Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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...Ok, I want you to stop for a minute and make sure that you actually understand what those terms mean, because it looks very much like you don't fully grasp the scope or practical implications.
2.1 represents the replacement rate for maintaining a consistent population size on a generation to generation basis. That's not a minimum for survival, that's the replacement rate to keep the population size at a more or less fixed value, with any variance between the size of each generation being within the margin of error.
If we assume a fertility rate of 1 (which is a dramatic drop from our current rate of 2.3) , that does not mean that we're doomed, it just means that on average 1 person was born for every woman of breeding age. Ie, it averages out to what we might oversimplify (by representing the entire generation as couples for ease of understanding) as 1 child per couple. The upshot of which is that the next generation is half the size of the preceding one. And we are nowhere near the point where a reduction by half would be trouble. We're not exactly an endangered species here.
And before you start pearl clutching over that being unsustainable in perpetuity: 1) Nobody's pushing for perpetuity. The argument is that our population size right now is too big and we need to dial it back to a more sustainable level over the next few generations. And 2) I don't think you realize how slow this works. Projections right now are that we're probably going to hit 10 billion by 2100. If we assumed that by that point every country in the world implemented a 1 child policy, it would take us 140 years (just under 5 generations) to get back down to a population of 2 billion, which puts us back inside the numbers I've seen suggested as our sustainable population size, but is still nowhere near putting us in danger. That's how slow this goes, and that's assuming a fertility rate of 1.
So, as you might imagine, "if we ever hit below 2.1 children per couple we are screwed" doesn't remotely hold up to scrutiny at this point in time. That kind of alarmism presumes that we're an endangered species that desperately needs to shore up the numbers. And not only are we not such an endangered species, we still wouldn't be even after presuming generations worth of dramatic efforts to reduce our population size.
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Honestly, we'll probably be able to grow babies in artificial wombs in a few decades: there have already been notable successes with animals. That might increase the birth rate simply by saving women from having to go through pregnancy.
Other than that, were we ever to get to a situation where the viability of the species were seriously threatened (and even with global birth rates of current Western levels ~1.5, that would be centuries away) I'm pretty sure someone would do something radical about it.
Let's take the UK. If the number of women of childbearing age shrank by a quarter every generation, in 2300 there would still be about as many women of childbearing age as the entire population of England in 1066.
Worry less.
Absent
And twice is the only way to live.
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1) Absolutely not. Of course conservatives would want (and easily succeed) to freak you out with that, because natalism is that the core of their religious/political/warmongering values (tribe big tribe strong wargh). The Earth is insanely populated, so if birth rates went below 2.1, population would simply slowly decrease, which would not be a bad thing. And it would decrease so slowly that there would be a lot of time for birth rates to vary again, many times, both ways. As birth rates do. We're far from THAT danger. It's like being in a burning building and freaking out because someone aims a glass of water at the fire and OH NOES WE WILL ALL DROWN SOMEOBODY STOP HIM.
Also, by the way :
2) If mankind was programmed to go extinct after several generation, nobody would give a shit, and everyone would carry on as usual, chasing their usual small scale pleasures and fleeing their usual small scale fears. Especially conservatives as these pieces of shit keep proving again and again and again and again that they do not give a shit about future generations, preferring to make the planet uninhabitable than to change their habits or endanger their short term financial profit.
The Limits of Self Love
Scholars and activists in the field of fat studies do not believe that there is an obesity-related health crisis at all.
quillette.com
Is it that hard to agree that overweight/obese people should be treated with dignity, while also agreeing that excessive body fat is dangerous for health? Anyone?
Apparently not.
I agree, which is why I don't think sub-replacement levels can be attributed to a "lack of security." If anything, more security means fewer children.
And yes, again, statistically, families in MEDCs want more children than they have, but overall, the trend is clear when it comes to the demopgraphic transition model. And over 50% of the world's countries are in stage 4 of said model.
I don't know where the line for "really tried" is when millions have been spent in some cases (see Hungary for instance). There's been individual cases of raising the TFR within a country, but there's never been a case (to my knowledge) when the TFR has dipped beneath 2.1, and subsequently returned to it.
And this isn't just a "West" thing, as I said, over 50% of the world's countries have sub-replacement levels. Heck, the most populous country on Earth, India, has a sub-replacement level. China had a one child policy, the TFR plummeted (in part due to already existing trends), now it has a two child policy, but it still can't raise its TFR. And if China can't get its people to have babies, good luck to liberal democracies doing it. Heck, countries outside the West have even lower TFRs (South Korea has 0.8, Taiwan is extremely low, etc.)
All that being said, again, is a growing or even stable population a good thing? For an economy, yes, for the planet, no.
You're comparing the possibilty of going extinct in hundreds of years to the very real existential threats that face us RIGHT NOW.
And look, unless you want to start killing people, plummeting fertility rates won't shift the population in a reasonable amount of time to do something about stuff like climate change or ecosystem collapse, I get that, but in the long term, fewer people is better for the planet. Humans have been around for 200-300,000 years, we existed for 90% of that time with a population below 1 billion, let alone the 8 billion we have now.
The human race will go extinct no matter what we do. All species go extinct.
A few years back a little book called All Tomorrows inexplicably went viral for some reason, mostly because people seemed to dig the body horror angle. If you want to read that book, the full text is actually online if you search for it. But there's a couple of really obvious and important themes which a lot of people straight up missed despite the fact it's remarkably unsubtle.
The first is that whatever descendants humanity leaves behind, they will not be like us. Our species, our culture, our way of life is doomed to obliteration in the vastness of time and space. Even without deliberate modification, humans will eventually just evolve into something else. That's how life works. The process that got us to this point is just going to continue. This form we exist in now is not special or favored in any way, and the universe doesn't care about the continuation of things that look like us.
The second point is that because of this, our motivation for what we do has to come from the present. The worst impulses of humanity tend to come from belief in some final state or higher goal that will retrospectively justify everything. The idea that any particular species or, worse yet, any particular "race" has some grand destiny that justifies suffering in the present is bullshit, because the destiny of every species is to eventually go extinct and be replaced by something else.
Work, create and innovate because it makes you happy, because it fills your tiny life and because it might lead to a better future for your children and people you care about, not because you think it will help your species to endure forever. It won't, but that's okay.
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As a fat bastard par excellence, I’m with you.The Limits of Self Love
Scholars and activists in the field of fat studies do not believe that there is an obesity-related health crisis at all.
Is it that hard to agree that overweight/obese people should be treated with dignity, while also agreeing that excessive body fat is dangerous for health? Anyone?
Apparently not.
Nobody is saying that, just pointing out stuff like "In 1998, the National Institutes of Health lowered the overweight threshold from 27.8 to 25—branding roughly 29 million Americans as fat overnight" that's curiously missing from that Quillette article written by the National Review guyThe Limits of Self Love
Scholars and activists in the field of fat studies do not believe that there is an obesity-related health crisis at all.
Is it that hard to agree that overweight/obese people should be treated with dignity, while also agreeing that excessive body fat is dangerous for health? Anyone?
Apparently not.
But it's mostly just whining about a conference that *did* talk about exercise and such, just not to that idiot's standards.
Why BMI is a big fat scam
Body mass index is used to sell weight loss drugs, set insurance premiums, and counsel patients. There's just one little problem.
www.motherjones.com
It literally quotes in the article itself the claim that weight stigma is the true cause of poor health for obese people, not the obesity itself.
Which is a red herring. We can debate the limitations of BMI all we want, that isn't the crux of the argument. The crux of the argument is that obesity isn't really an issue, which, if true, would go against the consensus of scientific data.
I don't know what conference you'r taking about. Here's the actual quotes:But it's mostly just whining about a conference that *did* talk about exercise and such, just not to that idiot's standards.
Why BMI is a big fat scam
Body mass index is used to sell weight loss drugs, set insurance premiums, and counsel patients. There's just one little problem.
Fat activism can be traced back to at least 1969, when Bill Fabrey founded the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). In 1973, Judy Freespirit and “Aldebaran” of the Fat Underground published their “Fat Liberation Manifesto.” In language evoking the spirit of the Civil Rights movement, they describe their movement as “allied with the struggles of other oppressed groups against classism, racism, sexism, ageism, financial exploitation, imperialism and the like,” and demand “equal rights for fat people in all aspects of life, as promised in the Constitution of the United States” and “an end to discrimination against us in the areas of employment, education, public facilities and health services.” The document cheekily concludes, pace Marx, “FAT PEOPLE OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE.” It took some time for this movement to spawn an academic field. The first fat studies conference was held at Smith College in 2006.
The contents of the Journal of Fat Studies reveal the discipline’s affinity with other critical theory influenced fields. The contributions bear such titles as: “Fat as a neoliberal epidemic: Analyzing fat bodies through the lens of political epidemiology”; “Fat politics as a constituent of intersecting intimacies”; and “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A study of pedagogical approaches aimed at challenging obesity discourse in post-secondary education.” Unsurprisingly, given the logic of intersectionality, which posits oppressions as an interlocking matrix, many articles connect fatphobia with other forms of bigotry. For example, in an article by gender studies and sociology professor Bek Orr entitled “Trans/fat: an autoethnographic exploration of becoming at the intersection of trans and fat,” the writer argues that “Being fat and/or transgender makes one an object to be acted upon … To live at the intersection of fat and transgender is to experience a specific form of intersectional objectification.”
Many of the core concepts of recent left-wing academia—a belief in structural oppression, the denial of individual agency and the simultaneous belief in the power of affirmations to increase self-esteem—combine to militate in favor of a depiction of fat people as completely powerless to reduce their weight. In this view, fatness is largely caused by societal factors like poverty, and people remain fat for societal reasons: discrimination by the medical establishment, lack of suitable workout clothes, an unwelcoming atmosphere in gyms. While it is undoubtedly difficult to lose weight, such rhetoric makes it seem impossible—and not only impossible, but not even desirable. The wish to lose weight, according to philosophy professor Kate Manne, is “internalized fatphobia,” caused by oppressive patriarchal forces, “the forces that tell girls and women … to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet.”
One of the most prominent popularizers of such ideas is Lindo Bacon, whose 2008 book, Health at Every Size, was frequently referenced at BodCon3. “Life expectancy [among Americans] has increased dramatically during the time period in which weight rose,” she blithely asserts—an assertion that, if true at the time of the book’s writing, is no longer true. She also claims that “there is great controversy as to whether weight loss is necessary or even desirable for improved health.” But most of that controversy centers on the utility of BMI as a measure. Some bodybuilders count as obese according to that metric. However, when corrected to account for muscle mass, this discrepancy largely disappears, according to a 2020 study. Excess weight is not necessarily associated with worse health outcomes—but excess body fat is.
It would be misleading to attribute the entirety of the rise in obesity rates to left-wing academic theories and their fat activist proselytizers. But they surely play some role—and it can’t be a healthy one.
The contents of the Journal of Fat Studies reveal the discipline’s affinity with other critical theory influenced fields. The contributions bear such titles as: “Fat as a neoliberal epidemic: Analyzing fat bodies through the lens of political epidemiology”; “Fat politics as a constituent of intersecting intimacies”; and “Toward a Fat Pedagogy: A study of pedagogical approaches aimed at challenging obesity discourse in post-secondary education.” Unsurprisingly, given the logic of intersectionality, which posits oppressions as an interlocking matrix, many articles connect fatphobia with other forms of bigotry. For example, in an article by gender studies and sociology professor Bek Orr entitled “Trans/fat: an autoethnographic exploration of becoming at the intersection of trans and fat,” the writer argues that “Being fat and/or transgender makes one an object to be acted upon … To live at the intersection of fat and transgender is to experience a specific form of intersectional objectification.”
Many of the core concepts of recent left-wing academia—a belief in structural oppression, the denial of individual agency and the simultaneous belief in the power of affirmations to increase self-esteem—combine to militate in favor of a depiction of fat people as completely powerless to reduce their weight. In this view, fatness is largely caused by societal factors like poverty, and people remain fat for societal reasons: discrimination by the medical establishment, lack of suitable workout clothes, an unwelcoming atmosphere in gyms. While it is undoubtedly difficult to lose weight, such rhetoric makes it seem impossible—and not only impossible, but not even desirable. The wish to lose weight, according to philosophy professor Kate Manne, is “internalized fatphobia,” caused by oppressive patriarchal forces, “the forces that tell girls and women … to be small, meek, slight, slim and quiet.”
One of the most prominent popularizers of such ideas is Lindo Bacon, whose 2008 book, Health at Every Size, was frequently referenced at BodCon3. “Life expectancy [among Americans] has increased dramatically during the time period in which weight rose,” she blithely asserts—an assertion that, if true at the time of the book’s writing, is no longer true. She also claims that “there is great controversy as to whether weight loss is necessary or even desirable for improved health.” But most of that controversy centers on the utility of BMI as a measure. Some bodybuilders count as obese according to that metric. However, when corrected to account for muscle mass, this discrepancy largely disappears, according to a 2020 study. Excess weight is not necessarily associated with worse health outcomes—but excess body fat is.
It would be misleading to attribute the entirety of the rise in obesity rates to left-wing academic theories and their fat activist proselytizers. But they surely play some role—and it can’t be a healthy one.
So basically, more intersectional nonsense, where fat people are an "oppressed group." Supposedly the status of one's oppression differs as to whether one is fat or not.
Since you clearly don't know what the world "intersectional" means, let me help you out.
Whether or not fat people are an oppressed group is neither a particularly interesting question (the answer is obviously yes) nor has anything to do with intersectionality. Intersectionality would describe the way in which body weight interacts with other social identities. Fat stigma is extremely and measurably gendered, for example. Fat women are generally treated very differently to both fat men (straight men, certainly) and thin women, in ways that aren't necessarily comparable to either. Did you think it was just coincidence that every single image of a person in that article is a woman?
How about another one. According to a pilot study at one weight management clinic, 30% of the people being treated for chronic obesity also had symptoms consistent with (typically undiagnosed) adult ADHD. People with ADHD don't produce enough of the neurotransmitter dopamine, and one way to get your brain to release dopamine is to eat, especially energy-rich food like carbohydrates.
But even setting aside actual neurodevelopmental disorders, different people also very clearly have very different reactions to food in a way that is not reducible to their personal motivation, willpower or quality as a person. One thing that makes this incredibly obvious is that many, many drugs affect the way people react to food. There's a very clear neurochemical dimension to the whole thing, which makes the assumption that everyone possesses an equal natural ability to manage their own weight and that those who can't are therefore bad or weak people very clearly ableist.
Meanwhile, approximately 10,000 people a year in the US die as a result of eating disorders, with many others being permanently disabled. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate among any form of mental illness, and are a very direct consequence of body image issues resulting from societal attitudes to weight. Unlike deaths from chronic obesity, deaths from eating disorders overwhelmingly affect young people who would otherwise be healthy.
I don't even feel this should need to be stated but here we are. Fat stigma does not help people lose weight. For most overweight people it actually, demonstrably does the opposite. The desperate reaching to try and construe the ability to mock or bully people as "helping" them is frankly sad, pathetic and transparent. It is far, far more neurotic and unhealthy than any supposed denial of the problems caused by obesity, and in fact it legitimates those responses because other people weren't put on this earth to amuse you. It's none of your business what other people do with their bodies, it's none of your business what they eat, whether they get sick or how they die. If someone starts acting like my body is their business, my automatic response is to put the middle fingers up too.
Obesity isn't a problem that can be tackled in isolation just by bullying people into eating less, it's a holistic problem that likely has very complex and individual causes. But, at the end of the day, obese people are still people. They have just as much right to control their own lives as anyone else, and that means if they don't want to lose weight trying to bully or force them is both unethical and likely to be worse than ineffective.
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My partner has likely ADHD (undiagnosed and taking ages to get anywhere with it) and I wasn't aware of that aspect of it, so thanks. I've never understood how into nice food they are, because it's just food.
I fucking love going to the gym OTOH, so much so that I've given myself two hernias and one of them has just expanded. Is that what hernias do, expand? Dunno, but I need to go to the doctor again now.
So do you agree that fat people should be treated with dignity/not discriminated against or not?The Limits of Self Love
Scholars and activists in the field of fat studies do not believe that there is an obesity-related health crisis at all.
Is it that hard to agree that overweight/obese people should be treated with dignity, while also agreeing that excessive body fat is dangerous for health? Anyone?
Apparently not.
Because all of those quotes you helpfully provided are about *that*. Hell, your dude talks about a speech at the conference about how you should exercise and thinks it isn't good enough because the conference isn't actually about weight loss. He correctly says that most health problems come from excess fat but not actually weight, and then complains that fat people are saying it's about health and not actually weight. Pick a fucking argument and stick to it
What, do fat advocates have to constantly flagelate themselves for being fat before they ask to be taken seriously? Fact of the matter is that chode just hates seeing fat people who aren't ashamed. He'd go back to the '90s if he could
And those fat advocates are 100% right about discrimination around gyms and exercise clothes: just fucking looks at what happens when Nike advertises workout clothes for fat people
Obese mannequins are selling women a dangerous lie
I fear that the war on obesity is lost, or has even, as is fashionable, ceased to exist, for fear of upsetting people into an early grave.
Hell, that discussion has gone to very stupid places on this very forum. Probably this very thread. And you're telling me it, what, doesn't exist?
I think they are correct about that discrimination generally, but on the gyms I think there's a degree of self-conscious paranoia to it that is self-defeating. I don't doubt for a moment there are some real dickheads in gyms but my personal experience of going to the gym is that most people there want the best for themselves and the others there - they are generally pleased that people of all stripes have made the effort (and it does take a lot of effort sometimes) to go. Like, we know how hard going to the gym is because we're there all the time whether we want to go or not.
Shouldn't be.
No, they're not, and if you think that, you either lack reading comprehension skills, or you're trolling.
Re-read the article, that isn't said at all.
That's not what the "fat people" are saying. Again, to quote the article:
"We [fat advocates] are solving for the wrong problem. The [health] crisis isn't obesity. It's weight stigma."
That's one hell of a claim to make. If true, everything we know about obesity is wrong. Or, more likely, the claim is BS.
No, but if your advocacy is making claims that obesity/excess fat doesn't affect your health, or when people like Rebel Wilson are shamed for LOSING weight, then your credibility is taking a nosedive.
That's one hell of a projection.
Obese mannequins are selling women a dangerous lie
I fear that the war on obesity is lost, or has even, as is fashionable, ceased to exist, for fear of upsetting people into an early grave.
...I don't see the issue. It's pointing out that the fat acceptance movement has reached the point where it's asking for medical advice to be rescinded.
It's extremely rich for you to ask what does and doesn't exist when you're the one making claims about stuff existing that definitely doesn't.
Does fat shaming exist? Yes. Is obesity a health hazard? Yes. Has fat acceptance reached the point where medical misinformation is being posted/medical information being rescinded? Yes.
Fittingly enough, at the time of writing this, I've just come from a 3km jog, which is something I do each day, every day, even now when it's winter, and usually in the morning. Let me tell you, I don't do it for shits and giggles.
That's fair, I just hate his face to the point I never click the little triangle that animates it and makes sound come out.
Seeing his face alone makes me hear the sounds in my head... which I then have to drown out with cheesecake.
Just as a point of scientific pedantry, it's more that their neurones don't respond to dopamine strongly enough rather than not having enough dopamine. Or as it could be put, not having enough dopaminergic activity.