Healthy Food and Stealthy Racists
I’d been hearing a lot about the Keto diet and its potentials, so I finally decided to give it a shot. For those who care: you cut out carbs/sugar intake to the point that your body is forced to burn fat to survive (ketosis) — it is supposed to allow for rapid weight loss, but you can imagine what living off of such a diet initially feels like. Spoiler alert — It hurts! No sugar means brutal headaches!
The first day that my body went into ketosis, I was feeling very out of it. My mind couldn’t function right, my work productivity was almost zero, and I was feeling pretty anti-social. So, basically, nothing had changed.
Six days in, however, I definitely knew something was wrong with my mind, having spent the better half of the day arguing with white supremacists on reddit. I come from a former British colony where the natives were actually dominated and then sort of liberated (rather than plainly exterminated so that a bunch of other British people could claim the land as theirs, refuse to pay taxes and then call the whole thing a revolution and sing praises about freedom, equality and slavery— not sure if I am oversimplifying things here). So, unfamiliar with claims that most Americans might have come across before, I was reading certain arguments for the first time in my life: that British and European colonization of the world was a result of relative technological prowess driven entirely by the industrial revolution rather than anything else.
I am slow, and on ketosis (so especially slow), but even then, that claim took me way too long to comprehend. I understand that white supremacists are all about incest (and the resulting physical/mental ailments), but I thought that they could at least count. The industrial revolution didn’t really kick off until the 1700s (well over a century after the European Colonists had introduced so many new people all over the world to the concept of imperialistic non-consensual butt-fucking). So, that justified my slowness in comprehension. Its more mathematically accurate of them to claim that USA had won the first world war because of Bitcoin (Using that example might have been a bad choice-I have the sudden urge to cry myself to sleep so that I don’t have to remind myself of having chicken-sold all of my BTC last year).
But then I understood their strategy: that tying the intellectual/scientific accomplishments of Industrial Revolution to colonization helps them justify raping and pillaging under the guise of innovation, while quietly hiding away the missing 150 years in their equation, just like it is their inbred family.
Ultimately, after them replying to my comments, and me in-turn asking them to actually read the comment they had replied to, their words gradually changed. Industrial Revolution disappeared and “technological advantage” replaced it: Apparently the Colonists were just in the “right place at the right time” and had any other civilization been in said situation, that civilization would have been the colonists. Basically, the claim was that murder isn’t a crime, no matter what, because had another person been in that murderer’s shoes the outcome would have been the exact same — admittedly, a claim impossible to disprove (how are we going to recreate that exact situation for experimentation), but infinite times harder prove in the first place!
Even as I kept getting down voted into oblivion, somehow, an ally popped up and pointed out that many Europeans, throughout the imperial times, pushed propaganda explaining how other races were sub-human. But, they’d have none of it. They’d would also refuse to acknowledge that European standards of living and strength of economy at that point in time were worse than some of the places the colonists eventually conquered, and that technological innovations had been flowing both ways for 1000s of years prior.
But all in all, it was a fun experience. I think the half day spent on arguing with them was more because I needed to take my mind off of something else. I had over-cooked broccoli and some other veggies to make the most disgusting concoction I had ever beheld, recollecting which made me feel like throwing up for hours at a stretch. It was healthy though. (Now please excuse me as I throw up).
