The combination of a strawman argument and a fat joke is just…not particularly funny?
I’ve argued with people who claimed being overweight isn’t bad for your health. It’s not a common position, but it’s not exactly a strawman either. It’s more like focusing on the crazies.
It kinda becomes a strawman when the meme presents “healthy at every size” people as the average “body positivity” person.
*on Twitter
The meme says on Twitter, the place you can find every extreme and shitty opinion blasted loud and proud
The subtle rephrasing of “health at every size” as “healthy at every size” also doesn’t help.
But the nature of straw man arguments is that since you are not citing someone who’s actually making that argument, there’s also not any way to refute it. “Somene somewhere is making a bad argument” doesn’t really mean anything. (What’s extra ironic is that this is an ad hominem attack against no one in particular)
Its not a strawman unles the bad argument is being misrepresented. Just because you don’t care to look for examples for fear of what you may find doesn’t mean that anyone who hasn’t thrown them at you up-front is engaging in a logical fallacy.
That argument is likely a distortion of the medical argument which goes something like, “People who are overweight by the medical definition of BMI between 25 and 30 are not necessarily unhealthy. There are some circumstances such as being an athlete or genetics that are associated with denser body compositions. BMI is a crude tool that is useful for some things but should not be used on its own to indicate health status.”
BMI isn’t science. Its an almost 200 year old equation that was arbitrarily fitted to data. There is no go reason square ones height except that it fit the data. The cutoffs are arbitrary and, at least in the US, shifted in 1997.
And there is a growing body of evidence showing it’s not accurate for many cases in addition to the one you provided.
We have better indirect measure and far better direct measures for assessing disease progression and likelihood of disease development. Getting rid of BMI won’t stop fat shaming, but I hope it gives people pause.
Fat people: I should be able to get medical care beyond being told “you should lose weight”.
Dummies like OP: 😡
But what if the medical care is loosing weight?
What do you expect them to do when a 160kg dude is rolled into the ICU with his third heart attack of the month? A transplant?
Every time people talk about this, they always envision the most morbidly obese example that they can think of, when we’re really just talking about the average slightly overweight/obese people. Those people often have their actual medical needs ignored by doctors and are given “lose weight” as a cure all. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who experience this.
Because in a lot of ways “lose weight” really is a cure all, and it’s not some grand mystery as to why people gain weight.
It isn’t a doctors job to drug the people up so they don’t have to live a healthy lifestyle. Most people aren’t told too lose weight because they go to the doctor to lose weight, they’re told to lose weight when they go to the doctors for the litany of health affects surrounding obesity.
Lose weight often IS the cure-all as obesity is clearly linked to a litany of health issues.
Do you want to treat the symptom or the cause? Folks can take pain killers for their knees, but the issue here is often that the knees are overloaded with too much weight.
Idk much about ozempic, but before that, “Lose weight” was rough to hear because a doctor can’t wave a magic wand to fix the patients problems - the patient had to work to fix things. And if you’re honestly putting in the work, eating a healthy diet and exercising and you’re still struggling with weight, then I feel for you, because that suggests there’s a hormonal or other medical cause for the obesity, that the doc needs to go over. However I am certain that the majority of the hundreds of millions of people you cite don’t.
when we’re really just talking about the average slightly overweight/obese people
Are we though?
I think the discussions here are mostly coming down to what you think you’re arguing about. Because there certainly are some crazy claims made by the body positivity movement as well. Even if the core message (“your dignity as a human is not bound to your body shape”) is something basically everyone can agree on.
So the big majorities on both sides argue against the other side based on some fringe opinions. And since one rarely explains their position in detail on the Internet neither side is aware that they actually have a lot of common ground.
Even on shows like My 600 lb life, they have to actually lose weight and maintain a healthy diet for months before they’re considered for Liposuction and other surgeries.
Sure, that care should be available, but you have to lose the weight first and maintain healthy habits. There’s no excuse for it.
There’s more to it than just “develop healthy habits” though. There are psychological reasons one could have for overeating like having eating disorders or using food to treat depression which could require psychiatric assistance. My brother died at 600+ lbs after breaking two lap bands. He required some serious intervention, but we couldn’t afford what he needed, he was homeless and he couldn’t hold down a job, so he died instead.
Mind you, being overweight wasn’t the only cause for his death. He was eating very unhealthy foods because they were a cheaper means to fill himself up since his stomach was huge. His severe ADHD prevented him from being able to hold down a job despite being a fairly intelligent person.
He did some shitty things in his life, so don’t give too much sympathy, but in retrospect doing something to help his ADHD early on could have helped to prevent the train wreck that became his life. Maybe that would have helped him do better in school, be better to our parents, be able to hold down a job, etc. which could have prevented overeating to treat his depression.
I get that, I really do. Mental health is a really really important part of being healthy.
But at the end of the day, eating less is the solution to the weight loss. Mental healthcare is the solution to mental health problems. They’re interconnected, but one can be solved independent of the other. And I do realize that it’s difficult.
Countdown to the men’s rights activists on lemmy
I’m just shocked Lemmy hasn’t gone full incel. The TwoX sub some poor hopeful tried to start looked like that meme of Jerrys talking to each other.
I do see the incels rear their heads from time to time.
I had to close out of a thread regarding how FGM was on the rise again in a country in Africa, and I saw users likening it to male circumcision.
There was (presumably) a chick in the comments trying to explain why they’re not one in the same, and she was getting heavily down voted.
Like, yes, I think a lot of Lemmy users are against male circumcision as well (myself included), but it is NOT the same.
My circumcised husband can still orgasm, most women will not be able to at all without clitoral stimulation. It takes the pleasure out of sex for us and makes us simple brood mares.
And I’m always like “Jesus, this line of thinking is prevalent in a lefty place like Lemmy? No fucking wonder things like ‘Fresh&Fit’ are taking the youth by storm.”
Lemmy has mostly tech savvy people, which are either oldschool incel or LGBT+. There’s some regular people but those two demographics are quite predominant in the tech world, you know, the geeky bullied people trope and all.
In this case I’d say that since regular people side with lgtb usually, the incels are shut down quite fast.
I mean it didn’t take long for the new atheist types to spawn, or the classic neolibs, so I wouldn’t be surprised if more dookie ends up flooding the site. I’ve definitely seen some MRA shit here already. Any comic or meme underneath like, a woman’s experience being recounted, is sure to be full of it, and if you ever bring up disparities in men’s and women’s sexual assault, that’s also a pretty easy trigger.
You know, he is a sponge. Why isn’t he huge and blobby?
I say, as I slowly roll over a 5 year old in my four door f150 “kids just don’t exercise anymore, they just stay in their houses and look at their phone” then I end my tiktok video.
