The recent and ongoing flap among feminist bloggers is structurally identical to the problem I have with many fat acceptance activists. Can we criticise the system that (makes us fat/keeps the sisters down) without criticizing the individuals who have been harmed by that system?
I admit that I have been cowed, a bit, by the hostile response I got to my fat posts. I’ve been wondering whether I should even bother writing more about the subject: as I’m no longer obese even by the overenthusiastic standards of the Body Mass Index, I can imagine people telling me I have no right to an opinion. Perhaps that’s an illusory strawfatactivist telling me that. Dunno.
Mmmmm. Strawfat.
Anyway, on the heels of the above insight, I’ve decided to forge ahead. I’ve just about had enough of the whole Post-Traumatic Politics thing. A comment on one of Amanda’s posts today summed it all up for me, in what even I, a man who is loath to presume to define for women what feminism is, must call a staggeringly honest repudiation of feminism’s liberatory imperative:
feminism is not a club whose membership you get to define. Its purpose is to support women and their choices
And here I thought that’s what Miltown was for.
I’ve got nothing against being supportive. It’s a fine thing. We men in particular should put a greater emphasis on being supportive. There is a time when it is utterly appropriate to refrain from making judgements. But it’s a peculiarly American trait to believe that political change can come about without personal effort. It’s unsurprising, I suppose, that this sentiment finds its finest flower in the blogosphere, a place in which making an approving and non-analytical one-sentence link to someone’s opinion is considered something akin to activism. But it’s odd to see this happening to a movement that was born of frustration over activists refusing to take responsibility for the political ramifications of their personal choices.
Here comes the tricky segue from feminism to fat! Because the natural parallel would seem “he’s saying it’s OK to criticize women’s choices to be accomodationist; he must be getting ready to say it’s OK to criticize people for being fat.” I am saying no such thing.
Get it? I am saying no such thing.
Here’s what I’m saying: Criticizing people for being fat is wrong in every scenario I can think of, with the possible exception of a few limited medical settings. But avoiding criticizing people for being fat does not require granting that there is no possible thing inherently wrong with being fat. We can criticize the choice without criticizing the woman who makes it; we can criticize the obesity-industrial complex without dissing fat people.
William Saletan has a damn good piece in Slate on the global obesity epidemic.
Fat is no longer a rich man’s disease. For middle- and high-income Americans, the obesity rate is 29 percent. For low-income Americans, it’s 35 percent. Among middle- and high-income kids aged 15 to 17, the rate of overweight is 14 percent. Among low-income kids in the same age bracket, it’s 23 percent. Globally, weight has tended to rise with income. But a study in Vancouver, Canada, published three months ago, found that preschoolers in “food-insecure” households were twice as likely as other kids to be overweight or obese. In Brazilian cities, the poor have become fatter than the rich.
Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut are spreading across the planet. Coca-Cola is in more than 200 countries. Half of McDonald’s business is overseas. In China, animal-fat intake has tripled in 20 years. By 2020, meat consumption in developing countries will grow by 106 million metric tons, outstripping growth in developed countries by a factor of more than five. Forty years ago, to afford a high-fat diet, your country needed a gross national product per capita of nearly $1,500. Now the price is half that. You no longer have to be rich to die a rich man’s death.
Soon, it’ll be a poor man’s death. The rich have Whole Foods, gyms, and personal trainers. The poor have 7-Eleven, Popeye’s, and streets unsafe for walking. When money’s tight, you feed your kids at Wendy’s and stock up on macaroni and cheese. At a lunch buffet, you do what your ancestors did: store all the fat you can.
Before technology, adult men had to expend about 3,000 calories a day. Now they expend about 2,000. Look at the new Segway scooter. The original model relieved you of the need to walk, pedal, or balance. With the new one, you don’t even have to turn the handlebars or start it manually. In theory, Segway is replacing the car. In practice, it’s replacing the body.
In country after country, service jobs are replacing hard labor. The folks who field your customer service calls in Bangalore are sitting at desks. Nearly everyone in China has a television set. Remember when Chinese rode bikes? In the past six years, the number of cars there has grown from six million to 20 million. More than one in seven Chinese has a motorized vehicle, and households with such vehicles have an obesity rate 80 percent higher than their peers.
Obesity itself is a way in which the obese are victimized. Tie this back to feminists again: scads of people, on learning that Twisty had cancer, left comments to the effect of “Cancer sucks.” Twisty did not, to my knowledge, read those criticisms of cancer as attacks on her character.
Fat politics is more complcated. Cancer is no longer seen as something particularly shameful. Moral judgments still abound regarding the level of a fat person’s complicity in his or her condition, as can, ironically, be seen in a recent thread at Twisty’s. Still, we should be able to say that obesity sucks without implying that fat people are bad.
And obesity sucks. And I have no use for politics that exists solely to make me feel better about myself. I want politics to liberate people rather than salve them, even if the process occasionally sparks more internal discomfort than some Americans are currently used to.
So enough of my trepidation. I’ll be putting those long-anticipated (by me) posts together after all. First up: the laws of conservation of matter and energy, and how fat people are alleged to violate them.
Those are what started me reading CRN, I think after there was a dustup about one of them in the Feministe comments. Anyway, I like the weight posts, for whatever that’s worth.
As for post-traumatic politics (I am stealing that), that subject’s been reminding me of something all week and I finally figured out what: Susan Faludi’s contrasting of the 70s-era consciousness raising groups with Robin Norwood’s “Women Who Love Too Much” support groups in the Bible, I mean, Backlash. That chapter is just about proof that change requires more than support and affirmation. Especially if what you’re supporting and affirming sucks.
Bam! Thanks, Ilyka. You’re so right I’m just in awe. Faludi managed to smuggle in so many great ideas in one book….
Chris,
A big “hell yeah” on your point about activism, if I understand it correctly. I am not (e.g.) a fan of Linda Hirshman’s work, or of Linda personally (to put it lightly) but I do admire her at least for making people think, even if what we are thinking isn’t always so nice!
I am working to get more parks and sidewalks and public pools in my city, because I think more opportunities for physical actvities would be very good for everyone. I am trying hard to keep weight out of the conversation altogher, but as you might imagine, that is very difficult. I look forward to reading more of your posts, because they are helpful, even though I sometimes disagree with you.
Why even when I disagree with you, I find you far, far superior to the Supposedly Liberal Dudes:
This post and associative, entirely predictable, and arguably encouraged, weight-realted comments: http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/09/love-is-like-iron-fist-that-vibrates.html
Also the hundreds of similarly disgusting comments at Eschaton (Atrios linked to the post):
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_09_03_atrios_archive.html#115763469602943483
Not that it needs to be explained here, but the problem with Kathryn Jean Lopez is not her weight.
Dear God.
I’d more eagerly identify as a feminist were it not for the us-versus-them, victimized mentality that seems to characterize so many of the arguments of those who walk under that flag. (Though to chime in on Ilyka’s comment . . .I happen to think that support and affirmation is crucial when it comes to change, but that the support and affirmation that matters is support and affirmation of oneself. I firmly believe that real change must come from within, and that it’s only in learning to be still with, and to accept, oneself and one’s own implication - and power - in the problem that this can occur.) Gender inequity is not a win-lose situation; it’s not that men are somehow succeeding at the cost of women. It’s unfair for both parties, and, to my mind, the task of feminism ought be the human task of helping us each recognize our own inevitable role in perpetuating systemic injustices.
And the same goes for obesity.
Converts ARE the worst.
I disagree. That whole expression right there is vile, from “lardcakes” (fat people never eat anything healthy for them!) to “off your butt” (fat people COULD exercise, but they just don’t want to!) to—oh, forget it.
“Eat healthier” is a fine thing to tell someone like my mother, whose job demands hours that leave her little time to prepare healthy foods. That same job carries with it a good deal of stress which inclines her to choose less healthy foods than she might ordinarily. Naturally, nothing about this lifestyle leaves much time for sleeping either, a lack of which is thought to play some part in obesity. Best of all, there are millions of Americans just like her who don’t dare do anything differently because working less might mean retiring later. Or never. Or doing without fewer benefits in the meanwhile.
So maybe, when someone like that is chained to her desk and looking at her third day that week of skipping lunch and some guy down the hall says he’s gonna run through the drive-thru at Wendy’s, can he bring her anything, she says “Sure.” And maybe she doesn’t order a 2-ounce side salad with lite dressing, either. Because it takes tremendous self-discipline to do that and corporate America has a way of grinding that out of you in a hurry.
As for exercise, there’s a picture in her den of her crossing the finish line of one of the three marathons she has run in her life. She is 50 pounds overweight in that picture. No one to whom I tell this ever believes me, because it’s much easier to say that can’t be possible and I must be lying. I am not lying. It is possible.
Lardcakes. Yeah, that’s helpful.
Gender inequity is not a win-lose situation; it’s not that men are somehow succeeding at the cost of women.
Yes they are! That’s why gender inequity continues. If it was a lose-lose situation, the wingnuts wouldn’t be fighting like bloody hell to hang onto it.
If you don’t get even that much then please don’t identify yourself with feminism. You’ll be much more comfortable with the wingnuts.
The person to whom you’re responding there, Nancy, is a friend of mine. Not that that should shield her from online insults, of course, though I’ll confess I am pretty damn weary of them this week. But I know Siona would find your first paragraph persuasive enough that you could have dispensed with the second.
It’s not at all about who does or does not feel insulted. I’ve got no brief for the outgrowth of identity politics that makes everything about who or who is not offended.
It’s the language of “public health panic” that worries me. Language like “epidemic”, which slips away from precision and proportionality just as the language of “addiction” does. Suddenly there’s a whole army of experts who have staked their claim and hung out their shingle on trying to advise people about their “addiction” to this and that. It becomes ok to spend millions, even billions, on pointless PSAs, on interventions of various kinds, on consultation contracts, and so on.
There are a great many “public health panics” of this kind in the past that have been more or less baseless or more commonly disproportionate.
In this case, I think the main problem, if you’ll excuse the unintended pun, is a proportionality problem. There’s no question that obesity is a public health issue and that it is occurring in more people and in more ways. But how big an issue is it, and how much should we worry about it? If life expectancies in the developed world are up to a very significant extent over the last century, and obesity curtails that slightly, so what? Why does that matter, how much does it matter, and how much effort should that occasion from us? How much does obesity negatively affect quality of life vs. efforts to curtail obesity negatively affect quality of life?
I particularly get frustrated with the language of efficiency in these kinds of “public health panic” discussions, about how much money is allegedly wasted on treatment, because they’re impoverished both as hard-nosed economics and as a kind of humanistic discourse. On the hard-nosed side, it’s the kind of thing that some economists are good at being playful at but do-gooder experts and suchlike make many bad assumptions about. For example, is it a net loss or gain if people die at earlier ages from smoking tobacco? You want to make a big deal out of this as a purely economic question, you have to run the numbers. How much does that affect productivity? How many people make their living out of selling the tobacco? How many people make their living out of treating the people who get sick from it? How much money in various costs do those people save by dying earlier? If you reject on principle those kinds of questions, don’t talk about how much money public health problems cost, just talk about the humanistic issue of quality and length of life. Which takes you back to having to make philosophical arguments that may limit or constrain the kinds of interventions or projects you entertain under this heading. If if turns out that obesity costs you three years on average, and has a relatively minimal effect on life satisfaction rates for the average person, then maybe you say it’s not a good thing, but you don’t lead a huge and expensive crusade with targeted interventions about it, you save your efforts for something else. The problem here is that people reason from themselves in really flawed ways and get to major projects that consume public resources and energy. I’ve personally been liberated by literacy and scholarly thought, but it’s not clear to me that literacy beyond basic competencies is equally liberating to all people. I would want to think about evidence for that, step back from my own satisfactions, and then think about cost/benefit ratios to making literacy a chief or driving objective of social policy.
That’s my issue: that there are a zillion people out there desperate to make a given issue a huge, prepossessing public priority, using the language of epidemic or crisis or disaster, without offering either hard cost/benefit analysis or thoughtfully situational humanism to explain why the issue at hand ought to be at the top of a list of concerns we all ought to share. I’d like to be thinner and in better shape myself, but I’m not at all certain why you or anyone else should really care that much if I’m not—or if you do, why you shouldn’t care equally about whether I drink, about whether I wear seatbelts, about whether I’m male, about whether I like to climb mountains, about whether I use my computer too much, and much else besides. If my employer should care about my weight because they don’t want me to croak or cost them too much in health insurance, every single one of those other issues is also potentially relevant. And frankly, maybe they want me to croak: a 27-year old version of me is a lot cheaper for them. My family and friends should care; should my society? If society should care because all people are valuable and full of potential, aren’t there issues which impede the value and potential of people far more pressing than whether a middle-class white professional is 50 lbs. overweight? Or even whether a working-class black man living in inner-city Philadelphia is 50 lbs. overweight?
The person to whom you’re responding there, Nancy, is a friend of mine. Not that that should shield her from online insults, of course, though I’ll confess I am pretty damn weary of them this week.
You think that’s an insult? You should see all the things I restrained myself from saying.
And do you really think it IS an insult? Isn’t the view that women and men are equally hurt by, and equally responsible for gender inequity pretty typical of a wingnut? So why wouldn’t someone who holds those views not be more comfortable with wingnuts? I’d say I was handing out some damn good advice, not insults.
As for you being friends with someone who could actually hold such bizarre views on gender inequity, well… with friends like that, who needs wingnuts? Seriously.
Do you think any of the members of your feminist blog posse disagree with me about her take on feminism? Ask them. I’d love to hear what they think. But make sure you tell them in advance it’s a friend of yours who thinks so, lest you actually be subjected to honest and undoubtedly scathing opinions. Cause if a self-identified wingnut said those things, the mocking and insults would never end.
Nancy,
Do you not think you might be missing some nuance in Siona’s comment? Right after the sentence you found offensive, she writes “It’s unfair for both parties”. I think that deserves a bit more than automatic dismissal, and while your comment might not, by your standards, be an insult, it is certainly uncalled for. Wingnuts are all about automatic, knee-jerk responses, but we are all prone to making them now and then.
My feminist blog posse?
I don’t disagree with you about her take on feminism.
But the fact is, I have friends with whom I disagree on things. And there are people with whom I agree on many things whom I nonetheless find to be irritating assholes.
Yeah well nobody agrees with everybody about everything. Even friends. But it’s one thing to disagree about spicy v. mild guacomole and it’s another thing to disagree about something as important as feminism. I sure as hell couldn’t be friends with someone with such - yes, I’m gonna say it, and it’s not sweet and dainty but I can only hold back for so many comment exchanges so look out - FUCKING STUPID - beliefs about feminism. Any more than I could be friends with someone who thinks that Jim Crow laws were equally bad for blacks and whites and so can’t eagerly identify with the civil rights movement. But maybe that’s just me.
But shucks, why can’t we all just get along and not be so annoyingly contrarian?
Nancy,
One fucking paragraph you base this on? You know, it might have been more constructive to ask Siona to clarify, but you seem to prefer instant demonization based on one friggin’ clause? She didn’t use the word “equally” anyway. If she thought men suffered as much as women, I would have a couple of points to make to her as well, but, you know, in a civilized way.
Ask not for whom the wingnut bell tolls…
So how many paragraphs are sufficient to form an opinion of a commenter’s beliefs? I wasn’t aware there was a minimum. More than one apparently.
And yet, you seemed to indicate in a previous comment that my take on her take about feminism was accurate - insofar as you said you don’t disagree with me about her take on feminism
But since I only have the one paragraph - excluding the obesity comment, let’s have another look.
Where have I read this kind of characterization of feminism before? Oh yeah, at NRO and Free Republic. Some would call them wingnuts.
OK, this one is more new-agey than wingnut.
How is that NOT absolute standard wingnut philosophy?
This sentence is very special - a delicate melange of new age AND wingnuttery in one bite. It’s very neo-pagan libertarian. And sums up the writer’s sentiment - those feminists should stop doing things as a group to try to end gender inequity. Because we don’t want to claim to be victims of any kind of systemic injustice, since clearly we are all guilty of perpetuating the injustices.
But yeah, I was a big old meany, not knowing she was your friend and all. But you know what - why did you even have to jump in and defend her in the first place? Why didn’t you just let her get around to addressing my comment? Will she get the vapors if she reads what I wrote unless she sees that the team is rooting for her?
Well in the same vein - I’m rubber and you’re glue, Hemingway.
I wasn’t defending Siona. She is more than capable of defending herself. Or of coming around to your point of view, if you had ended with your first para.
I was objecting to you doing your usual, tedious sociopathy schtick in my joint. Which ends now, preferably (but not necessarily) through voluntary cessation on your part.
Holy hopping Jesus on a pogo stick.
So I responded to a comment on your blog, comparing the commenter to a wingnut (and not knowing it’s a friend of yours), for reasons that I did take the trouble of explaining - and you consider that “sociopathy”? Really? So basically you think like 70% of the Internet is about sociopathy?
And how does that compare to my “usual” sociopathy? Care to give examples of my sociopathy? Or, since it’s your joint, is the situation that you don’t have to explain, you’ll just do some seriously nasty name-calling?
And if I had known that your joint was full of hidden landminds, like friends that one must not insult, let’s you be branded as a crazy, I would never have come by. And I sure won’t make that mistake again.
Spellcheck!
landminds = landmines
let’s you be branded = *lest* you be branded
Hopefully that’s not another sign of my sociopathy.
So long, Nancy.
OK, to recap. Nothing wrong with disagreement here, even heated disagreement. But I insist on respect for others, from left or right, at least until it is unearned.
That might just be the swiftest McClernan banning in history. Congratulations on your discernment.
Coming late to this, I don’t have anything useful to add the the subtance of the conversation. I will say, though, that I like Nancy and I’m sorry all this happened. She’s very passionate about her views, but I generally find her comments thoughtful and interesting.
We all have different pressure points, I guess. Have a very nice weekend, in any event.
I thought you might be interested in knowing, if you didn’t already, that Nancy is up in arms about this over at her blog (http://mcclernan.com/mcclernan/) where her current top post is titled “Chris Clarke Melts Down”. It is an astoundingly hypocritical rant, even for her, as it includes the following:
“Chris Clarke is not a person who shies away from getting into extended online debates on other people’s blogs…what would make someone like Chris Clarke have what I consider to be a meltdown and get all authoritarian and over-the-top insulting, over a fairly insignificant thread?
[...]
It really makes me appreciate the thick skins of bloggers like Echidne and Pandagon, where you can actually get into vehement, strongly-worded disagreements with the blog owners or their friends and not be called a crazy person.”
Yet just YESTERDAY Nancy banned me from her blog because I was getting into a LESS vehement, LESS strongly-worded disagreement with her!! Unf**kingbelievable.
Here is the comments thread, see for yourself:
http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18551139&postID=115690773950377662
It was after the last comment visible there that she apparently decided to ban me, since the next time I showed up I saw that “comment moderation was enabled”. But just in case you might think that what she refused to print was suddenly some obscenity-laced tirade (though I think my history there shows that’s not my style), I saved the comment, and will reprint it below:
——-
“Peccadillo” has two Cs, Nancy dear. As for my “bogus half-assed theories”, they’re (a) not mine, as you well know; and (b) anything but bogus or half-assed. Saying it over and over, no matter how nastily you do it, doesn’t make it so.
You blustered, “Not everything is about ‘evolutionary reward’!” Quite so. But the desire for sex came about most certainly because of evolutionary reward. Even those critics who take a very limited view of such things generally agree to this (unless they are Creationists, I suppose).
And while all kinds of behaviours can come about for many reasons if they are relatively neutral in their effect, disrupting one’s family and reducing one’s material wealth to pursue sex with young strangers is not neutral. For older men, it’s worth all the risk, disruption, and loss of wealth because there’s a substantial genetic reward. To an extent, this can be true for younger women as well. But for older women? It’s a behaviour that would tend to be punished in the long competition for “survival of the fittest”. And since we can empirically observe that it is older men who frequently do all kinds of things to gain sex with young women, and not often older women who do all kinds of things to gain sex with young men, the data fit the prediction.
Given all that, you would need some kind of extraordinary counterweight to argue that this all should be swept away. But you don’t have it. All you have is your stubborn insistence on the absolute sameness of men and women, of nurture as dominant paradigm, rather than (as I and Pinker and Dawkins believe) the reality being a pretty even balance between nature and nurture. You’re the extremist, Nancy, not us.
P.S. I see “comment moderation has been enabled”. You censor me, when I’m being reasonable and not abusive in any way, and beyond your own conscience, which is apparently not worth much to you, I’ll be sure to inform your playmates at the other sites you like to take on in debate, of your outrageous hypocrisy.
——-
You’d think she’d at least have a little more self-consciousness than to post what she did a single day later and provide a helpful link to this blog so I can do just as I promised! Wow.
Oh, Alan, you’ve so come to the right blog if you want support for your belief in EvPsych.
Though I had an argument with Nancy, this is not the “trash Nancy” thread. She’s got a right to say what she wants. She’s got a right to ban who she wants from her blog.
And she and I are in pretty close agreement on EvPsych.
She’s out of here not because she came in hostile—as she points out, I do that often enough at other blogs—but because she then flipped the bird to a gentle suggestion that she mellow out for the nonce. But it’s over. So let’s all move on.
Violet Socks, I’m sure that’s intended to be sarcasm. I don’t mind whether people are supportive or differ—I just enjoy discussing all kinds of things. With Nancy, it was EvPsych; but in years of posting online, it’s generally been about other things (currently at Echidne’s blog, I’m taking a wingnut out to the woodshed, if you want to check that out).
My point in posting here is to set the record straight. For instance, Nancy now has updated her “meltdown” post by saying that I “ignored anything I said that he didn’t want to hear”. Now, Violet, let me ask you to be very honest here: putting aside your disagreement with me about the core subject, and just looking at the comments I linked to, which of us did more ignoring of the other’s questions and points? Can you honestly say it was me? Really? Because I had to repeat things I really wanted her to address (and she never did); whereas I feel that, as Nancy said about herself, I’m “pretty good at online debate” and enjoy it—therefore I would rather take on a point like a tennis ball and smack my response back, rather than duck out of the way.
Chris, sorry: your post was not yet up when I was working on mine. I’ll take the hint and drop the subject.
Oh my.
I wander off for a few days, and come back to find that my probably-too-hastily left post incited something. It looks like the conflagration seems to have died down a bit, but I may as well at least acknowledge what happened.
Nancy, if you’re still reading, I’d love to talk more. I don’t think we’re in complete disagreement; rather, I think I might not have explained myself clearly enough. I do believe it’s a lose-lose situation, and I do believe that we’d all be better off - men and women alike - if there was greater equality. I know too many men who are wrestling with issues of responsibility and fear and anger and insecurity and all manner of pressures not to think this. You’ll note, though, that at no point did I say that men and women are equally responsible, nor did I say they were equally hurt. I’m not sure who exactly you mean by “the wingnuts,” but isn’t it true that there are women who are fighting hard to hang on to it as well? Just because people are eager to maintain a system doesn’t mean it’s the most beneficial or healthy for them. (Think of the way in which lower-income groups tend to vote Republican.) And while these beliefs might be “fucking stupid,” I don’t consider myself to be stupidly committed to them; again, I would love to talk more.
In any case, I don’t feel as though I need defending, because I don’t feel the need to defend myself. I’m no stranger to the patriarchy, or the women’s movement, and I’ve certainly suffered enough at the hands of misogyny. Perhaps I ought to have spoken from a more personal, rather than a generalized point-of-view. Perhaps I ought to have elaborated further. Perhaps I am flat-out wrong.
Siona, this is a bit of a myth (though a very widely believed one to be sure):
Think of the way in which lower-income groups tend to vote Republican.
Exit polling data from the 2004 election (http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html) show that Kerry did best among the lowest income voters, worst among the highest income voters, and it tracked almost perfectly at every gradation between. Interestingly, though, there was some regional variance: I was in Seattle when the election happened, and in the state of Washington there were enough highly salaried liberals—the sort of people you’re undoubtedly thinking of—to disrupt this neat progression found on the national aggregate numbers.
Howdy the bar,
Just popped in and having no clue about the roots of this offering from our host, but having seen a Nancy wreck somewhere else, I think I’ll have a quick beer and leave a light relief link.
Smoke Free Carmen
No, I can’t defend the humour but I am a musician and a feminist and am addicted to opera anyway, and so I think the thang’s funny.
Alan!
Thanks for that link; that’s fascinating. My apologies. I ought to have looked that up ahead of time. I was basing my claim on systems justification theory - the conservative interest in maintaining the existing status quo, even at the potential expense to one own’s self interest - and the hypothesized reasons for this. Obviously at a certain point this doesn’t hold - revolutions aren’t started by the content - but I think it does describe some kind of phenomenon, even if it didn’t hold true in the last election.
Incidentally, one of the negative side effects of this kerfuffle is that I’ve neglected to respond to Timothy’s thoughtful comment. But I think I’ll make a blog post out of my reply.
Siona,
You’re welcome; but no need whatsoever to be sorry. I had the same impression myself until I saw those numbers shortly after the last election.
Of course, one could still wonder why even thirty-odd percent of the poorest voters support Bush, or for that matter why about a third of the richest Americans voted against the guy who opens up the treasury for them.
But I do think it’s important for liberals to keep in mind that the mantra “people vote for Republicans against their self interest” isn’t necessarily the most useful way to engage political issues. A lot of Republicans (and Democrats) are voting out of self interest. What we need if we want a more progressive society is for people, especially those who are doing well for themselves, to vote in a way that helps the least among us, rather than just making a narrow calculation of what benefits their own fortunes.
And our society really is too affluent overall for the left to gain much ground (much less moral authority) by preaching that people should stop voting against their self interest (meaning they should start voting more selfishly).
No piling on penalties will be levied for actual discussion of issues.
Meanwhile, I’m heading over to Kathy’s house for the chocolate and vicodin party.
“reichwhingers”. Cute. How about sturmwankers? Godwin’s Law be damned.
Spyder, I think this is a good illustration of how the abortion issue really lies on a separate track from the left-right continuum (not that all other issues fit perfectly, but definitely better). I have infinitely more respect for the candidate you’ve decided to vote for than the other one, who just sounds repulsive. But then, I am profoundly disquieted by abortion and fervently wish they would not happen (though I don’t believe they should be outlawed, particularly not in the early term).
I see that my tardiness in replying to Timothy has caught up with me: his comment is getting some traffic from Amp.
So here’s the short version of my response: the risk assessment approach is less than perfect when the risk is 1) unnecessary and 2) inflicted on innocent people as a side-effect of someone else’s profit-generating activities. I salute Timothy for his intellectual integrity in bringing up the tobacco industry as an example, because that industry neatly illustrates what I mean.
In any event, though, I agree that health panics ar rearely helpful. My approach to the fat issue has always been to think about it on an individual level as far as action is concerned, and on the political level when looking at causes. Luckily for me, one side or the other of this bufurcated approach pisses off just about everybody.