Israel Passes Photoshop Law To Combat Anorexia 488
Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that the Israeli parliament has passed legislation that prohibits fashion media and advertising with models who fall below the World Health Organization's standard for malnutrition banning underweight models as determined by Body Mass Index. The new law also stipulates that any ad which uses airbrushing, computer editing, or any other form of Photoshop editing to create a slimmer model must clearly state that fact. Advertising campaigns created outside of Israel must comply with the legislation's standards in order to appear in Israel. 'I realized that only legislation can change the situation,' says Rachel Adato, an Israeli parliament member with a background in medicine. 'There was no time to educate so many people, and the change had be forced on the industry. There was no time to waste, so many girls were dieting to death.' The measure has been controversial within Israel for raising the question of where free speech bumps up against the fashion industry's responsibility — and its possible harm — to its customers' psychological well-being. Donald Downs, a professor at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on the First Amendment, says that it would be very tough to pass something like Israel's law in the US Congress. 'In the US, it would be hard to justify this type of law on either legal or normative policy grounds,' says Downs. 'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'"
Curtail 'free speech' by lying corporations? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Curtail 'free speech' by lying corporations? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just *mostly* unattainable, it's unwise to even try, much less to achieve.
Minor pet peeve of mine... Between anorectic fashion models and overweight "accept me as I am" reactions to the fashion models, the "sensible middle" has been lost.
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the "sensible middle" has been lost
I blame the two party system.
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the "sensible middle" has been lost
I blame the two party system.
And you thought the skinny donkey and fat elephant were just metaphorical mascots...
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No, we're here, we just sensibly realize that trying to convince either side of anything is futile.
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I heard an interview with a guy doing calorie restriction, in interest of an extended life. Maybe he was overdoing it, maybe he was doing what was truly necessary to double his lifespan.
But as a result of his calorie restriction regimen, he didn't have the energy for many activities most consider normal, let alone more strenuous things many do for fun. Half a life, lived twice as long.
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These types of systems are usually enforced on a complaint basis. Someone lodges a complaint, then some agency gets involved and the advertiser has to prove they didn't break the law or face a fine.
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Considering this story is about Israel, you sound even sillier than you crazy conservatives usually do. Those aren't just promises. Education is free, healthcare co-pays aren't just cheap but are merely symbolic, and pensions still exist. Oh, and they still maintain a massive military budget, and don't owe China their firstborn.
Your move.
Re:Curtail 'free speech' by lying corporations? (Score:4)
Re:Curtail 'free speech' by lying corporations? (Score:4, Insightful)
Money is fungible. If the US didn't support Israel's defense there would be less money for social programs.
In any event, the current state of affairs is unsustainable because the segment of the population that's having all the children isn't paying taxes or serving in the military and the economy isn't growing fast enough to make up the difference.
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Let me know when you're done moving the goal posts every time you're forced to retreat. I've got better things to do than debate a coward.
Re:Curtail 'free speech' by lying corporations? (Score:5, Interesting)
In my opinion (based, largely, by watching discussions here), the most important law in the Israeli law-book is called "the law of financing of parties". Basically, it prohibits any politician from accepting a large (the limit, I think, is around 10K nis, which are about $3000) from a single person or body.
I know from first hand experience that you can set up a meeting with at least some of Israel's Knesset members, discuss an issue on its merits, and have a fair-game chance of convincing them. I have been involved, with no more capacity than being a random member of the public, with the copyright overhaul effort that took place a few years ago. We (myself and one lawyer from the Israeli chapter of the Internet society) were the sole opposing voices in a room literally choking full of lawyers representing all major players in both software and music industries.
Our voices were heard, and on more than one occasion, accepted. This included some issues that any regular slashdot reader should easily identify as core, such as the fact that the final law, as passed, does not include DMCA like anti-circumvention provisions (which the Federation for Phonorecords tried to introduce), as well as having explicit fair use statements for allowing certain (rather wide) purposes of decompiling binary code.
Shachar
Those shiksa! (Score:4, Funny)
Those blonde shiksa with the skinny waists and the big boobs, Rachel, I can't keep my Baruch's eyes from wandering!
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Bar Rafaeli, btw, is a good 5 lbs. above the 18.5 BMI cutoff adopted by the law.
Also, the law was passed two months ago.
Why 1st ammendment? (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen a paper about it: the most significant contributor to anorexia is social context, specially advertising. The fashion industry is, therefore, responsible for what they put on ads. I fail to see what's the issue here: it's common knowledge that "free speech" doesn't mean "free to say whatever you want". If they put an ad with underweight, photoshopped models, then they are harming everyone who's watching, in a medical sense, and must refrain from doing so.
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Huh? It's a matter of personal responsibility. You shouldn't be relying on the government to tell you what's good or bad for you; that's trying to absolve oneself of responsibility for their own life. That some people lack self control in resisting external influences, real or perceived, is unfortunate but it does not justify infringing others' freedoms. The government being your nanny is not a right, whereas freedom is.
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How the fuck is an underweight, photoshopped model in a fashion ad, being called out for what it is, in any way infringing your rights? Jesus Fucking Christ. Go back under your Libertarian rock or wherever else you reside.
Clearly, the fashion industry still struggles to self-regulate itself and needs regulation to protect society from raising whole generations of young people who are obsessed with how skinny they are. Many models are already severely underweight, and photoshopping just makes the situation w
Re:Why 1st ammendment? (Score:4, Insightful)
"free speech" doesn't mean "free to say whatever you want"
You bet your bottom it does. And quite sly of you to say that your above opinion is "common knowledge". Having said that, I will acknowledge that there are rules that limit such freedoms, but only to protect other freedoms. Every time a new rule is put in place, careful thought is necessary in order to prevent abuse. I, for one, don't see a good enough reason for a rule in this case, so I guess I am against it, although I believe that our artificial world is seriously lacking in realism sometimes. But this is the tragedy of trying to keep such freedoms: most of the time you end up defending scum.
Re:Why 1st ammendment? (Score:5, Interesting)
"free speech" doesn't mean "free to say whatever you want"
You bet your bottom it does.
Free speech does not apply to commercial speech (in US, at least). I don't think advertisers have the option to fall back on 1st amendment if it is pretty clear that the "speech" in question is an advert.
Perhaps with Citizens vs United paving the way there will be a revision extending 1st amendment to all commercial speech (?)
Re:Why 1st ammendment? (Score:5, Informative)
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What if someone put out an advertisement about ice cream, and some insane person decided to kill themselves because of it!? Therefore, all advertisements should be banned because a minuscule portion of the population might decide to do something harmful because of them!
Re:Why 1st ammendment? roxy (Score:4, Insightful)
Under this logic, the government could censor pretty much anything. Some insane person went on a murderous rampage? Video games were the trigger. Ban video games!
This is extremely scary to me. Especially since we're considering banning/censoring things due to the stupidity of others. I don't care for such slippery slopes.
The real question is who finds this attractive? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the glory days of super models a la Cindy Crawford and Tyra Banks, from what CC said the typical size for a model was 6. Now, they're 0s and 2s. Some of them are downright repulsive. There's a pretty nasty pic of Gisele Bunchken post-pregnancy and it looks like she was trying to starve off the weight. Might as well drape the clothes over a wire hanger if that's what they're aiming for.
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Might as well drape the clothes over a wire hanger if that's what they're aiming for.
That is pretty much what they're aiming for, yeah. But they need something to show off the makeup and shoes, too.
No WIRE hangers!!! (Score:2)
yes.. mommie dearest.
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Women's fashion is designed to appeal to women, not to men, so whether you or I find any of the current crop of concentration camp victims posing as models attractive or not is rather pointless to the fashion industry.
Ironically, women as a group are as much a victim of the current obesity epidemic as men are. I find it curious that the rise of waifish, anorexically thin models parallels the so-called obesity epidemic. It almost seems like the heavier women get, the more the fashion industry taunts them w
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The so-called fashion industry I think also has also gone kind of off the deep end with an aesthetic that, frankly, seems to turn women into prepubescent girls, with so much emphasis being put on small size and slimness to point of lacking any secondary sex characteristics.
Fashion is certainly an industry - IIRC 2 of the 10 richest people run fashion-related companies. But if you think that the desire here is for prepubescent girls, you're really out of touch with designers ...
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Might as well drape the clothes over a wire hanger if that's what they're aiming for.
That is ***exactly*** what they are aiming for. Fashion design is hard, getting your designs in a show is harder. Then gotta find a model to walk the runway to show off the dress. If all your models are skinny stick women then you don't have to deal with design variables of a more fuller figure gal. There was a time when acceptable sizes more than a 6, and dress design was more challenging considering way back designers worked with fitted gowns. You have to balance the woman's bust, waist, hips, torso leng
Corporations don't have a Right to free speech (Score:5, Insightful)
They are no more "human" and entitled to human rights, then this building I'm sitting in. The people inside the building have a right to free speech, but not the building itself.
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Philosophically, this argument is not on solid ground, as continuing in the same line of regress to individual constituents, your argument goes to:
The neurons inside the brain have a right to free thought, but not the brain itself. The choice of the level at which you end the regress is arbitrary.
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Except there is no more regression smaller than the body nature has given you. The whole of that body is yours and yours alone, and you have the right to use it in aggregate to think a thought, to speak it, or write it.
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You mean other than the big gaping hole in your argument where neutrons are not and never have been the thing rights vest in?
Long term health damage... like smoking? (Score:5, Informative)
'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'
Isn't this the reason we have warnings on boxes of cigarettes?
US Law (Score:5, Insightful)
'In the US, it would be hard to justify this type of law on either legal or normative policy grounds,' says Downs. 'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'"
The US already has a law that "paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term". It is the FDA law that prohibits unsubstantiated medical claims because it might cause people to ignore treatments that actually work. The issue of under weight and Photoshoped images is that they cause people to attempt to attain that standard and cause health issues. This has been proven to happen.
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Much of it could be covered under "truth in advertising" laws already on the books. The part prohibiting models below the WHO minimum BMI might be tougher.
Incidentally... (Score:3)
Does anybody seriously suspect that advertisements prove compelling because we are deceived by them in some trivial 'I believe that this advertisement is a representative depiction of reality." sense that could be refuted simply by a textual disclaimer?
The idea that this is an information problem, caused by people just not knowing certain facts, seems about as naive(or deliberately toothless) as believing that you can make somebody stop gambling or buying lottery tickets with a dose of stats 101... It's nonsense. Do people advance these proposals because they actually do believe that? Or do they submit them because the alternative of banning photoshopping is just too dire; but Something Must Be Done?
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Refuted? No, because that's a rational mechani
Hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
I can't readily find any data just for Israel, but I find the law's author's assertion that "We also know that the first cause of death in the age group of 15-24 is anorexia" to be highly suspect. In the US, 46% of deaths ages 15-24 are accidents (33% motor vehicles), then there's homicide, suicide, cancer & other illnesses. Anorexia is nowhere near the top as a cause of death. Israelis have cars and murders and cancer just like Americans (ok, probably less cars & murders, but still); I find it hard to believe that their stats are terribly different.
The article itself says that mortality rates are 4% for anorexia, which is bad, but surely all the 10% with eating disorders she cites don't have anorexia?
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Maybe they just have a lot more anorexia.
Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate associated with all causes of death for females 15-24 years old.
Source: http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/ [anad.org]
Citation: American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 152 (7), July 1995, p. 1073-1074, Sullivan, Patrick F.
parts of that seem ok to me (Score:3)
I am very pro first amendment, but the idea of disclaimers on impossibly obtainable body proportions sounds as good as those white rectangles on the cigarette boxes. Women, and to a lesser, but increasing amount, men, are getting severely programmed by all the fake crap we do to our mass media people of fiction. I don't know if this is an American thing, or not even a thing at all, maybe I'm just out in left field here, maybe it's generational, I have no pattern - point I am making is that lots of women seem really put off by their body image, and they dont care that members of the appropriate gender think they look fine, or great, or even perfect. They just want to drop 30% of their body weight, to anorexic levels, stab their fellow with a rib, I dunno what the end goal is man, I'm just sick of cute girls crabbing about a little belly or having real thighs. So sick of it. This is probably my most ranty, less focused slashdot post in a long while, so I'm sorry about that. It's super frustrating to tell someone they look really beautiful and have them gaze off into the distance, miserable they aren't a jpeg and unwilling to ever embrace themselves or enjoy life until that day. We should all be extremely grateful that there's no great way to apply these photoshop techniques to moving images, yet. We'll be even worse off when that happens.
Yeah. (Score:2)
Of course. Ban something because someone might get offended by it/take it seriously. I honestly don't want to ban/censor something just because it might make a minuscule portion of the population want to do something harmful.
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Of course. Ban something because someone might get offended by it/take it seriously. I honestly don't want to ban/censor something just because it might make a minuscule portion of the population want to do something harmful.
Anorexia is more than a minuscule portion of the population. But, I would be okay with the ads if they had a warning box like cigarettes that said: "Warning! The models portrayed in this advertisement are at an unhealthy, non-life sustaining weight. The company selling the product chose to use unhealthy models to try and manipulate you into thinking you must be unhealthy to be acceptable, too. The World Health Organization believes that people should strive to maintain a healthy weight for their height an
asmiov (Score:2)
This kind of thinking, laws that favor society as a whole over the individual reminds me of the zeroth law of robotics.
Workaround? (Score:2)
Woodstock "gimp!ing" the image be legal?
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Stupid autocorrect. I obviously meant "would" instead of "Woodstock"
Whereas in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
'In the US, it would be hard to justify this type of law on either legal or normative policy grounds,' says Downs. 'The Israeli law is paternalistic in that it prohibits something because of the effect it might have on others in the longer term.'"
Whereas in the US laws are passed on the effect they may have on contributors to those who are passing them.
Truth in advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty libertarian, but I'm 100% OK with that requirement by itself. Labeling laws help consumers make informed decisions about their purchases, which is a basic requirement of a free market. For example, I fully support a store's right to sell ground beef containing "pink slime" as long as it's clearly labeled as such. Along those lines, let Israel require companies to state that their images do not depict genuine humans. I'd like to be able to show my daughter that I'm not just making this stuff up, that models in magazines really don't look like that in real life and aren't a reasonable standard to judge yourself by.
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Glad to see you say so.
What I don't get are the libertarians who think that requiring companies to give factual information is somehow an unconstitutional overreach.
Advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertising is not free speech. We already have tons of laws about what can be said in advertisements. We have entire categories of products banned from advertising via various forms of media.
And, besides that, fuck push advertisers. They don't inform. They don't help. They play upon human psychology and insecurity to make people feel inferior if they don't have The Product. They try to associate themselves with warm, fuzzy feelings to make people feel good about The Product. They do not operate on a rational level. The sooner we're rid of them entirely the better.
--Jeremy
Natural Selection (Score:2)
This is the information age. Maybe we should let people who can't effectively process information just die out.
My libertarian side (Score:2)
..is not at all opposed to U.S. law saying that advertisments with edited or modified depictions of models should dislose that fact, and plainly enough to be easily seen and understood.
The fashion industry pretty much depends on peddling fantasy, from the fantasy that what you wear will improve your life in any way, from the superficial to the profound, and shouldn't be too offended that we ask them to admit that.
Of course they won't like it, since that may break the spell, but hey - you abuse the magic, it
Good/bad? My point of view. (Score:3, Insightful)
This might not be the typical Slashdot comment. I post it anyway because anorexia was part of my live for many years.
My daughter has had anorexia. As a dad I watched my daughter identify herself with wrong and manipulated social standards (mainly fashion / beauty magazines) For her the images of her idols were reality. Nothing could change her mind. Over a period of 2-3 years she gradually slided down into anorexia. As a parent we tried to help and we sought professional help but mostly in vain. She only became more careful with exposing her 'behavior'. Unfortunately the switch only came after she reached 81.5 pounds (37kg) and was hospitalized for over 8 weeks. Specialists say that a few pounds less and she would not have survived it .
How do you explain to an 15 year old that everything she reads about her idols is manipulated / orchestrated? Warning messages in beauty and fashion magazines seem like a good effort to me. I consider myself liberal, normally I am against (government) control and over legislation. Normally I would immediately condemn such a legislation. But I also don't want any parent to experience what we experienced. Don't make the mistake that it can not happen to you. We are a normal family, no family history of drugs or mental disorders. We are realistic, we all enjoyed higher education. And still anorexia was a harsh reality for us.
Lucky my daughter got better. She is now back on a 'normal weight' but her fight is far from over. >5 years after she is still selective in what she eats, she still counts her calorie intake. But she can now place what happened to her and detect warning signals herself. Next September she will start her final year at university.
Free Speech (Score:4, Interesting)
There should be no Free Speech for non-humans. A corporation does not have any political or human rights necessities for Free Speech because a) all the humans that make up the corporation already have that right and b) it isn't human, so human rights don't apply.
I understand the line needs to be defined and corporations will circumvent the issue by paying people to make their speech for them - but the law is pretty good at wiping the floor with people too obviously circumventing it.
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Semitic
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Informative)
...mmmm....no, I think he does. One can be an anti-Semite, or one can be anti-Semitic, and they mean the same thing, essentially. It's commonly misspelled "Semetic", though, so maybe you're thinking of that.
Or you're thinking of the Semites, a Biblical term referring to the descendants of one of Noah's sons. Or you're thinking of the ethnic umbrella group, which refers to anyone who speaks a Semitic language, which is pretty much the entire Arabian peninsula since Arabic and Hebrew are the two most common. Amharic is in there, too, as well as a bunch of others. So, yes, in that sense it is ironic to say that someone criticizing the Israelis for their treatment of Palestinians is an anti-Semite.
However, in English, the term has been overwhelmingly used to refer to discrimination against Jews, so if you have a gripe with that, take it up with the late 19th century. Whether the claim of antisemitism is valid or not is another issue, but his use of the word is correct.
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's like saying that they don't know what they're talking about.
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
When you don't "use that word correctly", you are doing a lot more than using a wrong "naming convention". You are factually incorrect.
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Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic
Sure it's not antisemetic, but it's sure the hell not a walled ghetto. The majority of them live better than everyone else in the region unless they're rich, or royalty. And some of them live better than the Israeli's that they keep trying to kill.
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I wish more people would open their eyes to some reality when it comes to "Palestinians ". For some reason there was no recognized "Palestinian" state until after 1967. It was under Jordanian and Egyptian rule after England finished fucking up the region and finally left.. Anything England missed fucking up the middle east was taken care of by the French.
Many Palestinians voluntarily evacuated their homes in 48 when the surrounding Arab countries told them the war would take about a week. No body ev
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Funny)
It's like saying that they don't know what they're talking about.
Saying that Palestinians should not be kept walled into ghettos is not antisemitic. Disagreeing with Israeli government policy is not antisemitic. Being in favor of a two-state solution is not antisemitic. Criticizing Israel is not antisemitic.
When you don't "use that word correctly", you are doing a lot more than using a wrong "naming convention". You are factually incorrect.
You're saying he's being anti-semantic?
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"Right to exist"? What does that even mean? Does Palestine have a "right to exist"? Did the Seminole Nation have a "right to exist"? Hell, what does "right to exist" even mean when we're talking about nations?
"Right to exist" is a formulation created specifically for this one instance. Look throughout history and find me another example of a nation asserting a "right
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
The irony in Palestinian Israeli relations is that they're *both* descended from the same people who once made up the Hebrew tribe in ancient Israel. Not that either would ever admit it. It's kind of a bizarre situation. It would be actually be funny, if they weren't killing and oppressing each other with such deadly seriousness.
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
Wish I had mod points. Most people have no idea that both people co-existed in relative harmony for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Not only that, there's some indication the "Palestinians" have converted their faith twice...once to Christianity during the Byzantine era, and then eventually to Muslim when the Ottomans took over...
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I think you should go talk to a Palestinian, preferably one whose land has been taken away from them as a result of things like the settlements and that apartheid wall Israel is building.
And it's not Israel that's the evil entity. It's the Israeli government. I imagine the Israelis on an individual level are generally pretty cool people.
And for the record, it is FUCKING DISGUSTING that people like you would try to suppress the debate about the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians by throwing
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apartheid, apartheid, apartheid, settlements, settlements, settlements.
interesting.
All throughout Arabia, Shiite Muslims kill Sunni Muslims, nobody cares.
Sunni Muslims kill Shiite Muslims, nobody cars.
But if an Israeli kills a Palestinian - Apartheid, apartheid, apartheid.
Border disputes are border disputes all across the world. But if one party of a border dispute is Israel, it's occupation, settlement, apartheid racist.
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No, he's saying that these other people are killing each other, but for some reason only Israel gets criticized.
What? Occupation equals Aparthe
Re:Too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
And yet Israel still treats their Palestinian neighbors better than most of the nearby contries treat their Palestinian refuge camps. Naturally, the same people who blame the former on "teh Evil Jews" also blame the latter on "teh Evil Jews" (as well as the national debt, the behavior of Hollywood, and price of gas ,.....).
It's anti-semitic in the sense that it's usually mentioned as part of some larger anti-semitic rant.
On the other half of your comment - if Palestinians were launching rockets at my neighborhood school, I would have been vigorously advocating a Carthaginian peace myself, so I can only admire Israel's restraint in the circumstances.
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I think you're going to have some trouble getting Jews to stop their ritual circumcision. Hey, it's part of their culture, and if they believe their god demands that skin be cut from a boy's penis as part of a religious ceremony, I don't think they're going to give up just because you say so, Stormwatch.
Some cultures stretch necks, some scarify the skin, some pull the earlobes using bones and some cut skin off the penises of boys. Human beings are weird, what can you say?
Re:All part of Israel's new humanitarian plan (Score:5, Informative)
Someone who is actually fit, with more muscle and lean body mass, can actually show up as unhealthy when using BMI with the way we measure it.....
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I think it will be an OK tradeoff to restrict a handful of female bodybuilders from modeling in order to save a few lives from anorexic starvation.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
You don't understand. Put aside for a moment the implicit ridiculous comparison of circumcision to the mutilation committed against young women in Africa.
Think about communities where circumcision is most common:
Arabs
Americans (US)
Jews
By condemning circumcision as an evil practice, you get to condemn not only ALL of those troublesome Middle-Easterners, but also the United States in general! It's a pretty diversely targetted insult. But, it does seem a bit like pissing into the wind. ;-)
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Put aside for a moment the implicit ridiculous comparison of circumcision to the mutilation committed against young women in Africa.
Why is it ridiculous? You can argue the degree of the damage, but the principle is exactly the same.
Re:All part of Israel's new humanitarian plan (Score:4, Informative)
Pseudoscience, you mean. Circumcision is not connected with cancer prevention [circumstitions.com] at all. On the other hand, this is a procedure that destroys half the penile skin [circumstitions.com] (it is double-layered, keep in mind), and more precisely its most erotically sensitive bits [circumstitions.com], so it's no surprise that it is clearly linked to erectile dysfunction [menshealth.com]. Oh, how about over a hundred baby deaths [circumstitions.com], every year, in the USA alone, or life-lasting psychological effects [cirp.org]?
As a mutilated man, I'd fully support a return to Hadrian's law: a total ban, under penalty of death. Stern, but fair!
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Nope. I heard circumcision may even cause premature ejaculation, as you have less "feedback", meaning less control... also, circumcision increases attrition in sex, making it less pleasant for women as well, even painful. I even read some testimonials from females [pastebin.com] (not sure how legit these are) who wondered how any woman could tolerate living with a cut man.
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Lack of circumcision - Circumcision during infancy or in childhood provides partial protection against penile cancer, but this is not the case when performed in adulthood.[12] It has been suggested that the reduction in risk may be due to reduced risk of phimosis;[12][10] other possible mechanisms include reduction in risk of smegma and HPV infection.[10] Several authors have proposed circumcision as a possible strategy for penile cancer prevention;[13][14][15] however, the American Cancer Society point to
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So if I build a nice tall fence around your city/town, you'd freely and with pleasure either tolerate it or move away without feeling even the slightest bit forced?
That depends, are you sending women, children and men to try and blow up other other people in cafe's, bus stops, and shopping malls?
The wall did it's job, when was the last time there was a suicide bombing by the palestinians. And in other cases where the palestinians were sniping at israeli civilians again it did it's job, and very well.
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Generally speaking, communities in the U.S. usually build them by choice. It's actually pretty rare here to wake up one morning to find soldiers in your backyard building a 50-foot concrete wall around your house and city. And I'm not sure it would have a positive effect on your property value.
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As opposed to the necessary ones?
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Re:What about OBESE models? (Score:5, Interesting)
What BMI range will be acceptable for models?
If you truly believe that BMI is an accurate measure of somebody's overall health, you have some learning to do. It's simply a ratio of a person's weight to their height. It does not take into account the fact that muscle mass is denser than fat mass, nor does it consider other factors like bone density (which can be an indicator of good health, even though it will increase your BMI).
This isn't about encouraging "fat fucks", this is about realizing that a size 0 is unhealthy, especially on a woman who's 5'11". Magazines have been promoting an impossible image of what the ideal woman actually looks like for decades, and any attempts at self-policing have largely failed. Photoshop just makes it worse, because they can take somebody who's actually really beautiful in real life, and make her "better"... It's airbrushing for the 21st century.
By the standards of the fashion industry, I'm morbidly obese... *gasp* she wears a size 12?!?! By any rational standard, however, my weight is exactly where it should be for a woman of my size. I'm fit and healthy, and that's all that matters. Women come in different shapes and sizes, and they need to promote that realism. It's a sad state of affairs that porn is the only place you can find realistically proportioned women in print, and that's because their buyers are usually interested in different... attributes....
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>>>If you truly believe that BMI is an accurate measure of somebody's overall health, you have some learning to do
Let's suppose he's a doctor.
How much more learning does he need?
You still think you know more than the doctors in the WHO and AMA who publish these BMI figures?
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Yes. I, at least, am aware that weight increases as the cube of height, not the square. Consequently, BMI tends to give numbers that are too high for tall people, and too low for short people. As an extreme example, many professional basketball players would be considered "obese" based on their BMI numbers, but "normal weight" based on body-fat percentage.
(Actually, because of changing body shape, it's around
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But why only for women. There's also a problem with men in most magazines. Most of them look like they spend 16 hours a day in a gym and are probably on steroids. Should we start to legislate how much muscle men pictured in magazines can have. Because if we don't we might have too many young men experimenting with steroids.
Such proposals have been advanced, on roughly the same logic about body-image issues, sometimes explicitly mentioning steroids, sometimes not.
My impression is that they are a harder sell because they just don't have the same body count to work with. Unless you really go to town on the steroids, most of the things you would do in the pursuit of an impossible musculature are somewhere between 'actually healthy' and 'harmful, in the common-gym-injuries sense'. You won't actually get there, and you might sti
Re:What about OBESE models? (Score:4, Insightful)
But why only for women. There's also a problem with men in most magazines. Most of them look like they spend 16 hours a day in a gym and are probably on steroids. Should we start to legislate how much muscle men pictured in magazines can have. Because if we don't we might have too many young men experimenting with steroids.
Society places an exponential weight on how a woman looks versus how a man looks. Little girls are being indoctrinated with the idea that "thin, and nothing else, is sexy" from a very early age, and feel shamed for not meeting those standards.
Boys, on the other hand, do not. They are indoctrinated with other messages, like competition and winning, and are given pro athletes to idolize and want to be.
It's also a negative influence, but at least athletes are actually performing the acts they do in the games. No one will argue that boys playing sports is bad for their health (even though it could be, look at how many kids are injured in organized school sports), but girls starving themselves for an ideal only made possible by photoshopping is much more harmful.
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To be fair, the big problems with BMI (as you yourself point out) are on the high end. Especially with athletic people (muscle weighs more than fat), but also with people who have higher bone density, or other reasons that the weight more than they "should", but aren't really fat. On the low end, it's usually a pretty reasonable measure. If your BMI is too low it almost always indicates *some* kind of problem (anorexia, glandular issues, low bone density, whatever, something is making you weigh to littl
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Re:There's an obesity epidemic (Score:5, Interesting)
There's actually a rather direct connection between the obesity epidemic and the presentation of skeletally thin models as a standard of beauty. An awful lot of basically healthy teenage girls try to starve themselves into looking like models, inevitably fail (girls who become models are already naturally very thin, even before they start the starvation diets) and "rebound" and end up weighing more than they did before. (Starvation sets off all kinds of nasty reactions in the body, and one of the things it does is encourage the body to pack on as much fat as possible when food becomes plentiful again; this made sense for our ancestors, living in times of feast alternating with famine, but it's terrible in the modern world.) After a few cycles of this, they end up with deeply screwed up metabolisms and lifelong problems maintaining a healthy weight. I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
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I don't know how much of the modern obsesity problem is attributable to this phenomenon, but I'm guessing it's a non-trivial amount.
It's certainly more than the amount to which people make themselves overweight via 800 calorie coffee drinks and 1,600 calorie "meals" of saturated fat and soy protein. Oh, wait, fast food and frappucinos have been around forever, whereas skinny people are a new thing, right?
Anecdote 1, meet anecdote 2.
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They also don't have a country that came into existence on a founding principal of mistrust of government.
It's not Israel that's odd here, if you look at the world. It's the US that is.
Re:Hard in the US (Score:5, Insightful)
ok. i paraphrased the last one, but these are all because we do pass laws requiring that companies don't misrepresent their products. The cereal flakes are actually quite small. You won't be doing donuts in that car. The action figures do not walk and talk. If we have decided that people are going to feel so ripped off by the actual size of their cereal flakes that we need laws governing how you can depict your cereal, it stands to reason that we might need to inform people that those models have been digitally altered to conform to unattainable levels of beauty.
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Models aren't the product, so I wonder if false advertising laws would even apply.
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Models aren't the product
That all depends on your definition of 'product'.
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It would be hard to get passed in the US because we care more about a corporation's health than a citizen's.
An alternate theory would be here in the US we think it's not the government's place to be dictating how big models should be on the off chance the odd woman will feel sad because she's not bright enough to distinguish fantasy from reality. Following this logic, we ought to ban movies like Twilight and anything associated with Disney princesses.