this shit is as embarrassing as it is chilling and that's never good.

being obese is unhealthy, full stop. it doesn't make you a bad person or deserving of abuse but you will die sooner.

I will go beyond criticizing this as 'problematic'.  At a much more basic level, people should share mutual obligations to their friends and family.  A lot of the discourse is driven by people with toxic family members and the like, but this is a minority of human relationships and should not inform the general vocabulary.  You should not cull the various bores who make up your friends and family (with the exception of abusive relationships) but be devoted and loyal.

the neoliberal anglosaxon mind is truly something horrifying

What about the materialist conditions that produce even the abusive? A person getting away from them is good. But what about the abuse those people likely experienced, often beyond what any of us can imagine, that made them abusive?

In this public News Brief, we discuss a recent advice column in the New York Times advocating upwardly mobile professionals dump their fat and depressed friends and how it's part of a much broader trend of pop sociology repackaging cruelty and soft eugenics as "science-driven" self improvement.

News Brief: The Casual Soft Eugenics of Self-Help "Friendscaping" Content

Citations Needed is a podcast about the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. It is hosted by Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, and produced by Florence Barrau-Adams.

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