I want to lazily but quickly refer anyone who’s reading this to a recent video from Hank Green and a Vox video from last year concerning Facebook. During her 60 Minutes interview this week, Frances Haugen revealed that political parties in Europe have written to Facebook, claiming that the platform is making their constituents’ views more polarized and extreme, leaving them with little choice but to alter their campaigns and policy proposals to fit in with these emerging viewpoints. This is a reminder that peoples’ identities are constructed and maintained through our engagement with all forms of media. You think you’re in control of your beliefs; you’re not. And that’s not just about intentional propaganda and division. These algorithms, left on their own, reinforce any oppressive identity categories that already exist, like what women “should” be doing or what poorer people “should” be doing. There’s little room for diversity of thought. Historian Yuval Harari has written about this… others have too… about how “individuals” are constructs of capitalism, and we “individuals” distinguish ourselves chiefly through the goods and services we buy, liberal and conservative alike. Subgroups are easier to market to, so the free market is incentivized to keep our interests concise as well as consistent. As the Vox report shows, cleaning jobs are marketed mostly to women, and lumber jobs mostly to men. If you come into these platforms with more questions about the world than answers, you will leave with more answers than questions. If you feel two ways about a social issue, or another way entirely, social media will force you to coalesce into one of the pre-approved stances, like a Schrodinger Box. We need to be humble and vigilant while we’re compelled to rigorously defend our identities in the Misinformation Age, because our identities exist at the convenience of corporations. Otherwise, societal oppression will go unquestioned and unchallenged, whether the humans in charge of social media want it to or not.
Um… I Think South Park Just Criticized Liberal Media and No One Is Talking About It
SPOILER WARNING: Contains spoilers for the South Park Vaccination Special
CONTENT WARNING: Politics
Curiously, the argument between the anchor and reporter about the “passion” of the kids for stealing the vaccines and distributing them independently… this entire bit is absent from every review I’ve read about the episode. It’s not mentioned in any of the summaries.
Not AV Club. Not Indie Wire. Not Den of Geek, IGN, Collider, or even The Daily Beast.
For me, this was a big moment of the special. The news anchor argues that the anti-vaccine Q-Anon kids are just as valid in fighting for what they believe in as the pro-vaccine kids. Here, Trey Parker claims that you can use the same rationale to justify the acts of one group as the other. Since the initial confrontation between the two groups were reminiscent of the Capitol riot in January (ffs Butters waves that big U.S. flag), I’m preeeetty sure this as an indictment of the liberal media for their coverage of the BLM protests in the summer. I have seen conservatives and libertarians online pointing out a perceived hypocrisy of liberal media qualifying the Capitol rioters as “traitors” and “insurrectionists” and “seditionists”, while elevating any rioters during the BLM protests to an exalted status, or excusing their behavior as “frustration” with the system. Now, I personally do not think these events are equivalent. What I AM suggesting is that Trey Parker is probably making the comparison in order to admonish the liberal media for stoking acceptance of violence at police and property during the BLM protests. At the very least, Parker seems to posit that the Capitol rioters’ violent actions are logically consistent with their beliefs; it’s pointless to claim it was “senseless”, as the media often does. This criticism of liberals would be on brand for South Park, since Parker and Matt Stone have a solid history ridiculing any liberal or conservative who takes a belief as gospel and runs with it. Whether any of us agrees with Parker’s comparison or not, I think he is making it. Liberal outlets have already criticized South Park for its role in stowing political cynicism to the point of inaction, and for contributing to trolling culture. Why aren’t they talking now?
The referenced reviews:
South ParQ Vaccination Special Review: The futility of returning to normal (avclub.com)
‘South Park Vaccination Special’ Review: Comedy in Crisis — Spoilers | IndieWire
South Park Vaccination Special Review | Den of Geek
South Park: ‘South ParQ – The Vaccination Special’ Review – IGN
South Park Vaccination Special Review: A Hilarious Return to Normal (collider.com)
‘South Park’ Brutally Mocks Wacky QAnon Supporters in Vaccination Special (thedailybeast.com)
Sugar Too?! Ugh… Anyway, Look: It’s Not That Important To Be Super-Duper Vegan
Just a quick one for everybody. I just found out what a “sugar vegan” is. This is someone who abstains from eating processed and clarified white sugar because it is filtered using a form of carbon derived from charred animal bones. I think it’s important to be wary of all these little ways the meat industries insert themselves into our lives, but in my opinion we should be cautious about striving to achieve personal purity. I try to eat vegan when I can, but I usually rely on a mostly pescatarian diet. There are still efforts I want to make to eat more vegan, but I am happy with the success I’ve made so far at least when it comes to beef and pork. On occasion, if some beef is offered to me, I will eat it. I never buy it. But I understand that my own shopping choices hardly make a dent in consumer demand for factory-farmed animals and their products. I’ll avoid white sugar if I can (for this and other reasons). But it’s critical that many people are encouraged to make a switch toward a more vegetable-rich diet and refrain from the ritualized daily incorporation of meat-eating. It’s far less helpful for me to personally expunge every trace of animal by-product from my diet. It’s just another example of personal responsibility propaganda that makes us feel better but achieves very little.
Oh! By the way, it seems that organic sugar and less-processed sugars like turbinado and panela are exempt from this. But not BROWN SUGAR! It’s white sugar with molasses added back in. PHEW. Okay, I’m done now.
Bye.
Yeah We FIGURED Exercise Can’t Completely Stop Fat From Making You Sick. Your Point??
Just a quick rage post, everyone. This week you may have found some punchy, alarming news headlines pop up such as “FAT BUT FIT IS A MYTH”. Scary news. Scary fat news. It’s that kind of thing when “journalists” are desperate for material so they dig into recent academic research to pull out a claim out of context that gets everyone’s attention. Bravo. These news stories are alluding to a study out of a Spanish university that concluded people in “overweight” and “obese” BMI categories remained at high risk of cardiometabolic diseases like high cholesterol, hypertension, and diabetes. But in both the articles I read – one from CNN and one from U.S. News & World Report (see below for links) – the study authors reiterate that their findings also show that regular physical exercise lowered everyone’s risk of these diseases regardless of their BMI, corroborating other studies. I’ve written about this before. CNN interviewed a Duke University administrator who cautioned that this is a correlative – not causative – cross-sectional study (one of the easiest ones to conduct). He mentioned that it could be that some “obese” participants started exercising regularly BECAUSE they learned they had new health issues. You can’t know from a study like this.
This brings me to my biggest beef here…. wh- what… who are these articles for? What do you hope to accomplish? They’re setting up a straw man of well you know, you can’t stay FAT and expect exercise to fix any issues your fat may be causing. Wh- who the hell is saying this? The study authors admit exercise still helps. Besides, again, there still is not scientific consensus about what exactly makes people get fatter and how fat influences disease. And, again,
WE DO NOT YET KNOW HOW TO SHRINK FAT AND MAINTAIN LEANNESS AT A POPULATION LEVEL
Both the articles (both of them?) have a wrap-up with some authority claiming that it’s important to be physically active and get or stay lean. Ok, but HOW? Get out of here with this shit. And shame on the writers and editors for including good news somewhere in the text while having misleading titles and introductions that imply the opposite. Save it for the Daily Mail.
Exercise Doesn’t Boost Health If You Stay Obese, Study Finds | Health News | US News
‘Fat but fit’ is a myth when it comes to heart health, new study shows – CNN
You See, It’s FUNNY Because Buying Frosting Is Supposed To Mean You’re A Failure… JK
I’ve been sitting on this post for a few weeks. I thought it would be worth finishing before the end of the holidays. Enjoy?
One of Colbert’s recent Late Show cold opens is a fake ad for Cinnabon’s pint of frosting.
In the sketch, people at a loss of what left to do to survive the boredom and isolation of the pandemic are seen eating the frosting out of the carton (which is clearly some kind of vanilla yogurt). They are sad. One of them is crying in a bathtub. The announcer’s message is: “give up”. I have some thoughts.
First off there seems to be more than one premise. Are they lampooning big fast food for (literally) capitalizing on people’s anxiety and desperation at the expense of their health, while not helping us solve our actual problems? Or are they fueling the entrenched societal narrative of shame about overeating as if due to weakness? Even if the writers mean to fault the corporations, if the sketch still requires us to agree that binge- or stress-eating processed food is a sign failure, weakness, or lack of control, then I think the joke is not worth making. At the very least, the joke should be better crafted, more on target. I see that the main joke of the Colbert clip is that Cinnabon’s rollout of their signature frosting is a reflection of the state of everyone’s pandemic stress and boredom. It’s not really trying to fault individual consumers OR Cinnabon. It’s more of a suggestion that this is the natural, logical conclusion of a months-long life disruption that’s now spilling out into the winter holidays.
… However, it’s difficult for me to give them the benefit of the doubt, since (goodness, I did NOT want to get into this but here we go) Colbert’s Late Show writers have a history of making jokes about stress eating. They make like… a lot of them. Stephen himself has a long history of doing these bits where he feigns sadness or panic and then digs into some ice cream for relief. A few times he’ll even lament “I’m fat” in a sort of “teen girl seeks support after a break up” bit. And I haven’t even mentioned the many times he takes a passing jab at his own appearance; he tends to view his average amount of athleticism, muscle, and fat as evidence that he’s undisciplined, unaccomplished, and generally not manly (all in spite of the fact that Colbert is a very rich and successful actor). He and his team also write fat jokes about Republicans (most notably Christie and Trump) that draw on stereotypes you can leverage against ANY fat person.
Liberals need to know better than to make arguments that rely on fat stigma, and they should know that, while internalized fat bias is a fact of life, it is a part of the personal-responsibility narrative that lets institutions off the hook and is demonstrably false. It’s hazardous to make jokes that acknowledge how we feel about fat and food, and yet not challenge it.
Happy Holidays
P.S.: I’m only upset because I care about you, Stephen.
You Don’t Really Get What “Mental Illness” Means – The Killing of Walter Wallace
Among the litany of ignorant and inflammatory comments I’ve been finding on YouTube in response to the recent killing of Walter Wallace by Philadelphia police – the same tired-out claims I’ve seen time and again – something that stuck out to me today is this: don’t pretend you know what mental illnesses are, or that you know anything about their implications.
“I know he had mental illness… BUT…”
“So what if he had mental illness, you still can’t…”
Look, dingwipe. You’re lying to yourself and everyone else if you think you believe that mental illnesses actually exist. Why? Because the very concept of mental illness has huge ramifications for how we as a society view free will, hold people accountable for their actions, and grant people special care and consideration. And you’re not considering any of this. Frankly, it scares you. Believing in the existence of mental illnesses means you can’t assume anything about how someone is going to behave just by looking at them. It means you can’t just tell someone to “suck it up” or “cut it out” and expect them to behave prosocially. It means some people don’t have as much control over their actions as you think they should… and perhaps, neither do you. Hell, maybe we ALL deserve more consideration. But you can’t accept that. Your identity depends on your ability to cope with a lack of consideration from others. You need this story that people do bad things because they’re greedy and vain. The world is so much simpler that way. You can crank someone’s hardships up to eleven, but they’re still equally required to pull through.
After all, we suffer equally, don’t we…?
Anyone who complains just doesn’t want to put in the effort and expects everyone else to cover their asses, isn’t that right?
I get that you’re not going to change, not from this. Not from me. I only ask that you stop pretending that you’re on our side when you enter a debate about social justice for people of color and people with disabilities. You’re agreeing that people can have mental illnesses so you don’t look bad. You’re lampshading. Mental illness means that you will not be capable of responding to situations the way most people can. And as for the claim that having mental illness doesn’t give you a pass to misbehave in society… you’re right. In our society, no, it doesn’t. You are expected to carry yourself the same as everyone else.
Maybe there’s something wrong with that. Maybe that’s something we should change.
What’s ultimately terrifying about mental illness is that we fail to acknowledge it.
People Miss the Whole Point of Political Correctness
Ah, the joy of r/fatlogic.
I already knew what the commenters would write as soon as I saw this. This argument has been applied to other forms of verbal abuse and microaggressions such as sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and misgendering: you don’t get to decide how someone should feel in response to how you treat them. If someone tells you that the manner and content of your speech causes them to feel uncomfortable, afraid, or sad, the burden had ought to be on you to change your behavior instead of them sucking it up. I generally agree with this maxim, but I don’t think this is the best argument for why people should check their privilege and bigotry. People on the other side of this – usually conservatives and libertarians – claim that feelings are primarily one’s own responsibility (though conservatives are plenty offended by certain things). And people can feel offended about anything. That in itself does not make all feelings logical. Honoring everyone’s feelings as truth would probably amount to cultural relativism when feelings are shared among groups – this dreaded so-called “identity politics”.
I would caution two things. One, it is technically correct to acknowledge that someone has a feeling. Feelings are not under anyone’s control. They are automatic. They can be rational, but they don’t need to be. Erasing someone’s feeling because it’s illogical or inconvenient to you is a pointless endeavor. And two, you shouldn’t change your language or behavior around someone because JUST because it offends them personally. You should do it because you understand the specific ways that people are treated in society based on their group membership and how that creates a different experience than yours – even if they haven’t experienced it yet. It’s the reason why doing blackface is wrong even if your black friend doesn’t know the history and tells you they don’t care. This political correctness crusade has never been about exhausting yourself by constantly catering to individuals’ whims. It’s about understanding general patterns.
If you yell at a woman, especially if you are a man, you should understand that A) as a woman she might have had the experience of being abused by a man in the past – a particular dynamic that most men can’t experience, and B) she probably experiences low levels of verbal harassment most of the time, and your behavior will add to this accumulation of stress.
If you’ve been thin all your life and some of your friends make fun of fat people, with jokes ranging from playfully using fat stereotypes to being downright annoyed by them, you will probably laugh along with them even if you’re neutral or apathetic toward fat people personally. But then what happens if a year or two later you’ve gained 60 pounds? You’re not just so fat that only you notice – you’re so fat that everyone else has noticed too. You’ve never been one of “those people”, but now you are. How do you think all the jokes and insults your friends made about fat people are going to affect you? You’ll probably hate yourself and you won’t know what to do. You probably won’t have many sympathetic friends or relatives to fall back on.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t just assume that since an individual has not yet experienced explicit instances of discrimination for their group affiliation(s), it’s okay to make jokes or share negative views of their group. You might have a black or Muslim friend who may have been subject to systemic discrimination but happens to not have had insults and slurs hurled at them by strangers or been threatened with racist symbols or Islamophobic messages. But they can still experience these things in the future, and if they do they will probably not recognize it right away, because you’ve been deriding Muslims or black people for years. Just because you don’t see them as “one of those people” and you’ve convinced them that they aren’t, that doesn’t mean they won’t eventually be treated that way by others.
The point of political correctness is to try – at least TRY – to educate yourself about the experiences of marginalized groups and use what you’ve learned to treat strangers and kin with more empathy and respect. But more than that, it’s about fighting for systemic change; a kind smile and a conversation will only do so much. It’s dishonest and misleading to reduce fights for social equity to policing individuals’ language. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. But people who are truly “woke” know that people get their beliefs from SOMEWHERE, and they spend more of their time fighting the institutions that produce loyal followers rather than simply shaming people into compliance, or exiling them as punishment for their personal failings.
The Word “Overweight” Really Doesn’t Mean Anything
We’re back again with a hard-to-search query, and lo and behold it’s still about fat stigma. This time I’m trying to investigate the use of the term “overweight”, looking for nuanced analyses of its multiple uses and their consequences. But I have come back empty-handed. And whenever that happens, I BLOG.
THIS…. this is that blog.
I was attempting to watch a film analysis on YouTube and when this guy referred to the main character as “overweight”, I couldn’t watch anymore. Would people please, please stop using this word?! It’s not just offensive, it’s stupid. It’s a stupid word. I know what he meant. He meant fat. But fat in a “kind” way, in a way that suggests… not that fat, just fat enough for it to be noticeable. First off, you’re not granting anyone a kindness when you use this euphemism. The reason you’re using it is because you want to indicate that you can see a difference in someone’s body proportions, shape, or composition that qualifies them as “fat”, but that they are not REALLY fat, like, the real fat people over there that are actually the ones who are ill or weird or subhuman. It’s not “fat” – it’s “fat lite”. “Fat-ish”. But by doing so, you’re reinforcing the notion that there is a level of fat that is too far gone, too different, too inexcusable. You’re reinforcing the belief that there is any amount of fat that someone has that could make them chiefly responsible, and that we know exactly the point when someone is so fat that it amounts to an illness. But more importantly, when we say the word “overweight” we really mean 3 things, and we use them interchangeably:
- Having so much fat that your physical or mental* health is worse than ideal**
- Having a particular body shape – some proportion of fat that is intermediate between the proportions commonly seen in the media and the fattest person you can think of
- Having a proportion of fat that you think is greater than average
And by “average” I again mean consistent with common media depictions. In reality, many people are fatter than what you see on social networking apps and TV. According to the CDC , the average (mean) height for a female in the United States is about 5 feet, 4 inches (162 cm) and the average weight is about 170 pounds (77 kg). A rough estimate for the resulting average BMI is around 29, which is considered “overweight” by medical authorities. Will a female with a BMI of 29 LOOK fat? It depends, both on the proportions of the person and the schema of the observer. Are they so fat that their health is suffering? Perhaps, but it would still be difficult to know that with any certainty just by looking at them. Are they TYPICAL? Yes, yes they are typical.
I hope people will see that the criteria I listed above are, for the most part, mutually exclusive. People who look “chubby” are likely not over-weight in the sense that they are fatter than average. They probably are average. There are many people who have physical and mental disorders that we associate with being fat, but we don’t suspect it, because they aren’t fat. And besides, at least 80% of American adults may be “overfat”, which is largely to do with visceral fat depots (surrounding your guts); this figure includes a significant proportion of people whose BMI would classify them as having “normal weight”. Where’s our “concern” for them?
So please, let’s stop saying “overweight”. What should we use instead? Oh hell I don’t have ALL the answers. …. Let’s just say FAT for now and I dunno… use modifiers? I’m open to suggestions.
Thanks for reading.
For more on fat stigma, I like this blog post from Scientific American:
Fat is Not the Problem – Fat Stigma Is
*Being “obese” is associated with a greater likelihood of suffering from mental illnesses. Currently, the direction of causation constitutes a chicken-or-egg debate, but it seems that at least in the case of major depression, there is some evidence that both are likely to lead to each other. The mechanisms are not yet well understood. We do know that fat stigma causes increased risks for mental and physiological illnesses irrespective of BMI. Mental health may also suffer from the neurochemical and endocrine disruption that can occur with a diet of high-processed foods and a lack of regular exercise, but these conditions hold true for everybody.
**”Ideal” is, of course, subjective.
The Morality of Fat – Levels of Misconception
Tiers of the Morality of Fat:
1) Being fat does not always mean you’re unhealthy.
2) Being healthy is not always ethical.
People use their physical and mental stamina in order to oppress others, and the pleasure that they can experience can make them apathetic and ignorant to the ills of the world and other people in it.
3) Being ethical is not just about being prosocial; it’s also about living the good life.
4) Being prosocial is not always possible.
Claims that fat people over-consume at the expense of lower income people across the world, or at the expense of the environment, may have some validity. But on the whole, everybody in the middle class who live in developed nations use a great deal of energy in their daily lives, such that any additional costs from eating more food and requirements of supplementary healthcare are unlikely to be proportionally significant. More importantly, most middle and lower class people in developed nations face systemic barriers to having affordable healthy food and time for exercise, as well as mental healthcare for disorders like addiction and anxiety. Asking people to simply put in more effort toward eliminating their need for consumption cannot be enough.
5) Living the good life is subjective.
For some people, living a longer life or having lots of physically demanding experiences is important. But they’re not the only keys to a happy life, and some goods that come from being alive actually come at the expense of a longer life or being able to have lots of physical experiences, irrespective of how fat you are or how much you eat. You can’t have it all. It’s important to some people spend a majority of their time making art, solving puzzles, or enjoying lots of food. You can’t just assume that these things are less valuable. Though it can be argued that changing your diet and activity level can boost your performance and enjoyment of these experiences as well, that is true only to a point. Specializing in anything you enjoy still requires some sacrifice, and being human is about more than just being in tune with your biology.
6) Living the life you want is not always possible.
The majority of people who go on some kind of diet program do not experience sustainable weight loss. Exercise burns significantly fewer calories than people think. Fat loss may be possible in the near future for significant segments of the population, but not unless there are substantial changes in food access, job security, healthcare access, education, and media advertising. For now at least, most of us will have to accept the fact that we are going to get fatter, or stay fat, for a while. Exercise is still beneficial in a lot of ways other than simply losing fat, but it’s also something that is difficult for many people to do consistently. Moreover, people are naturally unlucky about all sorts of things, not just in the realm of fat. Some people respond to calorie restriction better than others; some people have more resources to support them than others. Some people grow up with physical activities and healthy eating as positive and reliable parts of their lives. Many do not. People have impairments, deformities, or injuries that they are born with or acquire later in life – cancers, blindness, missing limbs – that carve out life paths with very different outcomes. For these people, joy and achievement cannot look the same as it does for average people. That’s not necessarily a negative thing, but oftentimes people with disabilities have to be more creative and tenacious when society does not give them a simple blueprint for what experiences will make them happy, much less what actions they can take to make them happen.
Worst of all, depression can make this entire journey not seem worth it. Life is inherently full of suffering, confusion, grief, and regret. Sometimes this is downright intolerable. Everyone deserves the opportunity to change their circumstances so they can have new experiences and respond differently to life’s challenges, and even when people have depression… a new job, a new friend, or a new home may be all it takes to begin to make that happen. You could be like me, a person whose anxiety is frequently so bad that I overestimate the risks of physical harm and social embarrassment for trying new things, and I underestimate my worth, my capabilities, and my capacity to handle setbacks, such that I rarely enjoy the benefits of change. But there are those people for whom these resources are out of sight or out of reach for a long, long time. And there are also people who may never respond positively to these changes even when they occur. Human life is messy, and in this very fundamental way people can have vastly different inner worlds, and some people are more different than others. I can only offer this: you can never be fully sure that you are one of the people that can never benefit from a change in your life. But I would not harass even a loved one to stay alive and look for new possibilities no matter what. To do such a thing is not only presumptuous; it is selfish. And above all, it is cruel.
You’ll Benefit More From Exercise Than From Being Thin
The University of Cambridge published a longitudinal study in 2015 that found people were twice as likely to die prematurely if they were inactive than if they were obese. A moderate amount of activity amounting to a brisk 20-minute walk daily is sufficient to decrease your risk of death 7.5%. Lowering your BMI below 30 kg/m^2 would only decrease your risk by 3.6%.
This data is important, not just to reduce fat stigma but also to orient people at all levels of fatness toward an achievable, manageable, and sustainable threshold to increasing health outcomes. If these findings ring true, then the scary level of hype from the fitness industry, wellness industry, and the medical field is overwhelming, and it will continue to intimidate and dissuade many people from getting the benefits from exercise that they deserve. People should have the right not to exercise, but this toxic association between fatness and health, versus exercise and health, has got to go.
P.S.:
You know what ELSE would be nice? If major publications would refrain from using misleading, lazy, garbage microaggressions. This article in Scientific American from 2015 mentions that people can see health benefits from walking at a casual pace for just 2 minutes every hour, though at least 150 minutes a week of more “moderate intensity” exercise such as brisk walking is recommended. The article ends thus:
“The assumption here, of course, is that those casual walks around the house don’t take you to the refrigerator for a snack.”
… A blatant, and frankly unnecessary, piece of fat prejudice. Note that nowhere in the article is there a discussion of obesity or caloric intake. The POINT, people, is that a casual exercise like walking can improve your body’s functioning, not that it reduces fat. Eating will not “erase” the benefits.
Already Ridiculous 