The Long Weight is Finally Over

A-Dog posted this link to a Huffington Post article over on the Facebook.  Basically, some oatmeal bistro in New York posted the following sign on a nearby sidewalk to advertise their fine wares:

Then, basically, some chick tweets about how the sign is engaged in the ancient art of "fat-shaming" and the restaurant takes down the sign, and issues a fucking apology.  I can't believe this shit.

"Fat-shaming?"  What the fuck is this?  What the fuck does that even mean?  First of all, that sign wasn't discriminatory in the slightest, merely a statement of fact.  Second of all, shame is an emotion, which means it is an internal process.  One cannot "be shamed" by any exterior agent; one can "feel shame" when one is unable to reconcile his perception of self with perceived social norms.  You can't blame other people for your own emotions.  Take ownership.  If you "feel" a certain way and don't like it, then figure out how to change it.  And thirdly, if you're overweight -or fat in layman's terms - there is a 99.9% chance that it's mostly your own fault.  I mean, there are a very few number of people with "glandular problems" or "big bones" or a "slow metabolism" who genuinely have very little agency when it comes to weight, and that's fine.

However, the amount of body fat that human beings store has been predominantly linked time and time again to one factor: diet.  To a large extent, you control what you put into your body, barring, of course, the unknown variables that enter into the equation with any processed food.  If you are overweight and you feel shitty about yourself, you basically have one person to blame: yourself.  If you feel shame for being fat, that speaks to how you have failed to live up to your OWN, internalized expectations of the ideal human aesthetic.  And the thing with being overweight is that it is a factor we have almost complete control over.  And it's a real tragedy that in our culture feelings of shame in relation to something like body weight leads to a sense of self-righteousness instead of a sense of agency.  I guess it's a lot easier to complain about a sign than eat a bowl of oatmeal.  Or go for a jog.  Or do something.

Or don't.  If you don't feel like changing, that's fine.  That's your prerogative (or lack thereof).  If you don't want to adjust your diet or behavior to change a physical variable that is totally within your realm of agency to control, then adjust your expectations.  If you don't want to feel shame, then adjust your self-perception.  Be comfortable with yourself.  Accept the person you are, and stop blaming signs which merely present raw data and basic facts, and stop trying to infect other people with your misery and self-loathing.  In the end it has nothing to do with weight and everything to do with that most endangered of species, self-respect.

Be fat.  Be fit.  Be whatever.  Just don't be an asshole.

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To Hell and Bank Again

"Thanks, HSBC!  I couldn't have done it without you."

Well boys and girls, it appears that we are well and truly fucked in the worst possible sense of the word.  The general populace has known almost since day one that corporations operated in some kind of morally gray zone, which in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing because I'm a believer in moral relativity and we all operate in a morally gray area to some degree in our day to day lives as individuals.  In general, though, the corporate world seems to be a lot grayer than the world in which most of live.  Most of the time, for the sake of our sanity, we're allowed to just kind of wallow in our own ignorance, and for the most part this makes us happy.  It's better not to know some things, or at least not know things with as close to 100% certainty as it might be possible to achieve.  It's a lot easier to believe that the social institutions in which we explicitly or implicitly place our trust on a day to day basis are generally working with a mind towards the common good, or the most good for the most people.  It's a lot easier to swallow if the governments, and superstores, and corporations, and banks upon which we have apparently bestowed our confidence are engaging in practices which consistently stick it to a large portion of the population on a daily (or in the case of the stock market, nanosecond-ly) basis are doing so out of ignorance, or greed, or some kind of misguided sense of that greater good and not actively and intentionally fucking us over without even the common courtesy of pretending to show some sort or remorse or contrition.  It makes it a lot easier to sleep at night believing that the Average Citizen is merely collateral damage, and not actively being conspired against by the very institutions he has placed his trust.

Well as it turns out they do not even give one single solitary fuck and we really enjoy being asleep.I suppose it's already "old" news by today's standards, however, the cultural ramifications of the HSBC scandal are worth at least documenting, if for no other reason than for the aliens who will one day visit the ruins of this planet to wonder at how mind-boggling insane we were.  The "scandal" I'm referring to is the laundering of billions of dollars for drug cartels and known terrorist organizations and generally all around not nice people by the good folks at one of the world's largest (read: richest) banks.

"Well, that's bullshit," you might say.  "I'm sure the people and governments of the world will unite, rise up and proclaim, in all caps, 'NO MORE.'"  Surely if anybody deserved the same special kind of justice that made the Spanish Inquisition so popular, it would be these arrogant bastards, sitting all smug in their ivory towers, their pasty white bodies pulsating with the power of an evil chuckle.  Surely in America, the country that has been waging war against terror for over a decade, and an even more ridiculous war against drugs for  the better part of a century would brand anyone who betrayed them to these Wicked Forces as traitors to The Cause, and punish them beyond the full extent of the law.  Surely, aiding and abetting terrorist organizations and drug dealers would be considered tantamount to treason, and the ensuing (and, in this case, totally justified) witch hunt would land countless banking executives an extended stay at Guantanamo Bay or a firing squad or at least a Justin Bieber concert.  You'd at least expect that these pasty fucks would at least be fired and fined billions of dollars to compensate for the shittiness that they'd help cultivate the world over.

Well, as it turns out, just like in the world of dating, the key to avoiding disappointment is to set your expectations really, really low.

Not only did nobody end up going to jail for any of the illegal things that they openly admit to doing, they probably won't even see much of a dent in their annual bonuses.  One dude from HSBC quit as the sacrificial lamb, but can almost guarantee you that his fall will be broken by his own personal golden parachute.  And the American government with all of its talk of taking a hard line against the the various Axis's of Evil doled out a fine of a couple billion dollars, which amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist.  I guess they were two focused dealing on the larger threat of anybody with brown skin or wearing a turban who was standing in/leaving in the vicinity of/thinking about going near an airport.

So what, though, right?  It's the just the latest in a long line of corporate institutions fucking over the little guy akin to all the bullshit going on in shady offices in Wall Street before the financial collapse a couple of years ago.  Well it's a little bit different insofar as the Wall Street cronies were ripping people off with no regard for moral decency and (I assume) personal hygiene whereas the blokes over at HSBC were ripping people off with no regard for moral decency and (I assume) personal hygiene while simultaneously facilitating the operations and activities of people and organizations who are, in turn, responsible for even more heinous shit. In legal terms, I believe the technical term is "accessory."  And it's not like it was a mistake like, "Oops!  I just accidentally laundered a couple billion dollars for that Mexican drug cartel.  You know, like the kind of cartel that's been shooting innocent civilians, decapitating police chiefs, and that the military has been called in to fight.  My bad."  It wasn't like it was a one time thing by one guy who made a mistake because he couldn't find the ANY key on the keyboard.  This was a long-term, systematic, deliberate effort that required explicit consent on the part of dozens if not hundreds of people.

I'll bet the executives over at HSBC were collectively holding their breath when word got out and the swift arm of Justice was preparing to strike.  I mean, they already knew that their fat stacks of cash would absorb most any legal blow that could be landed against them, but even they must have been at least a little bit surprised by the degree and scope.  When they realized that they literally had a licence to kill that would put James Bond to shame, the sheer amount of mutual dick-sucking going on must have made those ancient Roman orgies seem like a five-year-old's birthday party.

According to conventional logic and the wisdom inherent in Internet memes, the execs over at HSBC were "too big to jail," meaning that because the corporation was so big and so interwoven with so many global economic threads that any disruption in the sordid little web would have caused a domino effect in the world economy more disastrous to economic markets than the mixed metaphors were to this sentence.  In essence, these greedy bankers had made themselves "so important" to global economic matters that without them at the helm of this massively bloated company we would all suffer as a result.  This is, of course, complete bullshit, but like most bullshit politicians either eat it up by the barrelful, or spew it out in waves.  The truth is that you or me or the vast majority of the seven billion people living on this god-forsaken planet run that bank better than those soulless fucks.  It's actually pretty simple.  There are basically two important rules -guidelines if you will- to follow in order to maintain a profitable business model for an international corporation:
 
1) Don't spend more than you make
2) Don't fund drug cartels and international terrorists

The real bitch of it isn't that yet another bunch of rich white guys got off scott free with their hands caught in the cookie jar.  It's been pretty common knowledge to most free-thinking citizens of the world for the past couple thousand years that justice for the rich is not the same as justice for the rest of us.  In Western civilization at least we have a two-tier justice system in everything but name only.  No, the real bitch of it that now we know beyond any reasonable doubt that if you're rich enough you can become exempt from justice altogether.  I can't help but be reminded of Senator Roark's comments from SIN CITY:

"Power don't come from a badge or a gun.  Power comes from lying.  Lying big, and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you.  Once you got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls."

Whatever excuse it is, whether it's "too big to fail" or "too big to jail" it's all just bullshit.  The simple fact is that the US government -and every other government in every first world nation- have not only implicitly endorsed the fact that if you're rich enough that you can both figuratively and literally do whatever you want
but have also become complicit in the actions of HSBC and assumed their guilt in these crimes as well, or at least they would have if guilt stuck any better to rich, corrupt politicians than it did to rich, corrupt bankers.  

However, there is a larger philosophical issue at stake here: if we won't hold people accountable for being directly responsible for the death and exploitation of thousands of people the world over, then what should we hold them accountable for?  I mean, now that we know for a fact that the justice system is complete and utter bullshit without any pretense of seeming otherwise, what's the point?  If our governments won't convict people that they know for certain have broken the laws of the land, and committed egregious crimes against his fellow citizens, then how can they bother to convict anybody of anything?  After seeing what HSBC is guilty of, most other crimes seem inconsequential by comparison.  What's the point of locking anybody up for trivial offences like drug possession, DUIs, money-laundering, sexual abuse, theft, extortion, assault, or any of the other thousands of crimes perpetrated by low-lives, drug-dealers, and elected officials on a daily basis?  If we won't even convict people who have openly admitted to funding terrorist organizations and drug cartels, then how can we, with a straight face, go into a courtroom and convict some poor schlub who was found with a ziplock bag full of weed in his car?  The crimes committed by HSBC and their ilk trivialize most other crimes by comparison, and their exemption from justice trivializes every other conviction for most any other crime from this point forward.

So for all you kids reading at home, if you want to break into the international atrocities market, you better start saving today.  I mean, if you really want to fuck people over with impunity, you have to account for inflation.

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The Tip of the Lance Hurts the Most

"I did not nor have I ever used high-fructose
corn syrup to enhance my performance"

People are fucked.  Both in the sense of impending doom and in the sense of being batshit insane.  There's been a lot of material that has been excreted by various people in various media recently regarding the latest developments in the story of Lance Armstrong.  You know, the cancer-surviving, Tour-De-France-destroying, (formally-) Nike-endoursement-holding, cancer-research-money-raising, incredibly-handsome-in-a-totally-objective-sort-of-way-that-has-no-bearing-on-my-sexuality, athlete who has become the centre of an apparently scandalous affair regarding his use of performance enhancing drugs including testosterone and fan-favourite human growth hormone to help him win at cycling, the most significant of human endeavors.    It turns out that after years of denying his use of these sexy-sounding PEDs, he revealed to Oprah Winfrey (because, I guess, why not?) in an interview that yes, he did indeed take large quantities of a variety of drugs.  And for some reason, ever since the allegations really started to pique public curiosity sometime last year, everybody has been up in Lance's grill, which I don't understand really.

Just exactly why is Lance Armstrong being demonized?  What exactly did he do that was so wrong?  In actuality, very little.  Let's run down the list.

1. Did Lance Armstrong get a PhD in chemistry and biology and start a pharmaceutical company that began researching, developing, then actively marketing these so-called performance enhancing drugs?

No

2. Did Lance Armstrong create the cultural system that actively markets, encourages, and even turns a blind eye to the use of performance enhancing drugs in athletes across a wide variety of sports (*cough* baseball *cough*) and then chastises and demonizes those very same athletes once they are "outed" to the public?

No

3. Did Lance Armstrong lie about his use of performance enhancing drugs throughout his career?

Yes (However, people shouldn't be upset that Lance Armstrong lied.  He was trying to protect his own ass -just like anyone else- but he was also -whether he knew it or not- protecting all of us from ourselves.  His life narrative gave us an inspirational narrative about a man rising over seemingly insurmountable obstacles and inspiring millions of other people, and now in the current social climate we're left with the story of a disgraced fallen hero, albeit one of our own making.  What's better: a depressing truth or an inspiring lie?  For a lot of smug fucks out there it's obvious they prefer the former.)

4. Did Lance Armstrong survive cancer and then go on to complete some pretty amazing feats of strength and endurance that pushed the boundaries of preconceived notions of the boundaries of human potential?

Yes

5. Did Lance Armstrong found and raise money for an organization that is doing important work to fight back against cancer, one of the most terrible biological assaults on human life in all of history?

Yes.

Lance Armstrong is a victim in all of this.  He is the latest casualty in a cultural circle-jerk that is the result of a society plagued by widespread hypocrisy and clear lack of vision.  Armstrong is -like all of us- a man of his time.  Was he implicit in covering up the shady, apparently drug-laced underbelly of professional cycling?  Most certainly.  But that's as far as his responsibility and accountability go.  He was part of a culture that pushes people to achieve their very best at any cost and push themselves harder and faster than anybody every thought possible, but then punishes people for trying to do just that.

And that culture is ours.

If you hate or have lost respect for Lance Armstrong, you actually hate and disrespect yourself and everybody else as well.  The point that Armstrong's use -and indeed the use in general of PEDs- is not a moral or legal issue, but a philosophical one.  How do we define what it means to be human?  If we deny that Lance Armstrong did not complete the feats of human strength and endurance which are attributed to him, if we deny that they would have been impossible for any human being, then what we are really denying is Lance Armstrong's humanity.  By these standards, Lance's feats were literally inhuman because Lance himself was not human.

It seems that the what we have is a battle between two schools of philosophical thought.  One school emphasizes the importance of biological purity in defining humanity.  We are human because we are born with human bodies determined by human DNA in a "natural" state.  Human achievements only "count" if the agent of those actions was purely and thoroughly human, presumably without the aid of technology of any sort.  The other school of the post-humanists and trans-humanists sees the biological body as a starting point, but not necessarily limiting to human potential, that there are other avenues afforded to us through technology to tap the unseen wells of human potential both physical and mental.  Technology is our fucking gift.  Lions have claws, sharks have teeth, porcupines have quills, gorillas have freakish strength and large testicles.  Technology is humanity's evolutionary advantage, and in the grand scale of things, it turns out it beats the shit out of claws, teeth, or large testicles.

It's a matter of how we conceive of human potential.  Are we limited by simple biological determinism, or can we rise above and shape our own future?  For better or worse we've already proven time and again that we are capable of overcoming biological constraints.  From something as simple as clothing to the invention of the airplane, humanity has proven time and again that it is capable of overcoming obstacles that we would otherwise not have been able to overcome had we been bounded by the constraints of biology.  As for biology itself, we are already constantly tinkering with our biological bodies.  Through the application of advances in dietary and medical discoveries we have actively raised the average life expectancy of the average person from 18 in the time of the Roman Empire to 67 (and even as high as 80 in some developed countries).  In fact, if one were so inclined, one might argue that the same logic that is applied to PEDs could also be applied to antibiotics and vaccines.  Both are technically upsetting the "natural" biological balance of humanity by providing us with an unfair biological "edge" over the competition.  I would argue, however, that these technologies both represent and help unlock human potential

The fact is that PEDs did not win the Tour De France seven times.  Lance Armstrong did.  Drugs may have enhanced his performance, but you need a biological starting point.  You need that potential to be unlocked.  PEDs are not going to grant every random cocksucker on the street the strength of Hercules and the testicular fortitude of Mohammed Ali, otherwise people would be popping pills and winning Tour de Frances left, right, and centre.  Everybody is overlooking the fact that Armstrong didn't just take some magic injection and become instantly jacked like Captain America.  The dude was a professional athlete and trained his ass off.  The fact is that human history is replete with examples of people who were able to seemingly exceed the limits of their biological potential through sheer force of will.  The point is that there are wells of human potential that have yet to be tapped, and as any athlete worth his salt will tell you, any sport is more a matter of psychological strength than physical strength.  You can have the best tools for the job, but if you don't have the ability to use them or the will to hold on or push forward just that one more second beyond the quantifiably measurable limits that your body should be able to, then all the PEDs in the world aren't going to allow you to succeed.    The potential, both physical and mental was in Armstrong the whole time.

And it's not only this ambiguity and indecision over the nature of humanity that's the problem.  The problem is that we live in a culture that is, on the one hand, constantly pushing its member to run faster, push harder, jump higher, and fuck longer than ever before.  Records are made to be broken, and unless you're breaking a record, your story isn't newsworthy.  The thing is that as more and more details are coming out about Armstrong's use of PEDs, more and more details are coming out about how widespread the use of PEDs are not only in the world of cycling, but in all professional sports.  The fact is that many (if not all) of the other cyclists that Lance beat were also using PEDs, which meant that the playing field wasn't as one-sided as some in the media might lead us to believe.  For those who are looking for some kind of cosmic justice, your sense of righteousness might be appeased by the fact that a PED-using Lance Armstrong beat a bunch of other PED-using cyclists.

But even if that weren't true, even if Lance Armstrong were the only cyclist in history to ever use PEDs, what really is his crime?  Is it really cheating?  He was using every possible means at his disposal to win, which he did.  Just because nobody else was willing to go to the same extremes wouldn't take anything away from Armstrong's accomplishments.  You may not be willing to embrace his methods, but don't fucking chastise others for a) trying an alternative route than you'd try to reach your fullest potential as a human being while b) personally assuming all of the potential health risks.  The simple fact is that athletes that use PEDs are not really physically hurting anyone else other than themselves (unless of course they're involved in boxing, MMA, or some other martial art, in which case they're probably hurting entire dojos full of people).  All they're hurting is preconceived notions about the nature of humanity that we may not even have been aware we had.

The problem is that we as a society have yet to come to some kind of general consensus about how we view and measure humanity and hence human achievement.  But don't blame Lance Armstrong.  He is merely the latest victim of our cultural indecision.  Until we pull our collective heads out of our asses and as a society make up our minds as to the nature of humanity, Lance and people like him will continue to suffer because of the mixed signals we are sending out.

The only apology that should come out of this whole affair is an apology to Lance Armstrong on behalf of the  rest of us.

Sorry, Lance.  (Just doing my small part.)

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Test

Testing

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