Hi everyone

[sunlit_stone]

So I decided to try out Dreamwidth, because there's been kind of a revival on Tumblr and also... To be honest I'm looking forward to trying something that's a little more slow-paced than Tumblr, which always makes me feel a little overwhelmed (at the ripe old age of twenty-three, ha).

I guess we'll see how it goes!

First step: poke at themes.

Comments

[lusentoj]

wow, you did some hard work haha! actually there's something you have to know when reading about sugar that most people don't talk about: sugar goes under like 10 different names and no one ever tests/measures them all at once. so for example, if it says "concentrated fruit juice", that's fruit sugar just as concentrated as table sugar. "high fructose corn syrup" is simply a mix of 2 different sugar-syrups, if i remember correctly. but they don't have to count this stuff as "sugar" because they can usually pretend it's a separate thing, that's one of the ways they can claim we don't eat any higher amounts of sugar today than we did 10-30 years ago, even though it's obviously a huge lie.

the other main problem being, america performs bogus research so they can keep selling junk food (many countries blindly accept american research), so when they do studies they don't actually distinguish between natural sugar (say, whole pieces of fruit, or sugar your body makes after eating starch) from man-made sugar (table sugar, glucose syrup, caramel etc), despite that they're drastically different. in an extreme example, i saw an american study which just so happened to be funded by a honey & high fructose corn syrup company, where they said natural honey affects the body in exactly the same way as high fructose corn syrup "so there's no reason to not buy either one of them". except, the "honey" that they tested actually had high fructose corn syrup in it, their control group wasn't 100% pure honey. so if you do read studies and stuff you REALLY have to watch out for that kind of thing.

as for education scores, they also teach math differently from country to country. for example, japanese kids learn multiplications tables by memory-aids connected to words, kinda like "seal x dog = 42". and i've also read studies saying that more logical languages get better test results in all subjects, ex. a language with "two ten" being the name for "twenty" is going to have kids better at math, "life-science" instead of "biology" is going to be better at science, simply because it takes less effort even in doing stuff like understanding instructions. so there's really a lot of factors no matter what you look at!

i was born and raised in the USA, but at age 18 i moved to iceland, then age 20 i moved to sweden. now i'm 25 and still in sweden, and am a swedish citizen with a swedish wife, but i'm gonna do an exchange to japan next semester and i'm hoping i can just find a job and stay there so i don't have to come back to sweden after...

i don't know if french twitter would be nicer, i hear they don't like foreigners and stuff so maybe they have a cultural mean streak too haha.

what annoys me the most about the "america is every country!" thing is actually about racism. in sweden the only slaves were other swedes, and they were generally speaking very well-treated. when swedes did stuff like came to america and made their own colonies in order to convert natives to christianity, they actually learned the natives' languages and translated the bible to their language, they didn't do forced conversion and forced language-learning or anything. they don't (or didn't) eat, talk, dress, etc. the same as americans in any way. and here in sweden, you can be bullied for being "foreign" if you simply have brown hair, it has nothing to do with the color of your skin and instead it's more like "you have a russian nose!". so when a tumblr person goes "white cis men act like x or y", or "white people will never know racism", they've obviously never met white swedish men. or "black people are blah blah", but they're not talking about black people in japan or france or something. i feel like tumblr's the most racist place i've ever been to and it's really disturbing.