Moonside

Moonside OP wrote

Since I am such a Braydehn, I'd like to complain about the common advice of "just being yourself, bro". The problem is that while I completely agree with the message, it appears to be basically useless in relaying the insight to those who need it. Since I am suspicious of help that actually doesn't help, I am suspicious of that advice giving as well. People have lots of reasons why they aren't comfortable being themselves and it's weird to me why the advice givers seem so satisfied with themselves..

2

Moonside wrote

My idea of comfort food is that it can be carby, fatty or carby and fatty and seemingly there's no real "sweet point" for fat-to-carbs ratio that seems obvious to me. A tasteful amount of salt is an improvement to most meals, indeed.

2

Moonside OP wrote

Honestly I find most food documentaries to be insufferable. I've never seen a popular one that genuinely takes the Columbian exchange, economic conditions or religion seriously as influences on cuisine, despite these three being perhaps the three biggest influences on modern day cuisines. It's often bullshit on how food was better in some preindustrial or even prehistorical time (just no), authenticity worship, "scientific" explanations or healthism.

i got genuinely angry because it was talking about how standard olive oil sucks and you should be getting olive oil made from olives that were personally caressed by italians when like... i just want to make the food taste good?

I like good olive oil, but I also buy refined olive oil on purpose. Sometimes all that a dish needs is the fat composition of olive oil to soak flavor from aromatic vegetables and spices and the neutral flavor of the oil itself is no great hindrance. This is great for good enough cooking.

1

Moonside wrote

I'll give a metaexplanation: liberalism, socialism and conservatism are all to an extent responses to trends in 17th century Britain. Socialism, conservatism and later fascism are all, in part, differing reactions to liberalism. The point is, things have been around for a long time by now and each tradition has lots of stuff in it. The messiness is essential and not accidental complexity.

There's also the fact that misunderstandings about what socialism is run rampart in politics. It's not when the government does things like the GOP says.

Y'all are a generally pretty smart and good group and I was wondering if you had Good Reading Resources for People Who Don't Know Things. I'd prefer reading resources that don't add emotional content and also try to provide details in a holistic manner.

I recommend giving a read to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on socialism. It fits your criteria, the encyclopedia is a peer reviewed resource and the article has, like, 100 works in its bibliography. It's also not a 19th century text like the ones socialists online often recommend. Stay away from YouTube for the moment being.

If you don't have experience reading philosophical texts, I recommend to:

  1. reading slowly, very slowly. Briefly pause after each sentence, thinking about whether you've understood it. After each paragraph, try to summarize it, think how it's serving the text as a whole (its purpose) and anything that comes into your mind. This with section as well and finally the whole text.
  2. return to earlier parts, if needed, liberally. It's not a novel. Later parts inform your understanding of earlier parts.
  3. Taking notes is a pretty good practice, and also taking notes of the notes as a summary at the end of each section and trying to construct the essence of the argument.
  4. The article might genuinely take 4-5 hours to read with my method, but that's ok.

I mean it's an encyclopedia article, so it's somewhat less bad to read casually, but imho this is step where people fuck up so why not do it right from the beginning?

My own personal take is that Sanders is as a private person a socialist, but he isn't running on a socialist platform for POTUS. He won't bring forth socialism (or make the world much closer to it), but if I were an American, I'd get involved in his campaign, but I see the movement as more important than any figureheads, including Sanders.

This was long because I'm procrastinating, but hopefully it's helpful.

6