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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26627 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics

Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:

“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.

“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”

Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”

“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.

“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”

The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:

Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”

“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.

She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”

This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:

One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.

…

The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:

The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.

Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.

Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.

“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.

Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:

To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.

…

Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."

If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.

The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:

Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.

Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.

OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.

Dissident right loooves hbd but not when believing in it would stop you from feeling good about yourself. No, chain of cause and effect doesn't stop at the neck, 45% of your fellow citizens becoming obese in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character. You are mostly fit because of your genetics, like any other fit person.

And discussion about healthcare costs is, of course, meaningless. People already written below about this, if you want to save taxpayer's money tax healthy people, not smokers or obese ones.

P.S. Please, before writing any counter argument, especially in the form of personal anecdote ask yourself: "Why?". "But my friend was fat all his life and then lost weight on this diet" - Why your friend lost weight when others in his situation didn't? What was different about him?

in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character. You are mostly fit because of your genetics

Genetics not only affects metabolism, but but moral character too. In humans, there is much more diversity of moral character than metabolism.

45% of your fellow citizens becoming obese in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character. You are mostly fit because of your genetics, like any other fit person.

This objection doesn’t seem to hold. If fitness were determined by genetics, then ~45% of the population should have been obese a century ago, unless obese people have a massively higher fertility rate than healthy people, which seems doubtful. Whereas if the rise in obesity is more about lifestyle choices (e.g., eating way too many carbs, never walking more than 1,000 steps per day, and never even dreaming of exercising), well, those are all personal choices deserving of scorn.

This isn’t to deny that some people have an easier time losing weight than others, but the unprecedented rise in obesity pretty clearly shows that there are factors other than genetics at play.

No, chain of cause and effect doesn't stop at the neck, 45% of your fellow citizens becoming obese in a century can't be explained by their bad moral character.

Nonsense. Widespread availability of pornography may make it considerably more difficult to not become a degenerate coomer than it was a century ago, but it is still a choice to consume pornography or not. I'm more sympathetic to modern coomers than I would be to ones 100 years ago because it's much easier to access and fall into, but it still doesn't change the fact that it is physically possible to go without masturbating, or at least to not consume all kinds of degenerate porn to do so, and ultimately it is a choice to do so or not.

The same applies to obesity, there may be all sorts of factors like more easily available food, more fattening food, and even genetic disposition to pig out or to retain fat. But it's still ultimately a choice to consume too many calories.

I think my own position regarding the role of genetics in life outcomes is pretty consistent with common biodiversity positions, which typically aren't hard genetic determinism. The effects of both environment and personal choice are sufficiently obvious that I don't see how anyone could sustain a serious claim that everything is genetically determined, environmentally determined, or under complete individual control. Genetic and hereditary characteristics define outer limits of capacity and shape tendencies. Environments define the range of available outcomes. Personal choices and elements of randomness fill in the rest. Using that toy model for most outcomes, including fitness and weight, provides results that are pretty consistent with observed reality.

I don't know how anyone that has ever put meaningful effort into improving at anything could land on hard genetic determinism as the only governor of their outcomes. I have literally zero doubt that if I elected to shift from my primary sport being running to weightlifting that I would lose aerobic fitness and gain muscle mass. I suppose the claim is that the only reason I'm even capable of doing that in the first place is purely deterministic and then we're into some goofy argument about whether free will exists. Suffice it to say I don't buy the claim that decision-making literally doesn't exist.

With regard to the accusation that my positions are shaped by what results in feeling good about myself - yeah, sure, probably, that seems like an unavoidable consequence of being human. Even so, I don't think that desire to feel good about myself has twisted my understanding of the world to anywhere near the degree as the morbidly obese individual that claims they're healthy anyway and that weight can't be controlled.

Dissident right loooves hbd but not when believing in it would stop you from feeling good about yourself.

If I've understood your comment correctly, you seem to be making a permissible and even potentially interesting point. But your approach brings a bit too much heat and not enough effort. Less of this, please.

I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility.

It's interesting that we seem to equivocate between "lifting", "not being fat", "aesthetics", "the gym"/"gym bros", fighting sports and fighting ability, strength, and "being in shape" in this thread and discussions of this nature generally, as if they were all more or less equivalent, while endurance gets ignored, briefly passed over as "oh yeah, you gotta do some cardio too", or downright dismissed as a PMC affectation. At least some online endurance spaces are pretty normie left bluepilled (TrainerRoad forums spring to mind), though LetsRun is regularly accused of being problematic. Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised), there was at least a brief period in the 70s-80s when marathons and triathlons filled pretty much the same subcultural niche that Crossfit (and its knockoffs) and BJJ do now, and long-duration endurance is notoriously a limiting factor in most of the higher-speed parts of the US military. I don't really have a point or even a question here, it's just an observation.

See also: https://www.unz.com/isteve/right-versus-left-movie-stars/

(Edit, that came to me while out running: also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).

Cycling is seethingly, maddeningly blue-coded, to the point where major events provide "scholarships" to anyone who's not a white male and demand the latter pay more than asked.

On one hand, yeah, fair. On the other hand, I guessed before I clicked that it was a gravel event doing this.

Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised)

Only for indoor training. I stand by Zwift as the killer app for indoor cross-training and having a good trainer makes "hills" feel pretty comparable in-game to being outside. I'm not a competitive cyclist though, so outdoor rides are almost always just fun with friends. But yeah, I'm generally fairly serious about running performance, at least within the confines of being a too old never-was that's not willing to change my diet meaningfully.

It is interesting that these sports don't code right-wing the way that bodybuilding and fighting do. It might just be idiosyncratic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hormonal element - living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it (although my impression is that it takes quite a bit of high-effort volume for that to be an issue). There are some striking similarities between the cultures of running/cycling and powerlifting/bodybuilding though even if the politics don't jump off the page:

  • The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds. Bro-nerds, but nerds nonetheless. If you want an earful about physiology, just ask a bodybuilder or a runner.

  • Highly welcoming of newcomers. The fastest guy at the track and the biggest guy at the gym go out of their way to make newbies that show interest feel welcome, to try to make sure that they know it's a journey for everyone, and that no one's looking down on them as they get started.

  • These are places where you can find something of a männerbund. Guys work hard together, encourage each other, drive people forward when they're feeling lazy, celebrate successes together, and commiserate in failures and injuries.

Some of this is just that sports are generally excellent, but I wouldn't say the same things are as true in basketball or golf. There's something about the sports where everything is stripped away other than pure physicality and the numbers simply don't lie that's a little bit different.

living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it

I was going to mention this as another example of sloppy equivocation but it seemed like it was straying a little far afield. I'm reasonably familiar with the relevant literature, and it seems like we're awfully ready in conversations of this sort to ignore other androgens, androgen receptor status, the differences between acute and chronic effects, what actually counts as a clinically significant effect size, etc. etc. This might be a reasonable analytical approach if you zoom out far enough (pretty obviously in the case of men vs women, for example) but that's surely too coarse a level of resolution to distinguish between "lift 2x, run 5x" and "lift 4x, run 2x" within the same individual.

The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds.

There's definitely a performance engineering mindset out there in Line Go Up activities, and I appreciate it. But I also see a kind of religion mindset, where as a trainee you do the thing because it's virtuous, a form of worship, and as a coach or advisor you tell people what they should want and what the virtuous thing to do is and baldly assert that one thing or another is true without empirical evidence or sometimes even without a priori logical argumentation--pretty far removed from methodically figuring out how to get from a well-defined A to a well-defined B and rebuilding Neurath's boat. Rippetoe is an obvious case in point, and I say that as someone who pretty much got into lifting thanks to Starting Strength (in fairness, he got a lot worse after 2017 or so). Older heads make it sound like the HIT types of the early 2000s were like this as well. Alan Couzens is an example from the endurance world (and I actually agree with quite a bit of his advice.).

are places where you can find something of a männerbund.

True, though probably 99% of my training has been solitary so it doesn't seem terribly salient to me.

also, participation in endurance sport is exceptionally white-coded, and indeed competition at the highest levels is dominated by whites outside of running at marathon distance and below.).

Do you mean anything longer than a marathon is dominated by whites?

Do you mean anything longer than a marathon is dominated by whites?

There are no gold medals or large prize pots so Kenyan's don't bother competing in them. Basically realtively affluent whites make up running categories no one else cares about.

Yeah. Also cycling, rowing, XC skiing, triathlon, and I'm pretty sure swimming.

These all are more expensive than shorter distance running, and snow is also not found in African countries. Longer than marathon running is very rare and pays less, so probably we don't see East Africans dominating it.

Eh, maybe, maybe not. "Kenyans would dominate Western States if they showed up" is a perennial LetsRun flame post. Every 15-20 years someone tries to build a pro cycling team in East Africa with lots of sponsorship money and it never amounts to much. Rowing, swimming, flatter cycling events, and by extension of the latter two triathlon, and possibly xc skiing as well all favor somewhat burlier body types than the typical East African runner.

Swimming favours long torsos. That means cold adapted people. Also tall.

Black people tend to have longer limbs and shorter torsos, so they have a reach advantage in a lot of sports.

The mechanical device probably eliminates the reach advantage in cycling and rowing.

I wonder if you could adjust the gearing and crank length to field a Kenyan team.

It is a running joke in British sports policy that we can only win Olympic medals in sports where you compete sitting down (rowing, canoeing, sailing, equestrianism and cycling). This isn't entirely fair - the modern UK is diverse enough that sometimes a Caribbean immigrant like Linford Christie wins a sprinting event or an East African immigrant like Mo Farah wins a long distance race. It also looks like we have been picking up medals in swimming since Rio.

You guys had an absolute murderer's row of middle-distance runners in the '80s. Seb Coe remains one of the all-time greats from any country. That little burst of greats really illustrates the impact that a group of elite competitors can have on each other.

I find it pretty interesting that those middle distances are still generally pretty favorable for white runners. East Africans dominate true long distance and West Africans dominate sprinting, but if we're going a mile, it's a mishmash. Jakob Ingebrigtsen has what is likely the fastest clean mile (or at least post-EPO mile) ever run, and won the 2020 gold. The mile is a stubbornly diverse distance!

Thank God for Andy Murray, I guess.

This little quote from NYU professor

discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.

People who are fat because of a chronic disease is in an absolute minority. The majority have issues with their size is because of eating too much ultra-processed foods full of subsidized crops like corn that is cheap and exercising too little compared to their energy intake. Is it a personal choice? Well if you are poor living in a "Food Desert" (i.e. a place where grocery stores with non ultra-processed food are far away) eating what ever is available, how much choice do you have? If you don't live near a grocery store it usually means that you are poor. Is poverty a choice?

As I see it the polemic of "personal choice" vs "chronic disease" is a faux debate disguising the fact that the options for the poorest urban areas and poorest "flyover country" don't have options with getting food without subsidized crops with high energy content. The only chronic condition they have is being poor.

So where does that leave "gym fascism"? Perhaps "Cui Bono" selling ultra processed foods to the poorest population is a multi-billion dollar business and it is also subsidized by politicians, they get to sell medicine for the consequences of that food(insulin for diabetes, pills against hypertension and so on) and so on. What happens if people notices this, that they are essentially being poisoned by the food supply? Better nip it in the bud the notion to have less processed food and more exercise cause losses. Lets call anyone who has that idea fascist? I don't know... It is a conspiracy theory...

Maybe you are not aware of it but many countries - including USA since 2013 - declared obesity itself as a disease. The decision makers in American Medical Association openly admit, that they completely abandoned long-standing criteria for diseases such as disease having some symptoms as opposed to being symptom by itself. Imagine for instance declaring malnutrition itself as a disease, it makes no sense. Malnutrition can be simple lack of food and thus not caused by anything special, or it can be a symptom of some other metabolic or psychological disease. The same with obesity, we can create a "cure" that will work 100% of the time, just admit people into anti-obesity camp where they will have their food intake as well as exercise managed. As the saying goes, there were no obese victims in Gulags or other prison camps, the "cure" is easy.

Instead what AMA did was stick with "utilitarian" definition of a disease in order to "destigmatize" the condition as the word "disease" suggests, that people may not have a control over it such as with some pathogens. Additionally if we allow this definition we can now direct the whole infrastructure used to treat diseases into this new problem. I guess this it the precursor of the new trend such as when CDC declared racism as a public health threat, who knows maybe in the future racism will become an official disease that will treated institutionally or by some brain surgery or pills.

I keep coming back to the fact that Japan does actual fat shaming, on an institutional level even (employers fined if employee waist sizes are too big) and as a result doesn't suffer from high obesity.

This should put the disease model of obesity to bed, unless we believe the Japanese, who love 7-11s and convenience perhaps even more than Westerners do, are somehow genetically immune or their food is still so much more pure.

Anecdotally, when I lived in Japan for a year I lost a lot of weight without even really trying. I don't think my diet was very healthy either, I was consuming a lot of cola, fried chicken, ramen and beer. I was walking a lot more so maybe that's it? But it could equally well be something in the environment, maybe all the second-hand smoke.

Living in a modern Asian city (or New York) definitely has a lot more walking built-in and I absolutely believe you lost weight. But were you... Japanese guy thin?

Hahaha no of course not. Still, it was amazing how easy it was to lose weight there. I wasnt going to the gym or watching my diet or anything.

They also walk more and their portion sizes are way more reasonable.

Don't Asians have some gene that makes them less likely to get fat (but more likely to get diabetes and heart disease) as well?

There's a documentary I watched recently regarding Japanese longevity, and one of the people they interview remarks on how the introduction of western diet is having an effect on young Japanese people, making them more obese.

Genetics can play a part, but there's a point where we need to at least consider that there's something whonky going on, here.

Are Japanese-Americans much fatter than their mainland brothers? From what I see not by much(23 VS 24, but it's including all Asians).

Do you know what a sumo wrestler is?

or their food is still so much more pure.

I wonder how much HFCS you can find in their food that they get from 7-11s? The options for good food at 7-11s AFAIK better than anywhere else ( not that I've looked myself but know people who have lived in Japan and talked about the cultural difference).

At world market prices, HFCS was more expensive than cane sugar, so the only products which contained HFCS are ones that are intentionally made to American recipes. HFCS was an originally an American work-around for a cockamamie government sugar policy, and is now the driver for that policy (because of the lobbying power of Archer-Daniels-Midland).

This is starting to change as cane sugar prices have increased since 2010 and the Chinese are getting into the HFCS business in response.

I mean, Japan probably does have stricter food purity than the USA.

Yeah, those sandwiches you can get at 7-11 or Lawson probably are just literally built different compared to how it'd be done here in the US.

Hey, if they took a half hour walk to the supermarket and brought their groceries back with them, that would be enough exercise to keep them in shape!

I don't disagree but I'd like to register that drivers in my particular region of the Midwest drive like they want to kill everybody, including themselves. I have two grocery stores practically two blocks away but I'm not walking it if I can avoid it. I don't have a sidewalk for most of it and I'd have to cross an intersection that's constantly handling traffic from the freeway exit.

The thing that really kills me is that the town is actively working on updating road infrastructure, but they didn't put a sidewalk in when they added two more lanes to the road.

Interesting. I guess I just assumed there would be space to walk - I'm not American.

So you think that "food deserts" don't exist because you can walk an 30 minutes to yours? There doesn't exist places where people live where they have to drive an hour to get "real food" while passing various corporate fast food chains on the way?

I didn't say that food deserts don't exist, in fact I agree that a lot of American food is chemical slop not fit for human consumption. Yet there's also a level of personal responsibility (and social shaming) that's clearly absent. You can see it in this libertine 'whatever floats your boat' attitude many Americans seem to have:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=to7BMBJR9P4

A real food desert is somewhere like Niger or Ethiopia. While there are structural problems, there are also solutions. You can order groceries to be delivered in some places. I imagine there are farmers markets out in rural USA.

I can see an argument for saying that the obese are people with a chronic disease tautologically: arguably being obese is a disease, and it's certainly not an acute condition (nobody gets obese overnight, and nobody stops being obese overnight). Of course if you take that perspective then I'm not sure how you can square it with "fat pride." Nobody goes around being proud of having multiple sclerosis, or saying that goiters are beautiful. And the fact that it is a chronic disease does not absolve someone of responsibility for acquiring that condition: cirrhosis of the liver is another chronic disease that is almost always the result of personal choices.

If you look at the history of "fat pride" it essentially started as dating for guys that loved fat women. And the post-modernist got its claws into it and gave it the social construct treatment and here we are: "healthy at every size". But the greater point I tried to make that some of the obese people have less choice in becoming obese, because their options are limited with what food is available to them. Yes being obese is a disease but I'm just making the claim that it is in big part caused by ultra-processed food much like cirrhosis is caused by overconsumption of alcohol, but it is much more reversible with better food and more excercise.

But what caused those personal choices? If you were them, you would have made the same ones.

Only if you assume first that free will doesn't exist (and if it doesn't then this discussion doesn't even matter but it's not like I could stop us from having it).

Well we have proof that they made those choices based on the life they lead. Given the same factors the same thing would happen exactly the same way, because it did happen that way. If you were exactly the same as them in every way then the outcome would be the same.

I agree with you that if you were them, you would have made the same choices, but that comment didn't respond to what @ChickenOverlord was saying.

That is:

You: if you were the same as them, you'd make the same choices

ChickenOverlord: Only if choices are indeterminate

You: if you were the same as them, you'd make the same choices

That merely repeats your argument. It doesn't address his.

That said, I think both of you assume too much about the implications of determinism, saying that it strips one of responsibility.

@ChickenOverlord, you say, "and if it doesn't then this discussion doesn't even matter but it's not like I could stop us from having it." This does not seem true. This discussion, under the belief that we have no free will, does at least matter in the sense that it is a part of the set of influences upon us that shape who are and contribute to our choices. And, depending on what you mean by "could stop," you certainly could. If you wanted to, you could get up and leave, the only question is whether you will decide to, which is itself based on such features as who you are.

@AhhhTheFrench, you bring up causal influences upon choices to argue that this absolves one of responsibility for one's choices. I do not see any reason to think that that is the case. You were still the person who made those choices, which reflects on one's character, etc. It seems entirely reasonable to cast blame on someone for acting badly, according to their own character. That their own character was shaped by other factors is irrelevant. That doesn't make them better.

Actions will still have reactions even if they were unavoidable. We still need to lock up dangerous people and encourage healthy lifestyles. We should still punish the evil and reward the good. It was just always going to turn out the way that it does.

Once again, only if you discount free will/individual choices/agency/whatever you want to call it. You're assuming that the same person in the exact same circumstances would always make the exact same choice.

Other than quantum mechanical shenanigans this seems like a settled fact of existence?

Seeing as it's been an open dispute in philosophy for at least 2,500 years I'd say no?

They always will, as long as it was at the exact same point in time and all other factors were exactly the same, because that is what happend.

I agree with you, and not with him, but you're not addressing his claims at all.

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If I was them I would be them and not me. I cannot think of a meaningful sense in which you could say "If you were them".

I'm sympathetic to the idea that environmental or genetic factors may make it more or less difficult to not make choices that will give you a chronic disease. That would change the level of responsibility, but unless someone held a gun to your head you've still got some responsibility.

There but for the grace of God, go I.

If you were born with the same genetics and raised by the same family and had the same exact life and experience you would be in the exact same place as them, because you would be them.

Yes, if I was them I would be them.

And the same things would happen to you. We have the data, it happened. If you were them you would be in the exact same situation. They can't have made other choices, or they would have.

If I was them I wouldn’t be me, as you’ve said, so it’s a pointless statement to say “if you were them”. It’s like sayin “If X was Y, then X would be Y.” Which is tautologically true, but provides us with no new information. If I was a cat I’d be a cat. If I was Hitler I’d be Hitler. If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.

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The reason for calling it a "chronic disease" is simply instrumental; it allows fat activists to use laws meant to provide accommodations to sufferers of disease to get accommodations for fat people also.

The causes of the obesity epidemic are also worth considering. From reading slime mold time mold, it seems pretty clear to me that there should be more emphasis on the importance of your body being properly calibrated towards whatever your proper weight is, and we should be more aware of what is causing them so much more frequently to diverge.

Of course, willpower also can suffice, should the first fail; that just becomes progressively harder to make oneself do the more they are misaligned.

SMTM's 'a chemical hunger' posts were quite bad, see here for more. I haven't followed their later posts but I doubt it was much better.

To be clear, I was not asserting that their lithium thesis was correct; the concerns you listed seem quite serious.

I was just asserting that there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"—that many are calibrated worse, for whatever reason that may be, and so weight gain is fairly common, and we should probably try harder to figure out what exactly is going on.

there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"

This is the strawest of straw men.

The thing that I took away from SMTM that seems most important is that something weird is going on, and it's getting worse despite our best attempts to fix it. People are getting fatter and fatter, and as a society we've been putting more and more resources into not getting fat. This does seem mysterious, and I do think something more is going on then just "food is cheap and corporations make food taste great".

Until someone figures out what that thing is definitively, though, the best I can do is employ willpower to try not to get any fatter than I am now.

It’s quite possibly endocrine disrupters.

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.

This seems connected to the more recent idea that competency isn't real, and that all jobs are rewards/punishments that grant privilege/status and nothing more. The idea is that we can just redistribute status by just giving members of oppressed groups prestigious jobs to do, and that will work out fine because nobody is more competent than anyone else at anything. It's not even believing that people might have equal capacity for competence when brought up with equal privilege, but that they actually do have equal competence regardless of their life history. There is no need to improve or work hard to earn something; we just need privileged people to get out of the way.

This comment from back when we were on the reddit by @SerenaButler (not sure if they're still with us) discusses the idea you're talking about, and is imo very insightful. Original: https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/ey1zdz/comment/fh6z9pz/

Text: As a somewhat aside, for the longest time as a kid and/or student I never understood why "Access to jobs" was a cause celebré for advocacy campaigners. Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit). Money, sure, everyone wants that. Jobs, no. It's like campaigning to be given sickle cell anemia rather than a malaria vaccine: you are asking for a horrible things that coincidentally happens to be upstream of the result you want, rather than asking for the result you want.

The solution to this problem became apparent the first time I'd worked a few jobs: to wit, many jobs are sinecures where you doss about with your work friends, get paid mostly for "presence", and are not actually required to exert your muscles (intellectual or literal) at all. So that's why people want """jobs""". Government's promising to deliver """jobs""" is really a promise to deliver what people actually want, money-for-nothing, with merely the most tissue-thin sop of "labors to be performed" in exchange for these monies to keep up appearences.

To bring this back around to the quoted point: yes, having understood the above logic, campaigners absolutely would have no problem pushing for unqualified people to get jobs, because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction. It does not really need to be completed and no-one will suffer if it is not completed so it doesn't matter if the people assigned to it are unqualified. Most jobs (especially public sector ones) are just dolled-up wealth-transfer programmes, and campaigners understand this, and governments understand this, and """generate jobs for the X community""" is a dog-whistle for "free money for X".

EDIT: Through this rubric, lots of (apparently very irresponsible) Blue Tribe campaigns suddenly snap into focus as perfectly reasonable. Women in front line infantry? Well, if you believe that government jobs are all sinecures and tasks to be performed are fictitious and everyone knows this, therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "upper body strength" or whatever probably are dealing in bad faith misogyny; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ burly dudebros rather than letting women sup from the greenback firehouse. Affirmative action Ivy League admissions? Why not, qualifications = credentialism = fake, there's no real tasks to be performed at Harvard or in post-Harvard employment, so therefore all these Red Tribers complaining about "meritocracy" probably are dealing in bad faith racism; they just wanna keep the wealth transfer in the hands of /their guys/ Good Old Boy WASPS rather than letting minorities sup from the credential spigot.

If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.

because, outside of a very limited subset of jobs, like, nuclear power plant technician or something, the accomplishment of the task is irrelevant because the task is essentially a fiction.

Except that’s very definitely not true; most jobs have actual accomplishments that need to be done. Sure, diversity coordinators are figures no one would miss if they all called in for months at a time, but almost all of the common jobs need to actually do something. Even the HR lady could perhaps be routed around but there are actual things she does; if she quit on short notice management would have to do it until they found a new one.

It seems like this idea is limited to very high status jobs- and truthfully I don’t know if replacing CEO’s with a block of wood in a suit would make any difference, I suspect it depends on the company- and we only notice it when it applies to things like ‘surgeon’ and ‘airline pilot’, where, not knowing how to do there jobs even in very broad strokes, I can tell you that a block of wood in a uniform powered by chat gpt could not do it. Honestly I’m not actually sure if diversity advocates believe these jobs are less skill-heavy than commonly assumed or if they’re just high on their own supply about the massive untapped potential of black women.

I think the government/academic jobs vs private sector jobs is doing most of the divide there. As Ghostbusters said, "You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

I've worked government jobs (low level ones) and I've worked private sector, and in the government job I just had to do the minimum required and follow the rules and I could be sure not to be fired. Private sector there have been times I've worked my butt off and still went home scared that I'd be unemployed next month because the company went belly up.

The wider concept of bullshit jobs also includes jobs that need to be done quickly and well because your employer is competing with other employers, not so much because the job would demand efficiency and high competence even in a vacuum (such as a nuclear plant operator).

This is a textbook example of someone failing the intellectual Turing Test.

Jobs are shit and no sane person would ever want one (at least, absent The Man's omnipresent conditioning that you must work for his profit)

But we live in a world where the Man and/or thermodynamics requires you to work in order to avoid death. Where jobs confer economic benefits (getting paid) and social status (not being an unemployed loser). Certain jobs confer not only money and status but a non-trivial amount of societal level power. Maybe we shouldn't value jobs but we absolutely do. And thus it makes perfect sense for someone to be concerned with access to jobs*. As an individual, you want your peers and broader society to stop humiliating you. As an advocate, you're trying to break generational poverty and what you see as inequities in the distribution of wealth/power in society.

In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.

If you really believe in the bullshit jobs thesis, and you really believe that everyone else is in on the open secret too, then when someone makes the "muh objective competence qualifications" against you, it is perfectly reasonable to believe it's an argument that could only ever be made in bad faith.

They seem to be confused about both what the bullshit jobs thesis is and how popular it is. As near as I can tell, SerenaButler subscribes to the theory more closely than their imagined blue triber.

In general, I don't think this post is insightful. It makes a number of assumptions about the beliefs and motives of the people it is attempting to describe that just do not track. Or it hits on surface level beliefs but fails understand the underlying content, e.g. it is probably correct to say that a lot of blue tribers don't think much of arguments from meritocracy, but it isn't because they think qualifications are fake. It's because they think we don't have a functioning meritocracy.

*there certainly seem to be no shortage of red tribers concerned with protecting their jobs.

In short, it doesn't require you to think that competence or effort are fake. It requires you to believe that discrimination is real.

This is not credibile. If it were true, I would expect progressives to participate in efforts to measure skill, qualifications, and merit. In fact, despite the many difficulties of doing so (Good heart's law, etc ), the urgency should inspire tireless ingenious effort to that end. Instead, everywhere I look, the opposite is true: progressives direct their energy towards frustrating the project of improving meritocracy, often enough ridiculing the goal itself.

The historical treatment of black Americans is a stain on our country and the progress we've made combatting discrimination fills me with pride. The job is not complete, but is close.

Certain jobs confer not only money and status but a non-trivial amount of societal level power.

Being valuleless in the sense of not accomplishing anything isn't the same as valueless in the sense of you not getting anything from it.

So there's no contradiction between thinking a job is valueless, and wanting the job because it provides you with money and power. But if you think the job is valueless (in the first sense), you'll think of being "unqualified" for a job as just an excuse to deny you money and power.

I haven't read this comment before, but I've had thoughts similar to this rattling around in my head for a while. I think the thought first occurred to me with respect to affirmative action, that the justifications were based around the notion that individuals belonging to demographics deemed as oppressed had been treated unfairly and therefore, at the individual level, deserved benefits to be tilted in their favor in things like school and job applications*. Obviously, the point of these filtering mechanisms is to select for individuals with the skills, ability, wherewithal, motivation, etc. to make the most out of the school and/or perform the job well, which are not dependent on whether or not someone belongs in a demographic group deemed as oppressed. So the benefit that we get better be worth the tradeoff of taking away these educational or employment opportunities from more qualified people to give them to less qualified ones.

But what is the benefit? Ultimately, it's mostly money. There's little benefit people get out of being assigned homework or going into lecture halls to take tests or sitting in front of computers to crunch numbers. People do these things so that, in the long run, they end up making more money. So why not just give these individuals money and let the work be done by people who are qualified?

Well, the problem there then is the "dignity" of the thing or whatever. People don't like to feel like charity cases; they like to believe that they earned the things that they have, through their own hard work, will, resilience, talents, etc. And so we have to get them to play-act the part, to go to classes and offices, to give them the plausible deniability that they actually earned the money that they're getting. This is also why AA is framed as helping people who are disadvantaged, rather than giving people bonus points for happening to belong to particular demographic groups, even though those are literally the exact same things.

And it's this dishonesty that gets me. I wish the left would just say that we should give people free money as a way to make up for injustices we presume they must have suffered due to belonging to certain demographics. We can then discuss and argue about which individuals deserve free money and how much, and there will be plenty to disagree about there, but at least everyone would have an open and honest understanding of what is at stake here. Trying to launder the free money through subverting our ability to put competent people in positions where they can contribute the most to society seems strictly worse than this.

I think this sort of enforced kayfabe is also at play with, say, the whole "transwomen are women" thing. I think it was Scott Alexander who argued that, regardless of how we see things, we should respect transwomen's identities by using their pronouns and such, because it's just the nice thing to do, and we ought not contribute even more to the suffering that they clearly must experience merely for believing that they were born in the wrong sex. I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I'm sympathetic to it, at least. But that kind of honesty is unacceptable in the modern left - the only line that's acceptable is that transwomen are women in every way that matters. This necessarily comes with it many implications about things like sports or pregnancy that many/most people aren't willing to accept. Like how AA only makes sense if you believe that competency isn't relevant in school/work, this kayfabe only makes sense if you believe that sex differences are purely socially mediated, and if we just twist society enough, then transwomen could live lives that are indistinguishable from females.

Again, I just wish people would state these honestly so that everyone can, with informed consent, place their votes on how they want society to be run instead of constantly obfuscating with this sort of play-acting fakery. But I suspect that, to some extent, the fakery is an essential component of the whole structure, and perhaps even the entire point.

* There are multiple justifications, of course, one of which is that, due to systemic oppression, our current filtering mechanisms erroneously judge individuals who belong to demographics deemed as oppressed as being less qualified than they actually are. However, assuming this were true, this, in no way, can support affirmative action; rather, what it would support is fixing our filtering mechanisms to make more accurate, more precise assessments of individuals, which is the opposite of the blunt tool of AA.

This strikes me as a great example of something passing the intellectual Turing test. I think this is exactly how a woke person would justify their opinion. Their opinion is misguided because it's based on an inappropriate generalisation, but I think a woke person would read the description above and think "yes, that's what I'm getting at". And of course, you're right to point out that the opinion contains a grain of truth: competency really isn't a core requirement for some jobs, and many jobs really are sinecures.

Oooh finally something I have personal experience on.

I was in one of the bluest parts of the country, and maybe the planet, Campbell California and yet when training at the gym the politics of the gym goers were... far to the right of the city but probably slighly left of the country as a whole (though at the magnitude we're talking here it's basically impossible for any actually Right wing opinion to be even discussed since things like "what about that city supervisor" have basically universal agreement. The few times national issues were discussed (mainly oct 7 when the isreali guy said that he has to take some time off to talk to his family) the opinion was definitely in the "RW but mainstream" group. Like they'll talk about Jocko Wilnik's podcast, or Huberman lab, or they'll watch Rennisance periodization https://youtube.com/@RenaissancePeriodization and other right ish aligned groups. Not crazy people but definitely not... super mainstream left. I'm somehow a normal guy for getting my news from Wikipedia instead of the NYT

I have no idea as to mechanisms, but the phenomenon is VERY strong, I remember a slatestarcodex article https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ that discusses how you can get into very strong filter bubbles, going and playing a sport with other guys possibly the gayest sport ever produces some of the strongest filter for Right wing opinion in the state of California yet there we go.

I'll note something odd, there's sort of this weird valley effect, the "mildly fit by incidental lifestyle" people (other than construction workers) were mostly college educated yuppie (I really wish there was a better word than Yuppie/Redneck for the rural city split)but then when I go to the place where people are active to a level most people haven't seen (I lost 50 pounds via pure fat shaming by being around them) are quite right wing . It's like if your lifestyle incidentally makes you more fit (or you only try a little bit) you're much more likely to be Left wing, but those who are actively trying super hard are pretty right wing for the city.

One thing I will note is that every one that took Testosterone replacment therapy (TRT) instantly became more right wing soon after starting TRT, they also became dramatically stronger faster and trained way harder, I do not know if this is the actual effect or if it's more of a "people who do sports are just straight up built different" effect. But I would like to see a study on that, does taking TRT change behavior? https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(11)00078-7 is hard to read, but indicates plausibly yes, but I'm so bad at google that i can't find any studies on TRT directly impacting behavior.

possibly the gayest sport ever

I know BJJ stands for "Brazilian jiu-jitsu". I've known that fact for at least a decade.

But every time I read it, my mind instantly goes to "blowjob-job".

There is an undying faction of TMA (traditional martial arts) which refers to BJJ as blowjob jujitsu or similar, as though some rhetorical win can possibly reverse the steamroller that modern MMA represents. Reassuringly, this faction gets smaller every year as the evidence rolls in.

It doesn’t surprise me. Most TMAs are basically LARP at this point, and they definitely feel the cognitive dissonance of watching MMA/BJJ fighters learn how to fight properly while they are awarded multiple belts and even half-belts for learning to play fight. You can get pretty high in the ranks of most TMAs without actually needing to demonstrate that you are a good fighter, where in MMA and BJJ rank comes directly from winning matches.

Modern BJJ is nothing like modern MMA and I'll fight you (literally) on that.

For starters as far as I can tell, basically every current MMA fighter focus's on Just standing up out of bottom position rather than fighting from bottom position.

Next from top position MMA guys emphasize holding the other person down and punching them, prefering to remain with their legs tangled in wrestling rides rather than passing the legs

BJJ's big 4 submissions are the Rear Naked choke, The armbar, the inside heel hook and the outside heel hook, when was the last time you saw a heel hook win an MMA fight? It's literally the 2nd and 3rd most common submission in top level bjj yet in mma both combine to about 6th? Like the Arm triangle is more common than both combined, when the arm triangle is 9th in bjj.

My MMA skills are rusty and I'd need to get back on the juice before I'm ready to fight anybody for real, but modern BJJ and modern MMA grappling have diverged to such an extent that to call the 2 the same is crazy.

I don’t know much about this at all, but aren’t you really just describing how MMA moved from a free-for-all mix entered into by fighters of various background to what is increasingly a specific martial art of its own?

As evidence of your claim that BJJ has fallen by the wayside in modern MMA, as well as a fun historical artifact, feast your eyes on Rousmiar Palhares's career record. Five heel hook submissions in the UFC! Five more in other pro fights! Of course, his last one in the UFC was over a decade ago, which kind of makes the point. Still, an impressive career that includes kneebarring Jon Fitch and tapping Jake Shields with a kimura.

I think there's a reasonable argument that MMA grappling has diverged from BJJ largely because bjj has been incorporated into the training process. Sort of a pareto effect thing.

Is Renaissance Periodization really a "right ish aligned group"? Or even huberman lab?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WBZGgrgMwvU

Mike's got this alt channel, quick perusal makes me think either right or far off the beaten path left. I don't think he'd qualify as mainstream right either actually. Not that his exercise videos really push any agenda, way too many gay jokes for someone like Ron Desantis to ever be comfortable around him.

Hilarious, I can't believe he's got a separate channel for Noticing.

I didn't pick up on any political lean in actual RP videos, maybe a few jokes that would get you kicked out of a faculty lounge but that doesn't really mean anything.

He talks about this topic a bit here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKyniPMgQ94&t=2410s

Talks about noticing "Willpower and generics take you really far — at least."

My interpretation is he is at least libertarian leaning. There are strong Kolmogorov complicity vibes whenever he butts up against a topic that would get you hard core canceled. I suspect because his business is primarily selling his apps and programs/books and getting canceled would probably hurt that.

Huberman surely isn’t, he’s more of a granola lib with some lifting optimizer tech bro flavor.

TBH I might be completely wrong but that's the minor impression I get when watching their content.

Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:

It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.

Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.

Oh dear.

After actually reading "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness", I'm not sure how you can honestly think that your two extremely cherry-picked paragraphs are representative. The article is decidedly not anti-fitness (despite the click bait title), and phrasing it as

a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023

seems pretty misleading. I'm going to charitably assume you were Google-search-and-skimming for examples of outrageous outgroup behavior, and not deliberately trying to mislead us.

I think somebody being able to write those two paragraphs and also not condemn exercise goes against your thesis that the wokes are crazy, and is a nice example of somebody not being mind-killed.

I suppose I just disagree. The quoted paragraph is the most egregious example, but the article has quite a few lines that are at least adjacent to the kind of silliness I'm poking fun at:

Until the 1920s or so, to be what would be considered today fat or bigger, was actually desirable and actually signified affluence—which is like the polar opposite of today, when so much of the obesity epidemic discourse is connected to socio-economic inequality and to be fat is often to be seen as to be poor.

I don't want to relitigate this at length, but a quick search of "beautiful women Edwardian era" should disabuse observers of the idea that women who "would be considered today fat" were desirable. Women who would today be considered fat were practically non-existent outside of freak shows in 1910.

Another big turning point is 9/11. You see a boom in the CrossFit mentality of almost like militarized fitness and girding yourself and your body for a fight—not necessarily, by the way, in the 1950s/1960s way of fighting for the U.S. Army—but more like “you need to know how to perform functional fitness to protect yourself if things go wrong.” At the same time, you see [an emphasis on] wellness, self care and healing and being meditative in an increasingly traumatic and unpredictable world.

This isn't silly and the first part doesn't even seem wrong, but referring to the world as "increasingly traumatic" is a decidedly woke perspective.

But it’s important to point out that access was never totally equal, if you lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have safe streets or streets that were not well lit. Women were catcalled. People of color were thought to be committing a crime.

The “running is for everybody” discourse still quite often leaves out the fact that depending on where you live and the body that you live in, it can be a very different kind of experience.

This framing isn't anti-exercise, but it includes the trope that a lot of people aren't exercising because they lack access, which is a distinctly left-wing position. Again, this isn't stupid, it isn't even necessarily wrong, but it's certainly casting a side-eye at jerks like me that think you actually can just put on your shoes, walk out the door, and go for a run.

Sure, I quoted the most ridiculous part and did it in a way to make fun of the interviewee's perspective on fitness. If journalistic outlets don't want to be mocked for referencing the "white supremacist origins of exercise" they shouldn't title their articles "The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise" and quote a guy that says that exercise has white supremacist origins.

I’m not arguing that the author isn’t woke. I’m arguing that the author never says “exercise is bad, don’t do it”, which is what you claimed, and which is not true.

If you think the rest of the article lets you similarly argue that the wokes have lost their minds, then you are welcome to use those other parts in your original post.

I don't want to relitigate this at length, but a quick search of "beautiful women Edwardian era" should disabuse observers of the idea that women who "would be considered today fat" were desirable. Women who would today be considered fat were practically non-existent outside of freak shows in 1910.

Is he says if that fatness was considered beautiful in 1910, or is he saying that it was in general considered to be a good thing, perhaps particularly for older people?

I think the correlation between class and fitness is likely substantially greater than that between politics and it. I suppose red tribe fatties are less likely to be HAES activists, but that doesn’t mean the obese Republican cop doesn’t have his own set of cope ideologies to explain why being fat isn’t actually his fault, or why he’s not even fat at all.

There’s fitness and then there’s fitness.

I agree there’s a likely correlation between male SES and fitness-when-it-comes-to-lack-of-obesity in Western countries, but the correlation between right-wingedness and fitness-when-it-comes-to-aesthetics can be on a similar magnitude or even higher, especially when holding some confounders equal.

Weight-lifting and belief in sexual dimorphism is highly right-coded, and male aesthetics fitness lore heavily invokes sexual dimorphism: Wide and capped delts, portruding traps, thick and wide back, strong chest and arms, relatively thin waist.

Grab a random guy from a gym who has less than 15% BF and can bench-press >1.5x his weight. Is he more likely to be right- or left-leaning relative to a randomly selected peer of similar geography, age, education-level?

The modal “in-shape” guy among the PMC, who does some running, cycling, or squash when he doesn’t have a Dorsia res conflict, maybe some light weighting from time to time, is still a DYEL and/or perhaps skinny-fat compared to what might be considered aesthetic.

Sure, I agree, but you’re talking about the 96/7/8th percentile or higher of male fitness if you’re talking about men who can bench 1.5x their body weight and have low enough body fat percentage to have visible abs while doing it. These people are probably right-leaning relative to peer group because hardcore lifting culture tends to the right, and young men with something to prove do also. Plus there are possibly hormonal or other reasons, as some have theorized.

The real problem in the West (and much of the rest of the world) is obesity and overweight-ness. The PMC DYEL guy who lifts once a week and does some cycling and squash while staying skinny isn’t the issue, if the whole country was as healthy as him we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Actual bodybuilding is a vanity niche for a small minority of men. That doesn’t make it wrong or bad, but it isn’t really the ‘physique issue’ that is plaguing a lot of the world.

Obese red tribers mostly cop the blame for getting fat, even if they think losing weight is too difficult to be a reasonable expectation.

It's silly for right-wingers to be like "can you BELIEVE these insane leftists saying fitness is a gateway to the far-right?" when "fitness is a gateway to the far-right" is the whole schtick of guys like BAP, and I say this as someone who lifts weights 3-4 times a week. On that note, I haven't noticed myself turning into any sort of right-winger as I get stronger. But for me it's not a hobby, it's a chore that I do purely out of vanity, not because I enjoy the activity itself at all.

It is possible, even probable, for both BAP and those leftists to be insane.

Okay, but it's undeniable (and why would they want to deny it anyway?) that the fitness 'aesthetic' is a very integral part of a certain type of online right-wing politics and fitness influencers/youtubers/etc. tend to lean right.

Great post, but I think the pattern you briefly mentioned at the end bears a much deeper examination.

Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals.

This really understates the phenomenon. As a conservative from a blue tribe stronghold, my visits to red tribe strongholds like the deep south are extremely disillusioning. It's hard to overstate what a dramatic difference there is in the obesity levels everywhere you go. And this in turn leads to much higher consumption of public health resources.

It's hard to square these realities with common sense arguments which ring true to me, like the ones you made above. It doesn't seem debatable that self-sufficiency is more a red tribe value than a blue tribe value - so why are blue tribe individuals, as a class, more self-sufficient when it comes to diet and health?

There are a number of explanations you could hypothesize: maybe personal belief in the importance of self-sufficiency is irrelevant in a system that doesn't incentivize it. Maybe if you controlled for poverty / IQ the differences are explained or the sign of the correlation flips. Maybe it's a Simpsons paradox thing where within a given region, right-wing beliefs are correlated with fitness, but the correlation doesn't hold across the whole population. But it feels like it's crying out for some sort of explanation.

It's possible that those on the left value being skinny and attractive more than those on the right do. The urban left is more likely to be interested in casual sex with strangers, and more likely to be going from relationship to relationship as opposed to settling down with someone. Also more likely to get divorced and try to find a new partner. With that environment in mind, it is advantageous to maintain your attractiveness so you can continue to attract mates.

In contrast, the further to the right you go the more likely you are to have a culture valuing finding someone to settle down with and start a family. Once you've bagged a mate and said your vows, staying physically attractive is much less important for your day to day happiness. What's more, on the right you're more likely to have broad family and local networks to fill your social needs: people who don't need to find you attractive to be in your life. For the urban left, I can imagine you have to build your social network more from fostering relationships with new people rather than leaning on your family and the people who have known you since you were a kid.

All that is speculative, of course. What I can confirm is that in right wing cultural spaces if someone is fat they'll usually say something like "I love to eat, that's why I'm fat!" or "I know being fat ain't healthy, but eating food is what makes life worth living." It comes from a place of personal responsibility, including the personal responsibility to accept the consequences of your actions and the trade-offs you have made.

Also more likely to get divorced and try to find a new partner.

Is this true? I don't think this is true. Maybe it's true after controlling for education, but when we look at the most stereotypically Blue people (urbanites with graduate degrees, either in academia or comfortably adjacent to it), the divorce rates are low. I might even suggest that staying fit and attractive helps people stay married.

I'll first note that your comment seems to reinforce my point; the idea that staying fit and attractive helps people stay married goes hand in hand with the idea that your partner becoming less attractive is reasonable grounds for divorce. That's much more of a left wing than right wing perspective on marriage. But you're right! We should find some actual data and check.

Pew found that when it comes to the statement "Couples who are unhappy tend to stay in bad marriages too long" 69% of Democrats agreed compared to 41% of Republicans. That divide gets wider the further to the right or left you go: for Republicans that described themselves as "conservative" (as opposed to "moderate" or "liberal") only 35% agreed, compared to 76% Democrats who described themselves as "liberal".

Of course that's just stated attitudes, what about actual divorce rates? A study from the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia found that for people who had ever been married at all 41% of Republicans had been divorced compared to 47% of Democrats. They also found that 57% of Republicans are currently married, compared to 40% of Democrats.

Another study found that the divorce rate was higher in red states than blue states, but they also noted that the marriage rate was much higher in red states than blue states which may account for it. A smaller percentage of divorces among a larger number a marriages may mean that Republicans divorce more per capita, but divorce less as a proportion of all married individuals.

divorce rate was higher in red states than blue states

Red states vs blue states is an apples to oranges comparison, because the south is dysfunctional, poor, and very red, and most non-southern red states are very rural.

Huh. That seems pretty dispositive that my impression was just wrong. Thanks for enacting the labor.

Thanks for asking for data. It's easy to armchair philosophize about things that we actually have data for, and I usually forget to check.

I think you are overthinking it. A lot of it just feels like cars versus no cars to me. When I am in a city anything 10 min away is a walk but everything suburban is a drive.

I also think the food industry has optimized for taste and gotten really good at it and these things are readily available everywhere and an easy pleasure in rural areas.

I think you are overthinking it. A lot of it just feels like cars versus no cars to me. When I am in a city anything 10 min away is a walk but everything suburban is a drive.

Philadelphia's SEPTA buses are full of extremely fat people.

Unfortunately while there's plenty of data on rural vs metropolitan obesity (rural is higher), there doesn't seem to be all that much on suburban vs urban (both are metropolitan).

Are young, wealthy, educated people in Alabama actually much fatter than young, wealthy, educated people in Oregon, though? It’s not like SEC sorority girls are (typically) fat. I’d be interested in @Walterodim’s opinion too. It’s true that the Deep South is much fatter than the Northwest and Colorado, but it’s also much poorer. There are also ethnic differences in obesity rates that obviously affect Mississippi’s rate vs, say, Washington.

Or, put otherwise, are poor, trailer trash, people-of-Walmart whites in Colorado actually much skinnier than their peers in Missouri?

Southern food is much more calorie intense than other parts of the country.

Sure, but there's a limit to that. McDonalds is available everywhere in the country.

Sure, but most, even poor people, don’t eat McDonald’s every day.

There’s definitely a regional tastes and cuisine thing going on, like prevalence of sweet tea or certain southern deserts. I tend to agree that junk food varies less across the country than home cooking, but, like, incidence of grocery store fried chicken or likelihood to drink sweet tea(which usually has more calories than regular soda) probably makes enough of a difference at the margins to be noticeable.

My first guess is that a lot of this is urban/rural just because of the fact of public transit. When I visit my sister in DC I walk and take the subway, while when I am at home I drive everywhere, just because of the material realities of where I am. So urban populations will, all things being equal, probably have a more active default lifestyle just because of this and thus I would expect they have lower levels of obesity even if both have the same diet and inclination to exercise.

Subjectively, I would guess they are, but it certainly narrows the gap. There's such a consistent pairing of urban environments with concentrations of young, wealthy, educated Blue Tribers that the layers of confounds are too much for me to tease apart mentally. One anecdotal addendum to that is that the secret right-wingers that I know deep in Blue territory are an unusually fit and healthy group, with a concentration in masculine-coded sports like powerlifting and fighting.

I agree completely that I understated that population-level difference by far too much! Having had a travel-heavy job that took me to quite a few parts of the country, this difference is really, really obvious. The reddest part of the country have a lot of what I've heard people refer to as "Walmart obesity". In stark contrast, the fittest places I've been aren't just blue, they're so blue that they're stereotypes, literally the punch lines for jokes - Eugene, Madison, Boulder.

There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world. What do the three places I just mentioned have in common? Huge numbers of bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks, climbing gyms, and so on. These opporunities and cultural reinforcement drive behavior. If we want to test that by hunting for a Red place with similar surroundings, the best place that I can think of to check is Utah, and sure enough, Utahans are an unusually healthy group. There are obvious confounders in Utah, but it's a start anyway.

Utahan food is also a thing people prefer not to think about. Southern food is both generally loved and unusually calorie dense.

Really? This was the first article I found on DDG about Utah cuisine, and a lot of it not only looks decent, it looks not unlike Southern food. Granted, this is some listicle from some website I've never heard of before, so all the caveats about blogsites in the age of ChatGPT apply.

Whether you love it or hate it, fry sauce is definitely a Utah thing. There are many different recipes around, but the easiest way to make it is to combine mayonnaise and ketchup.

Round these parts, that's called pink sauce. It's a bastardised version of Marie Rose sauce. It may be a "Utah thing", but they didn't invent it.

There isn't a great explanation that I'm aware of, but my working hypothesis is that it just really does turn out that the Blue Tribers are correct about built environment massively influencing how people interface with the world.

Isn't selection bias the most obvious explanation? Like how it tends to be the explanation for everything in education, and looking for "successful educational practices" without carefully controlling for it just tells you the educational fads in the most-selective schools.

Being normal weight correlates with traits, like intelligence and conscientiousness, that are also useful for succeeding in the educational system and getting high-status jobs. (Not always high-paying jobs, but that's because so many people want those jobs that there's competition driving down wages.) People move to the areas where those jobs are available, and they have children who inherit those traits. Left-wing ideology is popular among the educated/upper-class, so those areas are also left-wing.

This also tangentially relates to the recent blog posts about conservatism's human-capital problem, TracingWoodgrain's The Republican Party is Doomed and Hanania's Coping with Low Human Capital.

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.

I think there’s a bit of bias toward “everyone is just like me” belief as well. If you and everyone you know are high achieving type A personalities who make time to work out, it’s not that hard to reason yourself to the conclusion that everyone is like that and simply lacks some sort of environmental helps that would make them successful. If I made it because of hard work, and everyone works hard, you must have some extra problems that I don’t have or you’d make it too.

Personally I think both can be true and in fact are true. There can be things like lack of money, exposure to ideas that you could use to build a great future, IQ, supportive familles, race , or even geographical proximity that can radically change your life prospects. But I don’t think that negates work. It’s not either or, it’s both and all of the above. What I see the left making the mistake on is that they think the existence of environmental or biological factors somehow means not having to work hard as well. I see systemic racism narratives as something poisonous to black people in so far as it convinced them to not bother to try.

When I lived in Eugene for a few months in 2008, it certainly didn't seem to be particularly fatter than any comparable European city, save that there were slightly more of morbidly obese megafatties going around.

When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.

When the right bangs on about private responsibility, it is, on one hand, just phrasing something that is self-evident and, on the other hand, does not seem to have the required effect; you just get fatties who recognize they're fundamentally at fault for their fatness, and then... just keep on being fat, as a group (obviously there are numerous individual cases where getting some tough love helps make life choices).

When the left talks about fatness being caused by society rather than the individual, well, one of the things is what the society might be able to do to try to get people be more athletic, such as the cities maintaining bike trails, hiking trails, running trails, parks and climbing gyms. They don't just spring out from thin air, after all - I guess that there would be a possibiliy for private ones, too (climbing gyms, certainly), but the others are a pretty classic case of things that localities do on public money.

Which is why I think, inasmuch as we aren't going to eliminate deductions and go to a flat tax, we should have tax deductions for fitness and sporting expenses and equipment. For the simple reason that these are good things that we want to encourage.

When I lived in Eugene for a few months in 2008, it certainly didn't seem to be particularly fatter than any comparable European city, save that there were slightly more of morbidly obese megafatties going around.

They were intended as an example of one of the healthy cities, not the fat cities! And yeah, those fit cities still have the weird morphology of Amerifats that simply doesn't exist in Europe to any appreciable degree. The median is just much more similar to a normal European city and the athletic and fit tail of the distribution is both wide and long.

I certainly prefer the Blue environments in terms of the buildout, that's why I selected one to live in. If I had my druthers, my city would continue to improve multiuse paths and cycling infrastructure while implementing more and more traffic-calming to slow the speed of vehicles. At the end of the day, I prefer the Blue policy solutions to obesity and the Red messaging on obesity.

Just to be clear, I didn't try to imply it was a fat city - just commented on the basis of my own experience.

Red tribe has most of the hefty individuals in the country and they will tell you not to get fat because it sucks. Like pack a day smokers telling you not to start. Blue tribe has plenty of people in unenviable shape, but few cartoonish fats, and they’ll tell you it doesn’t matter.

Now, I think it’s entirely fair to allow health insurance to set rates however they want; at the end of the day fat peoplepeople of size should eat less if they want to pay less in insurance. I think it’s reasonable that poor decisions cost more in the end. But I also don’t think blue tribe actually disagrees with me- they think smoking should raise your insurance rates, after all.

Instead I think this is that they think obesity, specifically, is caused by something outside the affected individual’s control. And to be fair, there are genetic factors to it. But mostly this is their inaccurate idea that systemic barriers shape the poor outcomes of large numbers of people in the USA. ‘Food deserts’ for example. And compounding this is that the blue tribe, on average, is extremely privileged and doesn’t actually understand how functional working class people live- witness the Twitterati who think doordash is important for the working class to feed themselves.

While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility.

In this post, I argued that support for authoritarianism could be tied to internal vs. external locus of control, and specifically a person's belief that they are capable of protecting themselves from harm (or lack thereof). All things being equal, a gymrat is probably more likely to think he's capable of defending himself from a mugger than someone who rarely exercises. Even a physically fit person will tend to be more confident in their ability to flee from someone who comes at them with a knife, when compared to an obese person who gets winded walking up a flight of stairs. If you don't think you can protect yourself from harm, the natural assumption is that it's the government's job.

This theory would predict that men will generally tend to be more libertarian than women, that gun owners will be more libertarian than non-gun owners (e.g.), that women with husbands will tend to be more libertarian than single women ("I can't defend myself from a home invader, but my husband can protect me"), that younger people will tend to be more libertarian than older people (particularly pronounced in men as their body stops producing as much testosterone).

There was a lot of pushback on my theory at first brush, and the way I phrased it made it sound a bit like I was saying all Democrats are effeminate weaklings and all Republicans are ripped alpha males (obviously neither is remotely true). I think the internal vs. external locus of control might be a more productive framing: an authoritarian believes that it's the government's responsibility to protect him from various kinds of harm (whether that means criminals, Covid or mean words on the Internet), whereas a libertarian believes that it's his own responsibility to protect himself from most kinds of harm. For most people, if you can't do something (and don't want to put the effort into learning), it's only a hop, skip and a jump away from thinking that you shouldn't be expected to do it, that it isn't your responsibility to do it - because otherwise you've admitted that you have responsibilities which you're shirking. From this perspective, support for authoritarianism is sort of like weaponised incompetence on a societal level: much like your annoying colleague who insists that they can't do some trivial task in Excel because they're "not good with computers", authoritarians are people who are unable to protect themselves from harm, refuse to learn (or even change their behaviour in order to make harm less likely) and demand that someone else do it for them. And that belief doesn't sit in isolation: if you think it's the government's responsibility to protect you from a range of harms (up to and including nasty words on the Internet), that necessitates the creation or expansion of governmental bodies to carry out said protection, which means raising taxes. Conversely, if Joe (believes that he) can protect himself from certain kinds of harm, and the people who think it's the government's responsibility to protect them from that harm want to raise Joe's taxes to fund it, Joe will quite reasonably retort: "I can do this myself and don't need the government's help - why can't you?"

It's also worth reiterating that a person's assessment of their ability to protect themselves from harm can be flat wrong: there are plenty of physically fit Zoomers who are made of glass and think that catching Covid is a death sentence, and plenty of Red men in their seventies who refuse to get vaccinated, stop smoking or wear a seatbelt. But there's probably some kind of middling-strength correlation between one's actual ability to protect oneself and one's personal assessment of one's ability to protect oneself from harm. To reiterate, a man who goes to the gym three times a week is more likely to believe that he can protect himself than a man who doesn't. A man who owns a gun is more likely to believe that he can protect himself than a man who doesn't, even if he's a clumsy oaf who's more likely to literally shoot himself in the foot than shoot a home invader.

Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much

As I pointed out here, it's fascinating to note how recently mocking obese people for refusing to take responsibility for their condition was a left-coded belief. Consider this meme, or this one, or this one. Post these on left-leaning subreddits ten years ago and you'll be showered with upvotes; post them today and you'll be accused of being fatphobic, unless the subject of the meme is clearly a member of the Red tribe (prominent MAGA hat).

I'd be curious to see research regarding whether obese conservatives are more likely to hold themselves responsible for the size of their bodies than obese liberals. My gut feeling is that, the higher a person's BMI gets, the probability of blaming their condition on factors outside their control approaches 1, regardless of political alignment.

As much as we'd like to claim that Red Tribers have internal locus of control and Blue Tribers external, I don't think it's quite that simple. I think the real difference is between people with high life satisfaction and low life satisfaction, or high-status vs. low-status. If you're a Blue loser who can't hold down a steady job, the reflexive cope is to blame the patriarchy or Amerikkka or say that you can't work because of your depression or fibromyalgia. If you're a Red loser who can't hold down a steady job, the reflexive cope is to blame it on Biden flooding your county with Mexicans who'll work for peanuts. Successful people, whether Red or Blue, are bound to attribute their success to personal traits and hard work: the "nepo baby" accusation stings even if (especially if!) you self-identify as a woke person who acknowledges that society is set up in such a way that numerous people are afforded all sorts of hereditary unearned privileges. A successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and declaring, unprompted, "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my unearned white privilege" is effectively a kind of humblebrag, because the category includes hundreds of millions of white people who are nowhere near as successful as them. Good luck finding a successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my dad buying me a house when I was 21 and getting me an internship in Lockheed Martin because the CEO is his golfing buddy."

I think there is something to your main thrust re: locus of control, but:

Good luck finding a successful woke person placing their hand on their heart and saying "I acknowledge that my success is partly a result of my dad buying me a house when I was 21 and getting me an internship in Lockheed Martin because the CEO is his golfing buddy."

I have multiple progressive friends who would absolutely say that they were given significant advantages due to their family connections. I do think it helps that in several of the cases it would be absolutely ridiculous for them to claim otherwise (probably a lot easier to disavow your dad being the golfing buddy of a CEO than your dad being a CEO or if your last name is on a building at the college you went to).

Though if anything that further supports your main argument.

I'd be curious to see research regarding whether obese conservatives are more likely to hold themselves responsible for the size of their bodies than obese liberals. My gut feeling is that, the higher a person's BMI gets, the probability of blaming their condition on factors outside their control approaches 1, regardless of political alignment.

Having been around obese conservatives quite a bit more than the median motteizean, lots of them don’t think staying fat is their fault, but all of them admit that getting fat was their fault.

I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907

It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.

Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.

The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.

Kudos for putting actual effort into finding the original data.

I think this is just the most surface level manifestation of a deeper core truth. Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do. Maybe this breaks down or gets fuzzy at higher and higher levels, like debates over man made climate change. But on personal, practical levels, or levels near them, I think conservatives have liberals absolutely licked when it comes to understanding and acting on practical cause and effect.

Because literally every profession, hobby or past time that exposes people to cause and effect gets accused of "radicalizing" people into "far right conservativism." Video games, exercise, sport, engineering. Programming used to, but these days so much of "programming" is so far removed from actually talking computer, the effect is lessened a great deal. Seems the "tech-bro", that odious, middle class, quixotically conservative in the sense that they believed they earned their success, has been more or less vanquished under the weight of silicon valley's expansive DEI departments. That or the more autistic among them got trans'ed.

Look dawg, the rules here stress extending charity to the outgroup. Not an infinite amount of charity, but certainly more than is implied by:

Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do.

Which would fall afoul of it if the rest of your comment didn't.

And then we happen to have:

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

Which is precisely what it says on the tin. I'm not sure what your understanding of causality is, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the bare minimum required to be functional human being who acquired a degree of mental maturity greater than a neonate. While I, mod hat off, agree that there are gaping holes in their reasoning, and, mod hat back on I get that you're being hyperbolic, but that only makes you fall afoul of our guidelines on:

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

You've got enough AAQCs under your belt to know that such drive-by culture-warring is against the spirit of what we do here. I ask that you don't do this again. Neither side, be it your ingroup or your outgroup, has such a clear monopoly on truth and clear thinking that you can make such claims. Certainly if you do wish to make those claims, we expect more from you.

That's because this is what winning looks like.

Someone once said power is demonstrated by the ability to make outcomes that disadvantage people you don't like look like they occur naturally.

Here's my version: power is demonstrated by the ability to entirely avoid, or even remain entirely ignorant of, the negative consequences of your actions.

The losers have to eat shit. They also get to see the winners shovel it at them even if it is completely by accident.

At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.

A sort of nitpick: they don't think that all people are subject to circumstances out of their control. I think they only think the people who are oppressed are subject to this.

For the remaining people (who by process of elimination have to be the oppressors), the progressive frame generally seems to 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 off 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 find this sort of model very infuriating, because there's a lack of acknowledgement that we're all people, and we're all just trying to live our lives. And there really is no logical rubric for who is oppressed or not, other than inclusion in specific categories (most of which almost everyone has at least one of), and therefore, there really is no logic to who is in control of theirs and others lives and who isn't.

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.

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.

Yes, that's true. My framing of it is not a steelman, for sure. Though I do know some people who certainly act like they believe in the coordination, believe that there's a cabal of white men who are actively trying to keep others down, and they take our their anger on white men as such. I think that some groundling progressives may intellectually know some things, but have a lot of anger about their perceived injustices, and they end up having a hard time separating their angry feelings from their logical thoughts on the subject.

There's no consistent pattern here. It all reverses for vaccine mandates, where elevating personal choice quickly becomes somewhere between "get the jab chud" and supporting concentration camps for the unvaccinated.

Doubly so, originally the consensus was leaning 'oh Trump's rushing the vaccine, I wouldn't trust anything he puts out with a bargepole'. My now 5x vaxxed friend said something like that back in late 2020. Trump was and still is one of the biggest pro-vaxxer (non compulsory though), he views it as his great achievement.

While one can no doubt find a sizeable contingent to defend any belief, the more common and reasonable argument people such as myself would furnish against focusing on personal agency is not that it is 'wrong' but that it is useless. If we are approaching this from a policy perspective how much control any particular person had over their health is only important insofar as it impacts what we need to do to remedy poor health now, on a society-wide scale. Politicians and academics are generally in the business of policy, not personal advice.

What is really useless is creating policies that distort incentives and make problems worse. You can’t just ignore personal agency interacting with incentives just because the scale went up.

You have to consider effects on incentives for future behavior and “willingness to pay”, when it becomes a black hole of government spending for everything because it’s labeled a “chronic disease.”

In this case, individuals being shielded from bearing the cost of their poor lifestyle decisions will almost certainly make things worse.

A long life into old age costs the taxpayer a lot more. Smoking and obesity are cost saving for society. Nothing is more expensive than 10 years in assisted living.

Neither of those facts remotely modifies the argument I presented about incentives.

Assisted living and end-of-life care should also not be subsidized by taxpayers. Entitlements need reform across the board.

Perhaps they do. But in the current climate, smoking and heart disease save money for everyone.

It may be true for the retirees who reverse-mortgage their house and go on cruises around the world, but if the elderly do what they've done historically, they can be a welcome support in inter-generational homes, helping their children raise more grandchildren.

You'd have to factor the cost of that lost fertility before saying that the elderly are a net cost per year. There are some other benefits that the elderly provide, as outlined in this article.

Elderly people being a net cost on society would just be an additional sign of a sick society. I'd be surprised if a successful grandma who supports children and grand-children 'cost' more to society than a childless woman in her 40s.

I am speaking in healthcare costs. Also, Multigenerational households consistently make up about 3.8% of all households in the US. https://imgur.com/Cgv9Lrm So it really shouldn't factor into accurate cost saving simulation of costs. If that is a sign of a sick society, then we are terminal and in hospice already. It is just a true fact that the elderly take more than they give and it is much cheaper to have people die at 65 from smoking or heart disease.

I don't think that is GOOD thing! Far from it, but raising rates on fat people and smokers to save money is actually going to cost a lot more money. So if you want to save people from themselves, great, but it isn't for the ratepayers or the taxpayers.

Well healthcare costs are over-inflated anyway. Hospital systems, doctors and Big Pharma writing themselves blank checks off the government or third-party insurance.

Multigenerational households consistently make up about 3.8% of all households in the US.

From my personal experience, parents of families with grand-parent help look at least 30% less stressed-out than the ones without. Not necessarily in a same household.

I'd expect multigenerational households to have lower healthcare spending for the elderly: younger relatives can look after them, notice any serious health issues, and social interaction is important for health outcomes.

Instead of promoting obesity to decrease healthcare spending, I think it'd be preferable to promote family unity, as this would also help with the drop in birthrates.

It seems that the West will be a theocracy again or it will stop existing.

I agree that "it takes a village" and parents and kids have suffered from not having it in the nuclear family system we have fallen into in the states. I'm not promoting that as an end goal, just as I am not promoting the idea that we should have people smoke and overeat to die sooner and reduce the surplus population.

I am pointing out that it is silly to think it would save the taxpayer any healthcare money to incentivise healthier living in the current environment due to the cost of elder care being crazy high. If your Dad smokes you might get an inheritance, if he doesn't you and the taxpayer are on the hook for 10 years of declining mobility in a retirement home at 8k a month and 5 years of dementia in a 20k a month memory care unit.

if he doesn't you and the taxpayer are on the hook for 10 years of declining mobility in a retirement home at 8k a month and 5 years of dementia in a 20k a month memory care unit.

Or just bring him home. People pay for these things because they have too much money to know what to do with it.

And you know, maybe the next time a 'deadly' pandemic that's mostly fatal to the very elderly comes around, maybe just don't freak out as much?

More comments

The degree of personal responsibility does have an important policy implication - who pays? If someone is completely blameless for the state of their health, it's reasonable to say that it's deeply unfair that they be charged more for medical insurance, or even that they should pay more for medical care than someone that isn't utilizing those services. If, on the other hand, people carry the weight of their own choices, Hovde's suggestion seems correct.

One could do away with this concern by declaring that no one should pay for medical care and it should always be government spending or that government should pay for zero healthcare and to each their own, but neither of these is going to win in the United States anytime soon.

The problem with the whole---personal responsibly fat dialog--- is that it seems like it should make sense, but it doesn't.

Whole societies get fat when hyper processed super tasty high calorie food is inserted into a culture that doesn't have a very strong shame based immunity, when you drive everywhere and work at a desk etc..etcc... The experiment has been done in dozens of countries around the world.

When half your country is fat, and as you rightly point out, it isn't the half you would pick based on your culture war write up here, then something else is going on. It isn't a self discipline thing for the most part, it can be, if someone has a high enough level of it, or really enjoys exercise, or will be relentlessly shamed for being fat at all times. But that only works for a very small portion of the people with the propensity to get fat, and it needs to work every single day for the rest of their lives.

Humans are simply not evolved to be in an environment with this much abundance. Luckily the same scientific principles that have provided this abundance are now going to help solve the obesity problem by bringing baseline hunger levels more in line with people who are naturally slim. My buddy got on generic Wegovy and has gone from 260 to 220 in 2 months. It is pretty great that you can now take a pill or a shot to de-fat yourself without white knuckling every bit of food you pass for years on end.

I agree with the statement one of your examples made there, obesity is not some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for. Fat humans are not made for this level of delicious high calorie food availability. We should give them the opportunity to take a free magic pill that will make them skinny. Now if they refuse to do that, then it is a moral failing/choice to be fat.

Most of these problems have an environmental component to them. Highly processed super-palatable food available for consumption almost everywhere you care to look at very cheap prices does create an environmental that favors obesity. But that’s not the whole thing. You still have at least some choice in the matter. The food doesn’t leap into your mouth and down your throat. And therefore you do have choices. You can remove such food from your environment— you can’t overeat on the cookies that you never bought in the first place. You can choose to not buy or use processed foods, which people doing various specialty diets tend to do, whether it’s keto, paleo, vegan, or carnivore. You can control the portion sizes as well. If you don’t eat double cheeseburgers you eat fewer calories.

I tend to be skeptical of drug induced weight loss simply because we haven’t been doing these trials long term. Nobody knows what these Ozempic and generic brands of ozempic will do long term. FenFen was a popular weight loss drug in the 1990s and 2000s. It turned out to damage the heart. Maybe the new class of drugs is better, but we don’t really have 10-20 years of use.

Perhaps what we need is dram shop / over-serving laws but for food.

If somebody looks visibly inebriated, then serving them more alcohol can get you in trouble.

Similarly, if somebody looks visibly overfed, then it should be illegal to give them fattening foods (most products currently sold would qualify). Eateries would have to have a special menu specifically designed to be filling on low calories for these customers.

Another solution if we're willing to exert as much effort preventing obesity as we did covid: The Anti-Gluttony Door in Portugal's Alcobaça Monastery - can't go to the refectory until you need it.

The "Anti-Gluttony Door" is a myth, it's a serving hatch for trays of food:

https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2021/10/09/not-a-monasterys-anti-gluttony-door/

I still like the concept!

Yet another, I'm wrong, but I like the directionality of the fake news, or it is funny, so I'm not really wrong. I see this in almost every response to being tricked by fake news.

If you don’t eat double cheeseburgers you eat fewer calories.

While this is true, it's not the entire truth. I've been fat all my life, and I can tell you that I've never eaten a double cheeseburger. Indeed, for my early life, I hadn't access to such fast food (apart from chip shop chips, and that was very occasionally).

It is largely my own fault for eating too much and not exercising enough, but there is also the element of being constantly hungry. It's easy to say "oh just put up with being hungry, the feeling will pass after a couple of days" but not when it's at this kind of "I just ate two hours ago, it's impossible that I should be hungry now again, and yet all the signals my body is sending are 'eat eat eat'" level.

I mean yes. It’s not like double cheeseburgers are magically fattening or something. And I understand that for some people it’s harder than others. But at the same time, unless you have no self control at all, some level of self denial is necessary and probably helpful. I think part of the issue is a cultural change that encourages snacking and never let someone feel hungry. In the 1970s and 1980s it was considered fairly normal to eat three meals and a small snack all day. Yes, people probably got hungry in between times, but I think that’s a normal thing. People get hungry or tired and so on and keep going.

Maybe this is just me personally but I find it empowering to some degree to challenge my limits and find out that I’m not a slave to my body. Just because I am tired, that doesn’t mean I can’t go lift weights or run a mile or whatever I need to get done to be healthy. Nor do I have to eat just because food is available or I feel slightly hungry. I can decide to give in or not.

About a quarter of the world practices a religion where for one month a year adherents don’t eat from dawn to dusk.

One way of promoting agency is giving examples of other people that have done the thing that someone has convinced themselves is nearly or truly impossible for them.

Islamic countries have very high obesity rates, though.

It is a lot safer than being fat. Which is pretty much the worst thing for you. So if the options are a tested, approved and proven drug vs certain health problems that choice is clear. You also need to be the kind of person who can make those choices to not overeat or buy cookies etc...if you aren't that person, there is no way to make yourself that person.

Everyone knows what they need to do to be healthy, it isn't a lack of knowledge that makes people fat. Almost all diet and exercise plans fail. This isn't a problem any but a very small percentage of the population of fat people can "will" there way out of, as has been proven by the failure rates of around 95% (Freedhoff, 2014). I Think there just something in certain people that feel like a "magic pill" or drug is cheating somehow and you should have to struggle and go without to achieve fitness.

Diets don't work. A 95% failure rate proves this. America needs the drugs to fix this.

Having agency is right-wing.

And....this is the kind of comment that gets 18 upvotes here...turning into a bit of an echo chamber eh? Do I need to start right coding all of my comments to stop being rate limited by downvotes?

rate limited by downvotes

Please explain.

My biggest sin so far is being uncharitable towards Mike Pence. I think that is my top downvoted comment. Ripping on DEI stuff should have off set it, but man, people really like Mike Pence! If you have too many downvotes some/all of your posts go to mods for approval and the conversation often passes you by or is out of context by the time your post goes up.

That was a pretty bad comment.

Someone: "Mike Pence is a good role model"

You: Scornfully list a bunch of things you think are terrible about Mike Pence, assuming that everyone agrees the same things are terrible

The problem is chiefly the contempt and lack of justification. If you'd merely listed those as reasons that you don't think people should support Mike Pence, yes, you'd draw downvotes, but not as much.

That is, explaining why you support things in a way that shows that you understand that people can disagree on the issue and not be crazy, since there are a bunch of people present who would disagree with you on at least some points of your attack on Pence, and who do not fancy themselves crazy.

I at least am in favor of 1, 3, and 4, and get the motivation behind 2, even if I don't think it's good. Does that mean I like everything about Pence? No. But it does mean that your tirade isn't the self-evident thing you think it is, and recognizing that allows for better conversation.

Yeah I mean it was bad... but it was better than the "liberals are NPCs" stuff that gets heavily upvoted.

It looks like there's some rate-limiting/auto-hiding based on comment score leftover from the rdrama code. Certain users have finally hit the threshold for their posts being filtered to the mod queue like a new user's, but not this guy that I've noticed.

Whoa.

I hope someone removes that.

I find it a welcome respite personally. Haven't seen the code, but it seems like someone has to be really consistently awful for it to trigger.

We've asked, and it's apparently not practical. We try to fish them out as quickly as possible.

No, you need to come across as less smug.

I’m not exaggerating. Almost every time I see your name in the report queue, it’s attached to something combative. Either directly insulting people or laying on the sarcasm. People do not appreciate this.

You are clearly capable of writing with tact or at least good humor—I’ve approved enough of your comments to see that. It’s when you choose not to apply that skill that you get dogpiled.

If you make the same points but with more tact, you will receive fewer downvotes.

I'll second this, though with the caveat that you will get some downvotes whenever you disagree with the local hivemind. That's just a fact. But you (@AhhhTheFrench) are definitely above average among the handful of left-leaning posters here in how antagonistic and flame-y you are, and I've downvoted several of your worst posts accordingly.

Saying things in a better way and backing them up will make a real difference in how you're received.

At the very least, that sort of thing affects my vote, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Most people wouldn't describe me as left-leaning. I feel a bit like I'm taking crazy pills here, I invented the Piano Key Necktie Derrick! What have you done?!

If you're interested in my position on hot button topics I'm happy to straightforwardly list them. I feel like more people should do that since it helps prevent the motte and bailey situation this forum is named after, and seems to be almost a trademark of discussions in this space.

Most people wouldn't describe me as left-leaning.

Ah, that's fair, sorry about that.

I guess I was over-applying (non-explicit) heuristics like "worst post was for attacking Mike Pence," "dislikes religion a lot," "complains about leftists being downvoted," and "is downvoted frequently." None of these, of course, require one to be on the left.

If you're interested in my position on hot button topics I'm happy to straightforwardly list them.

I have no objection to you doing so, though I don't intend to turn that into an argument over every hot-button issue at once.

If you make the same points but with more tact, you will receive fewer downvotes.

I think it's clear that people frequently (though certainly not exclusively) use votes as a way of expressing agreement/disagreement, despite constant exhortations not to.

People are more forgiving of combativeness when they agree with the actual content of the post. There were posts where Dase really laid into Hlynka, and those posts were still upvoted, because Dase's views are popular here and Hlynka's views are not.

On the flip side, I think this post was written tactfully, but it still ended up in the negatives - in fact I was surprised to see how many downvotes it had given how anodyne it was. Certainly posts that were much less tactful have achieved far higher scores.

I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that the vote button functions as a general boo/yay reaction in many instances. Lord knows that's how I use it a lot of the time. I think it's unavoidable. If you give people a big "I don't like this" button, and they come across a view that they find deeply objectionable, then they're liable to press the button, regardless of how well argued the post is.

People are more forgiving of combativeness when they agree with the actual content of the post. There were posts where Dase really laid into Hlynka, and those posts were still upvoted, because Dase's views are popular here and Hlynka's views are not.

It seems to me that a big part of the frustration with hlynka was his refusal to engage with certain points routinely made by his opponents, and not his views per se. Really, I don’t perceive hlynka’s views as particularly unpopular here; I’m something of a poor man’s hlynka and it seems like I’m agreeing with people more than disagreeing. Hlynka had trouble interacting with actual, literal, honest-to-God Nazis and white supremacists in a civil and constructive manner and that’s why he was such a source of frustration.

Well, that, and he couldn’t help but lump us all together and combine us with the Left racialists.

He would not recognize that a fair number of us here combine race realism with a desire for race-blind classical liberalism/individualism.

If he would have engaged with actual arguments made, instead of constantly dodging and misrepresenting them, and only been pissy with the actual Nazis and white supremacists he would probably still be around here.

It sure was a trip to watch him contort his arguments against the descriptive evidence for race realism with his anti-elite/academia views.

On the flip side, I think this post was written tactfully, but it still ended up in the negatives - in fact I was surprised to see how many downvotes it had given how anodyne it was.

I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite. There's a good point to be made about singling out Democrats being unfair given the behavior of the other party, but that's not a tactful way to make it. This is the kind of behavior I tend to see out of people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place, that, at best, they're passive aggressive in an obvious way that's harmful to the quality of the discourse, instead of taking the effort to contribute their views in a non-combative way to produce good discussion.

I don't think that post was particularly tactful. Starting right off the bat by claiming the person is being weird isn't very tactful, just the opposite.

We might subjectively disagree over how tactful or not it is to call someone's post "weird" in this context. But the point is, I don't think 16 people downvoted that post because it called the parent post "weird". I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.

Posts with sharper personal insults than "weird" still manage to accumulate upvotes, if the content itself is popular enough. I already linked one. It's not that hard to find others (from multiple different users).

people who complain about being downvoted for not fitting into the "echochamber" of this place

But these people are simply correct in many cases. In every community with reddit-style voting, posts that disagree with the consensus viewpoint are more likely to be downvoted. This is simply obvious to me based on 15+ years of watching how different internet communities behave, and my knowledge of how I personally use the voting buttons, particularly with posts that provoke a strong emotional reaction from me. I can't recall any significant counterexamples, and TheMotte is no exception.

I want to reiterate that using the vote button as an agree/disagree button isn't a bad thing. It's natural and unavoidable. The solution is to simply not have any punishment associated with a low comment score. It's already a good first step that TheMotte doesn't hide low scoring comments like reddit and HN do, and I think we should remove the rate limiting as well.

I think 16 people downvoted that post because it questioned how committed Republicans were to the principles of the anti-lockdown cause.

The thing that would tempt me most to downvote that (I didn't) was the following sentence:

Density + poverty drives most of the type of crime you seem to be concerned about, not who you vote for.

I think there are other factors besides density and poverty: most importantly, policing.

That said, I agree with the overall thesis that people downvote for disagreement, and more than I would prefer. I would be happier with downvoting for disagreement when what is going on in someone's head is closer to "that point in that comment is wrong" than "I don't like their team."

I have no disagreement with your opinion on the pattern of upvotes and downvotes in this case specifically, at The Motte more generally, and in places with such systems even more generally. If anything, I'd say it is a bad thing, but it's indeed natural and unavoidable. Which is why I find complaining about it to be silly and pointless. It's like whining that the Sun rises in the east.

I didn't call anyone weird. I actually said "Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post." and went on to explain why I thought that was the case. As opposed to this post. which is dripping with condescension and outright insults such as "Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do." and has 20 upvotes to my 6 downvotes for a much milder and reasonable post that should have produced some discussion if the other party was willing.

To not accept that there is certainly a large and growing hardline conservatives only need apply culture on this form is to not see what the votes are telling you.

This post is literally a drive by insult and has 27 upvotes; 27 people thought it added to the discussion, that is what we are talking about right now...

I didn't call anyone weird. I actually said "Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post."

To say that this is in any way meaningfully different from, "claiming the person [who made the post] is being weird [by making the post]" is pretty absurd in my eyes. The person who made the post is obviously the one responsible for what the post was focusing on, and you claimed that the particular focus in the post was weird. If you believe that making a post that has a weird focus isn't "being weird," then your skills at splitting hairs are greater than mine.

I also have no interest in up/downvotes in general and specifically find the idea of comparing downvotes between one's own posts and those of other people to be silly and rather narcissistic, so I won't comment on any particular comparisons.

It isn't absurd. We should be able to seperate a bad post or one that seems misdirected from the poster themselves. Not everyone is going to write a banger everytime. The post did have a bit of a weird fixation. We are supposed to be a bit objective here and perhaps have our arguments called wrong, or weird, without letting our ego's get too damaged in the process. If anything, I thought that is what this place is for.

It is nice that you don't care about upvotes and downvotes, but they do impact the discourse, especially when your posts wind up in mod que.

"Having agency is right-wing." is at +19

This is low effort, insulting, smug and sarcastic. Sure you modded it, but the people love it.

What do you think "Having agency is left-wing" would garner?. I'm not even a left winger! I just don't want to see this place become /r/conservative +/r/Christian version of sneer club.

If that ain't at least a pretty good canary in the coal mine...seeing this should be a warning that the gas is building up to toxic levels.

People don't always point this stuff out, most just leave.

I interpreted it as being sarcastic, as in “agency is right-coded by the left, who worship victimhood.” Is that how you interpreted it?

What more would you have done? Ban the people that upvoted it?

I mean that would be a pretty good snare to catch people only interested in boosting team ideology with sneering insults. We should be engaging in interesting thought experiments, digesting the news of the day, seeing the other side of things, and exploring the pressing issues of our time with diverse viewpoints, not rewarding one liners dunking on the other side.

Well he was literally banned for that comment.

It does seem like your comments require mod approval though, presumably due to having received too many downvotes, which I agree is very bizarre and that feature should be disabled.

You have been warned before about low-effort comments. Enough.

One day ban this time.

No plans to ding the 4chan tier memery that's getting popular around here (including among members of the mod team who ought to know better) while you're at it I suppose?

Just look at the vote count on that drive by boo-outgroup comment. +18...wow

I like to think I try.

If you’ve got anything particular in mind, perhaps a DM?

Sure.

The current Christian theological consensus is that God knows the future with 100% accuracy. Shouldn't that make right wing thought align with zero agency thinking?

That's Calvinist predestination (since God is omniscient and sovereign, what He knows must come to pass so you're hosed), but we Papists believe in free will so agency is still in operation 😀

While the consensus is that God knows the future with 100% accuracy, there is not Christian theological consensus on predestination, election, or free will.

In the Evangelical tradition I grew up in the position I heard the most was that the Bible commands us to choose certain things, which means choice is possible. And that the Bible says God knows all things, including the future. Like most Evangelical theology, how to square that circle is left as an exercise for the reader.

The Calvinists, quite famously, believe God chooses who will be righteous and who will be damned from jump. We have no ability to choose salvation or damnation. Many Calvinists believe that we do have free will, but our choices are based on our desires and characters and God choose to give us particular desires and characters that will constrain the choices we have available.

The Catholic church teaches that we have the free will to either accept or reject the grace of God, and that when God predestined the course of history he left room for us to make decisions. He knows what decision we'll freely make in advance, of course.

C.S. Lewis described the intersection of our choices and God's predestination this way in Mere Christianity:

If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. We come to the parts of the line one by one: we have to leave A behind before we get to B, and cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.

…

Everyone who believes in God at all believes that He knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how can I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again, the difficulty comes from thinking that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only difference being that He can see ahead and we cannot. Well, if that were true, if God foresaw our acts, it would be very hard to understand how we could be free not to do them. But suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call "tomorrow" is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call "today." All the days are "Now" for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday. He has not. He does not "foresee" you doing things tomorrow; He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow's actions in just the same way — because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already "Now" for Him.

Oh, is it time for Time Travel Jesus discussion now? Awesome!

TLDR on the Lewis quote: God is omnipresent, and He is also omnichronal. Time is the specific arena within which we make our real choices with real consequences, even though from outside of time it looks like fate.

The Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity became a mortal chronal being. Does that mean that, in the thirty-two years He was Jesus of Nazareth who had not yet died, there was no Logos in Heaven? That seems absurd to me; one can no more separate the Persons of the Trinity than you can remove your shape from your body.

In my theological thought experiments, I model the Word as the perfectly accurate truth about God the Father, an infinitely complete and divine description, the only possible counterexample against Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. So the Son experiences time as one of Adam’s children for a time to bring the message that God is not an ineffable immaterial entity external to spacetime and abstracted from our merely human concerns; He walks with us and guides us in love, in concern for the poor and abused, because their suffering matters.

And then there’s the timeless sacrifice of the Jews’ Messiah for the sins of all mankind, the zero-point of history. It ripples back into the past as the sacrifice of countless animals by Iron Age and Bronze Age Hebrews, Shemites, and Noahics. It ripples into the future with the assurance that the debt is paid even though we haven’t yet committed the sin and earned its wages, entropy and death.

This is the Good News, as CS Lewis fictionalized it: “When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Stone Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” And if instead we consider time not a true dimension but rather a description of the order now present permanently winding down as potential energy becomes waste heat, He is the opposite of entropy, making all things new starting with His own corpse revived, rebuilt, and perfected.

Time Travel Jesus loved you from the foundation of the Earth.

Re: Catholics, well, I'm pretty sure it's messier than most people realize. There was a big controversy a couple hundred years between Jesuits and Dominicans a couple hundred years ago that was never actually settled (the pope just told them to stop talking about it) over how exactly human choice exists in combination with predestination. The Dominicans were basically Calvinists on this narrow issue, and that remains a viable option for Catholics today, if I understand rightly.

As a Calvinist, like you said, people choose things, just our choices are themselves based upon our own character, desires, etc. And I don't think that fallen humans will turn to God on our own.

Our agency matters, because God works through means, not apart from them.

Thanks for bringing a Calvinist perspective, since I was not confident I portrayed the Calvinist position right. Growing up my Dad always told me, "Son, beware the yeast of the Calvinists."

He also said that Arminians were Calvinists who flunked logic, though I never could figure out why. Every time I try to study Amrinianism they either seem to be agreeing with my perspective, or saying something completely incomprehensible to me.

Yeah, I think the default view in many places is basically Arminian, though probably with fewer moving parts (e.g. prevenient grace) than the original Arminian position would have had.

But I think a more predestinarian theology is clearly biblical.

I did remember the Jesuit versus Dominican bit, but looking up the details, one set of references says it's about free will, while another says it's about grace. The operation of grace would be different enough that the freedom of the will and personal agency isn't a problem.

"Is grace irresistible?" is a small difference, but even a small difference is enough:

The controversy between the orders began with a public disputation on grace held sometime around 1581 between representatives of the two orders, the Jesuits represented by Prudentius Montemayor and the Dominicans by Domingo Báñez, the confessor of St. Teresa of Avila. The disputation was heated and led Jesuit theologian Luis Molina to publish a work entitled Concordia in 1588. In his Concordia, Molina proposed a doctrine of scientia media, the “middle knowledge” of God. Scientia media concerns the ability of God to see future contingent events—not only things that will be, but every possible outcome based on the variability of human will. Molina argued that with perfect foreknowledge of how a person will respond in given circumstances, God gives grace accordingly. He thus does not cause us to perform deed A, but knowing that with the help of grace we would voluntarily perform deed A, makes this grace available subsequent to this knowledge, which in turn results in us performing deed A.

The Concordia was a controversial work. It quickly aroused the ire of the Dominicans, who claimed it violated several principles condemned by the Spanish Inquisition. The Dominican Báñez was asked to examine the question and stated that the Concordia did indeed contain condemned propositions.

Molina was offered the opportunity to clarify his work, which he did with several amendments attached as appendices. The book, now amended, began to circulate about Europe and was energetically championed by the Jesuits. But the Dominicans continued to object, specifically to the doctrine of scientia media. The teaching, they said, accorded too much to man’s free will. If scientia media were true, they argued, God’s decrees would be determined by man’s actions, since Molina argued that God gives grace based on what He knows men will do in given circumstances. Therefore, the Dominicans argued, man would be determining God.

Led by Báñez, the Dominicans proposed the idea of physical premotion as an alternative to scientia media. Physical premotion is the theory that God moves the will directly by the application of grace, which infallibly produces His intended result. Whereas the Molina’s theory was accused of extending too much to free will, the Jesuits accused Báñez of leaning too heavily upon grace, effectually negating free will. The Dominicans, however, replied even if grace moves the will, it does not do so in a way that negates its freedom; on the contrary, grace actualizes the will and makes it freer.

...By now (1600) the controversy had dragged on for 19 years and Luis Molina was dead. Pope Clement, still indecisive, ordered the matter to be discussed in his presence, as well as that of Cardinal Camillo Borghese (the future Pope Paul V) and various members of the commission and other notable theologians. The discussions dragged on for three years (1602-1605) with a total of sixty-eight separate meetings held in the pope’s presence. Clement had the matter talked to death—quite literally, as he died in 1605 before the discussions concluded. Seventeen more debates would be held in the presence of his successor, Paul V. By this time Domingo Báñez, as well, had died, and the orders were being represented by a new generation of thinkers.

At this point Paul V seems to have concluded the problem insoluble, at least at that time. In 1607 he issued a decree to the Dominicans and Jesuits allowing each to defend their respective doctrines but charged them to refrain from condemning the other. Beyond this, he ordered them to wait for a judgment from the Holy See on the matter, which, to this day, has never come. Besides the theological rupture, the pope was also concerned with repairing the bad feeling that had arisen between the orders and consequently forbid the publication of new works on efficacious grace, as he surmised these would only rekindle the intense passions that he hoped to extinguish. These rules remained in force for most of the 17th century.

Thanks for that context. It really clarifies the Catholic Church's stance on this matter.

I agree wholeheartedly with the Jesuit's "middle knowledge" and it's neat to see an argument that seems to be a direct precursor to Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" theodicy.

It (assuming you are referring to the Jesuits) isn't the same as Liebniz's "best of all possible worlds" theodicy. Leibniz was working from the principle of sufficient reason, among other things, which the Jesuits would not affirm, as they would think (roughly speaking) that human choices are brute facts; there is no reason sufficient to explain the choice beyond the choice itself.

The Dominicans' position is more compatible with that, I suppose.

Jesuits would deny the principle of sufficient reason? That's remarkable to me. I don't know much about Jesuit theology, but I would have thought...I mean, our choices are not ontologically simple enough to be brute facts.

The connection I saw was to the idea that God can see all possible outcomes, and His providence moves events in such a way that the choices He can predict we will make work towards His greater plan while preserving free will. That seems to fit well with Leibniz's thought, especially from this section of his Monadology:

Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.

And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves

It seems to me that the Dominican's primary objection is that God structuring the universe around our choices puts God subservient to man's decisions, in a sense. Which I don't really agree with, but I can understand the objection.

More comments

Two things:

  1. "Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.

  2. You are obviously correct. I think that's because the religious generally don't behave as if they actually believe in predestination or an omniscient god (same thing), not because they don't actually believe in personal agency.

"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.

I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)

Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.

Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).

This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:

GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.

SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.

GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.

SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.

GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.

SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.

SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.

SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.

SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.

SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.

GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.

If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.

(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)

This reminds me of my puzzlement at the reception of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. I imagined that English politics in 1651 had a right-wing that favoured monarchy and the divine right of kings, and a left-wing, that favoured Parliament, diggers and levelers, and if the diggers and levelers got too rambunctious, a Lord Protector. I further imagined that the right-wing would love Hobbes. Why? Because they would notice that a mystical faith in the divine right of kings wasn't persuading everybody. Some persons had a more mechanistic, materialist take on how politics worked, and Hobbes' reasoning, about needing a king to maintain order, would persuade them, perfecting social harmony as both the pious and the mechanistic/materialists agreed on the need for a king.

I was wrong. Quoting wikipedia "The secularist spirit of his book greatly angered both Anglicans and French Catholics" and "Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers." The divine right of kings was a mystical doctrine and one profaned it by offering worldly justification.

So yes, the rightist mind finds the enigmatic, such as monarchy, beautiful. The tiny minority of rightist (just me?) who distrust enigma and construct mechanistic/materialists accounts of why we should be right-wing are rejected by the right. And then there is the left, which offers mechanistic/materialist accounts of why we should be left-wing (that I find unconvincing due to neglecting the details of the mechanisms).

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word. You're unemployed because the government shipped your jobs overseas, you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country, men are depressed and committing suicide because of feminism/hostile society/subversion of traditional gender roles, you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs? I can accept that even if they did believe that, saying so publicly would be political suicide...but do you think that they believe it? Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?

When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.
When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.
When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.
When those same politicians order the secret police to monitor anyone who complains about it, they are denying you agency.
Noticing this and talking about it does not make you "anti-agency," it makes you correct.

This is not denying one's own agency as in "whiteness existing makes it impossible for me to show up to work on time." It is simply pointing out that a powerful and malicious agent is stronger than you are.

When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.

Hey man, I don't like that the government is subsidizing traditionally red tribe occupations either, but you should really pressure your elected officials if you want it to stop.

Not to mention the income tax rate tops out at 37%, so it's not half your paycheck, and even if you are in the top tax bracket...you really don't have anything to be complaining about because you're making over half a mil per year.

When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.

Based. How do you want to bust the megacorps, comrade?

When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.

That's an impressive 10,000,000$ per year. Do you have any idea how I could become an education consultant?

Anyways, I'll ask you the same question as last time. I largely agree with you about the problems in the country. Do you have any realistic, well-thought out plans to address them? We could zero out budgets for all the education consultants, all the minority-owned business subsidies, most of the other stuff you complain about as woke, and your buddy would still be struggling to feed his family stocking shelves. If you want to cut taxes, we probably need to cut medicare and social security (I'm assuming you don't want to touch the military), so your shelf-stocking friend will age into being a senior who both can't afford healthcare and has to keep stocking shelves until he keels over and dies.

But seriously, I'm listening. I'm open to having my mind changed. What do you actually want? What's your positive vision for the future?

you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages

So let's build a wall says the right-winger.

No you can't do that says the left-winger, you just can't. You really can't says the left-winger, so the right-winger says, ok we'll jan6 then, and then the left-winger says no, no, no, you really, really, really, can't.

You're afraid to start a business or do anything because of crime?

So let's gather all the gang-members says the El Salvadoran President. But at what cost??? Asks the NYT.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

How's 'relocating' working as a strategy generally? Plenty of 'relocated' Americans homeless on the streets of blue cities, not sure what good it does them.

Why is this never a solution to the mysterious problem of 'food deserts' that seems to plague African-Americans, completely unrelated to the spontaneous combustion of businesses in their neighborhoods when Republicans get in power?

Why is this never offered as a solution to racism? There are plenty of countries with way fewer oppressive white people.

I've seen right-wingers advise journalists to learn to code, does that count?

abstaining from drugs

Does the so-called 'War on Drugs' count? I'm all for going Duterte on drugs.

So let's build a wall says the right-winger.

No you can't do that says the left-winger, you just can't. You really can't says the left-winger, so the right-winger says, ok we'll jan6 then

You mean the wall I was promised Mexico would pay for (oops), the wall that was actually built by Trump after refusing compromises offered by Democrats and instead built by appropriating funds from the military? The wall that, as far as I can tell, has had virtually no effect on the number of illegal immigrants showing up at the border? That wall?

Leaving aside the fact that your implied definition of 'having agency' means 'getting whatever policy you want at the federal level.' By that definition, you're denying me agency every time you vote for a Republican. Nobody has agency.

So let's gather all the gang-members says the El Salvadoran President. But at what cost??? Asks the NYT.

Sure, we could crack down on crime in the US as well if we instituted a police state. This is diametrically opposed to what most conservatives want. When is the last time you saw a conservative cheering on NSA wiretappings or the FBI?

How's 'relocating' working as a strategy generally? Plenty of 'relocated' Americans homeless on the streets of blue cities, not sure what good it does them.

You do understand that homeless make up a minute portion of a state's population (~90k for New York out of a population of 19 million), and the number of them that were shipped there from red states is a fraction of them? Meanwhile, there are plenty of kids who leave West Virginia for college, work, etc and never come back - and they do just fine. People typically refer to this as a negative as the talented are leaving West Virginia, exacerbating the problem. Any hard data on the subject would suffer from selection effects as well, so maybe it isn't a solution for someone with a high school degree or less, who knows.

Doesn't really matter though. You seem more interested in 'zingers' and waging the culture war, right?

Do you yourself believe that, or do you agree with most of the statements I made above?

Those are not exclusive! It's entirely possible to have the deck stacked against you along some axes, but not to such an extent that it cannot be overcome by agency.

That said, I don't believe a bunch of those:

1.Sure, a bunch of jobs have moved overseas, but the unemployment rate is pretty low. If you can't find a job, that shouldn't be blamed on companies (not the government, of course) moving jobs overseas.

2.Sure, immigrants may drive down wages in specific sectors, but they should increase prosperity overall.

Others I agree with more, but think you should still take agency:

3.Being addicted to fentanyl probably is related in some cases to doctors prescribing opiates without sufficient caution. Doesn't mean you shouldn't get up and try to go through rehab programs and take steps to get rid of the problem instead of throwing away your life.

I have no comment to make on the suicide point.

But I agree with @Primaprimaprima that I see more pro-agency messaging on the right, even if there is plenty of victimhood messaging too.

Being addicted to fentanyl probably is related in some cases to doctors prescribing opiates without sufficient caution.

It seems like "is related" is kind of sweeping some stuff under the rug in that sentence. My understanding is that there is good evidence that over prescription leads to more drugs available on the black market, but that it is in fact extremely rare for someone to develop an addiction stemming from their own prescription. The vast majority of addicts started on other people's prescriptions. (Let me know if you have a different understanding of this.)

If that's the case, it's not really relevant to the agency that the addicts had in becoming addicted to say that the drugs were prescribed too carelessly in the first place.

That was not my impression, but I have nothing at hand to back me up, and am not at all certain.

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,' for lack of a better word.

What you are noticing is the difference between actual political philosophy and the advertising used to sell grifters who are nominally aligned with a given philosophy to retards. The two are only related inasmuch as they need to be for the grifters to successfully associate their grift with a tribal affiliation.

I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't. If you look at arguably the most traditional belief system there is, Animism, it attributes agency to absolutely everything down to trees, rocks, rivers and clouds, which are perceived as conscious beings that act with deliberate intent. Even something as simple as it raining is thought of as the deliberate act of a god.

On the other hand, far-left ideologies such as Marxism tend to stress the role of socioeconomic forces larger than any one man in shaping history. It's believed communism's victory is inevitable because the material conditions will shift and make capitalism obsolete. Class conflict is portrayed as inevitable, with the capital class effectively incapable of not exploiting the labour class to the greatest extent they can due to the way the system is set up. I believe there's also a parallel here with progressive beliefs about how white people are incapable of not perpetuating racism due to their position in society.

Great Man Theory, too, is right-coded and stresses the role of individual agency in historical change, where leftists prefer to believe that structural forces play a larger role; conservatives speak of the importance of personal responsibility while progressives emphasise the effect of environmental influences on a person's choices, and consequently cons tend to believe strict punishment of criminals is just as they are ultimately responsible for their choices, where progs favour leniency as they believe a person may have had little choice but to turn to crime.

I would even argue that the reason rightists seem to be more likely to give credence to conspiracy theories is that they align with the idea of a small number of individual agents acting with deliberate intent to change the world, something more plausible to the right-wing worldview than the systemic explanations the left favour, which suppose people perpetuate systems of oppression without necessarily having conscious intent to.

On the other hand, it could be argued that belief in HBD or in certain individuals being chosen by God to rule is anti-agency, and some right-wing ideologies do seek to greatly restrict agency for certain classes of people (e.g. women) or sometimes the population at large, whereas left-wing ones can seek to greatly expand the agency of groups previously denied it (again, women). Perhaps that's not so counter-intuitive though; if you think individual agency is powerful you might logically seek to restrict who can wield it, whereas if you think it doesn't matter so much, why not let everyone have it?

I can't claim this is particularly rigorous, but I have noticed a broad pattern in which traditional or right-wing ideologies tend to include a strong belief in the power of individual agency to shape the world, whereas progressive or left-wing ones don't.

And this is obviously adaptive, for the simple reason that even if you can’t affect the world very much, behaving better can affect it at least a little bit, and probably make life better for you as well. Traditional ideologies have an upper limit to how maladaptive they can be because they have by definition been around long enough to weed out the worst ones.

On the other hand novel or progressive ideologies have no such upper limit; the failures of communism are the obvious example, but there’s thousands of others. Lobotomies, alcohol prohibition, these things died out because they turned out to be bad ideas. That’s not to say absolutely everything new is going to kill millions of people; that’s to say most ideas which go on to kill millions of people are new-ish at the time they’re tried.

So we should generally expect traditional ideologies to tend towards adaptive beliefs, and novel ideologies to have no particular tendency, irrespective of truth value in any which way. And that being said, while adaptive beliefs encourage adaptive behavior, they don’t necessitate it. Most people have at least some disconnect between their actions and beliefs, and we should expect adaptive behavior to be more associated with adaptive ends.

That is, I think, what the thread notes.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

JD Vance seems like a good example:

Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot. Comparatively, he feels that economic insecurity plays a much lesser role. To lend credence to his argument, Vance regularly relies on personal experience. As a grocery store checkout cashier, he watched welfare recipients talk on cell phones although the working Vance could not afford one. His resentment of those who seemed to profit from poor behavior while he struggled, especially combined with his values of personal responsibility and tough love, is presented as a microcosm of the reason for Appalachia's overall political swing from strong Democratic Party to strong Republican affiliations. Likewise, he recounts stories intended to showcase a lack of work ethic including the story of a man who quit after expressing dislike over his job's hours and posted to social media about the "Obama economy", as well as a co-worker, with a pregnant girlfriend, who would skip work.[1]

Of course, Vance also has Senate policy positions and rhetoric that takes on the more populist tone, but I don't think he's scared to tell individuals to get their shit together. There's always going to be some degree of tension for anyone that's thinking carefully - obviously the material conditions and culture of a society, a locale, or a nation are going to matter and meaningfully impact the behavior and outcomes for the individuals there. Nonetheless, the best advice for individuals will still be to focus on what is within their control; in the United States, the things that are under one's own control are so plentiful that making endless excuses is going to be much more destructive than generating agency.

I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.

The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."

I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.

I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.

I'm not really getting your point here.

Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain.

He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees.

Should he go recruit a bunch of qualified workers in Honduras then? How would you feel if Guatemalans (or Indians, or Poles, or AI...) started offering lawyer services at one half of your rate and you started losing customers?

Would you be upset at your former customers if they told you 'Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay'?

I'm not a conservative so I don't worry about these things. As for them, I don't expect them to do anything other than stop bitching about people who need handouts and then asking the government to set policies that are basically handouts for them. And if you want AI to do legal services, be my guest; I'll make more money undoing the mess...

Hypothetically speaking, you're in the state of Washington. They vote in some progressives who decide that established lawyers have to hire assistants in order to train them for the bar exam bypass. The new hypothetical regulation leads to lower profit per case for you, with the same or additional work. Additionally they vote in some new taxes just for the stuff you like to buy.

Do you just take it, give up on some stuff? Do you move to another state and have to leave family and friends behind? Do you retrain for a completely different career that you can still live decently from? Do you complain in a bar with a bunch of your lawyer buddies until you decide that you will take some kind of action to lobby against the new regulations?

Also would actions like jan6, starting a border patrolling militia or targeting open-borders-supporting politicians qualify as 'having agency' for somebody complaining about economic stress from immigration?

On the other hand, I'd say forming a union definitely counts as having agency for (left-wing) workers who feel unfairly treated by their employers.

I raise my fees to cover the cost of the assistants. There's not even a competitive disadvantage to that since the laws apply to everyone.

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This is why people talk about luxury beliefs. AI can't do legal services at half your rate. New immigrants, especially illegals, can't either. You can be rest assured that your ability to sell legal services depends on a bar exam, many years of education, and a lot of overhead costs such as opening an office. It's not possible for someone to undercut you because he's willing to live in poverty, forcing you to live in poverty in order to compete.

I could say the same thing about any American, though. Believing the United States should restrict trade and immigration is a luxury belief for Americans, almost all of whom have jobs and live decent lives compared to people in say, Guatemala or Venezuela. We all have the luxury of being born in a country where a shitty job at a convenience store pays well above what most of the world is making.

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Alongside his personal history, Vance raises questions such as the responsibility of his family and people for their own misfortune. Vance blames hillbilly culture and its supposed encouragement of social rot.

In retrospect, it's wild to me that someone with a law degree from Yale and who worked as a tech VC with Peter Thiel got elected to the senate with that message. But yes, I'll grant you that one.

He did worse than Republicans in his state in general, if I remember correctly.

I'd also point to pro-police, anti-privacy, and anti-drug policy positions adopted by the political right. Really the entire Law and Order branch of right wing policies is totally antithetical to a politics that supposedly centers on personal agency.

Maybe a better way to rephrase is with the old line about racists: Not all Right wingers have an internal locus of control, but most people with an internal locus of control are right wingers?

I'm not a fan of the law-n-order branch, but it's not antithetical to personal agency at all. Do the crime, go to jail; it's your choice whether to do the crime.

It seems very incompatible with the idea that a right winger is high in personal efficacy to say that tax dollars need to be spent, and civil rights abrogated, in order to pay people to "protect" you from scary things.

The police exist as the enforcement arm of the state in order to hold up the state's half of the bargain in their monopoly on force.

We are making a deal with the state. We give up some things, most notably the right to use violence to enforce our will and of course our money in the form of taxes. In return the state acts as the "unincentivized incentivizer" to solve Molochian coordination problems and arbitrate disputes up to and including using force on our behalf to bring those disputes to a satisfactory close. The police are part of the terms of the contract, so to speak.

It is not a violation of one's autonomy to enter into a contract. Right wingers acknowledge that the state and its monopoly on violence is helpful and necessary (necessary in order to avoid the state of nature, the Hobbesian "war of all against all"), they aren't anarchists.

I think that difference in internal/external locus of control between the Left and Right is better thought of as a side effect of the difference between right and left wing thought, not the source of it. The primary philosophical disagreement from which all others flow is the Hobbes/Rousseau split, which is basically how you would answer, "if we stopped controlling everything and completely took our hands off the wheel, would things be good or bad?" or, "are people inherently good and learn to become evil, or inherently evil and learn to become good?" I think there are a fairly strong selection effects in that people with high personal agency tend to gravitate towards right wing politics, but it's not the cause.

We are happy to abolish the police and handle their functions ourselves, individually and as a group. The police are a peace treaty with the rest of you, who prefer to avoid the realities of that arrangement.

I disagree, I don't think this is an accurate description of what most right wingers believe. IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain. You're right that an average RW, high agency person is more likely to be capable of solving problems with violence, but I think they also tend to be more aware of the what the costs of doing so are (especially on a societal scale) and therefore are more likely to prefer the existence of the state/police.

IMO Rightists tend to recognize the necessity/benefit of the Leviathan, so long as the state is fulfilling its half of the bargain.

That's not the Leviathan. With the Leviathan, once you (or your forebears) have made the deal to surrender your sovereignty (whether voluntarily or at swordpoint), you're bound to it forever. Hobbes's second "OF THE RIGHTS OF SOVERAIGNES BY INSTITUTION" is "Soveraigne Power Cannot Be Forfeited".

Secondly, Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne; and consequently none of his Subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from his Subjection.

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I don't actually disagree with your disagreement. My point is that the police don't exist to "protect right wingers from scary things". Right wingers can and will do that on their own. The police exist to provide that protection in a codified, formalized, legible, purportedly neutral fashion.

No, personal agency does not require anarchy. Personal agency is vitiated by insulating people from the consequences of their own actions, not by insulating them from the consequences of the actions of others.

Much of the core messaging on the right is explicitly 'anti-agency,'

As opposed to... the core pro-agency messaging of the left?

Obviously no one believes that individuals can act completely unconstrained by external factors. Whatever "pro-agency" ultimately means, it doesn't mean that.

I can see how you might construe the right's general fatalism regarding inequality as being anti-agency, but as has been painstakingly reiterated numerous times on this forum, HBD itself is policy-neutral. Recognizing the reality of genetic limitations is no different from recognizing gravity: it's a fact, and it doesn't care about your feelings, so you may as well get used to it. You're welcome to try to circumvent it anyway, and you might end up inventing the airplane in the process. But don't be shocked if you fail.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

I can't think of any explicit instances to cite right now (except maybe some old JBP "clean your room" lectures), but I'm certainly happy to say it for them: poor people from West Virginia have the power to improve their lives by relocating, retraining, and abstaining from drugs. If they don't/can't do those things then that's on them.

Republicans obviously aren't immune to blaming the outgroup for their woes, but they are still consistently more likely to endorse the bootstrap perspective. While not a politician, Oliver Anthony was widely feted by them as well as the rank and file. Relevant line from his song:

But God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds

Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds

That's a pretty harsh way to talk about your ingroup, but they gobbled it up (so to speak).

you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country

Having just looked it up, I (a non-American) am surprised that needle exchange programs enjoy the level of support among Republicans that they do, but it's still almost twice as high among Democrats, and Republican states are far more likely to ban them. To be sure, this isn't a perfect proxy for embracing personal responsibility; it sets the bar below that. But the difference is still clear: Republicans are less likely to endorse policies that amount to buying people the opportunity to remain mired in their self-induced problems.

Taking a step back, you can believe in people's (qualified) agency without being a full-blown existentialist. All the conservative takes you list are accurate to some extent; if China stopped exporting fentanyl to the US, there would in fact be fewer addicts. It's a difference of degree.

When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts. Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types. Beyond them, there is an overwhelming surplus of righties telling kids to buckle up, lift weights, learn to cook, invest, mew, code, read, write, train, work, learn, mog. If you step outside academic credential and op-ed circles, it's hard to find right-wingers who aren't talking about such things.

Hanania's definitely pro-agency. On this particular topic, see him talking (well, until a paywall) about his becoming not fat due to willpower, and encouraging the same.

I can't think of any reasonable way to draw the lines which would lump Richard Hanania in with Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens. They're almost polar opposites.

There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts.

Fair enough, I confess to not reading BAP and I've never heard of Cernovich. I'm surprised you wouldn't mention Joe Rogan or JD Vance, but I know the phenotype you're referring to.

Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types

Well, also the vast majority of the Trump administration, people like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones (I guess he hawks his supplements) and other conservative talk radio hosts, red coded media (fox news, OANN, Breitbart), most of the local commentariat, most any public figure on the right whose schtick isn't self-help/redpill/MGTOW style. You know the rhetoric I'm referring to, right?

Sure, Trump isn't telling people to lift weights. What generalization do you want to make? That makes all the difference. The GOP isn't running on a platform of gym access and diet subsidies. If that's what you mean, I agree with you. But there are plenty of influential right-wingers with millions of followers -- BAP, Cernovich, lots of the guys Rogan brings on -- who are talking about these things.

Hanania tells them to buckle up. But since Trump’s ascension in 2015 this has been the minority position.

I guess. He's not really telling people to lift weights or invest or make their lives better. I do think he would just tell cons to suck it up when policies he likes cause bad outcomes, instead of trying to change policy.

So... No elected Republicans, nobody who is part of mainstream conservative politics. Just to be clear.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"? OP included "right-wing influencers". Those people are overwhelmingly discussing self-improvement. Politicians? Nobody is running on lifting weights and eating clean but there is absolutely a culture of "personal responsibility" and individual freedom. Whats's fair? Donald Trump isn't talking about it, but there are plenty of things that fairly characterize "the left" that Democratic politicians aren't running on either.

Who defines "the core messaging of the right"?

The core message of the Right could be defined as the message that is important to a majority (or perhaps a large fraction) of Americans who identify as Right of center or who vote for Right of Center politicians or support Right of center causes. Those people are the actual physical Right in real life. When describing what the Right is, rather than what we might like it to be, the description has to reflect the actual people who support the thing.

BAP, whose work I enjoy more than most here, has 143,800 twitter followers. Sean Hannity has 6,500,000. Tucker has 12,600,000. And it's fair to say that Twitter is a much more important playform to BAP than it is to Hannity or to Tucker! (For reference, Taylor Swift has some 95,000,000 and Lebron has 52,800,000) Ben Shapiro, who you brush aside casually, has 6,600,000. To point to a tiny portion of the Right as representative is like using /r/swoletariat (30k subs) as your standard for the left.

The Marxist left has its delusional fantasy of the movement as a vehicle for the proletariat, the working class straining against Capital; it can't cope with the reality that the socialist left in America is mostly a vehicle for stoned college students and those who never really graduated. The Right has its own fantasy of itself as the noble, bootstrapping, individualist heroes; and can't cope with the real life coalition that puts right wing politicians in power.

Here in Ohio, we elected J.D. Vance, the Hillbilly Elegy guy, to the Senate.

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