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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I mean sure there’s a bit of blaming in that. But I think until the issues are actually understood, I don’t think you can make much headway. Yes corporations especially food corporations are trying to get people to eat more and eat worse food, and I think it certainly needs to be addressed. But tge interventions would rarely be medical. They’d be perhaps regulations on ingredients (all surprising amount of our food ingredients are illegal in Europe), or not allowing vending machines in schools. I think it might be well past time to get cooking taught in schools so people know how to people know how to cook healthy meals. I’d like to see recreational sports make a big comeback as I think it would help both the loneliness epidemic and the sedentary lifestyle problems we have.

We also have to essentially renormalize the concepts of portion control and self control. You simply cannot remove all temptations from the environment. You can’t make grocery stores not have candy and sodas at tge checkout. You can’t ban video games when everyone has the internet. At some point, the same issues come up and it’s something the rest of society cannot do for you. You have to learn self control. We can’t have it for you. We can possibly shame people for having an entire pizza to themselves, but it runs counter to what most people have been taught so it’s uphill.

The thing is that very little of that is medical. And blaming the medical system for an entire culture eating slop and not exercising is not only not going to help, but will probably drive people out of those jobs. Your doctor can’t undo decades of gluttony and a sedentary lifestyle in a couple of visits. Nobody can. And I don’t think blaming the medical system for social problems is a reasonable way to get good results. Fix the cultural problems.