This is really interesting. I think if you define a mental disorder as a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) psychological condition that makes it difficult to function in normal society, there are probably a lot more categories that don’t conventionally get counted that disproportionately skew conservative. Just off the top of my head:
People who believe extreme conspiracy theories and act on them (eg, preppers, antivaxxers) or just become obsessed with them (eg, QAnon).
People who drain their bank accounts giving to political candidates (usually the elderly, but conservative olds get scammed a lot more than liberal olds).
People who get cut off by family members over their political views (this one is probably mixed but I’d bet skews conservative).
Dementia is technically a mental illness, and risk does increase with cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Conservatives are more likely to get cut off by family because liberals are more likely to cut people off.
Preppers and anti-vaxxers don’t create any trouble for other people or actually have problems functioning in society beyond those artificially created by woke people (e.g. vaccines frequently don’t stop transmission and can even do the opposite, preppers generally … prepare … but don’t do anything more than that).
The elderly skew conservative but more importantly they skew trusting, so it’s easier to scam them on a small scale. But when it comes to being drained of money for scams, it’s hard to beat liberals. The problem is it’s too effective: they never wake up and realize they were scammed. This is usually done via nice sounding charities and NGOs that are actually corrupt: see how BLM embezzled the money donated to them. An entirely predictable outcome that’s far from rare! Another recent wakeup call was the way their bank accounts were drained to the tune of over a billion dollars by Harris, who immediately spaffed it in ways so wasteful and corrupt she still managed to end up in debt.
As to cutting off family members over politics, this is nearly 100% a woke leftist phenomenon. It’s astonishing you’d intuit otherwise. Please cite some examples of this coming from conservatives - I’ve yet to see any. But you can search Twitter for election related meltdowns and find endless messages from Democrats saying they just cut off all contact with their family.
I guess this response goes some way towards convincing me you are left wing after all, because only leftists have reading comprehension that poor.
"vaccines frequently don’t stop transmission and can even do the opposite"
That's an assertion of fact which contains nothing about me and bears no resemblance to the summary you just put in my mouth, which manages to not only be wrong but of equal length to the thing you're trying to summarize.
If you don't think that statement is true and actually want to debate the topic, then by all means present your counter-argument, starting with COVID vaccines please (advertised as stopping transmission, didn't).
With the exception of Johnson and Johnson, COVID vaccines weren't vaccines. They were MRNA therapies were rushed to deal with a highly variable new viruses. You can't generalize about vaccines from COVID therapies.
Fwiw, the COVID vaccines were very good at stopping transmission in the original strain of the virus they were formulated for.
The virus mutated into new strains very quickly, which is what led to the vaccine being less effective at stopping transmission. It did still slow transmission down.
If Pfizer, Moderna, et al were allowed to update the vaccines for the new strains faster and without miles of red tape and paperwork, we would have seen more effective vaccines upon rollout.
"I think if you define a mental disorder as a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) psychological condition that makes it difficult to function in normal society'.
Ok, so there's one that skews left. You could probably say the same about being trans or gay (although the latter might be outdated). I think that says a lot more about social norms than it does about individuals because it's very easy to imagine the norms shifting on each of those. (In fact, they already have.)
I would think if you include something in the definition about harmful or antisocial behavior -- which is more in line with colloquial thinking about mental illness, and where the norms probably aren't going to shift -- you would include all my examples plus obesity while excluding the three above, with the possible exception of trans.
That's the case with almost anything. If you live in a community of preppers, you can have a great time prepping, chopping wood and building barns and what not.
However, specifically on veganism, here is arguably once the most prominent articulate advocate of veganism saying how he had to quit because he was losing weight, fainting and periodically shitting his pants. And yet vegans are all over the internet with abstruse proofs that their chosen lifestyle is healthy, like QAnon, except with shitting your pants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6QWY4T6gxc
It's a good article, but I don't think either of the explanations apply to Alex O'Connor. His own explanation seems sufficient: he has IBS, and needs to carefully control his diet. Cutting out 80% or more of the foods you can find in a shop makes that extremely difficult.
I have some relevant experience. At university, I started keeping kosher, though, for the first 2 years, I wasn't really keeping it according to Jewish law and it was closer to vegetarianism. It definitely wasn't a good period for my health and had long term consequences. Bottom line is I used to spend 8 weeks in a row being malnourished. Now, there are other reasons: I didn't have much money and skimped on food, stayed up all night drinking coffee and writing essays etc. but if I had been able to eat in hall I think it would have been OK. Most people, most of the time are either not organized enough, or have too much going on to rule large proportions of available food off limits and not suffer for it.
If you look at O'Connor in that video, he really looks like crap, and barely half a year later he was visibly healthy and super productive.
If you wanted to know if ideology caused obesity, you would want to control for any other factors in the regression that could be the driver. So for instance, you would want to control for class, or iq, or family size, or age, or geography, or profession, etc. just like you controlled for race.
But you didn’t do this. You basically said “high iq professionals on the coast are thinner than low iq rurals in the south, news at 11!
As a coastal professional, I will offer my own take, which I’m sure I could find in the statistics if I really needed to. Amongst the people of similar class around me, conservatives are generally superior to liberals on about every metric, including obesity. They are happier, more mentally fit, in better shape (almost always more muscular), and have way more kids conservatives in the to 20% of iq have 3x as many kids as liberals).
It’s certainly true that both parties have dysfunctional lower class voters banks to get to 51%. Liberals have brown people and conservatives have rural whites.
But I’m primarily concerned what the impact of being a conservative or liberal would have on ME and MY KIDS. They aren’t going to become fat people from rural Alabama if I teach them to be conservatives.
What I can see in my life is that the people at the middle/umc conservative church in my town are just way better people than the ugly fat blue hairs that marched for abortion rights in the town parade.
-"I’m sure I could find in the statistics if I really needed to"
If you want to convince me, yes, you will need to provide evidence rather than assertions. I cite studies showing conservatives exercise less than liberals. Conservatives do not have more muscle mass when you adjust for BMI -- fat people are more muscular, but conservatives do not have more lean muscle than liberals.
Based on what you have written here, it is probably more accurate to say that conservatism is a form of idealized and externalized co-dependency: let's all make each other follow the rules, and scale or institutionalize boundaries that we are not capable of setting on our own. (Though, of course, you probably chose this title to be intentionally provocative and drive engagement.)
I would say codependency is less of a mental illness and more of a crude relational strategy that optimizes for "rescuing" or "being rescued" – depending on which role you play – that emerges in environments that do not encourage properly testing and adhering to one's limits; which is a necessary practice for cultivating intrinsic restraint.
This is why, for example, wokeness is a rather conservative system of identity at the end of the day; it just tends to morally fetishize the "powerless, in need of saving" rather than the "powerful, who save".
One of the important tacit underpinnings of liberalism is a notion of robust self-governance, so it's not so much of a surprise that those who rely on and aspire for implicit rather than explicit regulation tend toward liberalism.
In this way, I think it is accurate and kind to recognize 'conservatism' of all kinds (not just the political kind) as a necessary and important developmental stage that arises on the way to a more mature relationship with power and to interdependency.
@RR: obesity is useful in some contexts, like traveling by boat to Samoa. We can either mutually disarm, and admit that liberals aren't mentally ill, or have mutual deterrence, and admit that both conservatives and liberals are mentally ill. In the latter case, I argue that obesity has much worse outcomes than liberal mental illness.
Utah and Idaho are very conservative and very low in obesity. Seems to me that is a more broad cultural issue than conservative vs liberal... Utah and Idaho are both of mostly yankee heritage, as opossed to the other conservative states.
Both states have many Mormons. I'm not a Mormon, so take what I say with the proverbial grain of salt, but from I understand Mormons emphasize self-sufficiency (storage of food) and have some dietary restrictions (no alcohol, no caffeine). I speculate that anyone who starts with being conscientious about what they eat will probably not let a fast-food diet overtake a well-planned balanced diet.
As someone who lives in one of the most densely populated urban areas, the political divide on this issue makes less sense than a class divide. I would wager that 8/10 obese people I encounter are either long-time or normie Democrat loyalists (true for their relatives, as well). I have met a couple obese conservative types, but they’re outnumbered.
One other example, my son plays in a soccer league in a suburb across the street and it’s VERY progressive. Most residents are in poor health and do not exercise (I go to a gym there and the observation remains true). It’s obvious even in their posture (separate vent, why do so few people know how to stand up straight??)
Also, I don’t disagree that obesity can/should be classified as a mental illness. But, doesn’t that put the malady into a category that takes the responsibility out of the hands of the (obese) people we want to see improving their own situation?
“Petty” is subjective. I don’t care about statistical evidence when I’m literally surrounded by counter-examples. Sounds like you need to expand your horizons.
To boil it down to a cliché, mens sana in corpore sano. Similarly, the neurotic lefty will also be prone to lots of physical issues, even if they don't manifest themselves as obesity. Anxiety disorders involve your nervous system, and this negatively affects your immune system etc.
For a potentially more accurate (but far more finicky) analysis on conservative obesity:
You've surely seen the argument that some bodybuilders manage to achieve a BMI > 30, yet hardly carry any bodyfat. Or that very big and somewhat fat strongmen are also in obvious robust health. (well... assuming they didn't mess themselves up with the steroids too much)
My argument is not, that conservatives have enough of these two extreme groups, that this would be a meaningful effect on its own (even if those two groups were to skew very conservative). But consider two somewhat related cases, that one would need to account for.
The apparent difference in obesity rates (or at least the effect, that this technical "obesity" would have) is somewhat blunted by the fact that conservatives lift more and do more hard manual labor. So population level BMI should ideally be interpreted differently, when looking at different populations.
case 1: semi-fat learning the joy of lifting
But imagine, you're at BMI 28 (somewhat fat, but not technically obsese) and then started lifting and gain mostly muscle mass, which would be a net improvement for your health. Your BMI now hits 31 and you're technically obese. Since conservatives lift more, that would happen a lot more.
case 2: hard laborer turning soft
People that have a high weight, but have worked hard across their whole lives can become fat later (beer bellies), but without losing much of their strength and vigor. Is it good for them, that they have all this extra fat? Definitely not, but their health is not comparable to the sedentary obese. And their alcohol consumption is probably the much bigger problem.
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Come to think of it, a better analysis might be to just compare conservative and liberal women. This should mostly account for this distortion.
Sure, if you adjust for race conservatives are more obese than liberals, but that doesn’t mean conservatives are more obese as a product of mental condition. Conservatives are older, more rural, more sedentary, leading to higher obesity. Yes, fat people are responsible for being fat, but all of those fat people wouldn’t have been fat 60 years ago and may not be fat today if their environment demanded a more active lifestyle. I don’t think obesity can be called a mental illness in the same way that we say “liberals are mentally ill”. One is caused by low IQ, the other is caused by high p-factor and high neuroticism
Veganism is a sign of effeminacy and physical weakness. It’s physically possible for vegans to get enough protein, but it’s hard, and most eat crappy low-protein diets. There are buff vegans, but every vegan I’ve personally met is scrawny and weak.
A diet of meats along with real foods can actually be pretty healthy. Low carb does work.
It's funny that so many people are straining to come up with explanations when this is incredibly obvious just traveling around the country and looking around. Go to any metro region or surrounding suburbs in the country and you are not going to find any fat white people. Go anywhere else and you do. It's amazing people have themselves convinced that liberals are all deranged obese blue haired people like on LibsofTikTok when that is some .001% of the most extreme weirdos who are blasted out to conservatives precisely as propaganda. In reality the liberals are all the slender UMC white women going to yoga by the tens of thousands every day, shopping at Whole Foods, all the lean men out on their mountain bikes and road bicycles riding 50 miles a day. And where tf did this nonsense about lifting weights being "right wing" come from? Just bc they talk about it online all the time?
Go anywhere that conservatives assemble in the thousands: a country music concert, a rodeo, a monster truck rally, a pro wrestling event. Fat people abound. Fat women, fat men, fat teenagers, fat kids. Now go to the places the liberals congregate...Coachella or Burning Man or something. No fat people.
It's just being more vain, socially/status conscious, and cultural norms of what's acceptable. Go to any liberal urban wedding in the country and you're not going to find a single white woman of any age who weighs more than she did in high school. Same wedding in suburban/rural area in a red state and almost all women over 40 will weigh a good 40 lbs more than she did in high school if not more. Oh and btw, part of that is because conservatives have more kids, because the majority of women gain and never lose about 15 lbs per kid.
Try reading instead of skimming. Here's the very next sentence in the paragraph you quote: "This implies that liberal culture provides some kind of additional protection against obesity that conservative culture does not possess, or that conservative culture aggravates obesity."
statement 1: Obesity correlates with LOW neuroticism.
statement 2: Liberals are accused of neuroticism (implying HIGH neuroticism, or at least NOT low neuroticism).
statement 3: These traits of liberals PREDICT obesity.
Statement 3 is in (partial) contradiction to statement 1. Since if low neuroticism correlates with obesity, then high neuroticism would not be a trait that predicts it. Rather Low neuroticism would be a trait, that predicts it.
*sigh* You're trying to defend yourself, holed into the impression that I'm a lazy, yet strangely argumentative idiot. All I just want to point out is a simple sign-error, but I didn't know where the error was, since I wasn't entirely sure, whether low or high neuroticism correlates with obesity. Both seemed somewhat plausible to me, hence I just pointed at the contradiction. Fine then, I looked it up for you.
Consulting ChatGPT, obesity correlates with HIGH neuroticism. So your error is in your first statement (second sentence of your essay), which is:
"Obesity correlates with LOW neuroticism..."
Mistakes like that stand out to me, like big flashing warning signs. It's conditioning from trying to understand complicated math proofs, in which an unaddressed/unnoticed single sign mistake (or worse, two) had me spinning my wheels in a haze of confusion, sometimes for hours. Skimming/out-of-hand rejecting in such a case is not out of laziness, but an instinctual protective response.
I've read the post in full now, and generally think it's a good take though.
Perceptions about “center” and “edge” are generally perceptions about “safer” or “more dangerous”. Such perceptions are volatile, easy to manipulate, but impossible to control. They’re especially easy to carelessly manipulate for destructive purposes when too few irresponsible people (seeking only impunity) have too much control over mass, mainstream, and social media.
Our center of political discourse should be multinational oligarchy and its relationship to empire and international fascism.
Wedge issues are excellent for manipulating visceral perceptions of safety and threat. Stoking up fear, anger, and disgust toward persons driven to create strange new ways of being in the world distracts us all from trying to understand how concentrated wealth can be managed, directed, and invested to build better futures for all humanity.
Stoking up fear, anger, and disgust only drives more people to more frantically seek new ways of being. Maybe flamboyantly. Maybe secretly. Maybe in riotous, silent isolation.
In the meantime concentration camps (called “staging areas”) are being designed for tens of millions of “unwanteds” needed so much by our communities and economy. And now, international oligarchs are planning more nuclear power plants and more fossil fuel extraction to avoid and profit from the consequences of climate change. And now, old illogics of religion, colonization, empire, and oligarchy are driving new genocides, most spectacularly in a land some call “Holy”
I would classify LGBTQ identification as a mental illness too, if we're permitted to disagree with clinical definitions! But I certainly don't disagree with you that obesity should be one.
Within Western countries (at least the US and UK), it's true that obesity is more prevalent among conservatives. However, on a worldwide scale, more liberal countries have higher levels of obesity compared with more conservative countries. This greatly complicates things.
One way of understanding all of this is via the notion of luxury beliefs. Some people are more impulsive and unable to self-regulate in healthy ways. These people vote conservative and generally benefit from living in a more conservative society which places more external restraints on human behaviour.
Other people are excellent at self-regulating, they are adept at diagnosing themselves with all kinds of mental health issues and then managing those conditions effectively either on their own or with the help of others. These people vote liberal and generally benefit from living in societies which place less external constraints on their actions, as they are adept at self-regulation.
I don't think a girl thinking other girls are hot is a mental illness. LGBTQ identification is very broad. Obviously someone who has surgical intervention for gender dysphoria is very different from a girl who kisses girls, in the same way that being moderately overweight is different from being morbidly obese.
I understand bisexuality as an ethos of "I will fuck anything," but I am deeply confused about why dominant gay men prefer feminine traits (think of James Charles) yet they are not attracted to women. I assume it is the product of a fear or hatred of women.
I wouldn't classify homosexuality a mental illness in the same way as obesity is. Homosexuality may correlate with anxiety, depression, drug use, risky behaviors, but it is not *directly* harmful in a physical way in the way that obesity is. It may be that an underlying pathology causes homosexual attraction, or it may be that homosexuality itself causes pathology (like the liberal argument that gay people are bullied and this is why they are depressed, or the Christian argument that homosexuality invites demons into your soul), or there is a third element which causes both comorbidities. I'm not sure. But obesity is just directly harmful.
I am skeptical of the concept of luxury beliefs here, because there are Amazonian tribes which ritualistically force teenage boys to perform oral sex on elder men. I should write an article on these topics, but it is difficult because there is a lot I do not understand.
Does this control for age? Older people tend to be more conservative do they not? Obviously metabolism diminishes with age and effects a consequent rise in corpulence.
I am hopeful that the efforts of Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist have made and will continue to make physical beauty, strength, health, and proper diet a cornerstone of a popular version of right wing ideology.
This is really interesting. I think if you define a mental disorder as a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) psychological condition that makes it difficult to function in normal society, there are probably a lot more categories that don’t conventionally get counted that disproportionately skew conservative. Just off the top of my head:
People who believe extreme conspiracy theories and act on them (eg, preppers, antivaxxers) or just become obsessed with them (eg, QAnon).
People who drain their bank accounts giving to political candidates (usually the elderly, but conservative olds get scammed a lot more than liberal olds).
People who get cut off by family members over their political views (this one is probably mixed but I’d bet skews conservative).
Dementia is technically a mental illness, and risk does increase with cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. Conservatives are more likely to get cut off by family because liberals are more likely to cut people off.
Preppers and anti-vaxxers don’t create any trouble for other people or actually have problems functioning in society beyond those artificially created by woke people (e.g. vaccines frequently don’t stop transmission and can even do the opposite, preppers generally … prepare … but don’t do anything more than that).
The elderly skew conservative but more importantly they skew trusting, so it’s easier to scam them on a small scale. But when it comes to being drained of money for scams, it’s hard to beat liberals. The problem is it’s too effective: they never wake up and realize they were scammed. This is usually done via nice sounding charities and NGOs that are actually corrupt: see how BLM embezzled the money donated to them. An entirely predictable outcome that’s far from rare! Another recent wakeup call was the way their bank accounts were drained to the tune of over a billion dollars by Harris, who immediately spaffed it in ways so wasteful and corrupt she still managed to end up in debt.
As to cutting off family members over politics, this is nearly 100% a woke leftist phenomenon. It’s astonishing you’d intuit otherwise. Please cite some examples of this coming from conservatives - I’ve yet to see any. But you can search Twitter for election related meltdowns and find endless messages from Democrats saying they just cut off all contact with their family.
@AP: Your defense of anti-vaxxers is "I am anti-vaxxer and anti-vaxxers are correct about vaccines," which I find unconvincing.
I guess this response goes some way towards convincing me you are left wing after all, because only leftists have reading comprehension that poor.
"vaccines frequently don’t stop transmission and can even do the opposite"
That's an assertion of fact which contains nothing about me and bears no resemblance to the summary you just put in my mouth, which manages to not only be wrong but of equal length to the thing you're trying to summarize.
If you don't think that statement is true and actually want to debate the topic, then by all means present your counter-argument, starting with COVID vaccines please (advertised as stopping transmission, didn't).
With the exception of Johnson and Johnson, COVID vaccines weren't vaccines. They were MRNA therapies were rushed to deal with a highly variable new viruses. You can't generalize about vaccines from COVID therapies.
Fwiw, the COVID vaccines were very good at stopping transmission in the original strain of the virus they were formulated for.
The virus mutated into new strains very quickly, which is what led to the vaccine being less effective at stopping transmission. It did still slow transmission down.
If Pfizer, Moderna, et al were allowed to update the vaccines for the new strains faster and without miles of red tape and paperwork, we would have seen more effective vaccines upon rollout.
"I think if you define a mental disorder as a (diagnosed or undiagnosed) psychological condition that makes it difficult to function in normal society'.
Veganism.
Ok, so there's one that skews left. You could probably say the same about being trans or gay (although the latter might be outdated). I think that says a lot more about social norms than it does about individuals because it's very easy to imagine the norms shifting on each of those. (In fact, they already have.)
I would think if you include something in the definition about harmful or antisocial behavior -- which is more in line with colloquial thinking about mental illness, and where the norms probably aren't going to shift -- you would include all my examples plus obesity while excluding the three above, with the possible exception of trans.
That's the case with almost anything. If you live in a community of preppers, you can have a great time prepping, chopping wood and building barns and what not.
However, specifically on veganism, here is arguably once the most prominent articulate advocate of veganism saying how he had to quit because he was losing weight, fainting and periodically shitting his pants. And yet vegans are all over the internet with abstruse proofs that their chosen lifestyle is healthy, like QAnon, except with shitting your pants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6QWY4T6gxc
It's a good article, but I don't think either of the explanations apply to Alex O'Connor. His own explanation seems sufficient: he has IBS, and needs to carefully control his diet. Cutting out 80% or more of the foods you can find in a shop makes that extremely difficult.
I have some relevant experience. At university, I started keeping kosher, though, for the first 2 years, I wasn't really keeping it according to Jewish law and it was closer to vegetarianism. It definitely wasn't a good period for my health and had long term consequences. Bottom line is I used to spend 8 weeks in a row being malnourished. Now, there are other reasons: I didn't have much money and skimped on food, stayed up all night drinking coffee and writing essays etc. but if I had been able to eat in hall I think it would have been OK. Most people, most of the time are either not organized enough, or have too much going on to rule large proportions of available food off limits and not suffer for it.
If you look at O'Connor in that video, he really looks like crap, and barely half a year later he was visibly healthy and super productive.
Should we just classify having a low IQ as having a mental illness? Because this is essentially what you are arguing.
@CR yes
If you wanted to know if ideology caused obesity, you would want to control for any other factors in the regression that could be the driver. So for instance, you would want to control for class, or iq, or family size, or age, or geography, or profession, etc. just like you controlled for race.
But you didn’t do this. You basically said “high iq professionals on the coast are thinner than low iq rurals in the south, news at 11!
As a coastal professional, I will offer my own take, which I’m sure I could find in the statistics if I really needed to. Amongst the people of similar class around me, conservatives are generally superior to liberals on about every metric, including obesity. They are happier, more mentally fit, in better shape (almost always more muscular), and have way more kids conservatives in the to 20% of iq have 3x as many kids as liberals).
It’s certainly true that both parties have dysfunctional lower class voters banks to get to 51%. Liberals have brown people and conservatives have rural whites.
But I’m primarily concerned what the impact of being a conservative or liberal would have on ME and MY KIDS. They aren’t going to become fat people from rural Alabama if I teach them to be conservatives.
What I can see in my life is that the people at the middle/umc conservative church in my town are just way better people than the ugly fat blue hairs that marched for abortion rights in the town parade.
-"I’m sure I could find in the statistics if I really needed to"
If you want to convince me, yes, you will need to provide evidence rather than assertions. I cite studies showing conservatives exercise less than liberals. Conservatives do not have more muscle mass when you adjust for BMI -- fat people are more muscular, but conservatives do not have more lean muscle than liberals.
Based on what you have written here, it is probably more accurate to say that conservatism is a form of idealized and externalized co-dependency: let's all make each other follow the rules, and scale or institutionalize boundaries that we are not capable of setting on our own. (Though, of course, you probably chose this title to be intentionally provocative and drive engagement.)
I would say codependency is less of a mental illness and more of a crude relational strategy that optimizes for "rescuing" or "being rescued" – depending on which role you play – that emerges in environments that do not encourage properly testing and adhering to one's limits; which is a necessary practice for cultivating intrinsic restraint.
This is why, for example, wokeness is a rather conservative system of identity at the end of the day; it just tends to morally fetishize the "powerless, in need of saving" rather than the "powerful, who save".
One of the important tacit underpinnings of liberalism is a notion of robust self-governance, so it's not so much of a surprise that those who rely on and aspire for implicit rather than explicit regulation tend toward liberalism.
In this way, I think it is accurate and kind to recognize 'conservatism' of all kinds (not just the political kind) as a necessary and important developmental stage that arises on the way to a more mature relationship with power and to interdependency.
@RR: obesity is useful in some contexts, like traveling by boat to Samoa. We can either mutually disarm, and admit that liberals aren't mentally ill, or have mutual deterrence, and admit that both conservatives and liberals are mentally ill. In the latter case, I argue that obesity has much worse outcomes than liberal mental illness.
Utah and Idaho are very conservative and very low in obesity. Seems to me that is a more broad cultural issue than conservative vs liberal... Utah and Idaho are both of mostly yankee heritage, as opossed to the other conservative states.
@NG: Utah is high in education.
Both states have many Mormons. I'm not a Mormon, so take what I say with the proverbial grain of salt, but from I understand Mormons emphasize self-sufficiency (storage of food) and have some dietary restrictions (no alcohol, no caffeine). I speculate that anyone who starts with being conscientious about what they eat will probably not let a fast-food diet overtake a well-planned balanced diet.
Lol, cope
Sorry you are fat.
As someone who lives in one of the most densely populated urban areas, the political divide on this issue makes less sense than a class divide. I would wager that 8/10 obese people I encounter are either long-time or normie Democrat loyalists (true for their relatives, as well). I have met a couple obese conservative types, but they’re outnumbered.
One other example, my son plays in a soccer league in a suburb across the street and it’s VERY progressive. Most residents are in poor health and do not exercise (I go to a gym there and the observation remains true). It’s obvious even in their posture (separate vent, why do so few people know how to stand up straight??)
Also, I don’t disagree that obesity can/should be classified as a mental illness. But, doesn’t that put the malady into a category that takes the responsibility out of the hands of the (obese) people we want to see improving their own situation?
@john: I have never met a fat white Democrat. It's really ineffective to fight my statistical evidence with your petty anecdotes.
“Petty” is subjective. I don’t care about statistical evidence when I’m literally surrounded by counter-examples. Sounds like you need to expand your horizons.
A good take.
To boil it down to a cliché, mens sana in corpore sano. Similarly, the neurotic lefty will also be prone to lots of physical issues, even if they don't manifest themselves as obesity. Anxiety disorders involve your nervous system, and this negatively affects your immune system etc.
For a potentially more accurate (but far more finicky) analysis on conservative obesity:
You've surely seen the argument that some bodybuilders manage to achieve a BMI > 30, yet hardly carry any bodyfat. Or that very big and somewhat fat strongmen are also in obvious robust health. (well... assuming they didn't mess themselves up with the steroids too much)
My argument is not, that conservatives have enough of these two extreme groups, that this would be a meaningful effect on its own (even if those two groups were to skew very conservative). But consider two somewhat related cases, that one would need to account for.
The apparent difference in obesity rates (or at least the effect, that this technical "obesity" would have) is somewhat blunted by the fact that conservatives lift more and do more hard manual labor. So population level BMI should ideally be interpreted differently, when looking at different populations.
case 1: semi-fat learning the joy of lifting
But imagine, you're at BMI 28 (somewhat fat, but not technically obsese) and then started lifting and gain mostly muscle mass, which would be a net improvement for your health. Your BMI now hits 31 and you're technically obese. Since conservatives lift more, that would happen a lot more.
case 2: hard laborer turning soft
People that have a high weight, but have worked hard across their whole lives can become fat later (beer bellies), but without losing much of their strength and vigor. Is it good for them, that they have all this extra fat? Definitely not, but their health is not comparable to the sedentary obese. And their alcohol consumption is probably the much bigger problem.
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Come to think of it, a better analysis might be to just compare conservative and liberal women. This should mostly account for this distortion.
@david: neuroticism has some positive health outcomes:
https://time.com/4872545/neurotic-longer-life/
Sure, if you adjust for race conservatives are more obese than liberals, but that doesn’t mean conservatives are more obese as a product of mental condition. Conservatives are older, more rural, more sedentary, leading to higher obesity. Yes, fat people are responsible for being fat, but all of those fat people wouldn’t have been fat 60 years ago and may not be fat today if their environment demanded a more active lifestyle. I don’t think obesity can be called a mental illness in the same way that we say “liberals are mentally ill”. One is caused by low IQ, the other is caused by high p-factor and high neuroticism
Veganism is a sign of effeminacy and physical weakness. It’s physically possible for vegans to get enough protein, but it’s hard, and most eat crappy low-protein diets. There are buff vegans, but every vegan I’ve personally met is scrawny and weak.
A diet of meats along with real foods can actually be pretty healthy. Low carb does work.
It's funny that so many people are straining to come up with explanations when this is incredibly obvious just traveling around the country and looking around. Go to any metro region or surrounding suburbs in the country and you are not going to find any fat white people. Go anywhere else and you do. It's amazing people have themselves convinced that liberals are all deranged obese blue haired people like on LibsofTikTok when that is some .001% of the most extreme weirdos who are blasted out to conservatives precisely as propaganda. In reality the liberals are all the slender UMC white women going to yoga by the tens of thousands every day, shopping at Whole Foods, all the lean men out on their mountain bikes and road bicycles riding 50 miles a day. And where tf did this nonsense about lifting weights being "right wing" come from? Just bc they talk about it online all the time?
Go anywhere that conservatives assemble in the thousands: a country music concert, a rodeo, a monster truck rally, a pro wrestling event. Fat people abound. Fat women, fat men, fat teenagers, fat kids. Now go to the places the liberals congregate...Coachella or Burning Man or something. No fat people.
It's just being more vain, socially/status conscious, and cultural norms of what's acceptable. Go to any liberal urban wedding in the country and you're not going to find a single white woman of any age who weighs more than she did in high school. Same wedding in suburban/rural area in a red state and almost all women over 40 will weigh a good 40 lbs more than she did in high school if not more. Oh and btw, part of that is because conservatives have more kids, because the majority of women gain and never lose about 15 lbs per kid.
Skimming and can't make sense of it.
I think either it's supposed to be high instead of low neuroticism in the first sentence here?
"Obesity correlates with low neuroticism, low conscientiousness, and low intelligence."
"The traits which liberals are accused of possessing — neuroticism and low conscientiousness — are the same traits which predict obesity."
Try reading instead of skimming. Here's the very next sentence in the paragraph you quote: "This implies that liberal culture provides some kind of additional protection against obesity that conservative culture does not possess, or that conservative culture aggravates obesity."
I think you're skimming me now?
statement 1: Obesity correlates with LOW neuroticism.
statement 2: Liberals are accused of neuroticism (implying HIGH neuroticism, or at least NOT low neuroticism).
statement 3: These traits of liberals PREDICT obesity.
Statement 3 is in (partial) contradiction to statement 1. Since if low neuroticism correlates with obesity, then high neuroticism would not be a trait that predicts it. Rather Low neuroticism would be a trait, that predicts it.
Do you understand what "additional protection" means?
*sigh* You're trying to defend yourself, holed into the impression that I'm a lazy, yet strangely argumentative idiot. All I just want to point out is a simple sign-error, but I didn't know where the error was, since I wasn't entirely sure, whether low or high neuroticism correlates with obesity. Both seemed somewhat plausible to me, hence I just pointed at the contradiction. Fine then, I looked it up for you.
Consulting ChatGPT, obesity correlates with HIGH neuroticism. So your error is in your first statement (second sentence of your essay), which is:
"Obesity correlates with LOW neuroticism..."
Mistakes like that stand out to me, like big flashing warning signs. It's conditioning from trying to understand complicated math proofs, in which an unaddressed/unnoticed single sign mistake (or worse, two) had me spinning my wheels in a haze of confusion, sometimes for hours. Skimming/out-of-hand rejecting in such a case is not out of laziness, but an instinctual protective response.
I've read the post in full now, and generally think it's a good take though.
I think this is a Freudian mistake on my part because I associate Santa Claus with sloth and joy, rather than neuroticism.
Yeah, I could see it both ways too. Neuroticism made me think of slim Lydia from Breaking Bad and her stevia habit.
Perceptions about “center” and “edge” are generally perceptions about “safer” or “more dangerous”. Such perceptions are volatile, easy to manipulate, but impossible to control. They’re especially easy to carelessly manipulate for destructive purposes when too few irresponsible people (seeking only impunity) have too much control over mass, mainstream, and social media.
Our center of political discourse should be multinational oligarchy and its relationship to empire and international fascism.
Wedge issues are excellent for manipulating visceral perceptions of safety and threat. Stoking up fear, anger, and disgust toward persons driven to create strange new ways of being in the world distracts us all from trying to understand how concentrated wealth can be managed, directed, and invested to build better futures for all humanity.
Stoking up fear, anger, and disgust only drives more people to more frantically seek new ways of being. Maybe flamboyantly. Maybe secretly. Maybe in riotous, silent isolation.
In the meantime concentration camps (called “staging areas”) are being designed for tens of millions of “unwanteds” needed so much by our communities and economy. And now, international oligarchs are planning more nuclear power plants and more fossil fuel extraction to avoid and profit from the consequences of climate change. And now, old illogics of religion, colonization, empire, and oligarchy are driving new genocides, most spectacularly in a land some call “Holy”
I would classify LGBTQ identification as a mental illness too, if we're permitted to disagree with clinical definitions! But I certainly don't disagree with you that obesity should be one.
Within Western countries (at least the US and UK), it's true that obesity is more prevalent among conservatives. However, on a worldwide scale, more liberal countries have higher levels of obesity compared with more conservative countries. This greatly complicates things.
One way of understanding all of this is via the notion of luxury beliefs. Some people are more impulsive and unable to self-regulate in healthy ways. These people vote conservative and generally benefit from living in a more conservative society which places more external restraints on human behaviour.
Other people are excellent at self-regulating, they are adept at diagnosing themselves with all kinds of mental health issues and then managing those conditions effectively either on their own or with the help of others. These people vote liberal and generally benefit from living in societies which place less external constraints on their actions, as they are adept at self-regulation.
I don't think a girl thinking other girls are hot is a mental illness. LGBTQ identification is very broad. Obviously someone who has surgical intervention for gender dysphoria is very different from a girl who kisses girls, in the same way that being moderately overweight is different from being morbidly obese.
I understand bisexuality as an ethos of "I will fuck anything," but I am deeply confused about why dominant gay men prefer feminine traits (think of James Charles) yet they are not attracted to women. I assume it is the product of a fear or hatred of women.
I wouldn't classify homosexuality a mental illness in the same way as obesity is. Homosexuality may correlate with anxiety, depression, drug use, risky behaviors, but it is not *directly* harmful in a physical way in the way that obesity is. It may be that an underlying pathology causes homosexual attraction, or it may be that homosexuality itself causes pathology (like the liberal argument that gay people are bullied and this is why they are depressed, or the Christian argument that homosexuality invites demons into your soul), or there is a third element which causes both comorbidities. I'm not sure. But obesity is just directly harmful.
I am skeptical of the concept of luxury beliefs here, because there are Amazonian tribes which ritualistically force teenage boys to perform oral sex on elder men. I should write an article on these topics, but it is difficult because there is a lot I do not understand.
Does this control for age? Older people tend to be more conservative do they not? Obviously metabolism diminishes with age and effects a consequent rise in corpulence.
I am hopeful that the efforts of Bronze Age Pervert and Raw Egg Nationalist have made and will continue to make physical beauty, strength, health, and proper diet a cornerstone of a popular version of right wing ideology.
Yes, from the article, "conservative children are more obese."
Yes, but amongst the adult statistics is age controlled for?
Also, which hyperlink contains the data about the obesity rates conservative children versus liberal children?
Consumption is a job
Conservatives are better at working
Economy runs on over consumption
Conservatives keep the economy going
You could say the horseshoe meets with the fat peasant and the anorexic royal in today’s world.