when “men” were portrayed as being simultaneously incompetent at everything they do, and at the same time manipulative and power hungry

Can’t help but be reminded of something.

On a basic level the message “Ken was silly, broke Barbieworld because he wanted to emulate men, they had to get Barbie and a feminist back to fix it”

How did he break it? He basically just flipped the genders so Kens are the ruling/working class and Barbies are just subservient eye candy. Barbie just flipped it back. It’s a broken and unimaginably unfair world in either case.

When Kens ask just for a bit of equality at the end, they are shut down and given some unimportant appeasement as a joke.

That’s how communism always ends up. When you hand over majority of the power to the state, it won’t be keen on giving it back.

That’s like saying the US is not capitalist because we don’t have a true free market and better products/services don’t always rise to the top.

These simply aren’t things that can practically happen, just like the workers owning the means of production.

No. The movie is very antagonistic towards men. I don’t think anyone who has seen the movie can dispute that in good faith.

Practically every male character in both the Barbie world and the real world is portrayed negatively. There are a few exceptions that are portrayed neutrally but they are mostly plot or exposition devices.

Conversely, practically every female character is portrayed positively. This creates a stark contrast that’s very difficult to ignore.

To be clear - personally I don’t care, it takes more to rile me up. But hating a movie that is deliberately spiteful towards your demographic is not an abnormal reaction. Neither is “slamming” the people who made it.

The idea is that the film is causing a knee jerk reaction in men who are otherwise prone to hiding their misogyny.

Why would a knee jerk reaction be any indication of misogyny? The movie is very antagonistic towards men. The proposition that having a negative reaction to that is misogyny is absurd.

Define “mad”. I’ve watched it (arrr) myself and The Barbie movie is very political, despite them completely hiding it in the trailers and the promotional material.

Fervent political media tends to rile people up, especially when it’s very one-sided. I presume you haven’t seen it and think people are upset over a light hearted comedy.

Russia loves people like you who are doing their divide-and-conquer work for them.

Most of the right wing is in support of Ukraine. And every case of the government officials opposing more help for Ukraine I’ve seen was on financial grounds, not because they support Russia.

Support of Ukraine is one of the most bipartisan political position in the nation.

Wow he got a death threat in an email, which also asked for his address lmao.

Poor guy. First day on the internet must be tough.

If you receive a death threat that you think is real, you contact the police and the FBI. But considering that the man who was threatening him didn’t even know his address, I struggle to think how he thought it was an actionable threat.

It’s not about being goofy. It’s about repeating the same damn thing for the millionth time. It gets annoying and adds no value to the conversation.

Why does it need to be a disorder? Being a selfish greedy asshole is not a disorder. It can be a result of some disorders, but it doesn’t have to be.

According to WHO, 40mg per kg of body weight is the safe limit.

Concentration of aspartame in chewing gum samples was between 1.9 and 30.5 μg/g with an average of 11.1 μg/g

So on average, 3.6kg of chewing gum contains 40mg of aspartame.

An average human weights around 60kg. So an average human would be within safe limit by chewing 216kg of gum a day. That’s about 475 pounds of gum a day.

You’re going to need to eat it by a spoonful to even have a chance of it causing cancer.

20 diet cokes a day is healthier* than 1 regular coke a day. Sugary drinks are that bad for you.

*ignoring the possible bad effects of drinking 20 cans of any carbonated water.

Sugar itself is not particularly harmful. Most foods we eat naturally contains sugar.

What’s really harmful are sugary drinks, such as regular soda, fruit juices, and sweet coffee based drinks.

The problem comes from how quickly the sugar is absorbed into the blood stream. Regular foods containing sugar such as fruits release the sugar slowly as they are broken down and digested. Sugary drinks however are pure dissolved sugar which is absorbed incredibly rapidly.

It causes a rapid blood glucose spike which is followed by an insulin spike. Having that as a regular occurance is devastating to your body, and can lead to some terrible conditions like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and diabetes.

Compared to diet soda, it should be very little. Otherwise it would be extremely sweet.

You used to drink 8 liters of regular coke?

8 liters of water per day already beggars belief. That’s going to the bathroom at least 16 times a day. You’d also need to take electrolyte supplements to avoid your nervous system shutting down.

But 8 liters of coke per day? That’s 880 grams of pure sugar. And 3200 calories, which is 150% of daily intake for average person.

If you consumed 880g of pure sugar daily, i think your liver would have failed after just a few weeks.

they literally can’t taste anymore

Figuratively.

People are so accustomed to sugar overload they literally can’t taste anymore. I drink la croix if I want something a bit bubbly, but so many Americans make fun of la croix drinkers. “It’s like smelling a lemon from 10 feet away haw haw haw”.

Considering la croix is not sweet, you will have literally the same experience as someone with taste buds that are 100% burned out from sugar. The lemon flavor is recognized by the sense of smell, and to some degree the sour sensing tastebuds.

I can’t really think of a reason those specific drinks would give you a headache.

I compared the ingredients of coke cherry zero with regular coke zero, and the ingredient lists are almost literally identical. The only difference would be in the flavoring they use, both of which are just listed as “Natural Flavors”.

The only other difference is coke cherry zero has marginally more Acesulfate Potasium or less Potassium Citrate. We can tell because their position on the ingredient list is swapped. It’s not well known, but ingredient lists are sorted from highest to lowest content.

Potasium Citrate is found in many foods, in particular in lemons, grapefruit and pomegranates. It’s added for preservation and flavor.

Acesulfate Potasium is another artificial sweetener, with sweetness on par with Aspartame. Like aspartame, it’s a very well studied food additive and is deemed completely safe by regulators.

But again, both drinks contain them, so even if we disregard that they are safe, the small difference in content is very very unlikely to cause any effect.

And you don’t have to be an idiot to be susceptible to confirmation bias. Our brains are built to look for patterns, but sometimes they see them where they don’t exist.

As for #2, really any amount of sugary drinks is bad for you. This includes fruit juices (including “no sugar added” and freshly pressed). The problem comes from how fast your body absorbs the sugar. Sugar dissolved in water is very quickly absorbed and causes a rapid spike in blood glucose. These spikes put you at risk of developing a range of nasty conditions - in particular Type 2 Diabetes and Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease. Of course drinking one can won’t immidiately give you those conditions, not unlike how smoking one cigarette won’t immidiately give you lung cancer. But like there is no “healthy” number of cigarettes you can smoke, there is no healthy amount of sugary drinks you can consume.

It’s best to avoid, but of course nobody is expected to live perfectly healthy lives, so drinking a can now and then will probably not harm you.

If you want to have a sugary drink, make sure you do not drink it on an empty stomach. Drinking it with a meal will slow down how quickly sugar is absorbed. For the same reason, eating sweet fruits like apples is perfectly healthy despite relatively high sugar content. The sugar is locked inside the solids of the fruit and is absorbed slowly.

Artificial sweeteners are usually 200-1000 times sweeter than sugar, so their content is tiny compared to sugar. A can of coke zero contains 87mg of aspartame. Aspartame has no effect on blood glucose or insulin levels. Even if it did, such a tiny amount could not cause a spike.

This is why I get agitated with headlines like these. WHO announces some study that they haven’t even published that says aspartame “might be carcinogenic” which flies in the face of decades of research and widespread usage. And thousands of fear mongering articles will push the already misinformed public to drinking sugary drinks that in contrast are practically poison.

The 2nd point in the blog post you present as a source is factually incorrect:

2. Artificial sweeteners contribute to chronically high insulin.

The link (bolded by me) in the following text

One of the most commonly used artificial sweeteners in diet sodas, aspartame is particularly damaging to the brain.

Goes to a page titled “Can Sugar Affect Your Cognitive Ability?”. They didn’t even link to the thing their text is claiming.

How can you take this trash seriously?

And personal anecdotes are absolutely worthless in discussions like this. Artificial sweeteners are consumed by a massive portion of the population. Any person who falls ill is likely to have consumed artifical sweeteners, so they will have incredible correlation with every disease on the planet.

Probably because many of them have a non-negligible amount of caffeine.

Aspartame does not cause headaches.