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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   44963 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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health risks

This one. Although it's incredible to me that of the options you put forward this one is so small and modified by "risks". I'm someone who needs to work pretty hard to not be fat. If I didn't think about food I would eat and drink to excess constantly. I have seen both sides of fat and thin plenty of times and I can say with zero doubt that it is far better to be fit. Everything you do when you're fat has this unpleasantness almost as a tax. It's unpleasant to lay down, it's unpleasant to sit up, it's unusually difficult to just move in the world, not because of society but because your body is not supposed to be this way, your heart and lungs are no supposed to support twice as much mass as they did in the ancestral environment. I'm fit at the moment and it is difficult to overstate just how much better life is when you're fit. You move through the world with an ease, you sleep better, wake up more easily, it's a genuine pleasure just to move about in the world.

And then the more medical health risks as you've mentioned. Sure, of course, lets get medicine to alleviate what we can of them. I'd celebrate a side effect free pill that would solve these issues. I've seen enough loved ones die decades too early because of these "risks" and I'd cherish those extra decades. But we don't have that medicine. And activism is not going to bring us that medicine. Fat acceptance is not going to bring us that medicine.

would you say glasses solve the root problem of poor eyesight? Of course, nobody is disgusted by poor eyesight

My eyesight is starting to go a bit, I'll be thirty soon and this is around when other people in my family moved to needing glasses. A solution? No. And I'd eat more carrots if that would fix the issue even though I despise that particular vegetable. But we don't have the equivalent solution for eye sight that we do for being fat.

You might argue that you consistently are taking the path of least resistance

I would not phrase it like this no, I'm trying to take the best paths taking resistance into account. I'm aiming for optimal and will take the carrot or kale path if they are worth the expense.

The question then, is what is the fat-acceptance movement doing differently?

They are taking the greased path into a pit of despair and human suffering.

they would approve of societal interventions to increase fatness, because interventions to decrease it are problematic. Whether or not they can do this openly is a political question of optics. This also explains LGBTQ groomers.

I will oppose them so long as there remains breath in my lungs.

You'd welcome medicine to fix those health problems but will it fix the unpleasantness that you spent a paragraph detailing? I think more medicine is good but I'd still prefer a world where everyone is thin. It's less disgusting in my opinion.

My point is that a philosopher of perfect emptiness couldn't choose between these two:

  • making fat people no longer exist

  • making it healthy to be fat

It takes an additional axiom like:

  • most efficient solution

  • fatness is disgusting

  • fatness is beautiful and diverse

In order to really care for one over the other.

I'm normally quite good at decoupling but the whole point is that we don't have this choice. It's not just a matter of efficiency, it's make fat people no longer exist or just be worse off for every marginal increase in obesity. We, at the moment, cannot mitigate the totally natural impacts of obesity. My disgust is totally irrelevant to diabetes and heart disease. The choice in the world that exists is not difficult.

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