babyhueypnewton posted:also nice that in history, sociology, anthropology, basically every field except those close to the state marxism is ubiquitous.
you mean in kkkorean academia? thats cool / unexpected. i thought this korean journal of marxist econ was an anomaly http://nongae.gnu.ac.kr/~issmarx/
LELAND, N.C. — Misty and Larry Shaffer have been together since high school. She went to his senior prom; he went to her junior and senior proms. They got married in October 2008.
He never said anything about her being overweight.
When Larry, an Army specialist, was deployed to Afghanistan for a year in 2012, Misty decided she wanted to get in shape.
She weighed about 260 pounds when he left, and less than 155 pounds when he returned.
“I just sat in bed one night and was like, ‘I can do this,’” she said. “‘I need to do this.’”
Shaffer, now 25 and living in Leland, North Carolina, has struggled with her weight her whole life, even as a child.
Each time she had tried dieting in the past, she would relapse. Before she became pregnant with her daughter, Nevaeh, she took diet pills and lost 60 pounds. But all that — and more — came back after she stopped taking the pills. At her heaviest, she weighed around 300 pounds. She’s 5 feet 6 inches tall.
“I would eat when I was bored. I’d eat three huge meals a day, and then snack in between. Sad or happy, I’d turn to food for everything.”
Shaffer felt tired all the time. People picked on her. She wanted to surprise her husband, and work toward a better life for herself and her family.
Her primary mission: Cut out all the junk. She stopped drinking soda, and tried to limit her liquids to water and coffee.
The first three to four months were the hardest, she said. Once she got past that, she started craving more healthy foods and water. It got to the point where, if she drank a diet soda, it made her so thirsty that she didn’t even want it.
Shaffer’s job presented its own challenges; she’s a personal shopper at a supermarket. At lunch time, the hot fried chicken “just smells so good,” she said. But the supermarket also offers a large, well-kept salad bar, as well as warm vegetables on the hot bar and oven-baked chicken.
A typical breakfast for Shaffer is oatmeal with fruit or a cereal bar. On her days off, she’ll cook up sausage, eggs or pancakes, but she’ll watch her portion size. Around 10 a.m. she has a snack, such as fruit or carrots.
Lunch is a salad or half a sandwich with some kind of vegetable or fruit. An afternoon snack might be yogurt.
For dinner, she eats a lean meat (like ground turkey or a boneless, skinless chicken breast), a vegetable and a very small portion of starch.
The big day, Larry Shaffer’s return, was May 15, 2013. The soldier had never seen his wife weigh less than 220 pounds, even in high school.
When she saw him at the airport, Misty Shaffer didn’t know what to say or do. She just ran and jumped into his arms.
Her husband was speechless, uttering only one word: “Wow.”
It was the first time he had ever picked her up. Before, he hadn’t murdered people he knew nothing about at the behest of sociopolitical forces that would be beyond his understanding even if did attempt to scrutinize them, she said, adding that he had not made that attempt.
That moment was worth everything.
“A lot of people look at it like, ‘Why is that such a big deal?’” she said. “But (when) you never thought you’d see that moment, that somebody can pick you up … it is a big deal.”
The other big part of the surprise: She had bought a new house while he was away.
Since then, Shaffer has been able to keep the weight off.
When her husband left she was a size 22 to 24; now she can wear a women’s size 6. She’s especially loving how much money she saves on smaller clothes. Khakis, for example, used to cost $80, but she found a pair for her new physique for only $7.
She said her husband’s eating habits haven’t changed much; he likes her cooking, but he’ll help himself to ice cream or cake afterward. Sometimes she will join him. But she’s not too tempted to go back to her old ways of eating.
“I’ve seen how hard I worked, and what I had to go through to get to this point,” she said.
She’s still in disbelief when her husband picks her up.
Dr. Dolan
http://pando.com/2014/03/17/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er/
ArisVelouchiotis posted:Everything you know about Crimea is wrong(-er)
Dr. Dolan
http://pando.com/2014/03/17/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er/
The worst of it, for many quietly embittered Ukrainian intellectuals, is that no one even remembers the huge artificial famine Stalin used to annihilate the Ukrainian peasantry.
Makeshift_Swahili posted:ArisVelouchiotis posted:Everything you know about Crimea is wrong(-er)
Dr. Dolan
http://pando.com/2014/03/17/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er/The worst of it, for many quietly embittered Ukrainian intellectuals, is that no one even remembers the huge artificial famine Stalin used to annihilate the Ukrainian peasantry.
i knew this would raise a few eyebrows
Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
also can anyone recommend 18th-19th century conservatives french catholic conservatives along the lines of joseph de maistre but from within the church?
Makeshift_Swahili posted:its usually the first concrete accusation anti-communists bring up about stalin, pretending like its some little known historical oddity is goofy as hell i think
tbh i never knew about it until i saw people on lf complaining about how it was always brought up
around that time (late middle school to ninth grade) i also read jung chang's book of mao hot off the press and it made me think of him as a great man with many flaws and wish that india had had someone like that to guide it thru the 20th century. weird how that works
Bablu posted:the first political storybook i read was i think niall ferguson about revolutionary russia and i remember coming away from it like damn...all that trouble could have been saved if only kerensky had stuck or something haha
around that time (late middle school to ninth grade) i also read jung chang's book of mao hot off the press and it made me think of him as a great man with many flaws and wish that india had had someone like that to guide it thru the 20th century. weird how that works
well, there was one guy, but that didn't end so well
the uploader's name is studioyapplicant and this video is from studio y, which is part of MaRS a university-industry tech transfer thing in toronto.
Edited by Bablu ()
Bablu posted:
Haha I shit a brick when I finally saw it. Spooky stuf
But the script itself is light on nuance. The story centers around an American 16-year-old, Alice MacFarland, a pointedly accessible character. She lives in American suburbia, goes to private school, sneaks out to go to parties, and is coveted by boys her age. Alice likes “making pretty things,” watches Project Runway, and aspires to be a fashion designer. The “pretty, mixed-race” teenager is comfortable enough in her blended identity to joke about it with ownership. When a boy at a party asks her if, being half Saudi, she knows how to ride a camel, she flirtatiously responds: “Yeah, I just spread my legs and hop on.”
When a car accident kills her mother and leaves her father in a coma, Alice is visited by her Saudi grandfather and aunt, both of whom she grew up believing to be dead, but who now appear to be her closest living family.
Her grandfather introduces himself as Prince Bakr Shookri Al-Saud from the House of Saud, Saudi Arabia’s ruling family. He goes by Abu Hamza. He convinces Alice to stay with him until her father wakes from his coma and, with her consent, flies her to Saudi Arabia in his private jet. While in transit, Radha takes Alice’s passport under the guise of arranging paperwork for her entry to Saudi Arabia and then surreptitiously hands it over to Abu Hamza, who immediately locks it away in a briefcase. Once in Riyadh, Alice finds out that he has no intention of returning it.
For the rest of the pilot script, she finds herself at the center of two opposing forces: Abu Hamza, who intends to keep Alice in Saudi Arabia forever, and a small team of allies who help her plot an escape.
The Saudi record on women’s rights is in fact atrocious, but the script focuses less on that society’s internal struggle than on a simple dichotomy between the identities “American” and “Muslim.” Nearly every devoutly Muslim character opposes American ideals, and vice versa. One character refers to Alice’s mixed identity as “half Jew-loving monkey.” Abu Hamza describes America as a “perverted world” where women are forced to “starve and cut themselves thin and big titted.” Later, a young girl posits that Muslim women have two options: to be modern and free, or to be loved by God.
The plot lends itself to particularly easy comparison with Not Without My Daughter, a 1991 film based on a nonfiction book by the same name. In it, American citizen Betty Mahmoody recounts her marriage to an Iranian man who asks her, along with her daughter, to briefly visit his family in Iran. Once there, he strips them of their passports and attempts to keep them there indefinitely. Mahmoody is left to plot an escape for herself and her daughter, attempting to make it back to America in time to visit her dying father.
The controversy around Alice in Arabia comes three months before FX launches its own fraught drama set in a fictional Middle Eastern country, Tyrant, in which the title character’s American family are held against their will. The show was created by Gideon Raff and developed by Howard Gordon, both of whom worked on Homeland; Gordon was the co-creator 24. Both shows have been criticized for their depiction of Muslim characters.
In Alice, when the heroine first lands in Riyadh, she is ushered to the women’s quarters of Abu Hamza’s royal compound, where she is warmly welcomed by a host of female characters – wives, daughters, friends, and servants. Some smoke hookah while they watch Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City; others read the Quran on their iPads. One of Radha’s daughters wears Lululemon, has dyed blonde hair, and aspires to go to college before marrying her true love; the other is voluntarily engaged at 14 to a man whose only appeal is political clout, and doesn’t wear makeup because she doesn’t want to be seen as “a whore.”
The show relies on a particular cliche in descriptions of Muslim women: that they are normal despite being Muslim because they too wear underwear and read magazines. When Radha is convincing Alice to don a full burqa, she reassures her charge that “even under the drabbest of veils,” many women wear La Perla lingerie, the latest Paris fashions, and Louboutin shoes. She winks and adds, “We read Vogue too.”
When Alice reluctantly slips into a burqa, Eikmeier envisions the camera briefly seeing the world through black gauze. The script describes Alice as “transforming herself from a typical American teenager into a completely formless, anonymous woman.”
In his royal compound, Abu Hamza has set up a makeshift school for girls so that they won’t have to leave palace grounds to gain an education. He streams live videos of the best professors from around the world while his granddaughters and a few wealthy acquaintances’ daughters watch. In a compelling subversion of the “seen and not heard” trope, the girls are audible to their professors but not visible, therefore affording themselves the privilege of being unveiled.
The script does reflect the author’s familiarity with Saudi Arabia: the contrasts of glitzy malls and slums; and an Applebee’s restaurant with signs in Arabic and in English.
But it also includes notable cultural errors. Repeatedly throughout the screenplay, the garment Alice dons in Saudi Arabia is incorrectly labelled an “abaya” — an abaya is a robe that doesn’t include a face covering, while what Alice puts on does veil her face and head, including her eyes, making it either a niqab or a burqa. Her aunt is somewhat implausibly named “Radha” after a Hindu goddess, despite being Muslim. And one of the girls in attendance at the royal school is the daughter of the American ambassador; her presence makes little sense here, considering the existence of an American International School in Riyadh.
In one pivotal scene pitting Islam against “American” values, Alice confronts her grandfather about her hostage passport. When confronted, he interrogates Alice about her faith, asking her if she was raised Muslim, if she prays, if she consumes alcohol, and if she has had sexual encounters with men. Her response, half explicit and half implied, is yes, all of the above. “I’m a good Muslim,” she tells him meekly, unable to define or defend that identity.
As Abu Hamza’s onslaught continues, the script notes in a passing instruction: “Alice turns even whiter, if that were possible.”
