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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.
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.
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.
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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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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.
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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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.
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