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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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Which, in the Kendi framework, makes you a racist.

As OP says, the eyes of fat acceptance activists, taking ozempic makes you fatphobic. My thing is: I don't think anyone cares now that there is a viable intervention. Even they don't care, when they can make money.

This article is a potential clue to how it'd go:

So when patients ask for it, I usually prescribe it. Part of practicing weight-neutral medicine, I've realized, is supporting my patients' own sense of what their bodies need.

...

Being a body-positive doctor in the age of Ozempic has made me realize, sadly, that I alone can't stop the fatphobia that permeates our culture. As long as it exists, we'll have a market for medicines that make people thin.

What I can do is try, with each patient I see, to make them feel comfortable and safe, and help them realize that being healthy may have little to do with how much they weigh.

If this is the sort of thing former-Kendi disciples have to tell themselves before helping along their black patients, so what? Their cope is their business. But, at a certain point, the public will want what it wants and someone will cater. The people with nothing to gain (or lose) can write NYT op-eds but everyone else will profit.

Also, we give him too much credit. Kendi may be the most popular purveyor of a certain view, he/it thrives in a bubble and with the forbearance of the people within (he almost never does hostile media for a reason). He's a product of George Floyd and white benefactors like Jack Dorsey who want to Do Something. Who said they'll stick around once they hear X treatment will raise Africa's IQ (this could be the thin end of the wedge because even the anti-HBDers think there's room for enhancement there)? Who said black people will?

EDIT: There's also another world where white people get the treatment first and then there's talk of closing the gap, for equity.

But, at a certain point, the public will want what it wants and someone will cater. The people with nothing to gain (or lose) can write NYT op-eds but everyone else will profit.

When it comes to genetic fixes, I disagree. I've encountered too many people, both IRL and online, whose opinions on the topic are such that I fully expect them to join whatever real-life Blue Cosmos ends up forming once serious engineering comes along. There's the classically-religious sort, who already object to IVF and find the whole field "meddling in God's domain" (I don't know who else remembers Bush-era "bioethics" debates.) There's the environmentalist-leaning who are already protesting GMO crops as "Frankenfoods" — their opinions on potential "Frankenpeople" as the worst example yet about how human beings are a virus and everything we do corrupts or destroys nature. Or people like the guy living in Germany who used to show up in the Marginal Revolution comments to call Tyler Cowen a Nazi any time he brought up CRISPR, and would go on about human dignity and the un-amendable First Article of the German Constitution, how the "Nazi idea" is that one gene variant could ever be better or worse than another. Or the fellow who argued for preemptively nuking China should they fail to join us in banning it. Or the people who called for the UN to expand upon UNESCO's "Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights" and make the human genome part of the "common heritage of humanity" so that genetic engineering is legally equivalent to vandalizing the Parthenon or such. Or all the countries who have already banned germline modification. Or…