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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2761 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023

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Granting all of that is true...

So from a harm reduction perspective, we are as a society, ignoring nicotine as a weight loss drug.

That still isn't what Imaginary_Knowledge was claiming and what I was pushing back on. What you've said is basically summed up as "society is incorrectly valuing the costs of obesity and nicotine". Fine. But what Imaginary_Knowledge said was that people prefer to be fat. That's not what is going on here, at all. They think that nicotine (and cocaine) are going to hurt them more, but that's not the same thing as some glib take of "well I guess people prefer to be fat" and it was disingenuous for him to act like they are the same.

I don't find it disingenuous, just a different interpretation of people vs society/establishment/cathedral/whatever. If you want to say that people themselves have been misinformed or otherwise lack sufficient agency to make that choice individually, it still reflects a society that chooses to value smoking and obesity in the ways it does. We, as a society from media to government to medical orgs, could choose to value things differently.

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