Hi. In today's episode, Katy Stoll looks at America's obsession with weight, how social media has made this obsession worse, and how we can be more empatheti...
has had a longstanding /r/FatPeopleHate fixation that didn’t go away when that sub was banned. Chanting “CALORIES IN CALORIES OUT” was another technically correct way to be a hateful asshole under pretense of concern that was actually concern trolling. They wanted overweight people to be miserable and to suffer to get off to their vaguely higher position on the social acceptability hierarchy.
It isn’t directly personal to me. I’m in good shape for my age, all things considered. But I have loved ones that are overweight, are putting in real effort to be healthier all the same, and yes, weight obsession doesn’t help them at all and I think at this point the cruelty from those howling about it is intentional.
As someone that directly brigaded FPH way back when I’ll put some things out there. Calories in calories out started basically just to demystify a lot of the bullshit around health, diet and fitness. There is a constant ongoing push in that space to make it super complicated to sell you shit. From Gwyneth Paltrows PT installing linen pulleys because women shouldn’t lift weight to Liver Kings liver diet to all of the thousands of articles about all kinds of superfoods, brainpower tablets and what else is out there.
I don’t think anyone denies the objective reality of our societies situation. People are supposed to have properly cooked meals but that takes time and energy so we’d have to have shorter work hours. People are supposed to get some daily activity in but you can’t bike anywhere because cars. You can’t walk anywhere because everything is spread apart and you can’t participate in group sports because media empires put out ‘content’ for you to watch and neoliberalism is slowly destroying social groups anyways.
But to me that means we have to claw back some subjective control over this situation and it works best by cutting through a lot of the bullshit
and we have piles and piles of external stimuli eroding our willpower which you need to consciously ignore huger signals from your body. if you’re poor and alienated then the happy chemicals from eating fat and sugar might be the only thing you have that makes you feel good.
I don’t get your point? Like yes again there’s an external reality that is causing obesity but you just go “this is a thing and it will continue to be a thing” which is at least to me a very convenient like ‘can’t do anything about that’. I think we ought to fight back against it build tools and encourage people to again claw back a kind of subjective reality/control. Feels a bit like a leftist going “well Marx wrote that the revolution will happen when the conditions are right so i’ll just sit in my comfy armchair”
And yet Marx did not fight in the revolutions of '48, much to the chagrin of other communists who, while respecting his academic output, did not respect his actual physical input to the movement. And yet Marx’s academic contributions are what survive, not any of the political structures formed by the '48 political movements.
There is no point to revolt if the conditions do not support it. There is a point to organizing and maintaining proletariat and vanguard political structures.
You cannot revolt against the material conditions, they are what they are and will continue to be so, changing naturally through dialectical processes, and recognizing that is powerful. You can organize social structures within those material conditions though, that have the power to supercede and take advantage when the material conditions change. You are correct, the powerful move is to try to find a cooking class or even a workout group. But those options are not available for many people. The goal then is to provide the opportunity for it as best we can.
ok then just die I guess? Like I really really don’t know what you or robot dog are meaning to say here other than “ya can’t do anything about it stopid”. Which I disagree with and I’ll do my own little thing thank you very much. I don’t blame people for their body weight and don’t make fun or put people down for it, but I don’t think it’s just “Superstructure too powerful”
Your hyperbole doesn’t help with comprehension. No one is telling you to die. No one is calling you stupid.
That is literally the opposite of what I am saying.
You can and should ‘do your own little thing’, just as I do mine, but it doesn’t alter the super-structure because it is informed by the structure and the structure is informed by the material conditions of existence which changes due to class conflict concerning the control of the means of production, and contradictions within those cycles of production. People are going to be sick and fat because the capitalist system requires them to be sick and fat because it is easier to extract profit from excess production from the sick and fat. It’s not the super-structure that is too powerful, it is the structure that is too powerful, a much fundamentally larger problem.
Because of this regression to the mean is fairly inevitable, pretending your individual diet and exercise routine is revolutionary political praxis is a mistake, equating it to revolutionary political praxis is quite literally consumer liberal moralism masquerading as leftist theory and politics. If you were to say, start a community cooking club or a rotational vegan cooking group, that is closer to approaching political praxis, as it is setting up a structure that can take advantage of a crisis in the cycles of production to push for political power. It has less to do with the fact that you are cooking, and more to do with the fact that you are self-organizing. Recognizing the difficulty of doing and sustaining that, not trivializing it, is the one of the first steps in doing leftist praxis.
It isn’t directly personal to me. I’m in good shape for my age, all things considered. But I have loved ones that are overweight, are putting in real effort to be healthier all the same, and yes, weight obsession doesn’t help them at all and I think at this point the cruelty from those howling about it is intentional.
I used to know a mod of that sub. He is now a cop and officer in the national guard, so that tracks.
As someone that directly brigaded FPH way back when I’ll put some things out there. Calories in calories out started basically just to demystify a lot of the bullshit around health, diet and fitness. There is a constant ongoing push in that space to make it super complicated to sell you shit. From Gwyneth Paltrows PT installing linen pulleys because women shouldn’t lift weight to Liver Kings liver diet to all of the thousands of articles about all kinds of superfoods, brainpower tablets and what else is out there.
I don’t think anyone denies the objective reality of our societies situation. People are supposed to have properly cooked meals but that takes time and energy so we’d have to have shorter work hours. People are supposed to get some daily activity in but you can’t bike anywhere because cars. You can’t walk anywhere because everything is spread apart and you can’t participate in group sports because media empires put out ‘content’ for you to watch and neoliberalism is slowly destroying social groups anyways.
But to me that means we have to claw back some subjective control over this situation and it works best by cutting through a lot of the bullshit
and we have piles and piles of external stimuli eroding our willpower which you need to consciously ignore huger signals from your body. if you’re poor and alienated then the happy chemicals from eating fat and sugar might be the only thing you have that makes you feel good.
I don’t get your point? Like yes again there’s an external reality that is causing obesity but you just go “this is a thing and it will continue to be a thing” which is at least to me a very convenient like ‘can’t do anything about that’. I think we ought to fight back against it build tools and encourage people to again claw back a kind of subjective reality/control. Feels a bit like a leftist going “well Marx wrote that the revolution will happen when the conditions are right so i’ll just sit in my comfy armchair”
And yet Marx did not fight in the revolutions of '48, much to the chagrin of other communists who, while respecting his academic output, did not respect his actual physical input to the movement. And yet Marx’s academic contributions are what survive, not any of the political structures formed by the '48 political movements.
There is no point to revolt if the conditions do not support it. There is a point to organizing and maintaining proletariat and vanguard political structures.
You cannot revolt against the material conditions, they are what they are and will continue to be so, changing naturally through dialectical processes, and recognizing that is powerful. You can organize social structures within those material conditions though, that have the power to supercede and take advantage when the material conditions change. You are correct, the powerful move is to try to find a cooking class or even a workout group. But those options are not available for many people. The goal then is to provide the opportunity for it as best we can.
ok then just die I guess? Like I really really don’t know what you or robot dog are meaning to say here other than “ya can’t do anything about it stopid”. Which I disagree with and I’ll do my own little thing thank you very much. I don’t blame people for their body weight and don’t make fun or put people down for it, but I don’t think it’s just “Superstructure too powerful”
Your hyperbole doesn’t help with comprehension. No one is telling you to die. No one is calling you stupid.
That is literally the opposite of what I am saying.
You can and should ‘do your own little thing’, just as I do mine, but it doesn’t alter the super-structure because it is informed by the structure and the structure is informed by the material conditions of existence which changes due to class conflict concerning the control of the means of production, and contradictions within those cycles of production. People are going to be sick and fat because the capitalist system requires them to be sick and fat because it is easier to extract profit from excess production from the sick and fat. It’s not the super-structure that is too powerful, it is the structure that is too powerful, a much fundamentally larger problem.
Because of this regression to the mean is fairly inevitable, pretending your individual diet and exercise routine is revolutionary political praxis is a mistake, equating it to revolutionary political praxis is quite literally consumer liberal moralism masquerading as leftist theory and politics. If you were to say, start a community cooking club or a rotational vegan cooking group, that is closer to approaching political praxis, as it is setting up a structure that can take advantage of a crisis in the cycles of production to push for political power. It has less to do with the fact that you are cooking, and more to do with the fact that you are self-organizing. Recognizing the difficulty of doing and sustaining that, not trivializing it, is the one of the first steps in doing leftist praxis.
Is it? The first law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems