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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30130 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.

This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.

I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.

I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.

point and laugh at the far white gun-toting people-of-Walmart

Still is, but it used to be, too.

It's funny to see how it plays out now in that Rich men north of Richmond viral song, where there's a line criticizing fat people on welfare being paid to eat fudge. It's also funny to see in the live show video how enthusiastically a lot of the heavier people in the audience sing along even that part.

The word "welfare" and the height of the fat person (roughly the average female height) clearly point to the "welfare mother" stereotype. White rednecks who rort SSDI for a living don't see themselves as on welfare as such, so they know the line isn't directed at them. The same logic is why PMC white male New Yorkers and Californians aren't bothered when their political allies say that "white men" are responsible for everyone bad in the world.

The same logic is why PMC white male New Yorkers and Californians aren't bothered when their political allies say that "white men" are responsible for everyone bad in the world.

As a PMC white male who works in New York City, I can tell you this is entirely wrong. They are quite clear about saying that "white men" includes us, specifically.

Are they your political allies?

They are not my allies personally, but I'm similarly situated to white men who are. And like I said, they are very much into PMC white men (specifically white men in tech) being the problem. They know it's directed towards them and they accept that.

Sounds like they aren't bothered then.

They aren't bothered, but it isn't because they think it isn't directed at them. It's because they're OK with it being directed at them.

I think you could cut and paste just about any movement in here. Whether you think the moderate defenders and allies are "sanewashing" the crazies depends entirely on whether you think the crazies are on the fringe, or just the ones standing out in the bailey saying the quiet part out loud.

I personally think "primarily a bunch of hate-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives" describes most modern social justice movements (particularly the woke ones we spend so much time criticizing here). Which doesn't mean they don't sometimes have legitimate grievances or weren't coming from a place of genuine injustice.

I’ve never considered either side of the debate “hatred”. I don’t hate fat people or lazy people or whatever other outgroup we’re talking about. My issue on a lot of this is about normalization — that the movement in question is encouraging society to treat as normal and neutral things that are generally harmful either to the people in question or the larger society. I don’t think problems get solved by pretending they don’t exist. We have a lot of these kinds problems. We have a lot of people who are too poorly educated to really understand and interact with modern society. We have people who have been made so emotionally fragile that they find coping with things not going their way is impossible for them.

I agree that in most subjects and movements there’s a pop-version of the main subject. Even for religion, there’s the high version people learn in official ministerial training full of very complicated theology, theodicy, and cosmology. Then there’s the pop-religion where not only are the ideas vastly simplified, some pop beliefs tend to contradict the official dogmas of the religion.

Not a defense of 'fat acceptance', but by normalization I think you mean positive acceptance? Obesity is, in any objective sense, normal in many communities in the United States.

Arguably obesity needs ... not necessarily more shame, it was and still is incredibly shameful in the eyes of most. I think a combination of explicit coercion, both towards the obese and towards those who create the conditions that lead to it (i.e. those who sell the food), is justified.

I think there’s a bit of a difference between shaming and simply not going along with the problem. Watching your kids eat themselves into weighing well over 100 lbs before they hit double digits and not even saying anything is borderline abuse. Watching someone you care about eat themselves into morbid obesity and saying nothing isn’t being kind. And I think as far as the media goes, it shouldn’t promote unhealthy lifestyles. You could also consider taxing foods that cause obesity.

I'm not sure taxes are that effective here - it's analogous to the sin tax problem, addicts really want alcohol / cigarettes, and raising the price reduces their consumption, but doesn't stop them from eating them. And there's a lot of cheap awful food.

There aren't really any legal options here because any law that would 'work' would require a different legal system/culture that'd be willing to enforce it. Analogous to how even if all of the legislature and SCOTUS were possessed, they couldn't actually make infidelity illegal, nobody would follow or enforce that.

So imagining legal solutions is just larping, but anyway: Not allowing selling unhealthy food to fat people is an option, but they (probably?) care enough about eating massive amounts of food and you just get the war on drugs but worse because you can buy the drugs at walmart.

And that leaves banning unhealthy food - just not politically viable, nobody supports it. Most on the far-right who claim to support it on twitter would probably revolt when it banned the unhealthy stuff they liked.

You can't ban "unhealthy food" because in the case of obesity, the dose makes the poison.

This just seems flatly untrue. Surely any quantity of e.g. fizzy drinks is net-negative for nutritional content.

Certainly not. It's not clear what "net-negative for nutritional content" would mean.

I mean that a fizzy drink is like tobacco or cocaine, in that there is no amount of it which is actually net-beneficial for the human body. It's not "the dose makes the poison": no quantity of it is good for you.

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I eat literal packets of gelatinized sugar while running long distances. I would be irritated if I wasn't allowed to do so because other people lack self-control.

Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.

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I don't think so? Certainly seltzers or non-nutritive sweetened sodas are basically neutral.

So imagining legal solutions is just larping

One solution can be going through children:

  • food ed classes about maintaining a proper diet (we had a topic covering this in our biology class, but that was like two lessons at most, I am thinking of a repeating module like sex ed)
  • do schools perform medical check-ups on their students every year? That would be an appropriate moment to screen them for extra weight or obesity
  • anyone who's technically overweight gets a second check-up to see if they really are. If they are, their parents get a brochure about feeding their children right
  • if anyone's obese, then the CPS is involved. The parents are given half a year to show progress, if they can't, the kid is placed in a foster family that has proven to be able to cook healthy and delicious meals.

Based on the quality of foster care and CPS... this seems like a major disaster for child welfare.

We've had government guidance about eating for decades. The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently (eat more carbs, replace animal fats with seed oils, eat less red meat) obesity trends ever upwards. People have obediently replaced butter with margarine and lard with canola oil based on the spurious idea that this would protect them from heart disease, and yet people have never been fatter.

The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?

The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?

yeschad.png

The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently

Citation needed. I doubt most people are diligently following FDA guidelines. How many of them really do stick to the diet of 50 grams of protein, 78 grams of fat, 275 grams of carbs, top up with 180 more calories of your choosing (please choose protein)?

Yes. Shame should not be the only tool to assisting in reducing fatness.

We have a myriad of options other than shaming, let's use them all.

One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work. Being fat isn't exactly desirable in our society, and they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives. The whole point of the fat acceptance movement is to remove what they see as an unfair stigma.

I would say shame does work, but it needs to be more constant and even. You should feel shame evenly and not at distributed points.

they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives

In the Year of Our Lord 2023, is that really the case? My sense from the doctors I know as friends is that they are absolutely loath to suggest, "Ya know, diet and exercise could help with..." because they know 1) Patients don't want to hear it, and 2) They aren't going to do it anyway.

I have other close friends who are obese and have proactively asked their doctor for help. Like pleading to have some direction, a support structure, a pathway to success. You know what the most phenomenal response I heard was? "Well, you're getting older... [next topic]."

In forums like this one, people constantly constantly lie about how weight loss/gain works. One bucket is CICO disbelievers generally (the true cranks). Others retreat to some form of, "Well, CICO may be true, but it's not helpful, so we really just need to point out that most people have absolutely no control over their weight." This is a complete lie that is far less helpful than explaining how things actually work and making suggestions for how to properly plan, build a support system, etc. It is not the people who are saying, "This is the way, walk you in it," who are doing the thing that doesn't work. It is the people who are perpetuating this lie, saying that the only choices are shame or doing nothing (or, I guess, like, chemicals or something that magically change CICO), who are doing the thing that doesn't work.

In the Year of Our Lord 2023, is that really the case? My sense from the doctors I know as friends is that they are absolutely loath to suggest, "Ya know, diet and exercise could help with..." because they know 1) Patients don't want to hear it, and 2) They aren't going to do it anyway.

From my experience, that's completely not true. Every doctor suggests it as if it's a novel idea you've just never thought of. They don't have many suggestions beyond that, other than to tell you to go see a specialist, who also doesn't have any ideas to help.

The most frustrating thing I find is that doctors also don't want to tell you to just eat less, which is in my experience the only thing that'll cause you to lose weight. If you adopt a strategy of severely limiting calories or working with some strategy that works for you but is not officially approved (like being really strict but having cheat days), then they think you have an eating disorder, and they warn you about that. They tell you to just lose weight, but don't approve of options that actually work for you.

Perhaps we need some way of gathering data by sending a bunch of obese testers to doctors. Sort of in any event, either response is equally useless, though I can understand why doctors would opt for either path, given their experiences/incentives. What I think we can both probably agree on is that they are not likely to give real, actionable advice that can be directly pursued to success, and that is the real shame.

This really strikes me as wishful thinking. Richard Hanania made the comparison with smoking. In the West, the rate of smoking has plummeted since the 1960s. I'm sure raising awareness of the dangers associated with the smoking played a significant part of that, but I don't think anyone can really deny that a major cause of this shift was simply social: smoking has more widely come to be seen as a filthy habit, which imposes a social cost on those who choose to do it. In much of the world it's illegal to advertise tobacco products, and legislation or local rules make it less convenient to do so.

If obesity was a truly immutable trait, criticising a fat person for being fat would be like criticising an amputee for having one leg. Fat acceptance activists are incentivised to downplay the mutability of their condition, in order to present it as something that they are powerless to prevent.

One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work

This argument is simply untrue. I would eat far more and be fat if I would not be ashamed of being (potentially) fat. Another big factor is health impact, and more extreme fat deniers deny also health dangers ("healthy at any size" insanity)

It does work for some people, you can definitely find cases of people losing the weight, and they often frame their motivation in terms of self-image and shame.

It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.

Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.

I know multiple people personally who have lost weight in the long term, and I myself am sitting quite stably at about 15kg below my peak weight (though I will probably try to gain weight again soon). The notion that it's impossible is just ludicrous.

I will say that I think some very morbidly obese individuals have permanently wrecked their body's ability to regulate hunger and weight. I give credit to their tales of constant, unbearable hunger and strict dieting for slow results. But such people are still the minority, and their situation is still ultimately the result of their decisions.

I agree that the obesity crisis is not a result of a sudden decline in morals, and I've said the same thing myself. And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us. The refusal to engage morally with this issue is tying people into knots, forcing them to insist that weight loss is impossible or to search for villains in the hecking sneed oil, because otherwise people would be responsible for themselves. And you know what, if Linda wants to eat ice cream and Harry wants to drink beer, go ahead. It's not important to me that everyone looks like a model. But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.

And yet, it is a moral crisis. Changes in technology cannot be blamed here. Just as the opportunity to steal separates thieves from honest men, the opportunity to overeat reveals the gluttons among us

Yet curiously, their gluttony disappears when sth like Tirzepatide is introduced into their bodies.

But it's sad, frankly, when people tell themselves that they can never lose weight. Because some of them will believe it.

I could lose lots of weight - even without modern drugs. The thing is, it's like holding your breath. With additional effects like your thought process being regularly hijacked to think not just about eating, but even stuff related to eating (it's pretty bizarre). Eventually you will be compelled to stop. And then overeat until you reach your initial weight. And then maintain it. Almost as if it's not about random whims made at the time ("I want this ice cream now"), but organism attempting to maintain homeostasis (and not caring that its idea of homeostatic amount of fat is unhealthy).

With Tirzepatide, I went down from about 103kg IIRC, to 84-ish (and I still continue to lose weight). Without any suffering. It's laughable that some non-fat people think they're virtuously eating less than they actually want to eat.

I don't find anything specifically virtuous about my own losing weight. In fact I sometimes worry that it's wrong for me to do so because I find it quite easy.

Yes, if you are given a moral choice and choose wrong, it is your responsibility, not the fault of society for giving you the wrong meds, or for making ice cream that tastes too good. Weight gain is not some biological inevitability. People a hundred years ago did not find their homeostasis point at gaining 2lbs every year. Not because of morality, but because of lifestyle and diet habits that are quite in reach for the average person today.

It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.

What? Human bodies are not excempt from the laws of thermodynamics. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. Period. And you won't gain weight if you don't put more calories in than you burn. You have to actively do something in order to stay or become obese.

Now, is weight-loss extremely hard psychologically? Oh, absolutely. My own weight struggles can attest to that and I'm not even obese.

But it isn't weight-loss that's impossible. It's getting people to not overeat that's impossible. Two very different things. To pretend they're identical is irresponsible.

If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.

Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.

So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.

A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards.

Obesity is defined as being above the threshold of a BMI of 30. Imagine a population where currently everyone has a BMI of 25, but it starts to increase by 1 every year from now. What would the corresponding graph like the one you linked look like? It would be 5 years of no change, until in year x+5 obesity "explodes" to 100%, despite the fact that the actual causal trend has been going on linearly for 5 years!

If we look at actual weight itself to avoid thresholding effects like I described above, there doesn't seem to be anything special about the 70s at all, they're right on trend. There's other data like discussed in this that indicate that the surge in weight had already begun around WWI, subsided a bit around the Great Depression and accelerated again in the immediate aftermath of WWII.

If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.

It's important because the message is wrong-headed. Telling people that there is nothing they can do when there definitely are very simple things they can do (move more, eat less) is cruel because it leaves people to their misery.

Also, I don't see how it's necessarily wrong to cast some moral judgement on fat people. It doesn't mean I suddenly cast them out of the circle of persons who should be afforded curtesy, respect or dignity. It means I disapprove of behaviour that is harmful to themselves and others. I also disapprove when someone smokes indoors or farts in an elevator. And that disapproval might actually motivate them to break the cycle.

I know that our culture has elevated enabling people with all sorts of miscalibrated habits to a twisted virtue, but being nice and doing the right thing aren't always identical.

Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.

Very interesting. Are there any studies with a larger cohort?

So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible.

It is eminently possible. Eat fewer calories than you consume. If your point is that it's impossible to maintain unhealthy eating and exercise regimens without becoming fat, then you're right. But there is no law of nature that says you have to stuff your face. Your argument about drastically reduced metabolism after increased physical activity is interesting, but I'll have to see more evidence.

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There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.

Really?

It is not even per person. It is not compared with total callories change. Not compared with say sugar production.

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Unless you're Eliezer, in which case diet and exercise are without value.

A lot of relatively skinny people I know regularly shame themselves if they start to get a little fat. I’d almost say everyone does that whose skinny or fit.

I'm a (comparative) walrus, and let me tell you, I also shame myself. I avoid mirrors, going out, clothes shopping, and photographs, because just seeing my face makes my gorge rise.

The problem is that the shame turns into a ball of self-hatred and impotent rage in my gut and does not effectively spur me to take effective action; feeling bad about myself makes me more likely to turn to unhealthy foods for a hedonic bump-up, rather than hedonically-unsatisfying but long-term productive things like home cooking (yes I know home cooking can be delicious but I do not derive joy from the process and am currently marginally unskilled, so there's a learning curve that needs to be overcome) and exercise (which is painful, sweaty, and only reminds me how much less capable my body is now than it used to be).

Instead of shame, I need to find an emotional motivator which is a more effective spur to action rather than just recrimination.

I felt pretty gross at 90+ kg. Not that I don't have body issues at sub-80 too.

I can confirm that. As soon as you can look in the mirror and flex something you get this boost of motivation to improve your shape. I think it's much harder for obese people to get motivated, because going from 82 down to 72kg means your looks actually improve, but going from 160kg down to 140kg, that is, losing twice as much weight, might improve your quality of life (like, being able to wipe your own ass), but the person in the mirror is not that different: he's the same disgustingly fat person, just with some extra skin folds. Most people can't stay motivated simply by shame and the number going down for long enough.

Seconding this. I'm not particularly skinny but I'm not overweight either. However if my weight goes above my ideal target by more than 1kg I immediately tell my self "cut down on your eating" multiple times a day whenever I make food related choices.

I started feeling self conscious after hitting a BMI just a little under 24 (and immediately worked to drop it back down to the 22-23 range), it makes it difficult for me to even imagine how the morbidly obese can live with themselves.

It sucks. You know what makes suck-y feelings go away, at least for a little while? Delicious unhealthy foods. Not trying to justify it, just explaining the vicious cycle.

I think different, more potent and coercion-adjacent flavors of shaming (more common in the past?) would be more effective than shame is today, so I don't want to say 'shame doesn't work', but it's true that the very real shame a fat person would feel today or a few decades ago didn't work. But your local grocer or mcdonalds refusing to sell you triple-decker burgers because you're 350lbs (or just not stocking the product at all) might!

Also, whatever the mechanisms, many young and higher-class subcultures in americans have managed to mostly eliminate obesity among their ranks. I don't think this is mostly just by selection, and, while higher IQ and other values do contribute, I don't think you need to be 115+ iq to prevent yourself from being obese. Maybe those values will diffuse?

I guess you might be trolling, but if you're not...

You know that 'white' and 'rich' are not synonyms right? East Asians are wealthier than Europeans in (more or less) every country inhabited by both groups.

I'm not sure how seriously to take this post. It smells like satire.

People starving in the third world are starving because food (which is produced and sent to them in abundance) is not efficiently distributed, largely because of the political and military instability of those places (i.e., corrupt governments, warlords, tribal conflict, etc.). It's not because fat white first worlders are hoarding all the calories.

And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly.

As discussed in the previous thread, I agree that having hate for fat people is a bad thing. I also think it's pretty uncommon and hardly the point. When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat. The claim that we "should treat them poorly" is also doing too much work - what exactly is meant here? Sure, don't just randomly be a jerk to a fat person for no particular reason, all good and agreed. Are people obligated to feign attraction to them? Aside from just literally not being rude to people for no evident reason, I'm unclear what the expected standard of treatment is that people feel isn't typically met.

When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat

It's more that normal people - both for logistics/convenience reasons and instinctive judgements of appearance - don't want to date fat people, don't really want to be friends with them, don't even want to look at them. This is a very unpleasant situation to be in. The analogies to other forms of 'exclusion', e.g. for minorities, aren't entirely without merit! It's just that the solution should be for the obese people to lose weight, by whatever means, rather than create acceptance. It simply is not technically difficult to take in fewer calories, and if an individual can't muster the will to do so themselves (although that itself is terrible), they should be assisted.

There's an obvious rhetorical claim (that is fundamentally misguided imo because the mental health memeplex is also bad) comparing obesity to self-harm and anorexia. We don't tie 'lack of stigma' for self-harm and anorexia to suggestions that it's fine to continue doing those things, we instead treat them.

It's more that normal people - both for logistics/convenience reasons and instinctive judgements of appearance - don't want to date fat people, don't really want to be friends with them, don't even want to look at them.

That is absolutely not how I experience life and I struggle with getting my BMI under 35. Yeah dating is shittier, but everywhere else it is totally ok.

Hm. I clarified in another response I didn't literally mean no friends, but did you not have a general sense that being fat was something other people looked down on you for, outside dating, people were less interested in being friends with you? Interesting to compare this to other replies below saying they would exclude obese people.

What class/kind of social circles did you have? Maybe it's more accepted in areas that have more obese people?

Absolutely have not found such thing, and actually my country is still on the thin side. I have friends from working to upper class. On the other hand I think that there is fat and American fat (the guys and gals that look all balloon-ish). I am also not the most charismatic or extrovert person. Of course I have to earn my acceptance, but for men this is the default mode anyway.

I think that if this phenomena exist they are more of expression of American cultural zealotry.

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But is "I don't want to be friends with fat people, I don't even want to look at them" really that common a viewpoint? What circles are you floating around in?

Many of my activities are about hiking/cycling and similar activities. I would not go on a walk across city with someone incapable of walking for few hours.

That it is not about complete exclusion, but more of feasibility. And I would put significant effort to help someone on say wheelchair or with serious disease but I am less willing to invest effort to help someone eating themself to death.

But is "I don't want to be friends with fat people, I don't even want to look at them" really that common a viewpoint?

Can only speak for myself, but when I meet a person who's not just fat (hell, going by BMI I'm technically overweight and have a fairly noticeable beer belly) but actually morbidly obese, my instinctive reaction is disgust. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. I see no reason to think that this instinctive reaction is ever going away, nor even that it should. Of course I still go out of my way to treat morbidly obese people with respect and good manners, but my knee-jerk reaction is disgust.

But is "I don't want to be friends with fat people, I don't even want to look at them" really that common a viewpoint?

Absolutely. If you're in an elite circle, your friends and the people who you visibly spend a lot of time with can have a huge impact on your reputation. At the same time, being obese just automatically imposes negative consequences on your friends - you require more food, you are less physically capable in a way that rules out vast swathes of physical and social activities and you have to be specially accounted for in a huge variety of ways. When you are fat you actually do place a substantial burden on the rest of your friends (if they aren't as fat as you already) and while people are generally nice and will accommodate a more rotund friend, they would prefer it if their friends were all in shape.

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I don't care about elite social games when it comes to artistic taste or political opinion, and I don't care about elite social games when it comes to weight, either.

You're free to simply not care about your reputation, but this doesn't mean you get to ignore the consequences of it. Having a bad or low-status reputation has a direct and serious impact on your life in countless ways, and while I would agree that too much importance is placed on those social games, they remain both important and relevant at every level of society - the elite qualifier was placed there because if you're one of the obese people living in the trailer park you don't actually care that your neighbour is just as fat as you are.

The assumption that physical activity is necessary for a social activity I suspect is also a class and subculture signifier, though I recognize it's important to many people.

Subculture matters more than class here, in my opinion. But even then, obesity prevents you from participating in a huge range of extremely popular and rewarding activities of all kinds - social, leisure, commercial, artistic, religious etc. I personally do not want to be close friends with obese people because they are going to be unable to participate in huge numbers of social bonding activities that I regularly take part in and enjoy - I don't think going for a long walk to have a beautiful picnic under the stars in a national park is particularly class-related, but it absolutely is something you don't get to do if you're obese! At the same time, I don't want to have to make a decision between an activity me and my friends want to do, and a less satisfying compromise that we have to take because Cletus is just too fat to participate and we don't want to make him feel awkward.

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Moral uprightness? I'm legitimately surprised that you're a Christian, because the bible actually has a few things to say about fat people!

Their destiny is destruction, their god is their stomach, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things.

A discerning son heeds instruction, but a companion of gluttons disgraces his father.

So not exactly a positive appraisal - gluttony is generally considered to be a major sin, but the bible goes even further and suggests that being friends with fat people actually disgraces your father. There's direct biblical support for fat shaming, and while that quote comes from the old testament the new isn't any kinder to the gluttons and still considers it a major sin. Being obese and not doing anything about it means that you are sinning unrepentantly, and people are actually being good Christians when they shame you and try to get you to change. That said, in the interest of being honest and forthright, I feel compelled to note that I'm not a Christian myself - The Antichrist and the Genealogy of Morals were far too compelling and I haven't even seen any Christian apologetics that try to grapple with them. I was one once however, and I still know enough about the faith to understand that it generally recommends against sinning, and it really doesn't like when you're actually proud of your sin and demand that other people accept it. The same kind of social shaming that you're railing against actually comes directly from your own religion, and when you say "I'm not okay with people having a bad reputation because they are fat." you are directly contradicting the word of God and elevating your own judgement above his while encouraging people to sin more. Personally I think that's a good thing and I'm happy that you feel this way, but at the same time I believe Christianity has a few things to say about thinking that you know better than God about what's right and wrong.

You should never have your opinion changed by one conversation. Claiming to have your opinion changed in the opposite direction by a conversation is just a "gotcha", and if truthful is just as stupid as having your opinion changed in the direction that your opponent wants. Once you've researched it a bit, determined that you don't need to fall victim to epistemic learned helplessness, and read rebuttals to the argument that convinced you and still determined that you think it's a good argument, then you can start changing your mind.

I must also wonder what you think about people who have poor hygeine instead of fat people. By your reasoning, you should not care about hanging around with people who have poor personal hygeine.

It's important to keep the spectrum in mind here. I have friends who are 'overweight', they can hang out fine, maybe they're out of shape and can't go on a hike or whatever, that's not really an issue. Getting into obese, logistics becomes more of an issue, but appearance is still more of a factor than that imo. Morbid obesity would rule someone out of social activity among 'elite' or even many normal circles both for social and logistical reasons, I think, but it's not really an issue as 'we' never encounter those people anyway, ssc different worlds. Morbid obesity is 9% of the US population, though!

Being slightly overweight is not a particularly big deal. I was using obese as the dividing point under the assumption that obesity is where you start getting real and serious limitations due to your weight. Morbid obesity is a whole other kettle of fish - but at the same time my objections apply even more strongly to the morbidly obese than regular obese people. What kind of social life can you possibly have in an existence like that?

But is "I don't want to be friends with fat people, I don't even want to look at them" really that common a viewpoint

Sorry I expressed that quite poorly, I was speaking in terms of actions / revealed preference, and not as one big thing, just a bunch of small things, death by a thousand cuts, the 'halo effect' of attractive people multiplied and reversed. The kinds of looks you get change, people are less enthusiastic about interacting with you and reach out less, etc. You won't have no friends, but you will feel the difference. Explicit mocking of fat people isn't that uncommon in certain spaces, but it's not really what I meant.

You can't say you've ever met a fat person you felt was worth knowing?

Wasn't attributing it to myself! Interesting to talk to and appearance have no inherent correlation, plenty of really smart people have been ugly / fat in the past. Although today there is a strong correlation for cultural reasons I mentioned elsewhere (young upper-class people aren't fat)

But they should lose weight because it is good for them that they be healthy, not because "normal" people find them gross

Eh. "You shouldn't shoplift not because you'll go to jail, but because our people have a common interest in prosperity upheld by free transactions among people with property rights and stealing undermines that". "You should dress nice and have good hygiene, not because people will like you less if you dress poorly and smell bad, but because healthy skin is valuable and society having a good aesthetic is morally important". For quite a few people that's not why they do those things. The cause of much prosocial behavior among random people just is coercion and shame, and even if it's unfortunate (and has many bad side-effects), it clearly works, and that mechanism probably wouldn't exist if everyone was able to do everything for the right reasons.

Frankly, if what you've described is what the fat acceptance movement is fighting against you can call me a fat acceptance advocate and I'm more than willing to call what you've outlined "fat hatred

That part of my comment was more motivated by - trying to paint a vibe of why the fat acceptance movement exists and what they're fighting from a sympathetic position. So on the one hand, i guess i succeeded? On the other hand, I might have painted a misleading picture.

I think it boils down to ‘fat women feel ugly(because they are) and want all of society to feel an obligation to fix their emotions’. So yes, people are obligated to feign attraction to them in a fat acceptance activists ideal world.

Of course, the way this is framed is that heterosexual males are simply conditioned to think they find women of a healthy weight more attractive than overweight or obese women, and if we were able to remove the "toxic beauty standards" propagated by social media and the fashion and entertainment industries, straight men would instantly be deprogrammed and realise that of course they find Lizzo hotter than Emily Ratajkowski, and how could they ever have been so stupid as to believe otherwise! In this obese utopia, there would be no "feigning" of attraction.

There's a grain of truth in this observation to the extent that social contagion plays some role in what people find attractive (e.g. Hollywood actress starts wearing her hair in hairstyle, men start finding women who wear their hair in that style attractive). But the sad reality for fat acceptance activists slacktivists* is that many if not most of the traits to which straight men are attracted don't seem to be culturally bound at all, because they are obvious proxies for genetic fitness and fertility, and this is true even of cultures which have never been exposed to the "toxic beauty standards" of white capitalist cisheteropatriarchy (e.g. African villages without a TV or internet connection to be found). Find me a culture in which most straight men find 40-year-old women more attractive than 20-year-old women (all else being equal), or in which the hourglass figure is widely seen as repellent, or in which facial asymmetry is seen as more desirable than facial symmetry, or in which women who are so emaciated that they've stopped menstruating are highly prized - then we can talk about how straight men's distaste for obese women is a "Western social construct".

You'll also notice that the traits which fat acceptance activists themselves find attractive in men are mysteriously exempt from having been conditioned into them by these toxic Western beauty standards they so loudly decry. The only reason the tall, lean gymrat next door doesn't want to fuck you is because he's been brainwashed into false consciousness; but the reason you want to fuck him is because he's just ever so dreamy. Awfully convenient, isn't it?

If I sound contemptuous of these people and their self-serving motivated reasoning - well, I am. More than anything I'm infuriated by the scorn with which sexually frustrated men are treated, while sexually frustrated women can land themselves cushy academic jobs in which they get paid six figures to whine about how sexually frustrated they are for reasons entirely within their power to change.

*The noun "activist" presupposes that you are active, which the obese aren't by definition.

I mean there's a grain of truth in that modern American beauty standards are a bit less porky than what men would prefer. But that some tribe in Timbuktu considers it high status for women to look like walmart landwhales is no more evidence of men secretly preferring that than Chinese beauty standards being borderline anorexic is for men preferring the concentration camp survivor look.

I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people.

This is a phrase always and everywhere used to disguise the casting of moral judgement.

So you think that there is no human ever that has actually stopped casting moral judgment?

I mean name one. Morality is a core part of human psychology, people use moral intuitions to reason about the world even on an unconscious level. Even this idea that one shouldn't judge is just care/harm rearing it's ugly head again.

Unless you're in a coma or something it seems literally impossible.

I mean name one

Jesus Christ. ;)

Perhaps if you take an extremely broad sense of 'judgment' sure. But I absolutely believe there have been many enlightened figures over human history that have been able to suspend the vast majority of judgment.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne.

All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.

I think that. 99% of the time when a person complains "Becky is so judgemental" they mean "Becky routinely expresses judgements I don't endorse" as opposed to "Becky expresses judgements at all".

I think you'd have to be basically Buddha to stop doing that. Every snap emotional impression - every "eww" or "woah!" - is a miniature moral judgment; deeming something good/beautiful/impressive or bad/repulsive/piddling.

I would generally say that ceasing moral judgments is only possible at a significant remove. Some of us can be detached about things that happened a few years ago, some longer, some can never detach themselves from moral judgment.

Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "...". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.

So you begin by acknowledging and distancing yourself from people on your side of the debate that seem hateful, then immediately turn around and accuse your wife of sane-washing when she does the same? Holy Russell's conjugation, Batman!

I have pure motives, unrelated to those on my side who are motivated by hate.

You are sane-washing the haters on your side.

He is a hater lying about his motivations.

yes we can all play that game. There is plently to criticize about the fat-acceptance movement, but pinning them as the side more prone to being motivated by hate / disgust is just lulz. I am sympathetic to an argument that hate of the person has nothing to do with it / one side is objectively correct / detraction is the appropriate response to unhealthiness, even if it's expression should be tempered etc / that shame can be a powerful way of patrolling unhealthy social contagions, etc. But the frame that it's the other side who is hate-filled is more DOA than Dems are the real racist type of rhetoric

Those people aren't on my side. That's a separate party, the group of people who hate fat people. I'm not a part of that group of people, and I dislike and disavow that group of people. Whereas my wife would say that she does feel that the fat acceptance movement is a fundamentally good thing, that she does like, and she would not disavow them. There's the big difference.

You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.

Calling the fat acceptance movement hate-filled, is just an ineffective "Democrats are the real racists". It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.

You're just cleaving 'sides' conveniently. By your description, your wife described the positive aspects of fat acceptance. You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction. Neither is truly a 'side' in any ontological sense, but you're just throwing in a biased gerrymander to accuse your wife of sane-washing.

It might be objectively true under carefully drawn definitions of the central word, but you've just engaged in word-thinking.

This sounds like an isolated demand for rigor.

You only want to be associated with the positive aspects of fat-detraction.

No I don't. I don't think there's much positive to fat-detraction, and I generally dislike fat-detraction entirely, pretty strongly. I know there are hate-filled people who hate fat people. I dislike them greatly. That doesn't mean that the hate-filled fat acceptance movement people are any better, or are suddenly noble. I despise those squeaky wheel social movements who try to shame everyone around them.

I know there are hate-filled people who hate fat people. I dislike them greatly.

You can tell how hate-filled they are from how much you hate them!

That doesn't mean that the hate-filled fat acceptance movement people are any better, or are suddenly noble. I despise those squeaky wheel social movements who try to shame everyone around them.

These guys too. Why would you hate them so much unless they were filled with hate?

Wait a second...

Well, for whatever it's worth, I've always been someone who hates people who hate other people for hating people. That's just the way I am. I'm a 3rd order hater. I guess I feel like the proper response to dealing with bigots is to admonish them, but try to do better yourself, not to debase yourself like they do, and not to play the victim.

I've always been someone who hates people who hate other people for hating people

I take it you have the common decency of hating yourself, bigot that you are?

Maybe you should walk away from this meta nonsense and do what everyone does: love the righteous, hate the wicked and admit to yourself that you actually have first order principles instead of postmodern aloofness.

admit to yourself that you actually have first order principles

Which would be what, exactly?

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I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys.

We've discussed similar concepts in the old place some years back, under the term "distributed motte and bailey". The basic problem is that while it's pretty obviously a thing and quite pernicious, there's pretty much zero way to discuss it productively across the divide. Even if one were to recognize that people on their side were using such a tactic, there's nothing they can do about it other than to maybe abandon their side over an argument of principle... which is not going to happen.

Seeing the larger pattern was one of those things that inclined me toward pessimism about the potential outcomes of the Culture War.

I have my views. I'm not going to apologize for the meanest loons who hold opinions adjacent to mine. I'm certainly not going to ideologically retreat just because a bad person holds views adjacent to mine.

Naturally. but you (or I) can derive benefit from adjacent loons, and can slow-roll cooperation against them, while maintaining plausible deniability. In fact, doing so offers immediate, obvious advantages, while policing the loons is much cost for little benefit. There doesn't seem to be a way to solve this, and the result is to make trust across the divide more costly than it otherwise should be. And at some point, the cost is too high.

Even if one were to recognize that people on their side were using such a tactic, there's nothing they can do about it other than to maybe abandon their side over an argument of principle... which is not going to happen.

They can 1) admit the other guys are crazy and 2) answer the question "how is my side winning not going to give the crazies influence?" If they can't answer that, especially #2, then yeah there's nothing they can do about it, but sometimes there is nothing you can do about it, and recognizing that is just recognizing the truth.

There's also a difference between "there are crazies on my side" and "the crazies on my side are the ones with influence", especially when the news media sees the former and pretends it's the latter because it doesn't like you.

I'm not doing #1 in every argument that pattern matches for this phenomena. It's not rhetorically viable for one, and for two it's also just an annoying argument to have every time.

If someone cries "sanewashing!" every time I try to talk about how " isn't that bad, actually" I would rather jump off a cliff.

Because then you have to walk back over and do a bunch of retarded rigor checks on what would be sane, what isn't, and re-establish all the premises from scratch, just because someone goes meta with their argument. It's bullshit.

All valid points. It seems in principle like it ought to be possible to come to some sort of understanding, some productive arrangement.

Remember Gamergate? The Gamergaters in the motte were actively, desperately attempting to sever any connection to the bailey, individually and as groups. The other side simply refused focused on whatever connection could be asserted, and studiously ignored all efforts to the contrary. As you note, if they don't like you, they don't have to play fair.

And this is where the despair sets in. Figuring out what's happening isn't hard, if you pay attention and work at being honest with yourself, which is to say that it's far beyond the ability of most people. But even if you can actually figure out what's happening, you are an individual, and the forces in operation are not individual forces. Someone on the other side, posessed of different values, has approximately zero incentive to recognize your diagnosis of the problem as valid. Reason is too loose, evidence too loose, too many degrees of freedom to pin the situation down into something reliably communicable.

This is true, but it's true no matter what you do. There are a lot of things that bad faith people on the other side can distort whether you give the crazies any influence or whether you have any crazies at all. If they want, they can just make up some crazies or otherwise lie.

My point is exactly that, as an explanation for why people on the other side who I think should listen to the OP's critique won't. They don't believe the criticism is made in good faith, and they arrive at that conclusion by exactly the logic you've just stated.

But even if you can actually figure out what's happening, you are an individual, and the forces in operation are not individual forces.

Groups are made up of individuals. Being a morally upright individual is the key here. If you're a model for others, they may choose to follow in your footsteps.

Giving up the individual responsibility of being a good person is why we're in this mess in the first place.

"You can't thicken up a pitcher of spit with a handful of buckshot."

Being a morally upright individual is good and necessary for its own reasons, but it's not a solution to social collapse or degradation. Something beyond individual morality is required for that. The "responsibility of being a good person" that was given up on was never an individual responsibility, but a communal one; the purely individual responsibility is is there in exactly the same way it always was. Pretending that this responsibility could be reduced to a purely individual matter is exactly how it was given up. Woke goes the way it goes because for all its madness, it is at least an attempt at restoring some form of public responsibility, which is why it has beat atomic individualism so thoroughly: people recognize that such responsibility is necessary, and lacking.

Of course it's good to encourage being a good person, but if the system is set up to incentivize defection, the defectors will rise, even if they are a minority. There are game theoretically unstable situations that are not amenable to solving via scolding and calls to be better.

Who creates these systems that set up incentives? Beings from another plane? No, humans do. The point I'm trying to make is that at some level it all comes back to individual responsibility. We need strong, moral people in order to take power and build better systems, if that's what you see as important.

This sort of thing isn't inevitable, and it's frustrating as hell to always see everyone here arguing that it's basically done and dusted. That pessimism is another major reason things are in the shitter.

There's people, and then there's the Things made of the spaces between people: Moloch and other egregores. If your plans involve assuming that the egregores don't exist and people are all you need to plan for, you are going to be very surprised at how things work out.

So no, humans do not have mastery over the incentives. They can in limited circumstances nudge those incentives, sometimes. That's about as good as it gets.

The point I'm trying to make is that at some level it all comes back to individual responsibility.

Do you recognize that communal responsibility exists as well?

We need strong, moral people in order to take power and build better systems, if that's what you see as important.

We do, but if the strong, moral people don't actually take power and build better systems, together, those systems won't happen.

Communal responsibility and egregores absolutely exist, and are important to factor in. However if we want to tackle those problems, then yes we need moral people to band together and build systems together.

Another way to phrase what I'm getting at is that it seems to me we have a lack of capable, moral people, especially young men, who are able to band together and build these systems. Could be a coordination problem, or a supply problem.

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There's a difference between demanding that silent people speak out and demanding that people who are already speaking out be careful about whom they are speaking out for.

I'd never demand that silent people speak out, for exactly the reason you describe, short of extreme situations like people being gunned down in front of them, and maybe not even then (abortion opponents think they are seeing the equivalent of babies being gunned down, but I don't want them to speak out).

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