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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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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.

Ah, in that case it is not true. Nutritionally, assuming you mean sodas rather than champagne or something, a fizzy drink is basically just simple carbohydrates. They also usually contain salt which is not strictly speaking a nutrient. There's nothing inherently wrong with these things.