I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
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Overweightness can easily be solved by socialism. Fatphobia is not needed in socialist society and is not useful in capitalist society. I agree that such unhealthy behavior should not normalized but that is not the same as fatphobia. Hard disagree
the issue here is with how the term “fatphobia” is used. Is it wrong to bully and discriminate fat people? for sure. But showing a severely obese model and saying that finding her unattractive or stating that she’s unhealthy is fatphobic is wrong and what i believe OP was referring to.
In other words, the term “fatphobia” has been diluted to a point where it no longer is a word used to protect vulnerable groups but rather an “excuse” to not accept any criticism, similarly to how israelites use the word “antisemitism” to deflect any criticism towards their genocidal settler ethnstate
I’ve poured fuel onto the fire about this topic in other comments, so maybe I can contribute something actually constructive now.
I think the waters are further muddied when you account for what some people call others fat. I think the best illustration of this is Jordan Peterson making a fuss about a sports illustrated cover model last year. While she looks like she’d be in a BMI range that would put her in the overweight category, she’s nowhere close to having so much body fat that it’s an obvious physical impairment. Yet the lobsterfather is acting like the magazine put some 300+ pound monstrosity on the cover. I think the frequency of a lot of people (usually sexists) to call anyone who isn’t in shape enough to meet their subjective and arbitrary criteria for fuckability “fat” primes people who are against fatphobia to think that’s what is being referred to at times when it isn’t.
Yeah that’s also very true. Instagram and whatnot have completely fucked up our societal standards and expectations. Humans can have a lot of fat on them and still be in good shape. There are people whose bmi is well into the “obese” category and walk around perfectly fine and healthy. I personally consider a person “unhealthy” when their weight impacts their ability to move as much as they would like to.
But the issue remains, because there are factors like muscle mass and bodyfat percentage, both of which are partially genetic in nature and impact how weight relates to size and thus health.
As in all other fields, i think adding labels, names and classifications really doesn’t help. People should be educated about how to gauge and manage their health at any size, and utopistically we should strive for a society where the idea of having a “body standard” has been overcame.
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Yeah I still don’t agree with that. That shit is more a side effect of unhealthy weight gain and people looking for acceptance in a society that has demonized overweight people than a cause of it and I don’t think attacking that does jack shit for people’s health.
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And placing the blame for social issues on individuals is not liberal thinking? Unless you think “fat acceptance” is the primary issue that overrides the replacement of culture with commercialism and how that has affected food consumption as well as created incredibly unhealthy and addictive processed foods? Because all that comes across in your comments is that you think overweightness is the result of a moral deficiency
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Using dehumanizing terms is not helping your argument. And clearly capitalism is responsible for all this, human beings are the product of social relations not metaphysical moral beings. Like, I’m kinda shocked to read something like this on here.
Edit: I deleted the cringy self-pitying screed because it makes no sense without the context of the removed comment. Also, because it was cringe.
Self-hatred helps no one comrade. I suffer from disordered eating myself as the result of childhood trauma, so my weight fluctuates a fair bit over the years. We know, collectively, how we can help everyone eat healthier and promote physical activity but its just impossible to combat the forces of capitalism that cause these conditions inside the system itself. They’ve literally processed food to the point of being a drug. Not all labor is physical either, and while physical health for all should be the goal those who struggle in this area are not useless.
This might be an unchecked labor aristocratic tendency to romanticize labor on my part.
Me shitting on software engineering in particular is partly me knee jerk hating things that are associated with myself and partly me trying to take the field off a pedestal. I touched a bit on why I think a lot of what programmers by trade do isn’t helpful to society in another post.. The tendency of productive labor being used to create shit is by no means exclusive to software engineering, but the importance, difficulty, and pay for the role (and to a lesser extent tech workers more generally) is overinflated in burgerland.
This is only a half baked hypothesis on my part that needs actual research, but I suspect the high pay and benefits tech workers get relative to workers in other fields is largely due to the role of the internet in maintaining burger hegemony. If you’re porky spying on people and disseminating propaganda all over the world, it makes sense to take measures to keep the people who maintain this powerful tool as compliant as possible.
I’d just like to jump in here to challenge the idea that labour only counts if it’s ‘helpful to society’. I know you clarified this already, so this isn’t a critique of what you said, but to dig into the issues.
I’m thinking about plumbers, builders, agricultural workers, dockers – all jobs which have become increasingly comfortable and easier (not necessarily easy with modern tech, but that’s a side issue). When these workers go to work, it’s to do the bidding of capital. So the construction worker builds cheap, shitty homes. The agricultural worker covers our food in pesticides and ruins the environment at the same time. Etc, etc.
So the fact that e.g. a software engineer works for Amazon or Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean much for the abstract job. The problem is, if the work is not socially useful according to an ideal of socialism (in capitalism, if it makes profit, it is socially useful), it’s because the worker is, like others, doing the bidding of capital. Under another social structure, their work could be more useful if, for instance, they were working on software that ensured food or medicine was distributed effectively.
This doesn’t really resolve the other aspects relating to buying off the labour aristocracy, though.
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Yeah but no one knows they’re fat more than fat people so why pester them about it.
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Most “fat” people don’t eat that way. Most Americans eat unhealthily, and I can’t deny that’s part of the obesity epidemic, but it’s mostly not based on individual choices, but on burgerland’s culture. There is also an aspect of bodytype, a whole lot of people eat really poorly and stay skinny or average, while many “fat” people can be as healthy as they want but never bring their weight down that much. It’s called genetics. The unhealthiness of USians will not be solved by “bringing back fat phobia,” but by creating a culture that promotes better diet and exercise.
Ok another, most working class communities which just so happen to be predominantly black and brown, have ridiculous access to affordable foods which just so happen to be fast food and other unhealthy foods no human being should be eating consistently.
These communities are also disproportionately more affected by the obese epidemic, with countless deaths and medical conditions caused by the inhumane ingredients used in everything. I’m not gonna go head and say the CIA or the govt would go to these lengths but when we look at their fuckin track record it’s not hard to put it past them.
There have been horrible eating habits in these communities encouraged by consumerism, and false advertising.
As someone who once weighed 288, at 5’7, by the age of 27. I’m currently at 253, i gained from 238. My cocaine, alcohol addictions but most of all my eating conditions and habits made it impossible to even have a good metabolism. I quit then and i have a year without drinking. Now I’m 30, and i only have so much time of my good metabolism years, and I’m desperately trying to lose the weight. My biggest fault is my eating habits, and lack of time from constantly working.
I’ll admit to have an internalize fat phobia, but I wish i had taken care of this sooner. I fall of the wagon from working out sometimes because I’m just work tired. We have to teach self control. We need to promote healthy physical lifestyles as communists. This is important for the future of our working class communities. US black and brown communities are the ones with all the junk food and liquor stores. It’s not a coincidence. They put crack in our hoods, no one else and used to to brutalize us. They only care about the opioid epidemic because it’s a terror in 1% communities.