty.
It's only a problem if unreasonable, excessive and unwarranted violence is used by the law enforcers. They should use every available indicator of crime in order to focus on problem areas. The alternative means that we're willingly sacrificing safety, peace and security in order to not offend, and that I find absolutely distasteful and negligent.
Of course, 100% innocent until proven guilty; I'm not saying we should convict/target people without merit based purely off of race/age/obesity/hair color.
No, there are problems with racial profiling long before things devolve to "unreasonable, excessive and unwarranted violence." What defines a "problem area" as you put it? What is an "indicator"? Am I incorrectly reading between the lines here to say that you believe that it is perfectly acceptable to police black neighborhoods at a higher rate merely because they are black neighborhoods? That is, your "indicator" is, to put it bluntly, blackness.
EDIT: Like any mutual fund manager will tell you, "past performance is not a guarantee of future results." Police policy is barking up the wrong tree if they think that blackness/race are the variables to watch, much like anyone would be amiss if they solely looked at TTM rate of return for an investment option, and that is to say nothing of the positive feedback loop that racial profiling creates. Poverty, education levels, and the availability of social mobility are the variables that should be watched to create sane public policy in the USA.
Yes, I absolutely think the police should not discriminate against crime-heavy neighborhoods by policing them less than they deserve/need. To police them less is the discriminatory thing to do, as they need it more than safer neighborhoods.
Of course, the entire discussion we're having is invalid if we work with the premise that more policing = more convictions, by virtue of the crime being everywhere (across boundaries in whatever criteria you wish, e.g. race) regardless, and convictions being a simple byproduct of policing and not of said underlying factor like race, obesity, education, socioeconomic status, or hair-color.
My point of contention isn't whether or not we should police high crime neighborhoods more or less, it's whether we should condone the (less-common) explicit or (more-common) implicit police policy of using race as a proxy for the other variables that I mentioned previously. You've danced around my question: is race a valid "indicator" of "problem areas" in your model?
If the statistics agree with it, then yes, of course race can be used as an indicator of problem areas. But as I said in my second paragraph, there are certain things that invalidate that completely.
This hasn't been true of comic books for several decades now. The medium has many examples of high quality, well written, and unique books. Also, the demographics of comics has changed many times over the last 100 years, the focus on men over the last couple of decades is recent phenomenon in the grand scheme of things.