This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Harry Potter and the Vibe Shift
I actually was thinking about giving this topic a rest - it makes me feel like I'm being radicalized in slow motion - but...just when I thought I was out...some room for optimism: NY Times: In Defense of J.K. Rowling
To give a brief rundown of the situation:
NYTimes employees in conjunction with GLAAD released a letter putting pressure on the NYTimes for reporting in a "biased" fashion on trans issues recently and how it's being used by states to pass bills against gender medicine.
The NYT...actually shows some spine and refuses to bend, saying: “...But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.". Who would have thought that we'd get to the point where a basic recognition of the different role of activists and journalists would be noteworthy?
Apparently the NYT also posted an internal memo warning NYT staffers against public working with an activist organization against their own company stating that they: "will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums."
Then, we see what the bruhaha was likely about and what the open letter was trying to preempt: we get the above op-ed yesterday, basically defending JKR against the criticism she faced - ahead of the release of The Witch Trials of JKR by Megan Phelps-Roper, an escapee from the Westboro Baptist Church.
In essence: the same strategy we've seen from wreckers and ideologues time after time played out, but the Times did the bare minimum and acted like adults. At a certain point - just as with wreckers like Felicia Somnez at WaPo - I suppose it simply became too much for too little gain. The constant fitna was fine when it was in service of popular causes with little cost, but now seems to be in service of a cause that is dragging many people down. So why not put out the op-ed, while also keeping the workers in line?
Said article's content?
...
Nothing here is new to anyone who spent any time checking on the actual words of JKR and her defenders. But it is interesting to see the NYT posting about it and fighting the pushback, especially as it follows the incredible failure of the Hogwarts: Legacy boycott and Sturgeon's fall from power*
The backlash can no longer be written off as the cultural peculiarity of "TERF Island" - a desperate rhetorical ploy used by activists to distract the blind. It's not just a European thing. It's everywhere.
My personal take was that transactivism was just the next, inevitable step in the march to atomization in liberalism. And it probably still is. But there may be bridges too far, even for liberals. I hope.
A good note to leave the trans issue on for at least a while and reset my brain before I become some sort of schizo, hyper-reactionary monarchist or something. Maybe go play a few new games...
* It's been a great month for her, after years of shit, I have to say.
Similar here, I figured that the high water mark before the tide receded would be somewhere in the vicinity of HAAS Fat Activism and the push for acceptance of "Otherkin." I hoped dearly that it would be be WELL before we hit the "MAP is a valid and acceptable sexuality" movement.
My suspicion is that the very visible entrance of Trans women into female sports leagues combined with the push for gender reassignment of prepubescent children is what snapped normies into a posture of resistance.
Note that I don't think the resistance is particularly well organized or even coherent, but with NYT taking the position that "it is in fact acceptable to consider the implications of these policies and one is not required to accept activist claims at face value" at least there's some room to breathe for those who actually WANT there to be a discussion on the matter.
But the left has no option to just retreat on this point, and as we've seen even the most milquetoast of defiance is treated as a nigh-existential threat, so generally I just find myself wondering which angle of attack they will implement next.
It feels very weird, though, to be on TheMotte talking about a culture war issue where the right is seemingly the one with momentum and the left is now on defense. Only took the combined might of the most popular author on the planet, the largest newspaper on the planet, and some of the more popular GOP governors and pundits.
The Cathedral as a whole appears to be proceeding with it's general plans quite unhindered, mind.
That, and the high-profile sex crimes cases. It's very hard to argue that "trans women are real women and just want to be left alone" and even more "Rowling is a monster" when, for Scotland, they have had three recent cases of "men who are sexual abusers/rapists deciding that they're really women" (Isla Bryson, Tiffany Scott, Amy George).
You're an average person, you see those stories in the media, you see that the crime Rowling is accused of is saying "maybe don't put people with dicks into spaces with women", which side are you going to come down on? The people defending "when the accused committed the rape, she did it as a woman with her feminine penis" or the people saying "don't put rapists in women's jails"?
Yeah, I don't know if that's the actual thought process used, but basically when the "TERFs" are warning vociferously that allowing penis-havers into female exclusive spaces puts females at risk, and these stories come out, and the trans-activists continue to bash the TERFs for being, it seems, correct, I expect the average person is swayed to the TERF side.
And of course the vestiges of feminism are still hanging around telling people that women are an oppressed class, so what the hell are you supposed to think when you see women being harmed and ousted from the sports leagues set up for specifically for them, by biological males? Seems likely it's just too much whiplash for people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The fat activists have been pretty successful. The fact that "fat shaming" is regarded as something that shouldn't be done is really quite remarkable.
I've been listening to the Maintenance Phase podcast recently, if only for the entertainment of hyper-woke individuals spewing typical Fat Logic, and I've noticed a sort of Holocaust Denial vibe. They'll do very good episodes about how some diet or some other piece of health apocrypha is bullshit, complete with what at least seems like a fairly rigorous review of the scientific literature, which is fine and what makes it entertaining. But the conclusion you're supposed to draw from the series as a whole isn't that certain things in the diet ecosystem is bad, but that you shouldn't worry about your weight or anyone else's and that doctors are unnecessarily turning obesity into a health problem it's not. It reminds me of how people like David Irving will focus on minutia like whether a particular facility was used as a gas chamber and, regardless of the quality of the scholarship, expects you to draw the conclusion that the Holocaust never happened. Being obese is really unhealthy; any doctor will tell you that.
Two groups tend to be left out of the whole "fat acceptance" culture, though. The first is fat men. Fat women never had much of a problem getting fat men to date them. I suspect that a lot of this fat acceptance bullshit is really just trying to guilt thin men into dating them; you don't ever hear of any obese young women standing up for some fat Trekkie who's being made fun of. The second group is old people. I see a lot of stuff on the internet about being "healthy at any size" but it's always women under the age of 45 who seem to be the poster children for this stuff. You never hear about older fat people in this context, despite the fact that magazines love to profile active seniors who talk about how their lifestyle has prevented health problems. Of course, none of these people are ever fat, because there aren't many fat older people who do things like walk 9 holes every day or take ballroom dance lessons. Most of them are at home in front of the television, dealing with diabetes, or heart problems, or arthritis, or any number of other disorders that obesity increases the risk of.
Phase one is beauty and fashion and dating instas.
Phase two is complaining about unfair beauty standards.
Phase three is assertions that chronic health problems have nothing to do with weight.
Phase four is turning into a shut-in due to immobility.
More options
Context Copy link
Fat men that are tall or built do well. Those that look like Jason Alexander do bad though on the market.
More options
Context Copy link
People the size of some of the hard to miss (300 lbs+ for women) fat activists die between ages of 45-55, which is probably why.
More options
Context Copy link
More critically, your own two eyes will tell you that.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Good for them! We shouldn't be fat shaming people. The problem with fat activists is that they are celebrating unhealthy behavior or even denying that its unhealthy at all.
And I suppose from an aesthetic perspective it's awful as well, much like the deliberately ugly statues, public art, and brutalist buildings we are now forced to endure.
The problem with shaming is it ignores the role biology plays too. Long-term results for most dieters are abysmal. Trying to lose weight long-term means having to make restrictions that are possibly infeasible. Some people who have bad genes are quite literally unable to stop eating, or have really slow metabolisms, or bad balance of ghrelin vs. leptin, etc. These people are screwed
I am increasingly adopting this belief. Willpower didn't just collapse, nor did activity levels. There is something in our food or environment that is making people having a higher set point. In the 1970s or in modern-day Taiwan most people don't struggle to maintain a healthy weight. But in the modern day U.S. most people will be overweight because it is very difficult to maintain a weight lower than one's set point. Not impossible, of course. Just not worth it for many people.
On the other hand, semaglutide and other weight loss drugs will fix this for wealthy people within in the next decade, so I expect being to fat to become even more of a low class signifier than it is already.
weight loss drugs are the future. i see no other way out unless we get better fat substitutes. most of the calories come from fat
More options
Context Copy link
Physical activity did collapse, though. Combine high caloric intake with very low physical activity and voila, everyone is fat.
Can't find the citation, but I believe that's not actually true, at least for U.S. adults since the 1970s?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Iterestingly, the average BMI of Japanese people doesn't show (Top left graph is men, top right is women) any sort of change in direction or strength of a trend during the 1970's, but does paint a steady increase in BMI of men of all age groups, and quite a complicated picture for women.
If I'm reading these graphs correctly, Japanese men have been getting fatter since the early 1960s while Japanese women have generally not. Interesting dichotomy. Potentially there is more social pressure for Japanese women to be skinny? Certainly, in Japan, the standards for feminine beauty are far above what they are in North America.
Nevertheless, Japan does not have an obesity problem. With only 4.3% obesity in 2016, it is in fact the LEAST obese of any developed country in the world, and less obese than almost all the poor starving countries as well.
So even though Japanese BMI has apparently been increasing since about 1960, it's not having nearly the effect it is on other countries. I wonder what their corn product consumption looks like?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And yet the obesity rate was much lower in living memory, and people who follow the procedure of ‘just shoving fewer groceries down their maw’ lose weight. Yes, that entails being hungry sometimes and passing on dessert most of the time and probably learning to drink water. But pushing people to actually do those things is a plausible justification for fat shaming.
Isn't this what a diet is. yet the stats are pretty miserable. ppl lose weight and then regain it
Don't you know people with healthy diets? I have relatives who eat muesli and yoghurt in the morning, a salad with some prosciutto berries for lunch, some potato chips (that is to say fairly traditional ones with just potato and salt) and cheese in front of the television, then beef, rice and vegetables for dinner. Or maybe salmon or lamb instead of beef.
They're not fat and never have been. It's not dieting so much as having a healthy diet. If we started people on that sort of diet rather than American style plastic food, there'd be no problem. These people have no attraction to McDonalds or whatever, they look upon it with disgust.
I know lots of people who maintain a healthy weight. I know many fewer people who were once obese but then slimmed down and maintained a healthy weight by dieting. It's far from clear from the data that "trying to diet" or "telling people to diet" is an effective intervention once they are already obese. It seems like something intrinsic to metabolism and appetite regulation is irreversibly broken at that point, and the only permanent solutions are gastric surgery and (now, hopefully) semaglutide and its analogues.
More options
Context Copy link
not so much healthy but rather eat little. I know someone who would often go something like 9 hours without eating anything. Dinner + small amount of food in morning...that's it. Stayed thin forever. No snacking, But steak for dinner and pastry in morning, so not particularly healthy anyway. Plus daily exercise.
People have been trying to figure this out for a century. Think of all the federal and state dollars spent on raising awareness about health, school lunches, etc. As an HBD and libertarian leaning person, I am inclined to believe this is infective. A bunch of factors come into play: Something as basic or fundamental as food is still largely a mystery. I think the solution will have to come from the private sector to provide better drugs to combat obesity and better substitutes for food, like low calorie food that better mimics high calorie food.
More options
Context Copy link
n=1, but I pretty much only eat pizza and other take-out food, and have for the majority of my life (I'm in my 30s now). I'm not fat and haven't been since I was a kid. It's not my metabolism or genetics, either - I quickly gain pounds if I let myself indulge snacks too much for a few weeks. In that eventuality, I just eat slightly less for a few weeks and go back down. I know the CICO observation is trite at this point, but it's true. It's trivially true. You simply won't get fat if you just don't eat excessively.
I suspect the sort of disdainful attitude you're describing/exhibiting (e.g., "plastic food") is just class signaling and virtue signaling, frankly. Pizza and burgers, for example, are just wheat, tomatoes, cheese, and meat. But combine them into the form of pizza or burgers and all the sudden it evokes an image of a lower class person who's perhaps not that bright, not that health-conscious, doesn't really understand nutrition, doesn't really want to put in the effort to be "healthy" (unlike you, dear observer, of course), and probably also has Coors Light instead of craft beer in his fridge.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you know where to buy actual muesli or toasted oat-based cereal any more? All my local stores stopped carrying the last one they had, and now the only marginally edible cereals are that horrible raisin bran stuff packed with as much sweetener as kids' Sugar Puffs.
I guess it fell victim to the successive wave of fads against carbs and grains
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because they don’t stick with it.
That's because sustained willpower is hard. For a diet to work long term, it requires a more fundamental behavioral change than just toughing it out.
More options
Context Copy link
Do you think that the root cause of increased obesity today vs in 1970 is primarily due to people in 1970 being more persistent in sticking to a diet where they are hungry sometimes? If so, do you think that's due to a general decline in willingness to stick with unpleasant things in general between the 1970s and now, or something specific to dietary habits (e.g. "feeling slightly hungry" was a feeling with ~neutral valence in 1970, but is a feeling with negative valence now)?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Tend to agree, but they've had far less success in getting people to actually change their preferences.
And, unlike Trans activists, they haven't coalesced the weight (heh) of the medical establishment behind them, either. It's still not taboo to say "obesity contributes directly to various health issues and reduced life expectancy."
More options
Context Copy link
Fat activism has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Obese people are as hated as ever, women and girls with normal-range bodies are still hating themselves and riddled with insecurity. More people are overweight, but that's basically unrelated.
However, if a large enough segment of people are overweight, it results in obesity/fatness becoming normalized. This has already happened among the underclass and lower class, especially among Blacks and Latinos, I think.
Normalized sure, idealized no. Something can be common while also being despised. In fact, it's very common for common things to be despised. Suburban life and whiteness and factory work and office work all became something derided in popular culture as they became more common among the populace. Idealization was the goal of the FAs, get people to accept the obese as equals. Not gonna happen.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not seeing this. Maybe if you're 12 years old in gym class during the 90s, but ppl tend to overlook or stop caring about that stuff as adults
... Which they did before fat activism started.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They've managed to get "plus size models" onto Magazine Covers, so that's at least a norm or two cracked open.
Likewise, look at the very existence of Lizzo and Rebel Wilson as celebrities.
It's fair to say they've had superficial successes, even if it isn't going to "take" with the rest of the population.
Wait and see how they react to the recent development of seemingly effective weight loss drugs, though.
I will not stand for this erasure of Ella Aretha Ma Rainey and this absolute fuckin' banger. I don't really know who Rebel Wilson is so I won't comment, but Lizzo makes fun music, fat acceptance for her isn't any stranger than Aretha or Ella.
Are there any obese male singers that have any real prominence now, other than Rick Ross?
I'll grant that Meat Loaf was a sex symbol in his day.
Speaking of Meat Loaf, if you broaden your scope to film actors as well as singers, you also have Jack Black, for instance.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd say DJ Khaled isn't exactly svelte. Luke Combs is a fatass, when he's in music videos with his wife it is disgusting to imagine them together. Historically we have Biggie, biz markie, Cedric the entertainer, big pun, a dozen great Tenors, fats domino, fats waller. Toby Keith's waistline varied throughout his career, as did the mustachiod half of Brooks and Dunn, I don't remember which is which.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Rebel Wilson has had recent weightloss and is no longer an example of what you're writing about. She might even be too thin for comedy now. Plus-sized people in comedy has existed for a while (Fatty Arbuckle, 1/2 of the duo Laurel and Hardy) and in woman more recently but I would say predates the fat acceptance movement (Roseanne Barr, Melissa McCarthy).
More options
Context Copy link
It does show the power of revealed vs. stated preferences.
More options
Context Copy link
Fat celebrities are nothing new, and it's very possible that the occasional plus size model can be explained at least as much as a cynical attempt to garner hate clicks and get any-publicity-good-publicity as a genuine sop to fat activism.
Fat celebreties in the past were usually men, but never a woman whom one isn't supposed to laugh at.
Appeals to publicity don't make sense since they are always to left, were they not motivated by political considerations, right-coded deviations from the norm would be as common, if not more, than left-coded ones. Probably more, since a media espousing nazism is more controversial, than that which promotes stalism.
Not in opera?
Or, for that matter, Oprah?
I also don’t believe that appeals to publicity are “always” left-leaning. Jokes about reality’s bias aside, there are marketing niches which clearly code right. You don’t have to talk about the extremes to count.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, sure, at some level they're going to bump into the same problem as trans activists - people are still attracted to what they're attracted to and people will still feel self-loathing when they're physically repulsive. They've had about as much cultural success as I think it's plausible to have though. You probably can't get away with saying, "I won't hire fat people because they're lazy, undisciplined, and I just plain don't want to look at them". Likewise, I've had people personally scold me for saying, "I would never be attracted to an overweight woman".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link