The Rise Of Fat Activists

Hard to believe they will keep the name “fat activists”:

In celebration of “International No Diet Day,” the school of public health, together with the University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work and its College of Food and Agriculture, invited Virgie Tovar, a self-proclaimed “fat activist,” to instruct America’s future nutritionists, dietitians and social workers on the finer points of “fat oppression.”

Tovar’s talk, entitled “Dispelling Myths: Fat, Fatphobia, and Challenging Social Stereotypes,” was designed to help students understand that “fat phobia” is rampant in a “white, heteronormative society” that is looking to actively oppress people with larger body types. Society’s bias against fat people is, apparently, a form of bigotry and discrimination, evident in everything from sexual preferences to the size of seats on public transportation.

She even, reportedly, compared society’s anti-fat culture to so-called “rape culture,” and chastised society for its obsession with what she termed “thin privilege.”

Amazing. Schools that are supposed to teach dieticians how to craft healthy diets are now specially importing mentally ill eating machines the size of small cars, to lecture the budding health professionals on how their entire field is evil. It is as if budding FBI profilers at Quantico had to sit through lectures by serial killers on how their profiling was evil because it was stopping serial killers from enjoying the dismemberment of innocent victims.

Fortunately there aren’t any expensive diet drugs, or these adipose-involved-individuals would demand we’d all have to pay for their Twinkie binges and then supply them with piles of diet drugs – because it is unfair if you are thin and somebody else had to eat four double-cheese pizzas for dinner last night. Don’t laugh – it is coming.

This demanding, protesting psychology would only arise in nature when there is no chance of failure and mortality, and when resources are prolific enough that when you demand concessions from others, it is easier for them to just surrender them and get more elsewhere, than to fight. What amuses me no end is to imagine that the K-selected Romans watched with horror as these same psychologies arose and exploited the Roman state until it collapsed, and they would probably even recognize the very same syndrome today.

There is nothing new under the sun, though I would wager the degree of free resources the US has managed to liberate, from the post-war boom, to the post-war technological and scientific revolution, through the debt spending of today, has created the greatest r-selected boom ever. What remains to be seen is if it will also create the greatest shift toward K-selection ever.

I’m betting it will.