07mk
7mo ago
I'm reminded of the phenomenon of the "luxury belief," where people espouse beliefs while being shielded from the consequences of those beliefs. The types of people self-motivated enough to move into cities and pursue an education or elite career also tend to be self-motivated enough to keep themselves fit, and so the message that there's nothing wrong with being fat or unfit doesn't really affect them. But others don't have such self-motivation and take the message seriously, resulting in the current Healthy At Every Size and fatness acceptance movements and the consequential early deaths. That said, it's not as if Red Tribe folks particularly listen to the Blue Tribe in this kind of messaging, and so that doesn't explain why Red Tribe tends to have many more fatter people than the Blue Tribe.
I do wonder how the differences would be if we controlled for intelligence or socioeconomic status. Certainly I see plenty of obese people in my everyday life in my blue tribe enclave, but they generally tend to be in the lower classes. It could be primarily a class divide, where the Blue Tribe's most visible members are on the upper end while being left/liberal and the Red Tribe's most visible members are on the lower end while being right/conservative.
And to spitball, there are some just-so stories that come to mind. Left/liberal is more associated with marrying later or not at all as well as being more willing to divorce, which puts greater pressure on individuals to be and stay fit longer. It's also more associated with lack of a belief in the afterlife, which would create greater pressure on keeping alive and healthy. It's also more associated with colleges, which in the USA means more opportunities for athletics. It's also more associated with postmodernism, which would allow for a greater disconnect between one's actions and one's beliefs, as well as a greater disconnect between one's beliefs and reality.
07mk
7mo ago
For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems attribute too much control to them, believing that these elite oppressors are coordinating things to take advantage of and oppress others. These elite are specifically the ones who are setting the beauty standards that the oppressed have to live up to, while also simultaneously getting rich of of people's obesity by selling cheap junk food and then marking up the prices of plus-size clothing, and purposely keeping medical expenses high, just cause.
I do agree there's a quite a lot of hypo-/hyper-agency attributed to oppressed/oppressor classes of people, respectively, in the modern "progressive" worldview, but I also don't think there's much of a belief in this kind of coordination. A belief in this kind of coordination could be challenged and even destroyed by the lack of evidence of such coordination, and even more by the evidence of the lack of such coordination. Rather, "white supremacy" and "patriarchy" and other similar concepts are said to imbue these oppressors with attitudes that lead them to behaving as if they coordinate to oppress others without any of the actual coordination. The oppressors aren't meeting in a smokey room somewhere to discuss how to keep the oppressed people down, they're merely inheriting a legacy of oppression which reproduces the past oppression despite every individual in every situation behaving in ways that are completely egalitarian and non-oppressive at the individual level.
Where the hyper-agency comes in is that people who have been labeled as oppressors according to this worldview are deemed as having the responsibility to sacrifice in order to tear down this oppressive structure. While the those labeled as oppressed have only the responsibility to speak their truth and to yell at their oppressors until they go along with tearing down the structure. And if this doesn't work, then the oppressed have no responsibility to adapt their tactics to convince the oppressors; it's always the oppressors' responsibility to be convinced, no matter how unconvincing or abusive the arguments that come their way.
07mk
7mo ago
The way I see it, there's simply no way to meaningfully prevent AI developments. The level of coordination and authoritarianism necessary is simply beyond the ability of human society as it exists. Our only shot of survival is that the doomers are wrong and the alignment problem is actually easy to solve or isn't a problem at all, or perhaps for some unforeseen reason, AGI and ASI are actually impossible to create. So all we can do is to let the chips fall where they may and party until the lights go out.
If it turns out that the lights do go out, then we want that final party to be the best party ever, the culmination of all of human civilization. I want the final experiences of the final humans to have ever lived to be worthy of that position, worthy of the billions and billions of people who were born, lived, suffered, and died to carry us to that point. And the more we develop AI in the meanwhile before the lights go out, the better those final experiences will be. And the fewer restrictions there are for AI development, more everyday laymen will be able to come closer to experiencing that zenith of human civilization before we're all snuffed out. It'd be a shame if only Musk and Bezos were privy to the best party that has and will ever exist in human existence.
If it turns out that the lights don't go out, then the accelerated progress in AI helps to ensure a more prosperous future, since it matters quite a bit how quickly we develop these things. If we can get AI that cures cancer, it matters to millions and millions of people whether we do it this year or next year. Or even if it's something more minor like AI being able to create better tailor-made programs to help people lose weight, getting people to a healthy weight this year is much better than doing it next year, in terms of real lives saved beyond just quality of life. And regulation seems likely to delay the progress of tech that could produce benefits to people like this.
07mk
8mo ago
I have very few thoughts on the actual topic of your post, but as someone who spent more time than was healthy on 4chan a little before 2009, your description of 5channel now sounds similar. As I stopped using 4chan around 2009 and started using other social network sites, I found that the quality of conversation on places like Twitter or Reddit were substantially worse in comparison to 4chan, and it has only gotten worse in the 15 years since. My pet theory is the enforced anonymity and abrasive/offensive social norms helped to keep everyone from taking things too seriously, which in turn helped to keep conversations from getting enflamed. I've heard 4chan also got worse in the meanwhile, so maybe those golden years are forever gone. But if I could wave a magic wand and destroy every social network and replace them with something akin to the mid-late-00s 4chan, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
07mk
8mo ago
I think he says "cool off" or something like that after impaling the final bad guy with a refrigeration pipe or something like that.
Very close, but the opposite; it was a steam pipe. Commando truly might have been Schwarzenegger the peak of his one-liners. "Cool off" sounds like something his Mr. Freeze might have said in Batman and Robin, which also had some fantastic one-liners.
07mk
8mo ago
It's not even just because I'm a raging misogynist. Like, I could suspend my disbelief while watching a fantasy series enough to believe that a slender 5' 4" woman could defeat half a dozen people at once, if she's a master warrior and they're all lowly amateurs. That's a common enough trope in martial arts and other combat-based works - usually it involves a clearly powerful and muscular badass, but the world being a fantasy world goes a long way. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did it quite well with the tiny Zhang Ziyi making fools out of dozens of men at once. But that's the kind of thing the show needs to establish first by showing us what kinds of supernatural/fantastical abilities she has to overcome these odds that would be literally impossible IRL. And even then, the show needs to meet me halfway by showing her struggling, getting bested here and there for a moment before using her greater experience, skills, abilities, etc. to turn the tables. There's some level of incompetence and intentional "waiting their turn" we can accept in these 1-on-many fights, but the show needs to make an effort in hiding it.
But even before all that, there's the fact that they seem to be starting the training by having these rookies fight this master swordswoman using real weapons. That's like bringing in Michael Jordan to teach basketball to teenagers and throwing them straight away into a one-on-one match against him. Not even where he's pointing out errors in his opponent as they play, but he's just playing to win. Sure, that'd be a fun thing to try at some point in training, most likely as a little showcase for the most confident/best trainees, but as step one? All that would accomplish is showing off just how much better Jordan is than everyone else, and no one would learn anything. Perhaps there could have been some subplot of Galadriel getting no respect as an unproven small foreigner, and using this as a way for her to earn their respect, but that didn't seem to be the setup. I'm no expert in things like combat or training, but even I know enough to tell just how unbelievable the whole scene is, right from the jump. These writers getting paid handsomely in this billion dollar production should be expected at least to do enough research to make it believable to a layman like me.
Gotta say, it's a shame that the GOT curse of its less established actors not being able to transition to proper stardom seems to be in force with Gwendolyn Christie. Someone of her stature could make for a really fun action heroine to watch, and she seemed competent enough in the combat scenes in GOT. The Star Wars sequels completely wasted the opportunity with her character. I wonder if there's an alternate universe where ROP starred her instead; that said, I never got the sense from the Jackson trilogy that Galadriel was supposed to be some badass warrior, so perhaps it wouldn't have been the best fit.
07mk
8mo ago
DISCLAIMER: I actually believe that his words should be seen as tribal applause lights and so fact-checking them is missing the point, but there you go.
This seems likely correct, but I'd say that not fact-checking tribal applause lights is missing the point. If the tribe I belong to uses applause lights that don't stand up to fact-checking, then that makes me question the tribe's epistemic/honesty standards and thus makes me question if the reason I elected to join to the tribe is due to incorrect/dishonest information. I don't think of myself as some high-minded elite idealist, but I do consider it preferable that I choose my tribes based on true information rather than deception.
07mk
8mo ago
I don't think these substitute for each other to any meaningful extent. An action movie buff is going to watch, what, like 5-15 action movies a year in theaters? Accounting for modern film runtimes and ticket prices, that's up to 45 hours and $225. 45 hours is nothing in terms of gaming, that'd be easy to cover within a single month. $225 is the equivalent of 3-4 AAA games, so there could be some substitution effect, but honestly, for most people with enough free time and money to be into playing AAA games, the equivalent of < $20/month doesn't seem likely to significantly influence decisions on this.
Anecdotally, the types of gamers who are most into the types of games where you can see explosions and gun fights also are most appreciative of action films. Which makes sense to me, since if you like explosions and gun fights, there's separate and complementary enjoyment from partaking in them in a video game and from watching professionals performing it at a high level. Playing as Nathan Drake hanging off a cargo plane is a poor substitute for watching Tom Cruise hanging off the outside of a real plane as it takes off.
07mk
8mo ago
The training sequence in Númenor is very special, though.
That is, uh, indeed very special. I had to pause 20 seconds in just from the cringe before continuing. I'm not sure I can watch the whole thing. It looks like if someone who has never trained in combat in their life or even watched a martial arts movie decided to write what they imagined a training scene might look like. Which, to be fair, is very common in action scenes in a lot of films and TV shows, where the choreographers clearly believe that making a good fight scene is about people waving their limbs around in flashy ways, rather than making every swing, punch, kick, block, dodge, etc. a meaningful and believable progression of the back and forth to weave the narrative that constitutes a fight. It's just, you'd expect with a billion dollars to play with, they could hire at least a half-decent action choreographer/director.
I absolutely hate the fact that I think of it in terms of cliches about sex differences, but at the time, the whole thing reminded me of the whole phenomenon of "She told me her problems, I suggested some ways to solve them, and all she did was get mad at me" and "I told him my problems, and instead of comforting me, all he did was provide me with solutions." IIRC Damore is on the autism spectrum, which is obviously associated with being "extremely male," whereas the ideology in question tend to be known for attracting lots of women, which doesn't help matters.
07mk
8mo ago
Famed fitness expert Steven Crowder answered this question for us 7 years ago.
07mk
8mo ago
Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what he did when he wrote and distributed his infamous memo. I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness, under the belief that the woke (or rather, the equivalents at the time, since I don't think "woke" was nearly as commonly used back then) genuinely wanted to accomplish the things they said they did.
07mk
8mo ago
In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.
I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.
07mk
8mo ago
The final season was so bad that, like the Three Eyed Raven traveling back to make things seem retarded, it actually retrospectively killed the rest of the series, people talked about GoT constantly up until the finale, and after it aired the show disappeared from popular discourse. Some of the pullback from obligatory breasts and "here's a scene of sexual perversion explaining what's wrong with [character]" likely stems from a desire to avoid being seen as derivative of GoT or a revulsion at GoT's aesthetic after the fiasco that was the finale.
Hm, how does this square with the works like The Witcher (2019), Rings of Power (2022), or Willow (2022) seemingly (I'm speculating due to only having watched the 1st 2 seasons of The Witcher out of these - I don't recommend even S1 due to S2 retroactively making it a waste of time) trying to ape GoT's aesthetic and stylings in an apparent effort to replicate its success? The Witcher was in production before GoT's self-immolation (though GoT was pretty clearly in the process of pouring gasoline all over itself and looking for matches for multiple years already), but the other two were being produced after GoT was well established as just a pile of ashes. Also, the sexual content in GoT is more associated with when it used to be good, and so it doesn't seem likely to me that the sexual content was specifically the part of GoT that show runners would avoid while trying to ape other parts of it.
07mk
8mo ago
It's hard to say, given how the boundaries of "politically correct" has changed in recent years. In the recent The Little Mermaid CGI/live action remake by Disney, they edited lines from Ursula's villain song where she was manipulating the heroine Ariel into giving up her voice in exchange for legs by telling her how men like women who stay quiet and meek, since the notion that women ought to be quiet and meek is offensive. So it seems that certain views are so offensive that even villains being presented as being villainous ought not express them. Pedophilia and rape could fall in that camp.
That said, not having seen Part 2, I'd guess that wasn't a meaningful factor, if at all, in the decision. Having listened to the Dune audiobook a couple years ago after having read it a couple decades ago, I recall thinking that the sexual perversion of the Harkonnens didn't add a whole lot to the narrative. In a film with limited time, it seems reasonable to cut it, or perhaps modify it to a less distracting form.
07mk
8mo ago
You've probably heard already, but Nier: Automata requires at least 3 or 4 playthroughs in order to get the full grasp of the setting and story. The first playthrough should only be like 10-20 hours and the next ones much shorter.
Whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze should come down to taste. I'll say, I can at least understand why the story gets hyped up so much. It's not a spoiler to say that there are twists and turns, and the philosophical musings are at the appropriate level of thought provoking for a game of this sort.
07mk
8mo ago
I started playing Elden Ring last week. I'm about 20 hours and 6 bosses in, with Godrick the last one I defeated. It's about as good as I'd heard, feeling essentially like Bloodborne (that and Sekiro being the only other From Soft games I've played - Nioh is the only non-From Soft soulslike I've played) but expanded to open world scale.
I always felt there was a fractal quality to the level design in Bloodborne and Sekiro, with how different forking paths attach to each other to create larger areas that are forked from other larger areas, and I feel like it really shows in the open overworld of Elden Ring. It almost feels like they took one of their Bloodborne levels, scaled it up by a couple orders of magnitude, and then put in other Bloodborne levels into the various castles and temples and fortresses and such that serve as important progression points around the world.
As I play, I find myself simultaneously marveling at how brilliant the level design is for balancing the feelings of open freedom and linear progression and being saddened at how other devs can't seem to do the same. Obviously, good level design takes a lot of work, but also, none of what From Soft does with their levels seems particularly difficult to copy and execute. They keep things feeling more open by constantly throwing forks in the road of players, letting many of them accumulate before any one of those paths hits a dead end. And almost always, one of those paths open up to some whole other area with a fresh new set of forks to choose from. They entice players to explore by placing items in areas that are visible but not accessible, sometimes remaining inaccessible until dozens of hours of progression later. And they do still place enough dead ends - true dead ends with no reward, no new information learned, not even an impressive visual to admire - to keep the levels feeling like a real place. All those forks that led up to such dead ends keep them from being unsatisfying, and the fact that, often enough, you do get rewarded by an entirely new world to explore makes the exploration addicting.
Doing all these well almost definitely takes a ton of work and testing, but devs often don't seem to even make an effort at doing them okay. I feel like, most often, 3rd person action games have levels that are either super linear or just fully wide-open, and when they do make an attempt at this forking-paths style design, they stop at just 2 or 3 iterations instead of letting it really get twisty and labyrinthine like From Soft likes to do.
Also, the bosses I've fought are as good as I've come to expect from From Soft, at least this early in the game. Those are always by far my favorite parts of 3rd person action games like this one. I'm expecting that the difficulty and variety of bosses will ramp up as I get deeper in, though, since Margit, Leonine, Erdtree Avatar, Godrick, and even the Ancient Hero of Zapor all felt like variations of each other to some extent.
07mk
8mo ago
Based on my own limited experience with Disco Elysium, I'd agree that it's not particularly "woke," and whatever political or ideological messaging it had seemed to be in the form of "fictional character has this opinion" rather than "this fictional narrative serves as a lesson for why this opinion is the correct IRL." I'll add, though, in my personal experience was that the only people who ever called the game leftist were leftists praising the game for pushing forward leftist (not necessarily "woke" or progressive) messaging. Such folks were the only reason I'd heard of the game and got interested enough in it to start playing, actually.
07mk
8mo ago
Except that there’s no reason not to make the game good (or movie, or TV show) actually good at the same time if they were actually interested in doing so. The new ugly women in the game don’t take so many resources that they can’t make the rest of the game work as a game. It doesn’t cost so much that they then can’t afford servers for the game (or couldn’t simply make the game playable offline).
Indeed, some games that are criticized for things like unnecessarily masculine women are well received by many gamers for being otherwise good, such as the Horizon games and The Last of Us: Part 2 (neither received anywhere near universal praise or disdain). But it's not as if making a good game is just something someone can choose to do; even if every resource in the company was directed with laser-like focus on the goal of "make a good game," I'm doubtful that the odds are good that they'd create a good game. If priorities are split between that and injecting messaging into the game - and particularly the perspective is a "woke" one where the ideological messaging is considered to supersede other factors when determining how "good" a game is - then it becomes that much harder. Who knows how much the "woke"-ish messaging of the Saints Row reboot contributed to its many issues both with bugs and just basic game design, but given how much the entire narrative and tone of the game was steeped in it, I imagine it had a more parasitic effect than what the character models in those other aforementioned games did.
And I think honestly this kind of thing is doing more to turn off audiences to “diverse” choices because they’ve been so often used to deflect from bad entertainment and media that people see it as a red flag for poor quality. And it doesn’t have to be that way if they’d simply make a good product around the DEI.
This is true, but the entire point that they're pushing is that they're already making a good product by injecting DEI and other "woke" messaging into the games. If players don't consider it so, then that means that they are wrong, and we need to put in more messaging until they get it. At their core, the ideologues who push this stuff truly believe that their ideology can never fail, it can only ever be failed. As ideological and political proselytizers, they see themselves as having no responsibility to check how effective their messaging is and to make adjustments based on that checking; rather, their only responsibility is to spread the message in the way the ideology tells them to, and if that doesn't work, then it's everyone else's fault.
It is a cliche at this point, that people labeled as sexist/racist keep pointing out that there are plenty of great works with diverse characters from yesteryear in gaming as well as in TV and film. "Woke" is a response and rejection of that; the idea that, in order to be praised, a work with women or minorities should also be good by traditional measures such as "entertainment" or "thought provoking" is, in itself, sexist/racist/White Supremacist/bigoted/etc. Rather, because we've now "awakened" to how the most salient way humans relate to each other in our society is through power dynamics between different demographic groups, we should realize that simply having these people represented in a positive way in entertainment works intrinsically make the entertainment works better. And, again, if the audience doesn't buy it, then the beatings will continue until morale improves.
07mk
8mo ago
We're supposed to believe Lex Luthor, of all people, wrote this?
Frankly, I don't think we are. I think we are supposed to praise it, and whether or not we believe it isn't really a consideration.
07mk
8mo ago
I do recall liking Kim the best during my 8-10 hours in the game, just for being the reliable straight man most of the time, though I also found him a bit on the dull side. Some of the other characters had really fun and outlandish personalities, but what got me for those was how much the writing just took me out of the game. It constantly made me picture some writer sitting at his desk typing out all this clever dialogue out in between break sessions to sniff his own farts. To some extent, I'm consciously aware that all video game writing is created this way, but when I think of writing in works like this being "good," part of it is that it momentarily, and perhaps only on an emotional level, makes me forget that the people I see on screen are merely marionettes being puppeteered by an author for the purpose of manipulating my emotions and instead makes me believe that this is a real person with a real history in some real world expressing himself. I want the writing to manipulate my emotions, not to remind me that it's trying to manipulate my emotions.
(Aside: this is a major part of the criticism - tangentially "woke"-related* - of the drop in quality of writing in the MCU, where everyone is a clever quip-machine all the time. When a handful of high profile characters like Tony Star talk this way, it was funny and somewhat plausible, but when almost every major character talks like this, the suspension of disbelief is harder to maintain, on top of just being tiresome).
To be fair, I think the voice acting, particularly the (likely intentionally?) overdramatic ones for the various emotions or characteristics of yours who would speak to you, didn't help. And the game started right off the bat with such internal monologue and never clawed its way back in my eyes ears. So I may be unfairly docking it points for that instead of just the writing.
* Obviously there's nothing about the "woke" ideology that insists on stilted writing in and of itself. But it's still tangentially related, because the "woke" influence being discussed is modern political messaging being inserted into the writing for the purpose of influencing the audience's behaviors, and due to the totalizing nature of the "woke" mindset, the authors have trouble doing this with a soft-enough touch to feel natural within the fictional world. Which then reminds the player that they're being lectured to by a script writer, rather than being immersed in a fictional world.
07mk
8mo ago
I'd say Ico is probably the one game with the best writing I've played (aside: don't read the novelization Ico: Castle in the Mist; it takes a 5 hour game with a fairy-tale-basic story about a cursed boy and girl, a castle, and an evil queen, and stretches it to 400+ pages, including the first 100+ focusing on the religious back story of the boy and his village), though Bloodborne came close in the similar minimalistic style. For a game with lots of dialogue, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis stands out to me as one with particularly good writing, though I'd probably place the original Knights of the Old Republic and Odin Sphere at around the same level.
07mk
8mo ago
by game standards it's certainly in the 99th percentile, I think it would be hard to dispute that.
As they say, there is no accounting for taste. I'd say it's probably close to 30th percentile, only avoiding going lower due to generally being coherent and internally consistent, grammatically correct, and lacking typos.
A place where I've noticed the whole "self-improvement is right-wing" meme being true has been in fictional media. In recent years, a number of films (e.g. Star Wars, Captain Marvel) and TV shows (e.g. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Rings of Power) - all of them made by openly progressive people openly pushing a progressive agenda - have been criticized for what some have disparagingly called the "HER-o's Journey," wherein the heroine, often fairly boring or unlikeable from the start, goes through a character arc where she discovers that she was actually always as awesome as she always believed she was, realizing that all her problems were the fault of everyone else who couldn't see her innate awesomeness that was always within her. This is obviously meant to contrast with the classic "Hero's Journey," which tends to involve a hero going through a character arc where he struggles with and overcomes some flaw he has, allowing him to overcome some obstacle at the climax. It'd be easy to say that this is a projection of how women and men relate to each other IRL, where women judge if men are good enough for her while men improve themselves to become good enough for women, but I don't think it's that simple, since, AFAICT, fictional media that follow this type of narrative tend not to be particularly liked by women any more than they are by men. But to add on to this whole "refusal to self-improve" phenomenon, when these works underperform commercially, usually the creators of these works tend to blame the fans for failing to understand their value, rather than blaming themselves for failing to deliver something that fans would want to give money for.
More broadly, these phenomena both tie into something Jonathan Haidt has talked about with respect to modern leftist politics, which is that he sees it as "reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy." One well known trope in CBT is that one reframes "this person caused me to feel this way" to "this person did this, and I responded by feeling this way," which obviously shifts the locus of control from external to internal. Much of the modern left is informed by the idea of discovering one's true self and being in touch with one's emotions, which often rounds down to just trusting every feeling that goes through one's mind as true and valuable and projecting it onto the world - this is something we obviously see coming from all sides all the time, but the modern left particularly encourages this as virtuous for people who have been deemed oppressed.
Another disparate thought I have is that the left has long been associated with support for religious and sexual minorities, who have traditionally been oppressed by a society that would treat them as second class citizens for believing the things they believe. In such a setting, trusting one's own feelings over what society tells you is considered a righteous act of rebellion, and it's not at all a leap to go from that to the belief that any sort of belief in improving oneself is actually an internalized form of the oppressive standards that society imposes on you. I also wrote in another comment that the connection to postmodernism makes it so that it's easier to disconnect one's beliefs from base reality, which in this case is the belief that any negative health effects of being fat or obese are purely imposed by society and disconnected from biology or physics. This also connects with beauty standards, where the notion that skinny, fit women being considered attractive is deemed to be a purely arbitrary societal invention.
I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade. The idea that it's our responsibility and only our responsibility to shape our message to win over Republicans and independents to our cause, and that these people who disagree with us have no responsibility to be convinced by a message they don't find convincing just doesn't seem to occur to them. That said, I'm seeing this from the inside of just one side, and so maybe this exact same type of passing-the-buck phenomenon happens just as much in the other side.
More options
Context Copy link