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