But anorexics are OK? They are not stuffing their faces with little Debbies or anything else. Yet for some reason you probably think they are in your pocket too.You are being too judgmental. It is rude.
Perhaps you can shed some light on why, in 2010, when being thin and flat-bellied is more prized than at any previous time or place in the history of the world, such an enormous percentage of Americans have made the choice to be so much more obese than ever before?
You have made it clear that you consider yourself to have perfect clarity about the nature of obesity, so I’m sure you can provide this information, since the facts are so counter-intuitive.
Because they lack the willpower to seek a long-term goal without meandering off course, and instead turn back to the instant gratification of food and TV? Because they have a distorted perception of the costs of achieving such a goal?
Could you agree to a slight modification of that statement?
“Because they lack enough willpower to complete that particular goal (very significant weight loss) and turn back instead to less healthy life style choices? Because they had a distorted perception of the costs of achieving such a goal and were not prepared for the amount of support achieving it long term would actually require?”
If so we may be near a consensus.
You mean the same exact problems every other person in the world has?
That’s what pisses me off about it. The fact that people who are naturally thin, or only grew into being overweight for a short time and then lightened up, think that somehow their size makes them better than the other people. That’s why they insult people. All reasoning about how much it costs you only comes up as a rationalization of your irrational hatred.
This is made quite clear when citations show that your thinking is incorrect, and yet you won’t even acquiesce a little. You have a vested interest in keeping your fiction alive.
Honestly, I wonder if a non-bigoted world is even possible. It seems like people need at least one group to hate. One group that is not them, so it will be okay to treat them like subhumans.
It really disheartens me that whether insulting people is moral or ethical is actually up for debate.
BigT, if I ever see you insulting someone for their stupidity, can I link you back to this thread?
Are whiny people fat or are fat people whiny? Are fat people rude or are rude people fat? Why is it that it’s always a fat lady at the checkout counter complaining and making me late? Why is it always some fat couple with fat snotty nosed kids causing hell in the middle of Wal-Mart?
It could be a self-reinforcing view where you only notice it when it’s true, like Asians being bad drivers, or it could be socio-economic reasons like poor equals fat, equals entitlement issues, equals whiny annoying bad parent.
All I know is that generally when someone has an issue with a fat person or makes a comment about them, the issue is never about the weight they are carrying but more often about how they are treating people in general, or how they get along in “polite” society.
Its a lot easier to say “some fat bitch made me late” then to say “a lady held me up at the check out counter because she couldn’t figure why they wouldn’t let her buy cigarettes with her food stamps”
Confirmation bias. I’ve had coworkers make similar arguments about black customers, too. People are just assholes all around.
Okay, so say i agree its confirmation bias. Being fat is a convenient descriptor, like being white or black, or wearing a red shirt. If I’m explaining something to my friends and say “the black guy over there…” or “the fat guy over there… ” or “the guy in the red shirt over there…” am I engaging in hate speech in two out of three.
Say I had a truly negative interaction with them “that fucking black guy”, “that fat ass”, “that jack ass in the red shirt” is it one out of three, two out of three…
I could be at odds with the OP in defining this as private conversation rather than blanket stereotypes spoken to the public at loud, which I feel are never the right way to go, but if the OP is speaking of what our duties are as bystanders the only time we could ever have a say would be in day to day conversation.
If you read my other posts in this thread you’ll find that I agree that calling someone fat isn’t hate speech.
I was just pointing out that you were engaging in confirmation bias. 
No problem Melon, just devils advocating my own thoughts on the subject.
The point that you’d expect to be ripped a new one hereabouts if you said something like “Are Jewish people pushy or pushy people Jewish?”, or “Are Black people loud, or loud people Black?”, or any other similar statement about a wide variety of other groups, and that this is no different, is of course the most cogent one to make.
While I can’t speak to your “generally” world, in my real world people don’t make statements like that … at least not near me, at least not more than once … but we can deal with behavior on these boards as our examples. And hereabouts the “rudeness” of fat people that people insult them over is the fact that they are fat. And therefore weak, or lazy, or stupid, or all of those. And those examples have been given in past posts (see just a few up). OTOH Rand had, like you, claimed that only specific fat people were being reamed for very specific whining behaviors, for saying that it was “impossible” for them to lose weight. But he could not come up with even one example of that actually occurring. Can you? Again, I am sure it exists buried in there somewhere, but my searching finds no examples of it. Since you believe it is what “generally” occurs, then you should be able to find several examples very easily.
No one has complained about use of “fat” as a descriptor, as in “the fat guy over there in line” and if you believe someone has please show me where as well.
I think you miss the point of the question: if the nature of obesity is as simple as some would have it, we would expect it to remain relatively constant over time, so long as the availability of food remains the same,of course. Meaning, if obesity is exclusively an issue of choice, of some people just being weak-willed and indifferent to anything but momentary gratification- what explains the sudden burgeoning of such people? The distribution of personality types and human behavior doesn’t magically undergo a massive shift for no apparent reason, why has the last 20-30 years seen such a profound upsurge in people who just don’t give a fuck about their appearance? Something has to explain it.
And it requires explanation even more in light of the other “massive swelling” of the past 30 years, which is the massive swelling of interest in being not merely of average or normal weight, but in being particularly slim, with very flat bellies and very fit bodies. Common sense would lead to the expectation that in a society like that we would encounter even fewer people who choose obesity, not more.
I dislike the term “hate speech” so I am not going to use it.
If one is really tuning into the power of language, there’s information in all three statements. Yes, it’s convenient to use weight or race as an identifying descriptor when you are directing someone to see a particular person, but there’s a difference in the two examples you gave. In the earlier post you were talking about the way people describe people who aren’t in the room.
Among slim white people bitching about some asshole who created a problem for them, there’s no reason on earth to refer to the asshole’s weight or race, unless perhaps the problem was that the fat guy’s fat was a component to his assholery: did he sit on the slim white guy? And off the top of my head I can’t think of any reason at all that a person’s race would factor into their asshole behavior…well, maybe if they were making it an issue as part of their assholery.“Some asshole black guy whacked me with his picket sign asking for reparations for slavery.”
We don’t hear slim white people talking about “Some asshole in a red shirt was an asshole today.” Because the red shirt doesn’t make any difference, the asshole and his shirt are not in the room, and the wearing of a red shirt doesn’t tell us anything about the man’s behavior or who he is as a person…red shirts aren’t some kind of tip off to the fundamental assholishness of people.
But fat or race is included in stories about assholes nowhere in sight all the time. Why? Because it’s a subtle tipoff: I’m talking about those lazy, obnoxious, fucked up people, you know, the FAT kind. I’m talking about the lazy, obnoxious, violent, bad people, you know the BLACK/MEXICAN kind.
See it now?
I struggle with this when telling the story of how I got punched in the face by a complete stranger. I was walking down the street and a big, shambling, mumbling, [black…do I need to say black? Why?] man walked past me and punched me in the mouth. The parts that matter is that it was a man (I’m a woman) he was very large (I"m a big girl, but not big like that) he was shambling and mumbling (likely not right in the head or drunk, turned out both, and he also wasn’t moving fast, adding to the he must be crazy vibe.) and he punched me in the mouth and split my lip. The fact that he was black is meaningless, except that I’m white - he’s therefor different. And he was violent towards white female me… I try to be very aware of not describing him as black when I tell the story. Because that’s negative stereotyping in a subtle and very powerful way and I don’t want to do that.
What explains it is a massive upsurge in cheap, salty, fat-filled food. I’d also argue that differences in the sedintariness of the majority of jobs and the lull of the idiot box factor in hugely though I have no real cites for that. Though I’m sure some searching would show that TV viewership has been on a constant rise since its inception.
In a backwards way the focus on bodily perfection also puts pressure on those without perfect bodies to essentially follow the path of depression and food addiction. Humans aren’t real good with will. We tend to look for comfort where we can find it.
More to the OP, I’m a person who generally doesn’t have much sympathy for fat people. You CAN control your weight. Bottom line. I have a friend (a neighbor really) who just had gastric bypass surgery a few months ago. She was barely five feet tall and weighed almost 400lbs at 21 years old. On top of that her obesity gave her diabetes. How did she get that fat? She was fucking lazy. She had no medical disorder. No glandular problems. She just ate like a horse and never exercised. All this she’s admitted herself. Her excuse was that she started getting a little fat when she was in grade school. She got made fun of throughout school which she felt isolated her more and more and made her stay in and eat more and more. I have no doubt those pressures were quite real and that’s pretty much what caused her to get where she is. My difficulty comes in her choice in how to deal with those pressures and, due to her young age when she started to gain weight, her parents obvious obliviousness to her mental and physical health.
Now, I’ve never called her hateful fat related names but I’ve been extremely honest with her that she has the ultimate say on her health and that I feel no sympathy for her when she has a hard time walking up to her place on the third floor. In fact, my honesty was a major factor in her finally deciding to do something. Maybe I’m callous but that’s how that callousness effected her personality.
And when I’m in line somewhere, or stuck walking behind a wheezing, sweating lump of a person who is slowing me down I’m certainly thinking horrible things in my head about them but I generally keep them to myself so long as that person isn’t particularly rude. I don’t feel sympathy for them though. I guess, for the most part, I keep my “hate speech” in my head. Honestly I’m otherwise an extremely tolerant person in most regards. Fatness just gets me. The image of gluttony just gets to me and, really, probably gets me to release more vitriol than any other state a person can be in. All that being said if, as a bystander, I saw somebody tearing into a fat person with a tenor that goes far beyond a simple truth (say, “You’re having trouble walking up these stairs because you’re so fat”) and into purely trying to hurt that person emotionally I’d tell them to lay off.
But none of that would have any effect on the nature of the people involved. As you go on in your own post, the perception is that fat people “choose” it, and the failure to make a different “choice” says something about them. You used the word lazy. Others use different words, different conclusions, but all of it boils down to comments about the personality of the fat person: lazy, weak, self-indulgent, whatever. The abundance of cheap, salty, fatty food doesn’t relate to personality characteristics, nor does sedentary work or lots of television.
I am not disagreeing with the proposition that the food in our culture, the TV, the sedentary work have something to do with obesity, but I do not agree that obesity is a “choice” in the sense that you and so many other people would have it, either. That’s why I’m asking.
In other words, you and others are saying that obesity reflects some kind of deficiency of a person’s character, because if they had better/stronger characters, they would do whatever it takes to not be obese, and the fact that they don’t leaves them vulnerable to judgment for having such deficient characters.
Ok.
So, I ask again: what accounts for the rampant deficiency of character that we’ve seen in this country over the past 30 years, leading to so much obesity, and so much “super” obesity? If it bespeaks a deficiency of character to weigh 250 pounds, it must mean an even greater deficiency of character to weigh 300 or 400 pounds or more.
What in the world is happening to so many people’s characters, and why?
Do you have any idea why that is? (And if you are someone who desires less ignorance, you should follow some of the provided links to learn about “gluttony”)
And were you raised to believe that stating the obvious to strangers about a situation which is almost certainly painful and well understood to them, publicly, knowing that it would be embarrassing for them, is somehow acceptable?
capeo,
Your post tells much more than what it intended to tell, I think.
You note that
and that this neighbor of yours
You know that before adulthood she was already morbidly obese, something you blame not only on her having been ostracized for being a little chubby (at first) but also on “her parents obvious obliviousness to her mental and physical health” because, of course, any parent who isn’t oblivious would be able to reverse a child’s road to obesity and solve the social isolation and stigma that their child was experiencing.
You recognize our modern environment is highly obesogenic and I think that you’d acknowledge the cites given that the predisposition to become obese given that environment is at least half due to genetic and early environmental factors (prenatal and very early childhood).
Yet you still chalk up her morbid obesity at age 21 exclusively to her being “fucking lazy” and have that voice in your head when you are stuck behind “a wheezing, sweating lump of a person” that says “horrible things” and creates an “image of gluttony” which, from your comment about vitriol, offends you at some very core level, despite the fact that in general you are “an extremely tolerant person”. And I believe that you probably are. And that you’d not only not say something to an obese individual with the intent to insult them purely to hurt them emotionally, but that you’d even speak up if you saw what you perceived as that.
The disconnect from your understanding that societal disapproval and negative speech (even if felt by the speaker to merely be the “simple truth”) contributes to obesity, from your understanding that the roots go back to very early childhood, from your appreciation of the role our current environment plays in triggering obesity in those biologically predisposed, to your visceral negative response to seeing someone who is obese and your assumptions about their gluttony, is … interesting.
And telling I think about the attitudes that many have, a result I think of messages we have all learned form very early on and that logic and science cannot stand up to. You are an overall tolerant and obviously thoughtful person who means well, and who despite claims of no sympathy for your neighbor has obvious concern about her health and relief that she is doing something to help herself. You appreciate the broad environmental contributors (from the food around us, to the lack of activity built in to our lives, to the effect of social stigmatization exacerbating the problem), recognize the early childhood onset of the problem, and probably only needed to have the genetic/early life contributors to obesity predisposition pointed out to you, yet despite that even you cannot help but to think of the fat as lazy, gluttonous, with parents who must have been oblivious, and are well served by people unsolicitedly telling them “simple truths”. If you, with all that understanding and sensitivity, fall into those images, hear those horrible things as tapes playing in your head, and feel so personally offended by the presence of the obese around you, then it should be no surprise that those with less understanding and sensitivity feel similarly only with less restraint.
And god forbid you tell what part of town you were in because that may unnecessarily target poorer parts of town, or where you were at all because that could possibly stereotype the town in general. Now if the guy that punched you was drunk you could say that because that was his choice unless he had an alcohol addiction, but if he was crazy then you would be stereotyping people with mental health issues. Is being a man a significant part of the story? I have seen some large and powerful women who could probably throw a good punch.
As long as you are going to run all of your stories through your head and remove all possible offensive material before you tell them, you would be better off just saying, “a large person punched me in the face”
Or you could just tell the whole story and trust the people listening to the story to determine how the facts pertain to their own personal stereotypes, and yes we all have them.
sitchensis, so I take it you have no examples to substantiate what you believe is what “generally” occurs either.
Funny how many people are so sure what happens all the time (“generally”) and who can find no examples of that behavior on these boards. We see what we expect to see I guess, whether it is there or not.
Moving on then. Sort of. And sort of the same thing really. Obviously there are details told that just make a story interesting and there are details told that are noted because they confirm our biases.
If one always find it worth noting the race of someone when telling a story about an assault when the person who did the assault was Black but wouldn’t use race as a descriptor if the person was White, then one may be well served by asking why one is doing that. If one always adds in the descriptor of “fat” to a story about someone who was rude but wouldn’t note in the telling about that “thin asshole”, then one may be well served by asking why one is doing that as well.
Confirmation bias of extant stereotypes contributes not only to the observation but to the reporting as well.
Once again (and again and again), you are misunderstanding what it means to look at obesity from a public health perspective and from a personal perspective. The personal perspective hasn’t changed at all in the last 20-30 years–a person that is too fat got that way from consuming more calories than they burned, and can take off the weight in the same way. Thinking about the issue from a public health perspective doesn’t change that simple fact.