Wednesday 31 January 2018

Bill Maher is a Small, Skinny Dumbass

I don't watch a lot of
Bill Maher's TV show
. I don't watch it mostly because I find him hideously smug and overly concerned with stupid issues. He loves to act like political correctness is ruining things. He also loves to make fun of people for being fat.

I also don't watch it because he's short. If I were standing next to him I could put my chin on his head.
I don't respect short men
.

In Bill Maher's mind he's doing the right thing
. He talks about the obesity epidemic and how being fat is tied to diseases and how this is a health crisis. He says you shouldn't support people who make bad life decisions in their bad life decisions, that it makes sense to shame people for things that should be shameful.

Through my twitter
feed I'm sometimes exposed to articles on fatphobia. If you aren't attuned to this issue you might not really know what is going on out there. Fat people endure mockery by strangers, they endure nasty looks and comments, they even endure physical violence from people who find fat people's bodies disgusting. Of course there's more to it than being fat. Fat men aren't going to take the same kind of harassment as fat women, for example.

The idea that there is something acceptable or right about treating people this way is stupid. Of course I'm sure Bill Maher would agree with that. He'd say it's terrible to assault someone because you disapprove of their body. He'd say that calling out people on his show for living unhealthy lifestyles isn't the same as making nasty comments to strangers or hitting them. Of course since he's a defender of free speech absolutism there's no point making a comparison between insulting fat people and insulting any other marginalized group and how that promotes this kind of behaviour.

I was watching clips of the View one day and I saw Trevor Noah. Joy Behar brought up the issue of political correctness and how you can't say anything these days without someone getting offended. Trevor Noah took a different view:



Maybe it's a good thing, he said. Earlier in his career he used to make jokes about fat people and he thought he was being edgy, but really he was just being mean. Being mean and propping up the status quo. Maybe it's good that people are learning to be better.

If I have an opinion on an issue and I'm told that one of Bill Maher and Trevor Noah agrees with me, while the other disagrees, I'm going to be thinking, "Oh please! Please let me be on Trevor Noah's side!" For one thing, Trevor Noah is
still funny
.

I don't know why I'm so fixated on Bill Maher with this. Fatphobia is baked into our culture pretty deep. It's just that I wish I could have five minutes to talk to him about his position.

I remember when I was young people criticized the term "homophobia." They said it wasn't fear, it was hate. I think the affix "-phobia" to describe bigotry is often right on the mark. We used to joke that all those bible thumping Republican pastors going after gay people were themselves in the closet. Years later when one after another was "caught" I started to wonder if it was really a joke at all. Lots of people don't like gay people for stupid reasons, but they don't all found a megachurch so they can have a platform to talk about it every day. It seems it takes someone who is afraid of their own sexuality to make a life-time cause of really going after other people's.

The "-phobia" affix seems even more apt for fatphobia. The story our society tells us is that all of us have the potential to be fat or not fat. Almost all of us like cake. So
we
're in the position of the person who is attracted to people of the same sex but who has convinced themselves that this is wrong. If we give in to temptation we become something we don't want to be - something we know we will be judged for being. The temptation is always there.

So I think calling Bill Maher "fatphobic" is probably right on the money. I bet he is terribly afraid of being fat. Terribly afraid that if he doesn't do the things that make him thin he will be subject to the kind of judgment that he currently dishes out. I don't think a person would go on TV to loudly proclaim that shaming fat people was a good thing if they weren't afraid of being shamed for being fat themselves.

Bill Maher presents his idea of shaming fat people like it's revolutionary. Like we now have lots of scientific evidence that
being fat is a hazard to your health
. We have more and more people who are getting fatter and fatter. We have a rise in weight-associated diseases. So it's time we all finally get on the bandwagon and shame fat people!

But Bill Maher probably made fun of fat people as a child, or was made fun of for being fat as a child. He probably made fun of fat people as a teenager or was made fun or for being fat as a teenager. He probably refused to consider dating women because he thought they were too fat. He probably hit on a woman and then when she turned him down
pretended that she was too fat for him
.

People made fun of fat kids when I was kid. People said girls and women were sexually unattractive because they were fat when I was a teenager and when I was in university. Due to my inability to take my own perspective seriously I once followed a societal script and deeply hurt someone I cared about because of their weight when in reality I actually thought they were beautiful. I've heard people my age imply that fat women don't get raped because they aren't attractive enough.

Making fun of fat people is not some revolutionary act, Bill. It's just being the same kind of zero-empathy dipshit that you were
when you were five.


If fat shaming made people thinner, there wouldn't be many fat people around. It's been the policy of our culture to shame fat during the entire growth of the "obesity epidemic" that Bill Maher is so concerned about. And that's not some coincidence, at least some of
us
are fat because we use sugary foods to medicate our mental health issues. Shaming is not a very good solution for that. That's the kind of how-things-work-in-real-life thing that I'd think Bill Maher could understand. There's no always a straight line between incentive and outcome. He gets that making weed illegal doesn't make people stop smoking weed.

And I don't want you to read that paragraph and think I'm buying into the idea that being fat is a bad thing we should minimize. Fatphobia means a lot of bad policy. It means we measure health far too much using
a very bad proxy for health
. It means that we when we talk about "ideal weight" we define it to be a weight that is statistically
not even maximizing longevity
. Not to mention that the way we measure fat, and research into how being fat affects health
is racist
. We have a lot more to gain, healthwise, by accepting people's bodies than we do by warping our assessment of health around a bigoted classification of bodies.

Which is all totally secondary to the fact that we are dehumanizing people, and we have been our whole lives, and we are pretending it's okay. If you eat something you think you shouldn't and say you feel fat, you are saying to everyone who is fat that you use their body as a proxy for "bad". If you are prone to do that, try doing something you think you shouldn't and mournfully saying you feel like a member of a racial group that has been stereotyped as stupid. You probably won't try that since it would make you feel awful about yourself. What was that nonsense about short people being untrustworthy that I wrote near the beginning of this post?

Reasons why some people are fat and some people are thin are extremely complex. That cultural idea I mentioned that people choose whether to be fat or thin may not be quite as nonsensical as the insistence from some bigots that people choose whether to be gay, but it's in that direction.

I don't think Bill Maher is all that stupid. But intelligence can be just as useful in rationalizing a bias as it can be in examining it. Of course he gets why making weed illegal is bad policy but doesn't get how shaming fat people is bad. He smokes weed, he isn't fat. It's all about what works for him.

You don't have to be stupid to be a dumbass.

Tuesday 30 January 2018

Schrödinger's Axiom

Schrödinger didn't believe in Schrödinger's Cat. He created the story of the cat to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the idea of superposition. Einstein praised his thought on the matter, noting that, "Nobody really doubts that the presence or absence of the cat is something independent of the act of observation."

The wikipedia entry on the cat has brief summaries of numerous other interpretations of superposition and collapse, some of which I'm pretty familiar with but some of which I'd never heard of. My favourite is the Relational Interpretation which is summarized by saying:
To the cat, the wavefunction of the apparatus has appeared to "collapse"; to the experimenter, the contents of the box appear to be in superposition. Not until the box is opened, and both observers have the same information about what happened, do both system states appear to "collapse" into the same definite result, a cat that is either alive or dead.
Which sounds a lot like saying
"different people might know different things and that's okay."


I've been thinking about the cat recently, and about the idea that some things in reality are undetermined until they are observed, and it struck me that this is circular reasoning.

How does science work. We craft hypotheses based on information we have, we concoct tests based on those hypotheses, we either disprove our hypotheses or we give them weight by conducting our tests. The key to this entire process is that there is something in the world that would let us know the difference between a world where we are correct and a world where we are incorrect.

Victor Stenger made this point very well in his book "God: The Failed Hypothesis". While one resolution to the debate about the existence of God is the idea of "
non-overlapping magisteria
", Stenger points out that a great many of the things that are asserted about God can be tested.

For example, if God exists in the way that God is described by some Christians, then praying for another person's health would help them recover sooner from an illness. We can test this and know that it isn't true. As long as a claim has any observable result, it's the domain of science. If a claim doesn't have any observable result - that is, if the universe as we are capable of knowing it would be the same regardless of whether the claim was true - then that claim would fall into the other magisterium.

We might say, well, if it makes no difference that is possible to detect in any way, then it doesn't matter, it doesn't exist. But that statement isn't the conclusion of quantum physics, it's the bedrock on which the entire idea of science is built.

Science is the idea that the way to know thing is by observing them. Science is the idea that is a thing cannot be observed then it is not real.

So it seems that the whole observation issue is sort of a breaking point for science. It's coming full circle and proving your first axiom as an important theorem. We already know that is a thing is not observed then science necessarily has nothing to say about it.

This is all just me thinking, and there's a good chance someone will read this who has a better understanding that I do. I guess my question is, what would be observably different about the world if it were the case that things that couldn't be or that had never been observed were still very real? This might be letting philosophy get in the way of reality, but it strikes me that the answer to that question can't possibly be anything.