Cav's Place

You always have at least four choices. You may die, one way or another, even if not necessarily physically. You may adapt to the conditions and simply push through, leaving little trace of your presence, eventually not even within yourself. You may fail to adapt without doing so on purpose, therefore being crushed. Or you may stubbornly, unapologetically, refuse to adapt, and do what you can to force the conditions to adapt to you.
You may fail. In fact, you certainly will the first time, and it will be painful, embarrassing, disheartening. You may feel it’s all hopeless, and that you are completely powerless and worthless. But if you somehow pick yourself back up and try again… Well, you’ll most probably fail again, and again, and again. It will still be painful, it will still be embarrassing, it will still be disheartening. But if you do it right, it will be slightly, ever so slightly, less so each time. You will fail, but you will fail better.
Then, one day, if you persevere long enough, you may just about, infuriatingly, demoralizingly nearly, manage not to fail. You still will, but that will be the key moment. If you’ll learn from that as well, and try again despite it all, the next time you should, just maybe, sort of, highly arguably, succeed. If everyone else gets your version first. And they look at it from the right angle.
Once you’re there, however, the hardest part is over. It’s just sad that so few ever get that far, and so many don’t even start on this path, fearing the costs of time, of sweat, of tears. But you know what? Time will pass anyway, and tears will be shed for one reason or another, whether by your eyes or by your true inner self, lost, abandoned, perhaps murdered, by you and you alone, in the struggle to adapt, to be “normal”, to know your place.
As for the sweat… Well, it is a struggle to be alive. It is a struggle to be anything, in fact. It is a terrible struggle to be someone you’re not, not truly, not if you’d care and know yourself. So why not struggle for the chance that maybe, just maybe, one day, perhaps far into the future, it may all become easier? Not just for you, but for everyone who deserves something better, or nobler, or at least something kinder.

As you may already be aware, perhaps after noticing what appeared on the screen when you first visited various sites, including this one, today is the Internet Slowdown, which marks another step in the battle for network neutrality. Or the battle against cable company fuckery, as John Oliver puts it in his explanation of the issue and what’s at stake, which is far more interesting than any article I happened to stumble into, not to mention anything I may write myself, so I’d tell you to watch it if you haven’t already, whether you already know what it’s all about or not.
Yes, at the moment the problem may appear to be focused on the United States, but the Internet is global and if this boulder is allowed to start rolling in a country that’s such a major player on the world stage and where so much of the infrastructure and so many of the biggest companies are located, it’ll be that much more difficult to stop it from crushing everything else in its path as well in the near future. In other words, while the simple fact that we should show solidarity with each other, as Internet users of the world, should be enough to make you want to get involved regardless of your location, other motivations are also there for those who require them.

I only mean to briefly mark the moment in this post, so I won’t get into details and there’s little point in doing so anyway, considering the video I linked to and all the information readily available for those who want to dig deeper, but what is being asked shouldn’t even need any complicated explanations. After all, the main demand is simply to ensure that all ISPs will treat all typical Internet traffic equally, without any sort of discrimination based on the sites accessed, the types of content transferred or the protocols used. Higher priority obviously needs to be given to critical services such as the emergency and security ones, but other than that, everything should be treated the same way.
Of course, the lack of competition, which is definitely also a major problem in the United States and a large part of the reason why cable company fuckery is even a possibility, absolutely needs to be addressed as well, but that’s a more complicated and lengthy process. Doesn’t seem to be so hard to destroy it, as it’s been happening here as well, but once that favorable climate is gone, it’s difficult to recreate even without taking the current economic conditions into account.
As such, the second request which should be made right now, alongside formally enforcing network neutrality, should be to regulate ISPs in order to prevent them from taking advantage of their dominant market position in all areas where customer choice is restricted by monopolies or deals between the companies. If decent pricing and service quality standards will be created, updated periodically to keep up with advancements in technology and, very importantly, strictly enforced, much of the negative impact of the lack of competition will be mitigated.

I was saying in the previous post that we need to figure out what to do in order to maximize the positive and minimize the negative consequences of this, but that first requires identifying precisely what “this” actually involves, other than an obvious invasion of privacy. And the answer is, perhaps oddly enough for many, “not much”. I mean, all that happened was that the Internet apparently suddenly found out that a number of women, some of whom aren’t exactly strangers to revealing themselves, have naked bodies under their clothes and engage in sexual activities. Imagine that…
However, our society tends to depict sexuality, and women’s sexuality in particular, as something shameful that needs to be hidden away from the eyes of the world, and as such many do make a big deal out of something that, violation of privacy aside, shouldn’t necessarily be treated differently from pictures of food and people eating, for example. Sadly, while some of those affected seem to be largely ignoring the matter and a few even appeared to take what happened in good humor, others reacted in ways which only make matters worse.
Now I’m obviously not referring to those taking action against harassment or the, shall we say, persistent unwanted attention generated by the leaked images, as that’s perfectly normal. However, lashing out at anyone who may look at the pictures, threatening all those who share any of them with legal action, serving sites with orders to take them down due to copyright violation or first claiming those depicting you are fakes and then having lawyers warn sites not to publish them because you were underage when they were taken even though apparently the file data says otherwise shows a degree of desperation that shouldn’t exist. If the point should be to ride this out with your head held high, not to mention to make something positive on a larger scale out of it, there’s no room for anything that merely serves to enforce the notion that you’re highly vulnerable to the impact of the leaks.

Should probably mention at this point that I did experience something of the sort after I stopped going to school. Had continued exchanging e-mails with one former classmate whom I considered a close friend at the time and after well over a year, when she suddenly stopped talking to me, another former classmate, who could never stand me and was probably unhappy that their source of entertainment was taken away, sent me a message to tell me she had been passing my e-mails around in class and they were even read out loud during breaks, while also using the sort of language you’d expect to ask for more intimate details about my girlfriend and mock the problems I had with hemorrhoids.
Now I’ll say I reacted quite well to that, promptly shutting him up by calmly correcting the few details he had gotten wrong while trying to prove he did indeed read the extremely personal e-mails I had sent during that time and asking him to tell the others to see about raising as much money as the winner of that season of Big Brother was to receive, since I was apparently followed around for way longer anyway. In addition, I resolved to be even more of an open book than I was until then, to minimize the risk of being surprised by anyone learning anything I didn’t already make public on my own. However, the moment was definitely uncomfortable, especially since I wasn’t the only one affected by it, and if I had the choice between that and having a bunch of naked pictures end up all over the Internet, I’d have taken the second option any day!

Not that anyone needs false friends to have their privacy violated in such a manner, considering what’s been happening in recent years and how easy it now seems to be to become a “person of interest” for one reason or another, or to have some of your communications monitored even if you’re not. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that some leaked documents revealed that the sheer amount of nudity and sex that was intercepted was a real problem for security agencies, some of those tasked with monitoring demanding methods to filter out such images and messages, so if you sent or stored anything of the sort on-line in recent years, it may have been seen by at least a few pairs of eyes other than those the content was intended for, even without any hackers getting involved.
In other words, on the one hand we have employees of the state, equipped, trained and paid by your taxes, who have the law on their side and are often also aided by major corporations as they violate your privacy looking for reasons to charge you of a crime. On the other hand, we have some guys who most likely operate on their own resources while both the authorities and the corporations try to find ways to stop them and prevent this from happening again, who violate your privacy looking for something to jerk off to. Once again, if given the choice I’m quite sure I’ll take this second option, obviously as long as it remains limited to this and doesn’t lead to things such as identity theft or stealing financial information.

Some may claim I’m only saying this because I’m a man, and while that’s far from entirely correct, there may be some truth in it. After all, while I’m sure there are plenty of well-known men that significant numbers of straight women, gay men and bisexuals would be interested in seeing naked, I rather doubt it’d have been considered this much of a scandal if this would have happened to them instead, and I’m almost certain the victims themselves would have reacted in a much more balanced and likely even humorous manner. Yet that only serves to prove one of my points.
This gap between men and women when it comes to the general public’s perception of their sexuality needs to be bridged, likely even before we can get to the greater issue of making the simple concept of regular, everyday nudity and sex more socially acceptable. After all, it seems that many of the pictures reveal only breasts, which means they’re only worth noting because those depicted are women and for some reason society expects and frequently even requires women to keep theirs hidden. If it’d have been pictures of men instead, few would have cared simply because there’s nothing unusual, much less shocking, in seeing a man’s bare chest.
For this reason, while what I heard about regular women posting pictures of their breasts to show solidarity with those who were hacked is not a bad idea and may go some way towards reducing this senseless stigma associated with women exposing themselves or being exposed in such a manner, I believe a message would truly be sent if similarly well-known and desirable men would do it as well. Considering what I said above, in plenty of cases nothing more than a bare chest may be needed to underline this discrimination and the need to do something about it, though it would obviously help if at least a few would tastefully go further, both as a stronger show of solidarity and as a way to challenge this prevailing misguided notion that nudity and sex are inherently “dirty” and shameful.

The worst part is that, as we all know, while this typical, everyday nudity and sex, which is simply natural and can be liberating and fulfilling for many, is shunned, certain more or less perverted forms of sexuality tend to be generally accepted when they’re used to shock, to advertise or simply to attract attention in one way or another. I mean, even without considering some of the “leaks” of supposedly private images that we now know were in fact publicity stunts, glance at a few tabloids on any given day and you’ll probably notice several stories about revealing outfits or “accidental” flashing of various body parts that are considered to be more or less business as usual, yet at the same time you now have messages posted by some who weren’t affected stating that thankfully all of their private pictures are of cats and food, suggesting that they wouldn’t exactly be affected even if their accounts would be hacked as well.
That’s completely wrong and it’s a problem that needs to be addressed no matter how much society strives to avoid doing so and even to silence those who attempt to start the debate. If the images in question were never meant to be public and they suddenly end up out there, your privacy has been violated in exactly the same manner whether you were exposed while playing with your pussy or while playing with your other kind of pussy. In addition, any rational analysis will find few reasons to see this regular, everyday sexuality as wrong, but the same thing definitely can’t be said about this carefully tailored use of the natural state of our bodies and of entirely natural and, under the right circumstances, likely beautiful and meaningful behaviors for the purpose of obtaining various gains, seeing as we’re simply talking of the exploitation of people’s instincts for the purpose of manipulating them.

Still, while this event has enough of an impact at least on certain groups to have the potential to nudge society’s views of sexuality in general and women’s sexuality in particular at least a short distance in one direction or the other, I’m probably going too far for one post, so let me get back to the matter at hand. A significant number of women, some of them famous and most of the others well-known to at least some groups of people, have had their accounts hacked and private pictures and videos in which they appear naked or even engaged in certain sexual activities have been made public, and the question is what should they and what should we, as in those of us who took a somewhat more rational interest in the matter, do about it.
Though I noticed my own curiosity lessening significantly as I wrote this, I’ll stand by my previous statement and say again that I don’t think it’d be wrong to look at whatever’s already public. What most definitely is wrong, on the other hand, is using this incident to demean or harass the women in question and, while in most cases those who do so tend to go away on their own if ignored, those who insist may need to be set straight. Actually contacting the victims yourself and mentioning this issue, or attempting to trigger a response from them at this time, is most probably a terrible idea, however, even if you only mean to show support. In addition, I believe that these efforts to accurately match each picture or video to a person even when the face isn’t visible are also wrong, seeing as, whether we’re talking about simple eye candy or about, shall we say, more practical applications, as long as it’s neither your partner nor a sex worker whose services you’re interested in using, an image of an attractive naked person of the sex you’re attracted to should be no different from that of another.
On the other hand, those who were affected by this need to behave in a manner that’ll make it clear they’re not vulnerable to any of the attacks they may find themselves facing because of what happened, which unfortunately some of them haven’t done. They obviously should take whatever legal action is appropriate against the hackers themselves, but otherwise their behavior must prove beyond doubt that they’re comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality, and that they know perfectly well that neither what can be seen in those pictures or videos nor the fact that these files exist and were perhaps sent to someone else as well should be seen as illegal, immoral or wrong in any other way. In many cases, a brief humorous reaction or even ignoring the matter entirely may be enough, but they may need to state all of this in just so many words if they end up being accused of tarnishing their image or of crap like no longer being suitable role models.

I’d have more to say, most of it obviously about the potential wider implications and the bigger problems which this incident merely served to highlight once again, but this is already even longer than I thought it’ll be. As such, I’ll stop here and hope that, somehow, more good will come out of this than bad and some years down the line we’ll know that, likely against the intentions of the hackers, the end result of this scandal was a step, however small, towards a more rational and natural view of everyday sexuality in general and women’s sexuality in particular. Not that this is particularly likely, of course, humans being humans, but one can hope, and one can do his or her part regardless of the odds.

Let’s start with the simple and easy part: It is a massive violation of privacy and those who actually hacked accounts to obtain all these pictures and movies should be caught and punished, along with anyone attempting to use this to spread malware, anyone who created any tools specifically for the hackers to use as part of this operation, and those who directly profit by trying to sell the images or posting them on sites that they obtain revenue from, be it through membership fees or advertising. In addition, it should go without saying that any threats or harassment aimed at those depicted in the images should be dealt with swiftly and the culprits punished accordingly.
Once you get past that point, however, it gets more complicated. For example, if anyone somehow obtained any such content without hacking, such as after accidentally receiving it or finding it when it wasn’t private, whether due to a bug or user error, should that person also be punished for keeping it? I hardly think so. Or should anyone sharing this content, whether by hosting it or merely by posting links, have to worry about any penalties? Well, depends on whether it’s done as a form of harassment or in a way that may directly harm those depicted, such as by including information on how to access their accounts, evidence of victimless illegal activities or private contact information. If that’s the case, then absolutely, but if not, my answer is a very clear no, which obviously also applies to anyone merely viewing what others share.

To get this out of the way, I don’t know all the details about what’s already out there, since all I did so far was quickly glance through some images, I assume from the initial release, dumped by someone on a site and some additional censored ones posted on another. I did not actively look for all of the content, refrained from clicking some of the links I saw, didn’t check AnonIB or 4chan at all, and didn’t download any of the archives claiming to contain most or all of what was released so far. Not exactly sure I intend to do so later either, though mere curiosity makes it quite likely, unless the materials will no longer be readily accessible by the time I’ll make up my mind.
I did occasionally check one dedicated Reddit page, however, clicking links that led to reactions, explanations and news pieces on sites I knew were safe, and also stumbled into a few other articles on my own as well. This means I probably have less actual information than plenty of Internet users, but nevertheless believe it’s enough to form a solid enough opinion about the impact this has, the ways in which it might have happened, the possible motivations and some potential solutions from this point forward.

Still, before moving on I’d like to also briefly mention the mess that started when Zoe Quinn’s former boyfriend released evidence of her cheating multiple times and which continues to plague the gaming community. Of course, the issue wasn’t necessarily that she cheated, but that she’s a developer and some of her partners work in the gaming press, which added another angle to the problem of the gaming industry and press working together against the interests of gamers. Worse, what followed was that little difference was made between misogynists using this as an excuse to throw shit and people trying to start a rational debate on the matter when several other developers released statements strongly condemning any attacks against her, major gaming sites immediately moved to censor any mention of the scandal and independent ones were pressured into removing their articles on the topic.
Now that would have made attacks against those seen as responsible for such censorship understandable and I dare say even fair, but nothing much seemed to happen to the sites directly responsible or to the men she actually cheated with. Instead, Zoe and a number of the developers who took her side were hacked and their personal information was made public, several on-line games and services were also attacked, while in what is quite obviously a related incident Anita Sarkeesian received particularly credible death threats, which instantly took the situation to an entirely different level.
Yes, a fair amount of background information is needed to properly understand all of this if it’s all news to you, but suffice to say that Zoe and Anita are particularly vocal activists who admittedly tend to go too far at times, but who lead an absolutely necessary battle against the traditional model that says games are made for young heterosexual men, female characters being typically relegated to the roles of prostitute, shallow love interest or damsel in distress while minorities, and sexual ones in particular, are depicted poorly or not at all. As such, it becomes rather obvious that the people behind these attacks are misogynists and trolls who were merely looking for an excuse, which the gaming press and some indie developers admittedly offered to them on a silver platter, and this makes it quite easy to see how the two events may well be related, at least if you take “The Fappening” as an attempt to publicly humiliate famous women.

That said, let me also get the part which may be considered victim blaming out of the way and ask why did these women store this content that they obviously dread to see made public in the cloud? This obviously doesn’t apply to anything the hackers obtained by intercepting communications or hacking devices to access content stored locally, and it likely also doesn’t apply to those who seem to manage to simply ignore the mess or had reactions that make it seem they don’t mind it quite so much, but if there’s something you absolutely want to keep strictly private, you must never store it on a server and must never use services that require you to do so. Not that avoiding this keeps you completely safe, of course, but if you keep such content out there longer than it takes to send it to the person you mean to send it to and it’s compromised during that time, you share the blame more or less equally with the hacker and the service you use.
Before anyone asks, yes, I have the exact same attitude when credit card information is stolen after stores or game servers are hacked, for example. Even yesterday, when I shared an article about this recent Home Depot hack, I did so with a comment asking people to get back to using cash, and whenever users are concerned about data theft from the servers of companies that require a permanent connection and personal information to even play their single-player games I tend to say something along the lines of “serves them right”, though in that case it’s also a matter of practices that need to stop being tolerated.

Now it does seem that some pictures had been deleted long before they were leaked, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they were somehow recovered by the hackers, since it’s perfectly obvious that such an operation required multiple people and a significant amount of time. If what some messages say is true, we’re talking at the very least of several months, but this still doesn’t explain the presence of images supposedly deleted years ago, the leaks that seem to be coming from different sources and the hostile reaction that some hackers seemed to have. It may have been one element of the operation, of course, but it’s the other explanation I saw that seems quite certain be true, and by this I’m referring to the fact that a group of hackers who kept a very low profile, obtaining such images and secretly trading them among themselves for years, was infiltrated by someone who then decided to make their finds public, therefore also making it impossible for them to continue, whether willingly or not.
Under these circumstances, discussions about the exact methods used aren’t particularly relevant anymore, since they couldn’t possibly apply to all cases. It does seem likely that at least a large part of the content was obtained by breaching the iCloud service, possibly using a mix of vulnerabilities that may have now been patched, social engineering and brute force attacks, but I also saw mentions of Google Docs and Dropbox vulnerabilities that were recent enough to be taken into consideration, plus the chance that at least a few smartphones were compromised directly. And that’s only the most obvious part of the list, since if we’re talking about a dedicated group that specialized in this and operated for years, there’s no way of knowing what else they may have found at one point or another.

Regardless of how it happened, however, what’s clear is that this is pretty much “the” story on the Internet these days and has the potential to have quite a significant impact in “real life” as well, so the question is how to minimize the negative consequences and maximize the positive ones. But 1500 words in two days without even getting to the important part is too much already, so I’m going to post this now and continue later with the rest.

Sunday I finally got around to reading the article about food insecurity in the United States published in this month’s edition of National Geographic and found it infuriating. That obviously wasn’t necessarily because this issue exists, but for a number of reasons starting from the fact that the cases depicted were of families with children, even with several children, and where children were usually also the most important part of the problem. I mean, the fact that people keep bringing children into this dreadfully overpopulated world is the main reason why resource shortages exist and then you expect me to feel sorry for those who face shortages after doing just that?
Still, this oddly enough won’t be a post about overpopulation. It won’t be about bad parenting either, even though ample evidence of that is provided by the mentions of children who refuse free school meals despite not having enough food at home and then still waste a part of what little they do have, or ask for and receive fast food from parents who claim to know it’s not healthy and can’t afford it either, or work hard to get themselves cool sneakers to match their parents’ flattering clothes, comfortable cars or the appliances bought on credit despite worrying about their next meal about half the time or even living in a homeless shelter. Instead, this post will be about the appallingly wrong choices that allow this problem to exist and even worsen in a country that, albeit at a completely unsustainable environmental cost, could currently eliminate it completely.

It’s difficult to say who is most at fault, so it’s equally difficult to know where to start and I was thinking to simply comment on the issues that stood out to me the most in the order they appear in the article itself, leaving the ones already mentioned above aside. However, that map of the “food deserts” in Houston, detailing the number and locations of households that are more than half a mile from a supermarket and don’t have a car, keeps nagging me. While probably not pointing out any of the worst causes, it seems to be such a succinct depiction of so many things that are terribly wrong that I simply have to start from it.
Look, I just used Google Maps to calculate the distance I cover when I walk to the hypermarket I prefer and the result was 3.3 kilometers, or just over two miles. It typically takes me 35 minutes, which is all the time I spend walking because on the way back I use the free transportation which some such major chains that operate here learned is worth offering, one of the routes dropping me off maybe some 50 meters or so from home. And yes, I could use it to get there as well, but unless the weather’s terrible I won’t even consider it. After all, that’s only some light exercise that most people could actually do with daily, not just weekly or however often one needs to visit such a store, so it’s utterly ludicrous for any person who’s in reasonable health and not too old to claim they’re in a “food desert” inside a city if they don’t have a supermarket within half a mile!
Sure, the weight of the purchases may be an issue on the way back, but a trolley cart can be an affordable and particularly useful investment in that case, plus that if you’re buying for the whole family, there may also be more people who could come and share that weight, so it should usually be manageable even if your only options are walking or cycling. Not that they should be, of course, but if they want stores to offer transportation like some do here, customers will need to prove that they’d rather not use their cars, and that plenty of them would choose a store that offers such a service, be it for free or for a modest fee, over one that doesn’t. And every city obviously needs to have reliable and affordable public transportation, including facilities for people with reduced mobility or carrying heavy items, but once again it won’t happen if the large majority of residents show that they prefer to drive everywhere instead of demanding, and then actually using, other methods to get around. Also, please note that I didn’t even take deliveries or asking friends or relatives for help into account.
Convenience tends to be an enemy of independence, and independence may often be a requirement for security, especially when it comes to resources. As such, while multiple factors, not least of which being the existing infrastructure, conspire to create and maintain this situation, people’s choices and behavior definitely play a major part. I mean, if you need another example see the part of the article about the home health aide who needs to drive all over the city to see her clients and often relies on premade food because she says she can’t go all the way home to cook, completely missing the fact that she could simply bring cooked food with her, and a small cooler to keep it from spoiling even on particularly hot days would pay for itself, especially if you also consider the health benefits.

It’s perfectly obvious that the less you can afford to buy or pay others to make for you, the more you need to obtain and make yourself, so the more independence you need. When it comes to food, this means growing, gathering, catching and cooking, and probably also setting up a local system based on exchanges between people who find themselves in a similar situation, whether out of need or out of the simple desire to control the way their basic needs are met. This may not work in the middle of an actual desert or some other similar area, but if you have a garden, no matter how small, or a balcony where you can place some pots, or a nearby forest where you can try to forage, there is definitely something you can do that will make a difference.
Thankfully, the article does give one good example when it comes to this, by mentioning a woman who dug two gardens in her yard, taught herself how to can food and forage for edible plants and generally ensures her family’s food security despite their meager income because she “makes procuring food her full-time job”. Unfortunately, the very next paragraph makes excuses for all the others who don’t do the same and instead possibly work multiple jobs that still don’t offer them sufficient money, so they end up eating on the run, choosing convenience over anything else and therefore relying on fast foods or processed foods regardless of their effects on health or even their price. That sort of behavior is wrong in more ways than one, and so is trying to justify it.
Worse, the next part of the article stresses this point regarding the prevalence of the wrong types of food by mentioning how “people in rural Iowa can be malnourished amid forests of cornstalks”, because that ends up on their plates in the form of meat from corn-fed animals or processed foods or drinks sweetened with corn syrup, even though one would think that, if you’re otherwise poor but have plenty of corn, you’d be eating plenty of corn, be it canned, boiled, foods based on cornmeal and whatever else you could directly make out of corn. I mean, there are plenty of other reasons why nutrition should be based on products that are as low on the food chain and as unprocessed as possible, whether we’re talking in terms of health, environmental impact or animal welfare, but nutritional value for the money is one of them, so the poor should normally strive for this even more than those who could afford anything they wanted.

It’s perfectly true that authorities, businesses and people who are better off also bear a large part of the blame, but the personal choices and priorities of those most affected clearly play a significant role in creating and maintaining this sad state of affairs. Not that reading such an article was needed to confirm this, of course, but seeing all the excuses for this behavior certainly proves that the problem runs far deeper and that tackling it from any angle will require significant changes in mentality and social framework.
Let’s start from the cars, which are supposedly “a necessity, not a luxury”, even though, for example, while writing this I sent someone a link to the article, mentioning the “food desert” part, and she was telling me that when she was little she was shopping from a hypermarket five kilometers away and one summer she was walking 16 kilometers, eight each way, to study, on a road with no sidewalks, staying on the side which allowed her to see the cars coming. Of course, nobody should find themselves in such a situation, and if they do then they’d do well to remember that bicycles exist as well, but if it’s between walking such a distance in those conditions and eating, or at least eating anything reasonably nutritious and healthy, the rational choice should be quite obvious and will eventually lead to solving the problem anyway, even if only because politicians will fear losing their positions otherwise.
And then you have all other elements of a painfully consumerist culture that’s overly concerned with maintaining a middle-class appearance in spite of poverty, starting with the decent houses and continuing with the comfortable clothes and toys, even if they’re purchased from discount stores or even yard sales, or the electronics bought on credit. Actually, I may say that then you have credit in general, as it’s mentioned several times during the article despite the fact that it only makes you pay more in the end and should therefore be avoided except in case of true emergencies, unless of course the purpose is an investment expected to result in a profit that will clearly exceed the interest rate.
To put it very bluntly, it’s like these people started by making a mess of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, placing obtaining others’ respect above health or finances above meeting basic physiological needs, and then added massive helpings of laziness, ignorance and plain stupidity on top. This article largely read as a list of bad examples, an inventory of choices and behavior patterns ranging from uninspired to absolutely terrible, and yet it seemed to intend to make the reader pity the people depicted and all the others like them. Why that would be, I honestly couldn’t say.

In fact, though I initially meant to also include comments about what the authorities are doing wrong, I’m going to end this post here. It got away from me anyway, considering how long it already is, but the point is that, with some rare exceptions like the one which was mentioned and then quickly brushed aside as too inconvenient for most, these people keep themselves in this situation and depicting their troubles in such a manner is a slap in the face for all those facing real hunger in so many other parts of the world, some of whom find themselves in that situation through no fault of their own. It’s infuriating, it’s downright sickening, and it most definitely should have never been published in these terms in a magazine like National Geographic… Not that I’m surprised that it was, of course, considering the idiotic reasoning behind this entire series of articles.