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It kind of feels like the undercurrent to everything @Walterodim has said in this thread.
There are other examples but I hate this thread so I don't want to find them. I say I sense that undercurrent in those comments because they are the kinds of things I would say back when I was Flex Mentallo, so I might be typical minding, but I don't think I am. He refuses to try to understand alternative perspectives and simply decides they are lying about their values. That is the behaviour of people who believe themselves morally superior.
The first comment is in response to someone that literally said they "can't imagine people spending hours at a time contracting their muscles presumably for fun, instead of enjoying gathering new knowledge or engaging in the debates with educated people from around the world", as though that's actually a set of interests that compete with cycling. The second is a comment that I stand by. I do think maintaining fitness is superior to neglecting physicality, so no objection there.
That said, the idea that I "despise them with a vitriol usually reserved for heretics or murderers" is absurd and completely unsupported. Yeah, I think obesity is usually a product of gluttony and sloth, but no, I don't hate people for having normal human failings. I do hate that we have a massively subsidized medical system that profits immensely from medicalization of everything from obesity to sadness and dispenses hundreds of billions in drugs per year. I'm sure that there are people, such as the topline commenter in this sub thread, that really do benefit from that, but I'm appalled by pharmaceutical solutions to character issues as a normal matter of course.
You say it's a character issue, but it's difficult for me to credit the modern phenomenon of mass obesity to sudden onset degeneracy rather than the mass availability of Oreo biscuits. Maybe we were always gluttons in search of a buffet big enough to kill us.
The Oreo dates back to 1912; it was a slightly sweeter of the 1908 Hydrox. The obesity epidemic is not that old.
In 1912 Joe Average couldn't afford to buy a shit ton of Oreos and also did a lot more physical activity.
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I assumed 'vitriol reserved for heretics and murderers' was the kind of hyperbole often used by people who feel unjustly despised, because never mind the motte, there are so few people anywhere in Western society who vocally hate fat people on the same level as murderers. It was considered impolite to be visibly disgusted by fat people even before the body positivity movement was created.
Anyway hate is the kind of word everyone rates differently, would I be wrong to assume you consider fat people broken? Or that you think obesity is repugnant? If charles hadn't explained his situation and had just said "I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am", would you not have assumed he was just taking a lazy shortcut?
I would consider them "broken" in the same way that anyone that has a reparable defect is.
Yes, of course it is.
Yes, because the vast majority of obese people are obese for straightforward reasons that don't have much to do randomly distributed crises. The correct prior remains that it's not that complicated of a story - modern food is too delicious, too plentiful, too subsidized, too cheap, and many people just eat too much of it. I still think drug treatments are a shortcut that I'm unconvinced of the long-run efficacy of. If it works and gets people back on track, that's great. I don't think the cornucopia of pharmaceuticals approach to health is actually working out very well and I'm not excited about subsidizing it. I do wish individuals well though.
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