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