GM vs. RR, Round 2: Phatphobia

Because I'd have blown up the comment section otherwise

Today, Rudolph Rigger, a dude I like, wrote on Riggery Pokery, a Stack I like:

Weight for it . . .

If your index finger was cut off by Somali pirates and you can’t click away, or you’re afraid your ADD will trigger you to drop your phone directly between your knees into the toilet, here’s the Cliff’s Notes:

RR is fat. He wishes he weren’t fat. RR notes that woke ‘body positivity’ nonsense engages in an aggressive denial of reality to assert the narrative that there are no downsides whatsoever to being overweight- in fact, despite what your lying eyes tell you, it’s lovely, probably lovelier than being lighter and toned- and that all of this is in an attempt to protect fat people’s feelings as part of what RR describes as the “feel safe religion” (woke).

I promise I'm not jumping off-topic here, but this got me thinking about the grave harm of post modernist "reality hacking," which is really at the core of woke bullshit. In this, I think there’s a “baby and bathwater” argument to be made on BOTH sides, which is rarely genuinely the case, so I find it fucking interesting.

Life is not always (or maybe, though you could debate this, OFTEN) black and white. I bring this up because, prior to a few years ago, it was seen as a pretty sensible perspective that usually wouldn’t lead you to any truly stupid conclusions, but would explain the wide range of perceptions of reality that humans have and have ALWAYS had.

At some point in my primary education, in an era where there was still something resembling education going on (Brothermouth and I were probably the last generation in the US who received a public school education with basically no substantial political indoctrination in the curriculum), I learned the words “subjective” and “objective” as an important pair of concepts. In fact, thinking back, it’s very possible that this particular lecture occurred in a SCIENCE class rather than an ENGLISH class.

For rhetorical effect, I’m going to recapitulate that lesson here, as I have many dozens of times in my adult life since then whenever I’ve taught or tutored students in English or in research writing:

“Subjective” observations are those particular to the specific observer’s point of view and are based on their own perceptions and individual experience. Other subjective observations of the same phenomenon will not necessarily agree.

“Objective” observations are those rooted in agreed-upon measures of phenomena that do not change from observer to observer. If it is done accurately, an objective observation will hold true across multiple observations of the same phenomenon.

I’ve used bigger and smaller words for this, depending on whether I was talking to an adult ESL student or a college junior who came to me to help her write a paper about how the endoplasmic reticulum proves systemic racism. But this is basically it.

Statements like “it’s hot,” or “that’s a delicious lasagna,” or “your butt stinks,” are subjective statements, because it is possible for another observer to think it’s pleasant or even cool, that the lasagna tastes like butt, and the butt smells like lasagna, and for each to be accurate.

Statements like, “it’s 21 degrees Celsius,” or “the lasagna contains 31g of fat,” or “your butt contains your gluteal muscles and adipose fat, among other things” are objective. If everyone knows what a “degree Celsius” is and how it is measured, and what a gram is and what fat is and is able to count it, and so forth, no one can honestly dispute those statements.

You’re a smart bunch, which is a big part of why I remain deeply honored that you’re my readers, so I apologize to the many of you that might be getting impatient with what seems like a lot of rhetorical throat clearing.

While many of us- not just smart people that hang out in the Gutter- know this in the back of our heads, we spend most of the time acting like these aren’t different concepts, or just not caring. We are especially lazy about how we use language in this way. We say things like,

“the Minnesota Vikings suck,”

“this is the best pizza in New York,”

“he’s currently the hottest guy in Hollywood,” or

“you’re a fucking asshole.”

What we mean by these statements is, “I believe the Vikings are a very poor team because of their losing record,” “I like this particular pizza better than any other pizza I’ve eaten in New York,” “I find him more attractive than any other guy in Hollywood,” or “I find your behavior extremely unlikable in a way that I equate with assholes.” We present our subjective opinions as objective statements of reality. We do this constantly, every day, and I would safely bet the farm there isn’t a single human alive who has never done this.

We do this for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s intuitive: look at my translations. Very few people regularly speak this way, qualifying their every statement as subjective, and when people do, it sounds weird to us and we wonder why they’re saying it that way. We (usually) understand that when people say “he’s an asshole,” they mean, “I think he’s an asshole,” and the distinction really only matters if we choose to disagree. Stop talking like a weirdo, you fucking weirdo. Ain’t no one got time for that.

Still not bored with this.

Secondly- and importantly for the way human biology AND culture evolve- the difference rarely matters to us. In most day-to-day concepts, assuming my brain is pretty normal, me treating my subjective observations like objective reality will work out fine. If I feel hot, I’m going to avoid the heat, and it doesn’t matter too much if other people think it’s hot or what standard of measure we would use to define that. If I like this pizza best, I’m going to seek it out over others whenever possible.

Unless my reality testing is faulty in ways that will get me killed, I will probably never notice the effective difference between my subjective reality and objective reality.

In fact, I think the truly average person could probably survive their entire life without even contemplating the difference. This has, after all, probably been true for billions of humans prior to the widespread adoption of Enlightenment-era scientific thinking, where the need to accurately and consistently measure something to collect data led to a real focus on establishing objective forms of such measure (“23 Degrees Celsius” instead of “it’s kinda hot”).

Which brings us to postmodernism and its vicious little reform-school baby deconstructionism.

If you really want to, there’s plenty of writing out there explaining these concepts in great detail; I recommend Cynical Theories, not because it’s an excellent book (it’s decent) but because the authors, career academics who have spent their professional lives waist-deep in this shit, provide a brief and functional primer explaining critical theory (a product of the aforementioned models) and postmodernism to the uninitiated so you can grasp the implications of the shenanigans in the rest of the book.

I’m a smart, well-read person. I’m not saying this to boast or hold myself above anyone. I say it only to preface the fact that my several forays into the belly of the beast of critical theory and postmodern thought in general has been the kind of thing in a Lovecraft novel: stuff that wipes its ass with reality and, if you manage to escape contact without being devoured by it, stand a good chance of being made permanently insane:

'The very condition of a deconstruction may be at work in the work, within the system to be deconstructed. It may already be located there, already at work. Not at the center, but in an eccentric center, in a corner whose eccentricity assures the solid concentration of the system, participating in the construction of what it, at the same time, threatens to deconstruct. One might then be inclined to reach this conclusion: deconstruction is not an operation that supervenes afterwards, from the outside, one fine day. It is always already at work in the work. Since the destructive force of Deconstruction is always already contained within the very architecture of the work, all one would finally have to do to be able to deconstruct, given this always already, is to do memory work. Yet since I want neither to accept nor to reject a conclusion formulated in precisely these terms, let us leave this question suspended for the moment.'
- Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul Deman, Columbia University Press, 1986

I found this little gem, by the way, by doing a search for “example of postmodern gibberish.” Try it yourself, it’s fun in the same way that holding your hand over a lighter until you can’t take it anymore is.

It is, as Brothermouth has said in describing the kind of awful self-indulgent art and culture of recent decades, the kind of language that “climbs up its own ass and dies.” It’s religious cipher created by a tiny cult that existed exclusively in narrow corridors of academia to be able to gibber knowingly at each other in the dark while birthing non-Euclidean children with tentacles and eyes on the tips of their nipples.

There are two problems:

1. Thanks to the “long march through the instutitions,” this shit has gone completely mainstream, and so you have 13-year olds with blue streaks in their hair talking like this without knowing what the fuck it means, and their parents and schools and community organizations being terrified by the scary nonsense big words and giving them whatever they want.

2. The central implication of critical theory is that there is absolutely no such thing as objective reality, and the goal of applying critical theory is to absolutely destroy all existing frameworks of thought that uphold the ‘illusion’ that there is- to pull every single brick of civilization apart, entirely, to be replaced by a framework of reality that holds all observations as being equally objective.

   The thesis of postmodern critical theory is that everything you bigots call science, mathematics, etc., only looks the way it does- and came to the conclusions it did- because it was created by cis hetero white male colonizers. This is where the whole “2+2=5” business came from- these people really believe that 2+2=5 if you say it does, because the conclusion that 2+2=4 was arrived at through oppressive systems of thought. There’s absolutely no accommodation for what happens when you build a bridge using 2+2=5 as a proof- something else caused the bridge to collapse and kill people. Systemic racism caused the perfectly good bridge to not be correctly explained to the people driving across it, or something.

Hopefully you can begin to see how these two issues- our instinctive blurring of objective/subjective reality and a rising cultural movement suggesting that there IS no objective reality, only whatever subjective reality is able to achieve and maintain supremacy- are connected.

Here’s where it gets scary: history (pretty fucking recent history included) has shown us that you can get people to ignore objective reality more or less indefinitely as long as you vigorously enforce the dominant subjective view. People will use the natural mechanisms of cognitive dissonance to patch together a narrative that gets them through it: sacrificing children makes the sun come up, face masks stop a virus, standing and sitting change your risk profile for aerosolized particles, all of this makes sense because I observe everyone else around me doing it, and consensus is usually correct or at least a very safe bet.

Getting back to Rudolph Rigger and his unhappiness about his gut. The “body positivity” division of the woke shock brigade will have you believe that there is no objective difference between a fat body and an average body or a thin body: that implications that overweight people are at greater risk of heart disease, skeletal injuries, and early death are all LIES purported by racist sexist homophobic Islamophobic transphobes, and the only reason people are consistently less attracted to obese people than people of other body sizes is because they’ve been brainwashed, and if we shame and punish people for not finding this attractive

they’ll magically be rewired to desire visual attributes suggestive of poor reproductive fitness and poor health.

(Rigger also makes a great point about how “fat acceptance” nearly always seems to be about obese women, not obese men, who are still totally okay to mock and not be attracted to. I suspect the social-justice answer to this is that men, especially white men, occupy the lowest position on the intersectional totem pole and as such are less worthy of defense; that their male privilege or white privilege is SO overwhelmingly powerful it negates whatever discrimination they might face as fatties- I mean, people with completely normal bodies.)

This is why I can’t, unfortunately, just say to you “don’t worry about it. There IS an objective reality, no matter what they say, and while it will be tragic, when a generation or so of obese people start dropping like flies and the data becomes too prolific to ignore that being obese is unhealthy, this mindset will be rejected and humanity will be sane again in this regard.”

Because swap “obese” with “vaccinated” in that paragraph, and tell me how that’s been going for us.

I have thoughts on how sane people cope with this. But that’s for another time. (I promise!)

In the meanwhile, Rudolph Rigger, you’re welcome to spend a few months at Mouth Farm, tote a few bales of hay, and join me in an afternoon jog; but if you can’t afford the airfare, I know that you’ll do something to take care of your body, because you’re a sane person who can still perceive objective reality and would like a long, healthy life.

Edit: an excellent substack covering similar philosophical ground by FFatalism, a Gutter reader, today published an article on tolerance vs. acceptance that dovetails very well with the themes discussed here. Reading them in sequence would probably feel great.

Through a glass