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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25841 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

…

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

…

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.

The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.

Oooh finally something I have personal experience on.

I was in one of the bluest parts of the country, and maybe the planet, Campbell California and yet when training at the gym the politics of the gym goers were... far to the right of the city but probably slighly left of the country as a whole (though at the magnitude we're talking here it's basically impossible for any actually Right wing opinion to be even discussed since things like "what about that city supervisor" have basically universal agreement. The few times national issues were discussed (mainly oct 7 when the isreali guy said that he has to take some time off to talk to his family) the opinion was definitely in the "RW but mainstream" group. Like they'll talk about Jocko Wilnik's podcast, or Huberman lab, or they'll watch Rennisance periodization https://youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization and other right ish aligned groups. Not crazy people but definitely not... super mainstream left. I'm somehow a normal guy for getting my news from Wikipedia instead of the NYT

I have no idea as to mechanisms, but the phenomenon is VERY strong, I remember a slatestarcodex article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ that discusses how you can get into very strong filter bubbles, going and playing a sport with other guys possibly the gayest sport ever produces some of the strongest filter for Right wing opinion in the state of California yet there we go.

I'll note something odd, there's sort of this weird valley effect, the "mildly fit by incidental lifestyle" people (other than construction workers) were mostly college educated yuppie (I really wish there was a better word than Yuppie/Redneck for the rural city split)but then when I go to the place where people are active to a level most people haven't seen (I lost 50 pounds via pure fat shaming by being around them) are quite right wing . It's like if your lifestyle incidentally makes you more fit (or you only try a little bit) you're much more likely to be Left wing, but those who are actively trying super hard are pretty right wing for the city.

One thing I will note is that every one that took Testosterone replacment therapy (TRT) instantly became more right wing soon after starting TRT, they also became dramatically stronger faster and trained way harder, I do not know if this is the actual effect or if it's more of a "people who do sports are just straight up built different" effect. But I would like to see a study on that, does taking TRT change behavior? https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(11)00078-7 is hard to read, but indicates plausibly yes, but I'm so bad at google that i can't find any studies on TRT directly impacting behavior.

possibly the gayest sport ever

I know BJJ stands for "Brazilian jiu-jitsu". I've known that fact for at least a decade.

But every time I read it, my mind instantly goes to "blowjob-job".

There is an undying faction of TMA (traditional martial arts) which refers to BJJ as blowjob jujitsu or similar, as though some rhetorical win can possibly reverse the steamroller that modern MMA represents. Reassuringly, this faction gets smaller every year as the evidence rolls in.

It doesn’t surprise me. Most TMAs are basically LARP at this point, and they definitely feel the cognitive dissonance of watching MMA/BJJ fighters learn how to fight properly while they are awarded multiple belts and even half-belts for learning to play fight. You can get pretty high in the ranks of most TMAs without actually needing to demonstrate that you are a good fighter, where in MMA and BJJ rank comes directly from winning matches.

Modern BJJ is nothing like modern MMA and I'll fight you (literally) on that.

For starters as far as I can tell, basically every current MMA fighter focus's on Just standing up out of bottom position rather than fighting from bottom position.

Next from top position MMA guys emphasize holding the other person down and punching them, prefering to remain with their legs tangled in wrestling rides rather than passing the legs

BJJ's big 4 submissions are the Rear Naked choke, The armbar, the inside heel hook and the outside heel hook, when was the last time you saw a heel hook win an MMA fight? It's literally the 2nd and 3rd most common submission in top level bjj yet in mma both combine to about 6th? Like the Arm triangle is more common than both combined, when the arm triangle is 9th in bjj.

My MMA skills are rusty and I'd need to get back on the juice before I'm ready to fight anybody for real, but modern BJJ and modern MMA grappling have diverged to such an extent that to call the 2 the same is crazy.

I don’t know much about this at all, but aren’t you really just describing how MMA moved from a free-for-all mix entered into by fighters of various background to what is increasingly a specific martial art of its own?

As evidence of your claim that BJJ has fallen by the wayside in modern MMA, as well as a fun historical artifact, feast your eyes on Rousmiar Palhares's career record. Five heel hook submissions in the UFC! Five more in other pro fights! Of course, his last one in the UFC was over a decade ago, which kind of makes the point. Still, an impressive career that includes kneebarring Jon Fitch and tapping Jake Shields with a kimura.

I think there's a reasonable argument that MMA grappling has diverged from BJJ largely because bjj has been incorporated into the training process. Sort of a pareto effect thing.

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