Charlie James critiques left-wing views on fitness and medicalization

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Full Transcript Well I tell you time flies, it's already September, um, and one of the goals that I had for this year was to increase my fitness. Get my overall fitness level up uh to a to a good sustainable level. So I've been, you know, been doing the walking, been trying to lift weights, although I've been slacking on that, I need to start hitting the weights a little bit harder, um because fitness, if you want to talk about longevity—let me tell you something, you guys, especially you men, you women, everybody out there that's getting a little bit of age on them, your legs, you have got to make sure that your legs are strong. There is, I mean, there is a correlation between aging and leg strength. And it, I'm not talking about, you know, being Mike O'Hearn and throwing 400 on a bar and doing squats. I'm just talking about maybe do maybe do wall squats, a good, get yourself an exercise ball, put it against the wall, do a squat, get your thighs down to about parallel or as close as you can, and do those. Do those three or four times a week, I'd say three times a week because you need to recover. Get those knees strong, those ankles strong, get the glutes engaged, get those hamstrings engaged. That will help you so much in your life. Increasing your fitness level, I don't care what age you are, fitness, you get one body. One body, that's it. You need to take care of it. Get that weight off, start eating right, exercising, get out there, get you a lot of fresh air, some good sunshine. Fitness is key to longevity. But, if you're a radical socialist, you believe fitness is actually fascism. Panelist: "We have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. It's not just that it's cringe or strategically bad—though it is, um—I think it's also politically revealing. Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable, to become more useful to the ruling order. What we all need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms. The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game. It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, the more dysgenic, the better, I think. Revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself, and erases the history of left struggles around the world." Charlie James: Yeah, the struggles around the world were won by the fittest. By the way, this woman is sitting on a socialist panel, both of them—she's wearing a mask, looks like she hasn't seen the sun in a long time, the guy next to her, also wearing a mask, morbidly obese. And they're talking about how fitness is fascism. Oh, you wait! You wait until socialism/communism comes! Oh, you're gonna love it! You're gonna find out what that hammer and sickle actually means. It means you either work on the farm or in the factory, and the government, the government owns both of them. No more sitting around with your little laptop, ticky-tack all day long, no more coming up with fancy little smancy words. Those are gonna be gone, and you're gonna be working. You're gonna be working for the man. You're gonna be working for what you just described as, you know, the ruling class. Yes, communism, socialism, both have ruling classes. So, fine, good, don't! Don't go to the gym! Don't exercise! Don't do any of that. We'll take care of that part. You keep writing your blogs and having your stupid little podcasts and having your little symposia. And we'll see who ultimately prevails. Pretty amazing. There's something going on out there right now that you're not gonna believe. Um, do you know what's cool now? You know what's—and this kind of ties into what we were just talking about—having a disability is now cool. There are people out there—do you know that canes, listen to this, cane sales are up! The sale of canes is up. There are people out there walking around with canes th ...

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