Helen Pluckrose Discusses Obesity and Fat Shaming

It occurred to me to write this article because 'tis the season where we celebrate refined carbohydrates and overeating. Holiday eating automatically means a table filled with sugary treats. Here's another well-known fact: Here in the U.S. more than 70% of us are overweight or obese.

The thought of holiday sweets automatically puts me in defensive mode.  I've substantially modified my eating and exercise routines several times during my life. I've once lost more than 30 pounds and I've lost more than 20 pounds twice. I know from experience that I need to consciously watch what I eat, make myself get on the scale several times each week and force myself to exercise. If I don't do these things, I inevitably gain at least 2 or 3 pounds each month. Over the course of 12 months, that can add up to more than 30 pounds. My personal struggles and hard-won successes probably explain my lack of patience with the common claim that being obese is something over which they have no control.  Or the claim that obesity is something that can be healthy or even admirable. I bristle when I hear people accuse me of "fat shaming" when my careful words and motives focus purely on health issues faced by obese people.

I've followed the writings of British writer Helen Pluckrose on many topics, including weight loss and "fat shaming." I follow her on Twitter and really enjoy her matter-of-fact upbeat attitude. Pluckrose currently describes herself as obese and indicates on Twitter that she is working on losing weight. In the attached 2019 article, "Big Fat Lies: The Fat Activism Movement is Risking Lives by Suppressing Obesity Research," she offers the facts first, then her opinions, regarding obesity and accusations of fat-shaming. For starters, according to WHO, most of the world's population "lives in countries where an excess of weight now kills more people than being underweight."

The accusation of "fat shaming" often begins with the false claim that overeating has little to do with obesity.  Pluckrose does not buy this attempt to portray obesity as an immutable characteristic:

There are certainly plenty of people who insist they eat very little and yet are heavily overweight, but it’s hard not to notice that in regions where people genuinely don’t have enough to eat, none of them are obese.  Similarly, people who tell us they are obese because of their genes do not seem to have answers for where all these obese genes suddenly came from as our grandparents’ generation did not have the same problem

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Continue ReadingHelen Pluckrose Discusses Obesity and Fat Shaming

Santa’s Other Job

Back in 1990 a friend of mine (Mike Harty) and I co-authored a Christmas card that we sent to friends an acquaintances. Another friend recently asked whether I still have a copy, and I do. The idea is that Santa Clause actually works all year round, not just on Christmas eve. Here's the front cover of the card:  

Here's the center spread of the card:

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Gifts that tell good stories

Geoffrey Miller has written an extraordinary book, Spent, that challenges us to recognize that our ubiquitous efforts to decorate ourselves and others with goods and services are primarily to project image and status. (and see here and here) "Many products are signals first and material objects second." The result is that we often engage in a vast orgy of spending mostly to look good in the eyes of others. What does this have to do with Christmas? We humans are also creatures who are always looking for shortcuts. Many of us have deliberately chosen to work long hours as part of "career" choices in order to make more money. Most of us who have who have made extra money as a result of those long hours at the office would much rather burn off some of that money at a store than to spend our severely limited amounts of time creating goods or providing services. We'd like to believe that our gift-giving is a display of our good intentions and of who we are, but as Miller points out, the store-bought gifts so many of us buy serve only to display only a narrow range of qualities regarding who we are:

Buying new, real, branded, premium products at full price from chain-store retailers is the last refuge of the unimaginative consumer, and it should be your last option. It offers low narrative value--no stories to tell about interesting people, places, and events associated with the product' design, provenance, acquisition, or use. It reveals nothing about you except your spending capacity and your gullibility, conformism, and unconsciousness as a consumer. It grows no physical, social or cultural roots into your local environment. It does not promote trust, reciprocity, or social capital. It does not expand your circle of friends and acquaintances. It does not lead you to learn more about the convention, manufacture, operation, or maintenance of the things around you. Retail spending reveals such a narrow range of traits: the capacities to earn, steal, marry, or inherit wealth, and the perceptual memory and media access required to spend the wealth on whatever is advertised most avidly now.
(p. 271 ff). Those who procure gifts with a moment's thought or two, and with the help of credit cards, often fail in their attempts to impress. Retail spending pointedly fails:
[a]s a costly, reliable signal of one's dedication to a particular person (in the case of gifts), or to a particular acquisition (in the case of things bought for self display).
Miller reminds us that creating something yourself speaks much more loudly than a premade thing purchased at retail. The proof is that gifts which require personal time and creativity make much better "stories" to tell to family and friends. I largely agree with Miller, though I think that retail spending can make a compelling story in some circumstances. For instance, what if someone has limited financial means, yet digs deeply in order to purchase a nonfrivolous gift that another person truly needs (e.g., assume that someone of limited means provided a student with books that were desperately needed for a coming semester). During the Christmas season, however, Miller's version of retail spending is a common occurrence. Most of us patronize retail stores in order to send out ready-made gifts. This much is not disputed. What can be disputed in an interesting way, is why . Many people would claim that we give gifts to each other because we "care about" or "love" each other. Miller's writings dig several levels deeper, recognizing that we are human animals who have come equipped with deeply felt needs to display our traits to each other, and that we resort to retails gift giving to serve these deep urges. In other words, Miller resource to biology rather than folk psychology:

Biology offers an answer. Humans evolved in small social groups in which image and status were all important, not only for survival, but for attracting mates, impressing friends, and rearing children.

(p. 1). During this Christmas season, and at all other times of the year, it is fascinating to re-frame the widespread displays of gift-giving as anciently-honed and deeply-rooted biological impulses geared to ensure survival. For more, consider this post, entitled "Shopping for Sex" and this post on The Church of Stop Shopping.

Continue ReadingGifts that tell good stories

Improbable Christmas

I'm not trying to rain on anyone's parade, or should I say, snow on anyone's parade. The Christmas season can be a terrific opportunity to hear extraordinary music and to catch up with the people we care about. But there is something I'd like to discuss that perplexes me, especially at this time of the year. Those who read this blog know that I am a skeptic and that I don't believe that a divine man named Jesus saved the world. Nor do I think most people who say they believe these things actually believe them, based upon the fact that most people who say they believe in the divinity of Jesus spend very little time learning about the origin of the Bible. Almost none of them take the time to learn Hebrew or Greek, the language used by the earliest manuscripts of writings that they claim to be the direct word of God. Almost none of them pride themselves on being highly informed about the content of what they claim to be the most important book in the world. In short, the behavior of most Believers suggests that they don't deeply believe the things they say they believe about the alleged existence and importance of the man they call Jesus. I don't want to sound too harsh, because this is the Christmas season, and I am well aware that numerous people find inspiration in their religious beliefs and they are motivated by those beliefs to do impressive acts of kindness. Nonetheless, I am on the outside looking in with regard to Christian religious beliefs. From my viewpoint, it is difficult to understand how anyone could claim to believe that a man who was actually God was born at all. One reason I have such trouble is that I don't see the Christmas story as a single belief. Rather, I see "it" as a nested hierarchy of highly improbable events. In order to believe the Christmas story, one must actually believe a long series of events that depend upon each other in order for the entire story to be true. Let's start at the beginning. Did the universe always exist (perhaps as a pulsing series of big bangs or as a huge mostly invisible network of multi-dimensional strings that occasionally bud in the form of individual universi)? Or was there a first clause of the universe, a prime mover? I find the first option to be much more likely, but I'll admit that it's possible that there could have been a first cause, some sort of entity that created the universe such that before the creation, there was no universe at all. What are the odds that there was some sort of entity that created the universe? I would think it highly unlikely, about as unlikely as the Norse claim that four dwarves held up Ymir's skull to create the heavens, or any of the creation myths of any of the other religions of the world. Nonetheless, let's assume that it's 60% likely that the universe had a first cause. We're still a long way from locking down the entire Christmas story. The next step is considering the likelihood that the creator of the universe is sentient (conscious), as opposed to the insentient "God" of Einstein. [more . . . ]

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Welcome to our store! . . . sort of . . .

Customers of this Dollar Tree store in St. Louis are greeted with the following signs located on the main entry door: img_0210 Here's how I interpret the above: Welcome, honored guests, but it you rip us off, we'll throw your ass in the slammer before you can even utter "Merry Christmas."

Continue ReadingWelcome to our store! . . . sort of . . .