Post a controversial opinion

you wish

The 1975 are The Kooks for the Spotify generation.

i feel like the us military is great at fighting wars according to the geneva conventions. how many more wars are going to be fought according to the geneva conventions?

I've been taking nasal spray all year round but I just got advised to check a doctor about possible side effects. Really worried I won't be allowed to keep on taking it and being left unable to concentrate much and unable to go to cinema because of sneezing and running.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Monday, February 6, 2017 2:35 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what kind of nasal spray? i used Zicam a lot in the late aughts whenever i had a cold, and then it got recalled because of rebound effects. this happened to me all the time: would have a cold for 3 days, would be completely congested, use the Zicam and it worked better than anything ever, but after 3 days you had to keep using it otherwise your nose would close back up. so i'd end up taking it for weeks at a time. p sure this fucked up my nose, though i've always had congestion problems...

also xp Angela Merkel grew into her looks

swoon

http://img.wennermedia.com/620-width/181152202_angela-merkel-zoom-4980b7ac-7291-4178-acd5-c9063ab8e7a4.jpg

Flappy Bird- I use Nasobec Beclometasone Dipropionate. I got it prescribed after spending a the majority of a year with allergy problems but then I just kept buying it afterwards.

I worry about the side effects of prolonged use of anti-histamine medication so I just wear a particulate respirator all day

My dad is into science and evidence and so on, but when the doctor said "why not try cutting out gluten?" it seemed to sort out the nasty digestive trouble he'd been having straight away. I don't know whether that's the placebo effect or whatever, but he's sticking to it and that seems to be working out well for him, so : /

Wins- does it stop your nose running?

A quick image search shows some that say "misuse may result in sickness or death".

seems to be working out well for him, so : /

for ordinary & personal purposes, good results are >>>> scientific verification

Yeah, exactly. And (which will elicit less sympathy) my wife (who is from China) is seriously into TCM, and while I don't agree with her on this particular topic it's taught me a lot about not judging people for doing whatever works best for them. The :/ is confusion at other people not getting this but instead getting annoyed with other people for not being logical.

xxp yeah but to be clear I don't wear it out on the street or anything, just at work - I work with cereal crops and the allergic sensitivity that develops from prolonged exposure to the dust (especially barley, that shit is nasty) can get quite extreme quite quickly - aside from terrible rhinitis I realised I was feeling really run-down all the time and this contributed quite a bit to that (although there are a good few other health problems that mean I feel like shit all the time anyway lol). I have a liver condition so I worry about 1-a-day allergy tablets putting a strain on it, but the respirator seems to do the trick - used to just use it for proper ~hazardous chemicals~ but now I wear it all day; I potentially have another 30-odd years of working with this stuff day in day out & cant afford to fuck about

re non-coeliac ppl avoiding gluten, digestive conditions like ibs &c are pretty poorly understood & the advice often seems to just be "work out for yourself what affects you and avoid it"

Cutting out gluten removes a category of foods that have other effects on your body besides providing gluten, so he may be benefiting from that.

xps

this is reminding me that I work near labs and hear some stories wins would find entertaining, gotta work on sharing those

the whole food thing, it's such a complex system of environmental and genetic concerns compounded with your whole bacterial ecosystem

when I was a kid, I couldn't eat eggs. I mean, I could have foods made with egg or egg yolks or w/e but if I had more than a tiny piece of scrambled eggs at breakfast I'd have the most excruciating stomach and abdominal cramps for the rest of the day to the point I'd just curl up in a ball on my bed

at some point I either outgrew this or my biology changed enough that it's not at all an issue. had a couple eggs over easy yesterday, no prob

otm

Wins- does your allergy symptoms keep going after work? You don't wear the mask at home? When you're feeling lousy can you concentrate on difficult reading?

Well not really but again there are other things at play - I don't think I'm that affected by allergy symptoms outside of work. The one time I wished I had it was this weekend when I went to London lol

Why would you wish that?

Because the air in London is not v breathable

I figured you were just looking for an excuse not to go out with friends

Yeah, exactly. And (which will elicit less sympathy) my wife (who is from China) is seriously into TCM, and while I don't agree with her on this particular topic it's taught me a lot about not judging people for doing whatever works best for them. The :/ is confusion at other people not getting this but instead getting annoyed with other people for not being logical.

― Camaraderie at Arms Length, Monday, February 6, 2017 1:42 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't like old movies?

I always think of Texas Chainsaw Massacre first.

US Army hasn't properly won a war on its own since the nineteenth century. WW1&2 they came in after years of fighting by everyone else, and Korea, Vietname, Iraqs 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Cuba etc all were varying degrees of fuck-ups.

tbf 19th century wars were all also fuckups as were wwi and wwii

None of the next 46 US Presidents should be men.

Reassuring that you think there'll be any at all

Maybe Sarah Palin will get another shot.

We will not have a non-celebrity president for as long as we continue to have presidents.

I should be paid to not work

the whole food thing

I confess that on my first reading, I parsed this as "the whole 'food thing.'" rather than "the 'whole food' thing."

Like mh was coming out to us as a breatharian and questioning the whole concept of eating food. Which would definitely qualify as a controversial opinion.

US Army hasn't properly won a war on its own since the nineteenth century. WW1&2 they came in after years of fighting by everyone else, and Korea, Vietname, Iraqs 1 & 2, Afghanistan, Cuba etc all were varying degrees of fuck-ups.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), 7. februar 2017 08:06 (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This list severely underlists the amount of wars the US has started... There were glorious victories in Grenada and Panama, for instance. Glorious! Clint Eastwood even made a film about it, that's how glorious it was.

From a ways back:

the US military's great weakness is capturing and holding territory where there is a significant hostile population. they're great at attrition on the battlefield, but occupation is a numbers game and the US army can't muster the numbers without a YUGE military draft

Is there an example of a military organization that was truly good at this?

iirc the Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Soviet empires did best by suborning local regimes to act as vassal states, rather than by occupying hostile foreign lands with large military concentrations.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan did a good job of accumulating territory rapidly, but they failed to hold hostile territory for long. Partly because they needed to do so with their own presumed-loyal forces, and failed to successfully enlist auxiliaries.

Yeah, I grant that there could never be enough pure German Nazis to hold and pacify everything from Norway to Morocco long-term (let alone the UK). But which military powers have _ever_ captured and held a large piece of hostile territory against significant resistance?

Napoleonic France? The British Empire in India? Early USA vs. Native Americans?

no I mean the whole "food thing" as in what, out of the spectrum of all foods, which will make your stomach try to kill you is difficult to predict outside of a few known allergies

my opinion is to try all kinds of foods and then avoid the ones that don't work for you

Okay, mh, so you're down with food - just not all of it. That makes more sense.

the whole food thing -- food is necessary and some is very good, but some may kill you so be careful

the whole fossil fuel thing -- they're pretty bad for the environment and getting them out of the planet is an environment and geopolitical nightmare, but using some is probably necessary right now

Napoleonic France?

also worked on a vassal state / client state system - the one place where they were forced into an occupation (Spain) turned out to the quagmire (or ulcer) that brought down the empire.

to be* the

Good point, Mordy. Also worth pointing out that in their greatest eras of expansion, European powers and America had microbial allies that often did more damage than their militaries.

Irish pubs

Not to be too controversial, but the US in itself is a country occupied and taken from hostile populations...

re the US and Native Americans this isn't 100% accurate but for a large part (in addition to the disease) the "occupation" so to speak occurred at an individual non explicitly State driven level (though the State obv did participate cf things like Trail of Tears) but individuated settlement is a different kind to occupation - and if it could even be called occupation which implies the native population gets to stick around under the thumb of the occupier and isn't ethnically cleansed/straight up murdered.

That said here's controversial opinion: I don't think the US is at risk of authoritarian fascism. I don't think it's in the character of the American public to have a centralized powerful state generated nationalism - too many individuals of all political persuasions, too much foundational myth of anti-authoritarianism, Americans are (mythopoetically) homesteaders w guns. They prefer self directed collective action/violence to State-run violence. Which isn't to say the US isn't at risk of State crimes or even mass crimes throughout the general pop just that a) there is a sort of antibody to the kind of classic fascism found in 20th century Europe and b) that the worst case scenario for the US doesn't look like Nazi Germany but really its own thing a kind of anarchistic breakdown of society violence; the threat coming from the people themselves ad hoc cohering into a massive movement rather than a formalized programmatic totalitarian State. (Nb caveats required cf FDR's internment camps, Polish citizens taking the initiative in massacring their neighbors but speaking in terms of broad trends I think this distinction is accurate.)

Concerts are only fun if yr drinking

tbf 19th century wars were all also fuckups as were wwi and wwii

― the late great, Monday, February 6, 2017 11:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

spanish american war - if we ignore the moro uprising

which we should imo (different belligerents)

further addendum - the mustering of troops and logistical planning for the invasion of cuba and the landing were totally amateur-hour but they routed the spanish anyhow

The Spaniards were already practically defeated by 3 years of the José Martí's guerilla campaign for independence, hunger as they starved in urban barracks, and yellow fever. Cubans always felt the Rough Riders essentially thwarted their own independence movement.

there was also the naval battle in the pacific which the u.s. bossed