I didn't mind "body positivity" too much, it was more "healthy at any size" that I found objectionable.
If you as an adult want to eat to excess (or drink, or smoke), feel free (within reason - don't encroach on my economy airline seat) and happily accepts that they might shorten their life by doing so, then have at it. Just don't pretend it's a healthy lifestyle choice.
What got to me was when my own doctor was telling me I was "healthy at any size" when I was telling her about things like plantar fasciitis in my feet that clearly got worse as I gained weight. Like, it would be one thing if I told her I felt like a million bucks and my labs were excellent and I was a little bit big. But I was in there explicitly telling her that I was NOT healthy at my size.
I eventually got a better doctor and a dietitian and lost 50 lbs by changing my macros to focus on getting enough protein, fat, and fiber, which finally curbed my hunger, and wouldn't you know it, my feet feel better.
Even body positivity goes way too far for me. If it were only adults in play that would be different, but the rise of "body positivity" coincided with a massive increase in child obesity, and there's a strong connection between the eating/health habits of parents and the health outcomes of their children.
body positivity was a very much needed reaction to the mass media starvation-chic obsession of the 2000s. Kate Winslet in Titanic, Jessica Simpson and Britney Spears in the mid 2000s were all widely mocked and panned for being fat whales despite being completely normal looking.
I don't think there is continuity there. Body positivity was a movement of extremely obese people trying to normalize obesity, not a movement of healthy people trying to denormalized anorexia.
The very earliest versions weren't like that. For example, "healthy at every size" was originally "health at every size" - it was supposed to be encouragement that you are succeeding in improving your health by eating better and exercising even if you don't lose weight.
> the rise of "body positivity" coincided with a massive increase in child obesity
The obesity epidemic is yet another instance of “What changed in America in 1971?” that can’t be attributed to body positivity, a movement that didn’t really get nationwide traction until the 90s.
It's one of those initially unintuitive things that makes perfect sense when you consider that "burning calories" is... pretty literally burning calories. Of course CO2 is how most of the mass goes away.
Similar to the "trees are mostly made from air" thing.
There are several multiple that cause sudden weight loss or weight gain with no change in lifestyle and eating. And then there are sicknesses that affect hunger regulation and surrounding hormones (including anorexia actually).
For those that want to stick with thermodynamics, imagine an organism that stores 1% of consumed calories as fat, and uses the other 99%, and that cannot - for whichever reason - turn fat back into calories.
Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.
My point is, unless you have found a way to break thermodynamics, the only way to reduce your weight is by taking in less than what you excrete out, regardless of deficiencies and conditions.
Sure. But we know that some conditions, both physical and psychological, can make that process much harder. (Medications, too! And billion dollar companies who employ experts in breaking your will.)
"Just abstain" approaches have failed repeatedly and conclusively in public health. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to wash their hands after pooping and get vaccinated.
Personal experience: the first time i took buproprion/naltrexone it became clear to me why people that arent and have never been overweight think "just eat less move more" is the only advice you need.
Except it's not typically very effectively actionable advice.
It's more in the realm of "just be happy" to a depressed person. Sure, that'd help a lot. It's the how that's tough. So we move the levers that aren't rusted solid first.
Good luck. I've tried to completely replace Windows with Linux over the last two decades or so, and it's still lacks polish. I really don't enjoy having half-written GUIs for different apps and having to compile my own fixes after searching for 3 hours.
I think I finally gave it up in anger, when it was on a laptop I was using for a few important projects and it cost me days of work.
I now use Windows+WSL and it has the best of both worlds: A fully functional GUI with everything I would ever need with Linux.
MacOS is really the best Nix Desktop OS out there. I would use this instead, but I still require some windows apps.
Chicago started with similar conditions as NYC (30 murders per 100000 in 1991), but they didn't have no-nonsense mayors like Bloomberg and Rudy. So its murder rate now is still 5 times that of NYC.
Broken window policing and stop-and-frisk absolutely worked. Stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional, but it also was highly effective.
CPD generally does whatever NYPD does. The difference is that New York isn't Chicago. Different geography, different forces at work. Peter Moskos wrote a whole book about how NYPD turned things around in the 1990s, and "stop and frisk" and "broken windows", whatever Malcolm Gladwell wants you to believe, don't feature prominently in it.
Chicago had tried Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in 90-s it was so famous that even I heard about it during my lessons on urban planning. In Russia.
And it was not entirely unsuccessful, but definitely much less effective than policing in NYC.
I read multiple articles from both conservative and progressive sources about the drop of crime in NYC. The evidence is decidedly mixed. "Broken windows" policies probably helped a lot during the 90-s but lost their efficacy by the early 2000-s. Stop-and-frisk probably reduced the rate of serious crimes, mostly through incidental arrests but undermined some of the community trust. It also was unconstitutional.
I obviously haven't read it completely yet, but I read the parts that mention "Broken Windows". So far they seem to basically affirm everything I said:
> Now Bratton had some success in Transit, and well-publicized success, because he decided to stop people from jumping over the turnstiles. It was rampant. They wound up locking up some guy who had like $10,000 and a gun and couldn't be bothered to pay the dollar subway fare. The idea was, if I keep these guys out of the system, crime will go down. And crime went down in Transit, which is why Bratton got Boston and why he got back here. It was like, "This guy might be on to something."
> Operation Alternative
> But you can use the Broken Windows theory. Stopping a guy for drinking beer gave you a chance to run him for a warrant. Is he wanted for a violent crime? Stopping a guy for pissing in the street gave you a chance to issue a summons. Which meant if he couldn't produce ID you could bring him into the station, run his prints, and then find out he was wanted for one of last week's shootings.
Chicago was run by Richard Daly 2 for 20 years during the Guliani era. I’m not sure what a no-nonsense mayor is but Daly resolved a dispute over an airport by having the runway jack hammered over night in the middle of negotiations.
During the 80s CPD ran a torture warehouse. They are currently operating under court direction for their mass use of pre textual traffic stops.
I’m not buying your “just so” story about mayors or hard nosed policing being the difference.
Or… criminals were caught and remained incarcerated leaving rates low. A large part of crime is committed by repeat offenders. Catch and imprison them and crime drops. This is well supported by data.
As you said, a large part of crime is committed by repeat offenders. Enough time has passed that those people are back on the street. If crime rates have remained low after the end of S&F, then it can't be that.
An unmarked car pulls alongside you, all men are masked inside and the windows tinted. You're ready to fight back or run, but then it turns out it's the police attempting to harass and bully you. Wonderful.
Look up Sean Bell - not a stop a frisk, just an open fire.
Once, my wife and I were stopped, but not frisked, and cited for riding bikes, on a sidewalk at 2AM on a stretch of Atlantic Ave that would kill you to ride on. It made no sense, until I found out that my neighbor and his friend had been murdered at a street party. There was a drag net out trying to find the killer and they stopped anyone for anything.
I had the same issue after college. I joined a meetup group and made lots of friends over the course of a few years. It's been over a decade now, and I'm still friends with many of them.
More so that the 1% have fewer loopholes, not the other way around.
Regular folks filing taxes don’t have particularly difficult returns, but if the government already knows what you owe/get back, why waste everyone’s time? Obviously deductions exist for a reason, but standard deduction folks shouldn’t have to file to confirm that their number matches what the IRS already calculated.
Stuff like this is common in states with no income tax. If public services in two states are equivalent and one has income tax but one doesn’t, the latter state residents pay the same total tax burden through property tax, tolls, and sales tax.
Yep, people really think they've hacked America when they move to states with lower/no income tax. Meanwhile they pay 5-figure property taxes on a house they've paid off until the day they die.
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