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Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
Possibly the most popular right wing thinker today, Jordan Peterson, advocates a meat only elimination diet for health reasons.
If pickiness about food hasn't been a thing amongst conservatives until lately, I'm sure lots and lots of them are thinking about it now.
Yeah the left and the right did a total reversal , with the left embracing healthy at any size, fat acceptance , etc and the right now being stridently pro-health
Is that true? More liberal people probably are less likely to embrace shaming as an avenue for encouraging healthy behavior (though far from universally - in most of the liberal social circles I occupy, fat people are still very much acceptable targets, especially if they're obviously gluttonous and idle), but health nuts lean left as well (a lot of that is woo, but we're judging on consciousness, not accuracy). Conversely, conservatives are more likely to be obese than liberals, less conscious about their diet, less likely to exercise, etc... (at least in the US).
The thing to remember is that the Blue Tribe derives from the New England Yankee/WASP elite, which in turn derives from the section of the English upper-middle class which looked up to the upper class (and was frequently descended from the younger sons of upper class families). In that class, if someone commits a sufficiently grave faux pas you are unfalteringly polite to their faces and then quietly disinvite them from your social circle. (And if enough people do this to you, you fall out of the elite). You never shame people in public - that would be making a scene. In fact, the only people you even shame in private are your children and mentees, who need to learn what not to do to avoid getting cold-shouldered.
Getting fat is not acceptable in Blue Tribe elite circles. Public fat-shaming is even less acceptable. These are not inconsistent.
Yes. It's frustrating that progressive ethics seem to tear down formal rules for what a person has to do to stay in good social standing (eg no hat at the dinner table, dress appropriately, no taking the lord's name in vain, tithe 10%, no extramarital sex) while erecting a gridwork of invisible, informal third rails that cause you to lose face if you step on them.
People on the spectrum/systems-focused people skew anti-woke. Self-flatteringly, I think, anti-wokes like me say this is because wokeness is irrational, and so people with rational minds see straight through it. But the old religious rules were also irrational. Maybe autistic/systems-focused people skew anti-woke because we're annoyed that the "new way" is so implicit and requires social saavy to navigate. For example, an autistic teen girl may start putting on weight while getting supportive feel-good messages from everyone; only when her social circle shrinks and she starts getting cold-shouldered does she realize she violated a norm no one spelled out for her. You can write the same story for a person who transitions and then never gets a boyfriend.
This leads to bitterness from the systems-focused person, who would prefer explicit rules.
Yes - I am pretty spergy (obviously, being here) and I always prefer social situations with written rules, whether that is a formal dress code, Robert’s Rules, or the rules of the board game we are playing.
Anthropologist Kate Fox in Watching the English talks about the “English social dis-ease” - a kind of national spergery - and how it causes the English to adopt formalised dress codes and form social institutions with clear rules of etiquette. I also suspect it is why we invented sports with written rules.
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