About the below, that the food industry is most likely a secret hidden funding source doesn’t make the FA/BP/FC movement incorrect.

This is a fallacy and failure of critical thinking and of discernment.

The FA/BP/FC movement should be evaluated on its merits or lack thereof (and there are indeed some merits, especially before the movement was hijacked by its most extreme elements).

While it is important and interesting to know why a largely-harmful movement achieved cultural ascendance, who funds them doesn’t make them wrong or right — corporations like the psychopaths that they are will throw money at anything that advantages them, regardless of its truth value.

Fat people claiming oppression is an insult to people who are actually oppressed.

Firm evidence is yet hard to find, but I think the best chance is that the Fat Acceptance/body positivity/fat celebration movement is mostly funded by food industry groups.

Why would they not do this? That’d have great return on investment. If I were Monsanto or General Mills or Nestlé I’d be shoveling money (discreetly) at these groups as fast as I could.

Some indirect evidence is that you never see any of these people or groups question current food industry practices, ask why obesity suddenly begin increasing in the 1980s and then skyrocketed in the early 1990s (even though processed foods had been widely available and cheap since the early 1950s), or make any effort into funding investigation into possible environmental exposure links to obesity.

Of course not. It all reeks of food lobby money. The ROI on that would be very high, so if they are not doing it I’d be extremely shocked.

I’m constantly surprised by the narrowness of people’s conceptions of the world and the relations therein.

For instance there’s loads of people convinced that humanity can never go extinct and furthermore, that the natural environment has little relation to human flourishing.

Where do they think the oxygen they breathe comes from? Magic? Are they not aware of the complex relationships of ocean salinity, temperature and nutrient/pollution levels to phytoplankton, which produce ~70% of the oxygen we breathe?

One of the real and extreme dangers of global warming is of course that we disrupt the oxygen cycle and that is game over for humanity. We are done. Goose, fully cooked.

But it’s not just about that. Just a minor example. I run into this constantly. Most people are specialists knowing one minuscule area and grasp almost nothing about any other area, or even worse have in their heads only some combination of urban myths, long-debunked “science” from the 1900s, and what they’d prefer to believe.

It’s just a bit shocking how little most people are even aware of the complexity of other areas of study, or that the things they take for granted don’t just get created and sustained by hot air and hocus-pocus.

I know that it’s basically impossible for most people to read and to study as much as I do. But still…it seems like more is possible?