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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.
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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