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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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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.