Nuts and Gum posted:

Paladinus posted:

Not a great decanter, is it? How do you even clean it?

steinrokkan posted:

If it's legitimate dirt, the glass has a way to clean it out.

Paladinus posted:

Not a great decanter, is it? How do you even clean it?

FreudianSlippers posted:

With a bent coat hanger.

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

No. I didn't click the link. I can't handle that amount of blatant stupidity unless it involves a nut shot.

Zero One posted:

Woah, we're half way there
Woah,

[quote="ekuNNN" post="530221722"]

The Wicked ZOGA posted:

A dude ate a slug and died so I wouldn't do that if I were you

JOHN CENA posted:

lowtax?

Captain Hygiene posted:

Re: eating various critters

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Ralp decided to drop a Gamergate thread on us in D&D when I was a mod and it made absolutely no goddamn sense. To quote... I wanna say Shine? "Girls have cooties and they infected Megaman!"

Tjadeth posted:

yeah but I think it depends on if you're moving toward or away from compulsory heterosexuality. usually the unexamined life turns out gayer than expected

zenintrude posted:

I mean… do any of these really compare to the greatest story ever told?

Captain Hygiene posted:

Jesus Kawaiist

ekuNNN posted:

Libra posted:

I kind of want one of those rotating magnetic platforms for my first aid kit.

"Just like video games" I would gasp as I crawl towards the spinning medkit, my mood brightened despite my various gruesome injuries.

ultrafilter posted:

Lemon posted:

Hempuli posted:

Not a comic but maybe cartoon-adjacent enough to post: I've had this pun in my brain for the better part of a year and finally painted a funny image about it:

LifeSunDeath posted:

https://v.redd.it/tqdxrqzg3rla1/DASH_1080.mp4

Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:

Hah! Nice hat, idiot.


For a clown to wear.


To space.

Karate Bastard posted:

That's art. Beautiful work.


In other news Stupid sexy Flanders has been hitting it out of the park lately

Beachcomber posted:

Why does the bull appear to have a remora of some kind?

Karate Bastard posted:

That's art. Beautiful work.


In other news Stupid sexy Flanders has been hitting it out of the park lately

andis311 posted:

this kid i work with paid for me to use this gay forum. yes windows 7 was my loving idea BITCH!!

(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)

Discendo Vox posted:

I'll try to keep this all in one post, because while it's cool, it's really off-topic.

Vox's food derails: butter orgy comic edition

First a tiny bit of background. Margarine is a butter substitute invented in France in the 1870s. Originally derived primarily from beef tallow, margarine is now mostly made from vegetable oils. It's one of the earliest, biggest victories of food science manufacturing. Incredibly cheap to produce, modern margarine has no negative health effects (so long as it doesn't use trans fats), and has pretty much always been healthier than butter. Margarine can also be kosher (though I don't really know anything about that area- something to do with mixing meat and dairy?).

When margarine came to the states in the 1870s, it was viewed as a huge threat to the dairy industry. Dairy producers were right to be afraid; margarine was available much cheaper than butter, and in a void, likely would have largely cornered the market. The dairy industry took an all-out approach to manipulating public opinion of margarine - and bear in mind that the information ecosystem of the time makes today look positively healthy. State legislatures were bribed to ban margarine. Scientific reports were falsified to show that margarine caused...basically every serious negative health effect. Rumors were spread about the margarine manufacturing process involving dead cats, rubber, and other unsavory
substances. The federal government put massive taxes on margarine. Public figures gave live, barn-burning speeches about the threat of margarine to the American Way of Life. At every level, Americans were targets of a tide of misinformation about what they ate.

Here are some choice quotes from this NatGeo article:

Governor Lucius Hubbard of Minnesota bemoaned the fact that “the ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of oleomargarine and its kindred abominations.” Senator Joseph Quarles of Wisconsin (the Dairy State) thundered that butter should come from the dairy, not the slaughterhouse. “I want butter that has the natural aroma of life and health. I decline to accept as a substitute caul fat, matured under the chill of death, blended with vegetable oils and flavored by chemical tricks.”

Another legislative maneuver by Big Butter was coloration. Butter is normally a very pale yellow; it's dyed to look the way it does. Margarine looks even paler, but it's difficult to tell the difference, especially if it's also dyed yellow. Butter manufacturers came up with a great response: get state legislatures to require that it be dyed unappealing colors, like pink (which was used to imply there was blood in it- anti-margarine messaging tried to tie margarine to blood, death and decay). Some 30-odd states required pink margarine, and left the laws on the books when the Supreme Court overturned them in 1898.

Margarine was aggressively depicted as simultaneously, artificial, unnatural, unhealthy, foreign, unamerican, unpatriotic, and (in particular) a cheap product used by the lower classes. Even before the great depression, financial turbulence and class inequality meant butter was effectively a luxury good subject to shortages, and like any luxury good, organized crime became involved in controlling the supply. They would also manufacture fraudulent butter, sometimes by dying margarine (people do genuinely have trouble telling the difference). That's where that comic comes from! People were drowning in these messages, even in comic books.

Fake butter was the source of another big, big change in how food was regulated in the US. See, the dyes used in butter? The fake butter? Yeah, that stuff wasn't exactly harmless. At the time adulterants used to change food color and texture weren't regulated, and companies (and criminals) had a strong incentive to just use whatever made something look good on the shelf. This was an issue in many areas, with butter (and "butter") being a prominent one. A lot of people were getting sick or dying because the "margarine war", alongside other trade conflicts and the endless tide of harmful "patent medicines" and other quack remedies. In response, in 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the FDA! The FDA regulated food, drugs, and other product categories. In particular, they set purity requirements for food (there's now an upper limit on how much rat poop can be in your flour) and require that all food ingredients be listed and certified by the government to be "Generally Recognized As Safe" (GRAS). That means no more sawdust in your oatmeal . I am, to put it mildly, an FDA fan.

Something to emphasize about all of this is that the harmful, undesirable, unclean nature of the "artificial, chemical" margarine wasn't just something that the average American assumed. Messages about how bad it was were absolutely everywhere, like the air people breathed. People just...bought into it, and it became a part of culture. It may seem ironic now with our purple artificial berry flavor cheese spread, but margarine was an alien, foreign thing that people didn't grok- a weird artificial creation that was surely, surely harmful. You'd read somewhere it was bad, your friends thought it was bad...why doubt it?

This hasn't changed. Right now, trade groups, companies and lobbyists are still putting out wave after wave of bullshit chemophobic beliefs about food. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, who do great work in other areas, are militantly opposed to the existence of food dyes. The FDA is chronically underfunded and its regulatory power has been limited by industrial interests. Rumors and (industry-funded) studies about non-caloric sweeteners and corn syrup and salt abound. There is now a massive marketing drive for "clean", "natural", "honest" food with "fewer, easy-to-read" ingredients (that cost more to produce and decay faster, but can be priced much higher). Green labels and cert marks and health claims are everywhere. "Organic" means everything and nothing.

Industry does this because it works, and it works on us. Pink Himalayan Sea Salt is a thing people actually purchase. Soylent exists. The Food Babe is real, and she has made more money than you ever will. Large numbers of people believe sugar is an addictive toxin, and that carbohydrates are the root of all cancer.

We are not materially smarter than the people of the 1870s. While the media may have changed, the quality of information isn't much better- and there's a hell of a lot more of it. We're still targets, and the tide continues to rise.

A couple sources I used to fortify and color my knowledge for this post:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/margarine-used-to-be-pink-and-more-colorful-tales-from-the-food-dye-industry
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2014/08/13/the-butter-wars-when-margarine-was-pink/
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/harp/0807.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1870s-dairy-lobby-turned-margarine-pink-so-people-would-buy-butter-180963328/

PS: I don't know whether or not there was an antisemitic element to the crossover between kosher margarine use and the use of blood imagery in anti-margarine messaging. While I wouldn't put it past the people involved, I don't know that kosher formulations of margarine were in use at the time.

PPS: about 1110 words. Right on target.

Infinitum posted:

Why do you know so much about butter?

Samuringa posted:

you would not believe it

strong bird posted:

anyone who posts gbs-flavored posts in this thread from this point forward is getting a 6 hour stay in the smackdown hotel

Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:

this is the first time i've ever seen someone threadban themselves

Arivia posted:

If you want to read a good book on how food safety in the US started, the creation of the FDA, and everything else in that effortpost, I highly recommend the Poison Squad by Deborah Blum.

e: there's a documentary version too https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/poison-squad/

EorayMel posted:

Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:

this is the first time i've ever seen someone threadban themselves

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

some plague rats posted:

It's been updated with an additional punchline

Marcade posted:

A really interesting post and a joke two-fer.

Zulily Zoetrope posted:

Huh, that brought back a childhood memory of the Donald Duck comics I'd read as a kid. Whenever the story required him to have a pre-established day job, he worked as a packer at a margarine plant, which was obviously the lowest job a person can have. Wild that that is where it came from.

Karate Bastard posted:

He won't miss a bucket or five, if he didn't count it in the first place

EorayMel posted: