The New York Times ran an op-ed arguing that shorter people are better because they have a smaller carbon footprint ๐Ÿ’€
ยท Jan 2, 2023 ยท NottheBee.com

Down with tall people!

Look at this quote:

When you mate with shorter people, you're potentially saving the planet by shrinking the needs of subsequent generations. Lowering the height minimum for prospective partners on your dating profile is a step toward a greener planet.

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The New York Times is publishing that bitter kid from 3rd grade who got bullied for his size.

It's true that there are physical advantages to different body shapes, but I've been told we can't talk about that lest we stray into being fatphobic!

The short are also inherent conservationists, which is more crucial than ever in this world of eight billion. Thomas Samaras, who has been studying height for 40 years and is known in small circles as the Godfather of Shrink Think, a widely unknown philosophy that considers small superior, calculated that if we kept our proportions the same but were just 10 percent shorter in America alone, we would save 87 million tons of food per year (not to mention trillions of gallons of water, quadrillions of B.T.U.s of energy and millions of tons of trash).

This writer, Mara Altman, apparently wakes up in the morning and dreams about turning the human race into a species of diminutive dwarves in order to save the planet.

When I was a kid, we were dreaming up futuristic storylines where humanity built hulking supersoldiers to fight back the alien hordes as we spread out into the cosmos.

Now the NYT is dreaming up a future where humanity is really only worth saving if we all turn into garden gnomes so we can eat less food.

From where I stand โ€” at five feet even โ€” being tall is a widely held fantasy of superiority that long ago should have been retired.

Fun fact: Your average European a few hundred years ago was barely over five feet. Malnutrition is fun!

It made sense to fawn over height when it facilitated survival. Ages ago, when the necessity of defending oneself cropped up daily, if not hourly, tall people could more easily protect their families and bring home some woolly rhino flank. Today, those who have the stamina to sit in an office chair all day bring home the plastic-wrapped meats.

Ah yes, because life is about sitting in a cubicle and there are no advantages to being taller, stronger, and faster in any job on the planet.

Nope, we all live in air-conditioned offices. No one would need extra muscle mass.

Let's all just be the comfy couch potatoes from WALL-E!

Heck, moving burns energy and energy is killing the planet!! You don't want to kill the planet, do you??

There is an ongoing debate about the stature of a population and what it means for the prosperity and fairness of a nation, but I'm interested in shortness on an individual level.

Amazing. That is one of the dumbest sentences I have ever read.

"An ongoing debate"

What, in your head??

But remember, not having food or possessions is a good thing!

See, Mara says it was one of those evil 18th-century white people who started fetishizing tallness.

In "Size Matters," the journalist Stephen S. Hall wrote that in the 18th century Frederick William of Prussia paid exorbitant sums to recruit "giant" soldiers from around the globe, institutionalizing "the desirability of height for the first time in a large, postmedieval society" and attaching tangible value to inches that would reverberate into modern times.

"Attaching tangible value to inches"

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This lady writes great comedy!

Anyway, yeah, I'm sure no one on the planet ever, throughout all of history, thought that height gave advantages to soldiers.

The irony today is that the best wetwork operators are often average size. That's because they have to be able to withstand things like G-forces while parachuting out of a plane at 30,000 feet, or swimming through swamps for 8 hours to get to a target โ€“ all while carrying 150 pounds of gear.

The tall and beefy guys tend to burn through their energy quicker, and in most cases, don't present tactical value other than being larger targets. Guns are the great equalizer.

But imagine telling the NBA that only Prussians from the 1800s came up with the idea that being tall has value in many fields!

The echoes of these early human desires and biases have stuck in our minds like a particularly catchy marketing jingle, so much so that we vote for tall candidates assuming that they are better leaders and often choose tall people as partners with no definitive data that they make better spouses.

Did you hear that, ladies? If you want a guy who is taller than you, you're probably evil.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the 6-foot-8-inch economist and diplomat, suggested that favoring the tall was "one of the most blatant and forgiven prejudices in our society."

This is all so stupid.

Tell ya what โ€“ If you're short, I'll start apologizing that you have to stand on step stools the moment you empathize with my pain bumping my head on my basement ceiling rafters (I have reflectors on them to help with the daily struggle).

We're all different, but these weird neo-Marxists always have to find some stupid new way to divide us over "prejudice."

As a preteen I injected Humatrope into my thighs for three and a half years, at the behest of my parents, who feared I'd be alienated for being short.

Yeah, you know what would help with that?

Teaching people to be comfortable with the bodies they have, like people used to say when I was a kid, and getting them to be as healthy as possible in them. Instead, we have that backwards now.

We tell these people to accept their bodies in Gatorade Fit ads:

And these people that their bodies aren't good enough, so they need to change them:

Short people don't just save resources, but as resources become scarcer because of the earth's growing population and global warming, they may also be best suited for long-term survival (and not just because more of us will be able to jam into spaceships when we are forced off this planet we wrecked).

Ah, the climate doomsday cult again.

Thomas Malthus would be proud.

The future I envision is different: I want my children's children to know the value of short. I want them to call themselves "short drinks of water" with "legs for minutes." While one yells, "I'm the shortest," I hope the other will bend his knees to gain an advantage, shouting, "No, I'm the shortest!"

This is literally never going to happen.

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