By David Futrelle
The Daily Stormer is expansive in its hatreds. The site’s writers (and readers) not only hate Jews, black people, women, and LGBTQ folks; they also, in keeping with Nazi tradition, despise anyone they see as somehow defective, especially if they can be blamed for their alleged defects.
And so it’s hardly surprising that Stormers hate fat people. What is perhaps a little surprising is the vehemence of their hatred.
In a couple of recent posts on the site, the Stormer writer who calls himself Pomidor Quixote launches an outright war on fat people. In the first, he cites a study of rats to “prove” that the children of fat mothers age more quickly, concluding that parenting-while-fat is “a form of child abuse that has devastating health and social consequences,”
And he’s just getting started:
Allowing overweight people to reproduce is really no different than allowing meth addicts to become parents.
Unless they fix their serious addiction problems first, they shouldn’t be anywhere near children.
This is all horrible, but there is a rather striking irony to Quixote’s sideways swipe at meth addicts, given that a recent book has shown that meth was used as a performance-enhancing drug by the Nazis, and many soldiers ended up addicts.
In his second recent post on the fat menace, “Quixote” takes his argument (such as it is) even further. Citing an OECD study (as summarized by Bloomberg), he concludes that
The obese are not being as productive as normal people, so they’re not contributing the same as normal people.
Yet they are responsible for governments spending hundreds of billions of dollars trying to keep them alive.
Why are governments trying to keep the obese alive if the obese can’t even perform properly?
Because we don’t kill people, or let them die, because, statistically speaking, they’re slightly less productive than skinny people due to taking more sick days.
Also, as a fat person, I have to say that I really haven’t noticed the government doing much of anything to keep me alive.
We know how to force them to lose weight, but for some reason these fat monsters are given the freedom to decide what to eat despite having proved time and time again that they’re incapable of making choices that would result in them losing the weight.
Diets, broadly speaking, don’t work; the overwhelming majority of those who lose weight through dieting end up gaining the weight back. And this sort of yo-yo dieting can have far worse effects on health than being overweight.
Quixote continues, each new sentence more unhinged than the last:
Why are productive, slim people paying for the freedom of the obese?
It’s a kind of slavery.
These monsters are enslaving healthy humans!
Nazi that he is, Quixote concludes with a very on-brand “solution.” He wants fat people rounded up and put in “starvation camps.”
[T]he problem with fat creatures isn’t really a lack of education about food and exercise. They know that if they ate less, they’d lose weight or at least stop getting fatter. They know that eating a lot causes them to gain weight.
It’s a kind of addiction and everything points to them not being able to handle it on their own.
They have to be put in starvation camps and given only water and a bit of salt until they lose all the excess weight.
Setting aside the moral depravity of this, er, “solution,” starvation camps aren’t exactly what you might call practical. For one thing, according to the OECD study Quixote himself cites, more than half the adults in OECD countries (that is, most of the developed world) are classified as overweight or obese.
In the US, 72% of adults are overweight, and 40% are obese, according to the CDC. To fulfill Quixote’s cruel fantasy, you’d have to lock up something like 160 million people — quite a responsibility for the remaining 60 million adults.
Quixote also seems to have forgotten that Nazis themselves aren’t immune to the alleged “addiction” of being overweight. Indeed, while Quixote may be, for all I know, perfectly svelte, there are plenty of fat Nazis, and some of them — like the fugitive from justice known as Azzmador — have even written for the Daily Stormer.
Hell, Hermann Göring was famously fat. Would Quixote have sent him to the starvation camps too? Somehow I think not.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
If you meant “I think that it would be nice if obsesity was something that less people had to struggle with”, this is a really shitty way to say it. Because people who have been subjected to fatphobic harassment and abuse are not going to hear “it would be nice if obsesity didn’t negatively impact your life” they’re going to hear “it would be a good thing if you didn’t exist”. Because that’s the kind of horrible bullshit that society keeps pushing on fat people.
It’s like saying “having less disabled people would be a good thing”. Even if you’re talking about it being nice if spinal injuries and whatnot could be avoided or treated, that’s not what those words in that order mean. Those words almost universally mean “there are too many existing disabled people and they should be removed”.
Don’t say things like this.
Kupo, proud fatty and knitting cat lady,
Thank you for sharing your stories and I’m sorry you experienced this horrible treatment. I hope that now you are all feeling better in your lives. This is exactly why people need to be educated about weight and health and we need to challenge all the lies. I don’t know what to do except to challenge people each day when they say fat phobic things. Just like the article says, it is so hard to challenge fat hate because fat people are also told the same lies about their bodies which makes it hard to have solidarity.
Maybe this is missing the point, but can I say that Pomidor Quixote bothers me the most because of his name? A good Nazi piece of shit names themselves something like Adolphus Volkermort so we can know “Oh, okay, you’re garbage who got way too into your Warhammer figurines, cool cool”. But they are appropriating the name of someone who actually represented a complication of Spanish masculinity, with the Don being intelligent, empathetic, and respectful of the rights of prisoners and others. The exact opposite of this mean spirited puke rag.
Here is a thread by Kivan about antifat bias. Its antifat bias which is actually the biggest threat to the health of fat people.
https://twitter.com/KivaBay/status/913612973624590336?s=19
(Sorry I don’t know how to embed)
@Frederic Christie
I’m a bit confused. How does the name “Adolphus Volkermort” relate to Warhammer in any way?
(But oh man, do I loathe the piece-of-crap wing of the Warhammer fandom. Do they not get that the Imperium of 40k being a fascist theocracy is supposed to be a Bad Thing? It is the “the Grim Darkness of the far future,” not “the Totally Sweet Awesomeness of the far future.”)
“Adolphus Volkemort” does sound like the sort of name Games Workshop would give a Space Marine hero character .
Do…. these people not have any self awareness at all about what they are saying or the implications of it? Not even an inkling??
Do they realize that it comes across as they are being the baddies just casually suggesting sending fat people into essentially concentration camps made to starve them and enabling and advocating slavery?
I mean even at it’s basic it’s not a solvent notion to hold… much less ethical…
Uhm, weren’t most of these weightloss tactics used in the reality TV show _The Biggest Loser_, including drugs for the contestants to help them loose weight faster for the camera? And weren’t those tactics ultimately exposed as not only not working, but actively harming the contestants’ health?
Or did I misremember something again?
No, you’re right. They used drugs and forced them to dehydrate themselves.
I read a really interesting article about a study following up on those “Biggest Loser” contestants. They followed them for (I hope I’m remembering this right) something like 5 years, and a depressingly tiny percentage of them kept the weight off. The vast majority gained the weight back, sometimes more than they had weighed before. The ones who kept the weight off did it through meticulous food journaling and a dedicated program of exercising at least an hour a day.
It turns out that people who rapidly lose more than 10% of their body weight due to dieting permanently change their metabolism so they have to eat on average 500 calories less per day than the average person permanently to keep the weight off. Keeping in mind that these were people without medical conditions that caused them to become obese, it kind of makes one wonder if losing the weight is worth it.
I don’t think anyone has studied slow weight loss—like a pound a week until you hit your target kind of thing. I wonder if that would be less damaging to ones metabolism.
@janipurr
I think focusing on weight loss as the sign that you are becoming more healthy is the problem. Focus should be on ending fat hate, giving more access to verity foods and vegetables, removing processed foods and this fructose thing which is so bad, and more money from government for activities and places to go to do activities. Because many people can’t afford to pay for a gym or basketball teams, but government money can make this free. All kinds of activities can be free. And then it’s not about the shape and size of your body, it is about what you can do with it and the food you can eat and that your life is good.
BUT
All people deserve respect and dignity. It doesn’t matter about their personal life, or their size or what they eat or if they smoke or if they are disabled. They all deserve respect and dignity. They deserve accessibility. That is the first thing we should learn as society.
@Valentin:
Well, people are quite likely to lose weight if they can no longer find food that tastes good.
Not sure that a milder version of the Stormer’s starvation camps (instead of no food, just no food that doesn’t make you gag, and without the prison walls) is quite what we should be aiming for, here …
@Surplus
I don’t see how Valentin was suggesting that we all exist on gruel and water? Just making fresh foods more accessible, both in availability and in price. (I assume)
When it’s so much cheaper to buy heavily processed foods than the ingredients to make it yourself?
Beyond price and availability, people need the time, energy, and facilities to make their own dishes, which is often quite difficult to get.
I believe the ‘fructose’ thing is the High Fructose Corn Syrup that is added into so many things. From my limited knowlege it’s not great for us, and is used by manufacturers because it’s cheap and maybe a little addictive?
I find home made meals usually more delicious, especially if i’m proud i made them. I love going through the till and having what is obviously ingredients, rather than pre-prepared food. It’s a sign that i’m feeling good, and have energy to deal with cooking.
I know people have food preferences/limitations that can be pretty non-negotiable, so i’m not giving a blanket statement that we need to do away with things that are easy to heat up + eat, but wouldn’t it be nice if a can of chunky soup didn’t have like, 100% of your daily intake of salt in it?
Surplus you are twisting my words to get something to be angry about.
Foods can be flavoured with something other than fructose like sugar from cane or from beetroot. There are many studies which show that fructose only is used because of capitalist aims to support american farming, not because it is the most delicious option. Do not try to say that I want to remove delicious items, this is clearly not what I am trying to say and my history on this site when I post a lot about that people can do exactly what they want with their body also shows that you took my words and twisted them just so you can be angry with me.
I want accessibility to food. I want affordability for food. I want no more food deserts where the only place to get food is from a petrol filling station or fast food. I want accessibility for all kinds of food so that people can make a free choice. Of course I do not want to force people to eat what they do not like. But many people probably think your favourite food is not tasty, they also deserve the choice for something different. Right now, capitalism stops choice, poverty stops choice, industrial food production and politics stops choice.
How dare you compare me to these fascists who want to put people into camps? For what did you do this? Why did you decide to twist my words for this when even on this article you can see my other posts which clearly show my view?
Yeah, so what happened was the US government started giving subsidies for certain crops, including corn, wheat, soy, and others. This was an attempt to save farms from going under, but they just never took them back, so we continue to subsidize crops we now have a surplus of. So something needs to be done with that surplus. Regular corn syrup is lower in fructose, and doesn’t work great as a sugar cane replacement, but chemists kept working on new processing methods until they were able to get a sweeter version, which is the high fructose corn syrup we see in a lot of foods today. Fructose is processed differently from other sugars, and HFCS is believed to be a contributor in a lot of diseases (not sure how far along we are in the research into those claims, though).
Thank you for explaining kupo. I read about it in an article a long time ago but I couldn’t remember the fully story, only that it’s not a very good sweetener and was something about subsidies. Except I couldn’t remember the word subsidies ?
Occasionally I spring for a Mexican coke that has cane sugar instead of HFCS and it tastes so much better.
@WWTH
Agree. I don’t really drink much soda (I don’t like the bubbles and it’s usually too sweet for me), but I’ve tried Mexican Coke before and it’s much better than the American version.
@Valentin:
I’m supposed to interpret “removing processed foods and this fructose thing which is so bad” as increasing choice? I think a few things need noting here:
1. Removing some options does not increase choice.
2. Not everyone has the time or the desire to be a part-time chef on top of the other hats they wear, so there should be easy-and-quick-to-prepare meal options. If the current ones are mostly unhealthy investigate why that is. It can’t be inherent to being easy and quick to prepare!
3. Pushing “eat your veggies and no sweets for you” as a one-size-fits-all solution for all health or dietary woes won’t work, and will backfire badly in some cases. (Starting with, anyone susceptible to hypoglycemia.)
Perhaps you expressed yourself poorly, but it sounded like you were suggesting governments act like strict parents in regulating the food available to citizens. If you really just meant to “remove” things like corn subsidies that distort the market and flood it with cheap HFCS and the like, then you won’t get any disagreement from me. Take all those corn (and fossil fuel!) subsidies and plow them into public housing and transit upgrades!
Putting removed was a wrong choice of words. I meant that fructose is only used because of the reasons I said and the reasons that kupo saidm but you ignored that. But the other things you claim I said, i did not and you are now putting words into my mouth.
I did not say this. I said I wanted vegetables available and cheap so people can if they WANT to. That was clear and you are again twisting my words for something to be angry about. Some people want to cook with other things that they can’t afford or can’t buy because of no access. I am not forcing people to cook or eat in any way except the way they want. I want more choice, more access.
I also did not say this. Show me where I said I wanted to force people to eat vegetables? Because I didn’t say this. I said I wanted vegetables and all other verity of foods which are expensive and rare now to be available and accessible to people easily so they can eat them if they want.
You got angry over one small word which if you didn’t realise already my first language is not English and from the rest of the context of my comment and the other comments I made you can see that I am not the kind of person who wants to tell what you can’t put in your body or do with your body. I want more accessibility because people live in food deserts, they can’t get the things they want and need and that can easily be fixed.
But I know you just want to be angry with me, so yeah okay I am as bad as some nazis. Fine tou fucking win.
Give me evidence for this claim. Find a quote which shows this. Because I really did not say that. And even if I am “worded poorly”, I put this sentence:
In the end to make it very clear my thoughts. It is clear here I support personal freedom and choice. So here is what I think happened, you have assumed what you think i am talking about and then got angry about that assumption. You did not really try to understand what I said and what I believe. I’m a fucking anarchist, you really think I want government nanny?
@Surplus
Even if Valya actually meant remove all processed foods, that doesn’t mean remove all prepared foods. “Processed foods” is generally understood to mean foods packed with preservatives and conditioners and other additives that are more difficult for the body to break down and filter out. But I interpreted his post as expressing frustration that a lot of people have only overly-processed foods as an option and not a call to ban them but to give more options.
You know, it’s okay to disagree with someone. You don’t have to go 110% on the doubling down and twist everything they say into some kind of personal attack against you using the most uncharitable reading possible. You might even be happier if you were to just like….have a civil conversation with someone about a topic you care about. But you always go in swinging both fists and even when people clarify themselves, you just want to hold onto your original interpretation and be angry about it. It might be good to ask yourself why that is.