Plastic. Its in your blood ffs
This may be true but I hate the practice of referring to “plastic” as if it’s a single substance. It’s a bunch of different materials that don’t really have that much in common with each other, especially from a health/toxicity standpoint.
For example, people treat it as common sense that “you shouldn’t burn plastic” because the smoke is “toxic”. For PVC this is totally true, it makes very nasty stuff like dioxin that will poison you. But on the other hand you can burn polyethylene (think milk jug) and it’s no more toxic than burning a candle. Definitely way healthier to breath than wood campfire smoke, for example.
There’s also such a silly pattern where people learn some chemical might have some effect on the body and suddenly everyone is up in arms about it. For example Bisphenol A in many applications was replaced by the very similar Bisphenol S just so things could be labeled “BPA Free”. BPS probably has similar estrogenic effects to BPA.
I’d say the moral of the story is be wary of received wisdom about chemical toxicity from people who aren’t chemists.
Now I just want an accurate infographic of “safe” combustible plastics.
Yeah! I don’t want to accidentally throw a redneck bonfire with white smoke again.
Have you heard of Dihydrogen monoxide? It literally kills hundreds of thousands of people every single year all over the world, including young children.
You don’t hear about it in the news though do you…
I’m confused about how it kills hundreds of thousands of people per year. How, by drowning?
It’s an old (early-internet?) joke iirc. And yes, I think that’s the answer
Oh shit, I was thinking there was no way that hundreds of thousands of people did from drowning every year, but they actually do.
WHO estimates that every year over 200k people die from drowning
Yea I did my 10 seconds of research before I quoted my number! I could have said ‘200k’ but ‘hundreds of thousands’ sounds much more dramatic don’t you think? Which is the whole point of the Dihydrogen monoxide thing.
Wow, talk about preventable deaths…
According to its Wikipedia page, this joke was first published in 1983! I suspect most people know it from the early 2000’s when it made a resurgence again.
What I think it is, is that every single person who ever consumes it, will eventually die. We are also literally dependant on it. If you stop ingesting it for too long, it can also cause you to die… That’s how it went around here, at least.
That’s my understanding as well, it was a joke about correlation != causation.
Look at all of the related “risks” and add them up. I’m sure that drowning is a small number, but then add in all of the deaths from scalding, acid rain, poisons (that contain water), etc etc and it eventually gets to be a very big number. Probably in the millions
The WHO estimates 236k deaths per year worldwide due to drowning. There’s other ways to die to Dihydrogen monoxide other than drowning, so my numbers hold up!
Acid rain has never killed anyone. It can kill plants and destroy farms, so I guess it can kill indirectly by causing famine, but that’s about it.
Not only BPAs but many chemicals like BPAs can cause birth defects because our bodies think they are estrogen.
If this worries you, read the books It Starts With the Egg and Grain Brain.
They both suggest that not only what you eat, but how it’s prepared can affect the health of a child.
For instance it’s a big no-no, according to It Starts With the Egg, to heat most plastics in the microwave. The heat breaks the plastic down, it can get in your blood, your body will think it’s estrogen, and they don’t even know the full effects of this yet.
So think about
- burritos in plastic wrapping,
- cling wrap on a bowl,
- reheating leftovers in Tupperware,
- disposable cutlery
These chemicals are not just in food:
- your car’s interior
- your cell phone case
- even the clothes on your back, unless they’re 100% pure, untreated, natural fabric, may have been made with these chemicals.
Yep, the long term affects are gonna be worse than we can imagine imo. These plastics are everywhere in the environment so it is literally unavoidable anywhere on this earth. They are in small concentrations for now, but they are increasing rapidly as more and more plastic is created/wasted every minute
Thinking about reducing plastic fucks me up and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Noticing every single time we bring new plastic into the household, and how hard it is to avoid. Chicken comes in plastic wrap, and even if we got it at a butcher counter, they still toss it in a plastic bag before wrapping it in brown paper. Bags of potting soil, our toothpaste tubes, peanut butter jars… it’s endless.
At least the majority of my clothes are cotton or wool, but another source is carpet and there isn’t anything I can do about this apartment carpet.
Are microplastics similarly diverse in their effects on the human body?
I would guess that chemical effects would be diverse while “physical” effects would not be so diverse. Keep in mind that things like mesothelioma from asbestos are kinda sorta “physical” effects because it’s from jagged roughness of the particles at the nanoscale rather than any specific chemistry.
So what you’re saying is instead of having a bonfire I should be have a milk jug fire?
Yes.
Also be wary of people that say they are chemists on the internet when oil, plastics, and guns have mostly only been researched by their manufacturers. All totally safe.
Social media. It wasn’t until very recently that people started to realize just how harmful it actually is.
Less social media IMO, more the weaponization of techniques first researched in the 60s-80s made real and pushed via automaton to all corners of the public internet.
The reason you become vulnerable is because you abdicate control (most had no idea) of your feed to providers that own domain names.
This was a co-option of how the internet worked previously.
What kind of techniques were researched? This sounds interesting to learn about. Do you have some terms I could search that will help me learn more?
Start with Cambridge Analytica for sure.
I always thought the Cambridge Analytical scandal was just the left trying to point fingers at how Trump could have possibly won, instead of blaming the Democratic party for their terrible handling of the Sanders campaign, and how Clinton was so utterly unlikable, they grasped at so many straws, we’re still reeling from it to this day.
The big ones being the Ukrainian war, the failure of the Afghanistan pull-out, and of course CA.
Well this might come as a shock but the techniques used to groom suicide bombers also work on white people too. Prey on their disillusionment, pump them full of hatred for “the enemy” then give them the means to carry out an attack.
But if you’re digging back through history, check out how once upon a time, everyone from the US government to Coca-Cola was awkwardly trying their hand at mind control.
Fortunately, they’ve pinky promised that’s all behind them now, despite having access to millions of people who voluntarily pin their own eyes open and spend the night scrolling through rapid flashes of sex, violence and extremism, in their own DIY Clockwork Orange therapy (only it’s trying to make them worse, not better)
What could go wrong except for everything that’s currently going wrong?
The damage done by giving neoliberals power and the far-right platform is going to take decades to undo, if we survive it at all.
Climate change is progressing at an alarming rate while the oil and gas lobby teach AI how to astroturf, cheered on by every billionaire hoping they can fire their employees and pocket their wages.
If the far-right are given the power they need, they’ll decimate the population searching for whatever magic group they need to genocide that will make their parents love them, their mental illness evaporate and their dicks 14" long. When they finally realize no such group exists, we’ll get to see what happens when you give the nuclear launch codes to wife beaters ane school shooters.
Vote better.
there were a number of university experiments on human choice often dealing with a disparity of information between the parties.
What was learned by the US government in its testing was also known. The reality is experiments like these were done very heavily up until the 60’s with the vast majority getting nixed by the early-to-late 70s
this coincides also with our release of mental patients which were as much experiment subjects as they were patients. We were mapping out people’s behavior to information stimulus for most of the 20th century.
the programs were all stopped but the information continued on and is used in many strata of our lives.
https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0by2ybb/mk-ultra-the-cia-s-secret-pursuit-of-mind-control-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
Subliminal Marketing (one of many techniques) is banned however use of the technique in other mediums is not. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/laws-subliminal-marketing-69892.html
With regards to international actors and thier domestic collaborators, check into Foundations of Geopolitics. Its a playbook being followed.
I don’t think the SPE is that good a reference, and also not super meaningful to this sort of case of Internet manipulation anyway. Look at the amount of points showing it was basically not a normal experiment but predetermined to act out how the PI wanted - in that wikipedia link.
My understanding of MK Ultra was basically the government wasted a lot of money because of fear of missing out vs the Soviets. It didn’t accomplish anything.
And subliminal marketing has been widely debunked to my knowledge. People thought it might do something, but experimentally it didn’t.
I would have pointed to disinformation campaigns myself - there is research that implies it works.
SPE shows exactly how when you alter a worldview how that person changes. It was extreme and unintended but it showed how powerful it can be when the subjects willingly accept the game.
subliminal marketing in the form of showing single image frames was debuked, thats one of many techniques.
SPE shows that people being paid or encouraged to act a certain way will act a certain way, especially in deference to authority - which we already knew IMO. How does this translate to the Internet - people can be paid to spread info online that might be misleading or straight up disinformation? That doesn’t seem especially novel to me. PR and Propaganda existed long before SPE or the 60s.
Do you have any links to what sort of subliminal marketing you’re referencing that is shown to work?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6204644/
simple phrases and mnemonics are amazing too, those short insulting names have more of a role than people realize.
That geopolitics book is buy some Russian guy right? I’ve heard that it’s literally being played out even though it was written a long time ago
printed in the early 80s, written by the man who is considered the grandfather of the current Russian’ govt’s ideology and “plan”
he has the ear of putin, or did.
Is that the guy that Adam Curtis talked about in Hypernormalisation?
Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride Zersetzung
this guy
Abortion was a very well researched controversial topic to divide the feminist movement as much as possible.
Most propaganda boils down to fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) to promote division and conqueror the smaller groups
I agree, and I think it’s even more broader: Anxiety and stress. These are extremely dangerous and underrated, and even exploited by many (e.g. news, politicians, workplace, social media, marketing). It’s like sticking a cigarette into your mouth without you able to immediately take it out.
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Sugar. People don’t realize how bad it is for you and how addictive it is.
Micro plastics. We were advertising them in facial scrubs ffs.
Perfluoroalkyls aka PFAS appear to screw with all manner of body functions.
Since you mention tobacco: It’s worth noting that the smoking/cancer connection was noticed long before peak cigarette smoking in the population. Prior to WWII, lung cancer was considered a rare disease. That changed with the mass marketing of cigarettes.
Zembla, a Dutch independent journalism TV program, made a video regarding a big PFAS cover-up in The Netherlands: https://youtu.be/y3kzHc-eV88. If you ask me, PFAS is worse the plastic.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/y3kzHc-eV88
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Good bot
While what you say is generally true, I would add that many diseases were “rare” in pre-modern times because they were not easily diagnosis at the time or because people were killed earlier by something else that is now treatable.
Sure, but incidence of lung cancer went way up as tobacco consumption rose heavily in the early 20th century.
There’s a couple studies showing that even though your body can’t process and remove PFAS and it just keeps accumulating, if you donate blood regularly you reduce the amount in your body by a bit each time. There are other slight health benefits to donating blood and lots of places will pay you for it. So if you can reduce your PFAS intake and donate blood you can slowly get rid of it. I use arch linux btw.
I also use Arch btw
How do I avoid these?
Starbright boat polish contains and advertises that it has PTEF. Think about that , a product designed to be rubbed all over l boats until it “wears off” in waterways. I used to use it ( it is a good polish) until I realized how messed up that is.
A lot of good lubricants and dry lubricants and anti-sieze bolt coatings have PFAs. Most waterproof fabrics like tents, goretex jackets and boots, waterproofing sprays, etc also contain them. Atleast waxed canvas and wool is making a big comeback in the outdoors communities.
Non stick cookware. Water repellent and stain resistant items and coatings. Stuff like that.
Largely by avoiding waterproof or water resistant skincare products such as sunscreen and makeup. Also avoid using nonstick cookware.
But I need sunscreen or my stupid Irish skin will turn into a big lump of cancer anyway.
I think the key there was “water resistant”, suggesting the substance is used in the additives to make it resist getting rinsed off.
It’s not a required ingredient for sunscreen to work, it’s just to make it more water resistant (it stays on your skin longer) so those chemicals are typically used in sunscreen that’s marked for water/sports applications. You can buy PFAS free sunscreen too
Use the ThinkSport brand.
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Ahh yes, the bury your head in the sand trick
Also non-stick pans, flame-retardant fabrics, …
I recently got a reverse osmosis water filter to remove it from my water. Since I rent I got a countertop filter but if you own your place you can get a filter installed for all your water.
Thanks. Any chance you could share a link so I know what to look for?
Mine is from a company called bluevua. They’re on Amazon.
Social media.
Microplastics are the new lead, and screens are the new tobacco, in my opinion. Overuse of sugar in processed foods is the new version of how they’d cut food with inedible stuff like sawdust back in the day.
Social Media
Microplastics
Social media
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Plastics.
Yes, all plastics. Even bpa free plastics leak estrogenic chemicals into food, and fpod is often stored in plastic containers. Even milk cartons are lined with plastic.
Teflon(nonstick coated pans and pots) arr similarly terrible
Shoes with a raised heel is bad for your knees. (Easily measurably bad. Especially for running)
We’ve so much plastic waste that its now our most signifigant marker in the fossil record to say “humans lived here”.
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Barefoot shoes ftw
Vapes.
What will happen is one or another of the flavorings used will be safe to eat because of stomach acid and digestion, but inhaling it into delicate lungs will cause disease long term. Look up popcorn workers lung to see how a common butter flavoring in the past that was meant for eating on popcorn harmed factory workers breathing it in daily.
One of the existing vape flavors… or a new one… will eventually be shown to cause simular lung disease due to daily breathing it in never truly being studied. Someone with a favorite flavor will use it for years, like any smoker with a favorite brand of cigs, then probably get sick from constant long term exposure.
Microplastics and plastic related byproducts, like phtalates (which are connected with a decreased fertility in mammals)
I’m positive that the long term effects of these substances, that can be found in every link of the food chain nowadays, will be discussed a lot in the futureAutomobiles. Especially in the USA they are causing a public health crisis, environmental crisis, qualify of life crisis. I grew up loving them and they have uses but I’m fully convinced in the future they should be a luxury used for specific tasks or trips rather than the only form of transportation available.
