“Lmao no sympathy for anyone who buys expensive shoes”

^this you?

When you mature as a human being, whatever age that may be, you develop kindness through a willingness to understand and empathize with perspectives that conflict with your own. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to accept it for yourself. For many people, clothing is not simply a means of pragmatic function. It’s also a source of self-expression, joy, and beauty. Now for me, $600 for a pair of sneakers is exorbitant and ridiculous no matter who designed it. But it’s not a product for me. And if someone with the means feels great buying and wearing them, I don’t see the harm. I don’t usually pay more than I have to for footwear, but I would pay a premium for certain kitchen tools I use all the time if I like the design, enjoy looking at it, and feel good using it. What I do sympathize with and would like to see reduced in harm is the consumerist culture that pressures people with less means into feeling like they have to have such things for fulfillment.

Wrong, this is about all the excess lives lost due to misinformation and the moral culpability of those responsible, not your country’s PR image. Russia getting Americans killed through anti-vax propaganda and the US getting Filipinos and others killed through anti-vax propaganda. Both are responsible for their actions. The US has proved untrustworthy long before this incident anyway.

Don’t you mean appreciating the beauty in imperfections?

For most things where the person you’re talking to should know better than you, e.g. marginalized groups, field experts, professionals, etc. I might go with something like “Sorry, I don’t quite get it. Can you look up a definition to help me understand better?”

You don’t need to be a therapist or psychologist to not shoot someone having a mental health crisis

This framing makes it seem like Biden is going against the majority congressional sentiment, but he is not. The US congress, overall, is supportive of sending military support to Israel, as evidenced by their passing bills other aid bills, which is a slower process.

I was talking about how widespread BMI is used in health sciences, I.e. everything from basic physiology to clinical trials to program evaluation to epidemiology. This is different from medical practice, e.g. family doctor taking your BMI. Whether it makes for good science or not, it’s use makes it part of science and replacing outdated tools is part of the broader scientific process–that doesn’t make the tools “not science”.

You’re asking about “accuracy” which is a good question, as well as “precision”. However in health sciences we usually evaluate such measures more thoroughly with similar concepts of validity (construct and discriminant) and reliability; you’ll also see sensitivity in the literature but it’s a kind of discriminant validity.

So if you do your own search using “BMI” and these terms on PubMed or even Google Scholar, you will find a range or scientific evidence. Most will say BMI is not good but not terrible, even good in some specific contexts. You will also find lots of evidence of how BMI is associated with other health indicators and health outcomes. I’m not going to spend an hour collating this for you. “Review” is also a useful search term. You seem smart enough to do it if you really want it. In any case, the argument is moot because we agree BMI should be replaced.

Edit: okay I was curious comparing BMI to WtHR and actually found a couple cherry-picked examples that might be interesting for you

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/8/8/512

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405457723021642

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23775352/

I completely agree, we need to move on from BMI. But it’s a bit silly to say it’s BMI isn’t science when it’s been used for the entirety of modern health sciences. People would be shocked by how many crude, yet useful enough measures that health sciences use even today. And it’s notoriously slow/stubborn in adopting the best tools for many methods. Still, humanity has continued to make scientific progress with them.

That argument is likely a distortion of the medical argument which goes something like, “People who are overweight by the medical definition of BMI between 25 and 30 are not necessarily unhealthy. There are some circumstances such as being an athlete or genetics that are associated with denser body compositions. BMI is a crude tool that is useful for some things but should not be used on its own to indicate health status.”

I would argue with the implication that the degree to which a story is political is gauged by how violent (in the broad sense) the political actions are. Something can be extremely pacifistic or extremely democratic for example. In star trek you have a tremendous numer of stories where non-violent political actions like diplomacy, legislation, or legal argument are the main focus of the story and hugely consequential, for an entire people, an entire species, or the entire galaxy.

Immediately relatable to whom?

The comic is not implying that every single time a woman says no to man, that man will do something bad. It is saying that often when a woman wants to say no to a man, they have to do an internal calculation to answer questions like “Can I trust this man to respond okay to a No? How likely will they say something rude, or escalate to harassment? What do I do if he gets physically persistent? Is he going to get pissed off if I say no and come after me when I leave?”

Usually the answer is “he’s probably fine”, but women do have to go through the calculation much more than men typically. And that’s kinda fucked up.

The comic is saying “just say no” ignores/dismisses the non-negligible risk of just saying no.

Yeah, fuck the media. Instead, you should try talking to the women close to you about their experiences turning men down. Some might have no issues and think nothing of it, some might have good reason to be calculating. Don’t take it from me.

Exactly, you should stop listening to media and start listening to the experiences of women close to you instead.

That’s kinda like complaining about how nobody talks about how airlines keep planes flying and landing successfully, how the media only focuses on planes crashing and accidents. “Sure, this one airline covered up poor maintenance practices leading to deaths, but what about all the passengers airlines help everyday?”

Imagine airlines get to investigate themselves instead of the FAA and how it would go over when they find they did nothing wrong every time.

People get butthurt over things others do that don’t affect them all the time.

People also get buttgurt over things others do that indirectly affect them or violate their ethical principles.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell them apart and sometimes there’s a bit of overlap when worldviews conflict.

We live in a society.

Yeah I wasn’t disagreeing. Teenagers are indeed annoying as shit. They’re also bright, depressed, confused, fired up, determined, lost, immature, too mature, and on and on. None of this negates the importance us adults having the maturity to not dwell on our bitterness or frustration over youth and focus on being a positive influence when we have the opportunity.

I mean you could maybe try being a compassionate adult around them. Attidudes like this are what contribute to poor inter-generational relationships. It’s why boomers blame everything on millenials and why millenials just respond with “ok boomer”. Teenagers are people, their brains are developing, some are figuring out their shit, some never will bother to. And they will become older folks who are people just the same. So it behoves us to try being a positive influence around them rather than trying to fuck them.

Part of the problem is that from a social history standpoint, libertarianism typically has attracted people looking for an ideology to justify their selfishness.

The ideology that tends to attract people who value social organization while minimizing a forceful overarching government has been anarchism.