I HTAE TYPOS! 
Jesus Christ on a crutch you all are petty. Or is that word no longer accepted here?
Calling someone fat is just as insulting as calling someone a slut or calling someone stupid. An insult is an insult. Are you proposing to do away with all insults? Christ! Grow some thicker skin because it’s a big bad world out there and EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO THEIR OWN OPINIONS! If I think someone is stupid does that make me a bad person? If I think someone is fat does that make me a bad person? In both cases (fat and stupid) you can quantify whether or not a person is one or the other via the scale or an IQ test. Let me restate AN INSULT IS AN INSULT.
I agree with Mouthbreather and Gary on this one.
a) IQ tests measure nothing except your ability to do IQ tests. There is no objective measure of “stupidity”
b) Replace the word “fat” with the word “gay” in your missive above and read it again.
pan
“Gay” i8s not a bad word, neither is “fat.” It’s all in context. “Fatty,” on the other hand, is just plain rude, kinda like “fag.”
ai dolor! get off your high horse, already, redboss. speaking as a fat man, i personally find gobear’s repetitive, sanctimonious shilling re: a ‘healthy’ lifestyle to be far more tiresome than the random ‘fatty’ epithet.
gobear, exactly how fat were you before you hit the gym and started eating nothing but egg whites and chicken breast? sheesh, give it a rest.
i also wish to point out that the soapbox types in this here thread haven’t addressed the double standard of ‘bitch/slut’ adequately, to my mind.
im going camping now, but tonight we’re gonna drive up and out of our land in placerville to grab a big ol rack of ribs at poor red’s, home of the golden cadillac. as i strip the piggy, luscious flesh from them big bones, i’ll raise my glass to dopers everywhere. salud!
Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. If you bothered to read my entire post, I am against coercing, shaming or picking on heavy folks. I have always said being fit is what counts, not waist size. and who said I eat nothing but egg whites and chicken breasts? One of the benefits of exercising is eating a big ol’ pizza now and again and not worrying about it showing on my waist the next day.
If your weight causes you no problems, then why worry about my post? Live and be well!
BTW, one of the reason I push a healthy lifestyle is that I have been on the other side of the fence. I come from a fat family, and I porked considerably in Korea from too much beer and not enough activity. I know what I’m talking about.
I have a feeling I that I really should stay out of this, but…
The two posts were in The Pit, where insults are common and acceptable, within limits.
Is it acceptable to call a person a slut and unacceptable to call a person a fat slut? Get real.
As has been pointed out a number of times, selfish and slovenly behavior were the subject of the two rants, not “fat people”.
“Victim of this, victim of that
Your Daddy’s too skinny and your Mama’s too fat
Get over it !” by The Eagles.
Welcome to SDMB, MusicMistress.
JFTR, I was unhealthily skinny until about two years ago, and have put on a degree of weight that would be fine if it had more muscle and less adipose tissue (I need to do some exercising).
My wife, while small-boned, has always had a slight tendency to overweight, particularly in a slight paunch that is present even when she is at her most slender – think of a child drawing of an oval torso with stick-figure limbs and you have a caricature of her at lowest weight.
I told her over a quarter century ago when we married that I would never criticize her weight on aesthetic grounds, but that I did reserve the right to nag her if her weight gain began affecting her health. (And nagging it would be.)
When she, at 5’3", got up over 200 pounds, she began having achy limbs (partly due to a mild fibromyalgic condition, but IMHO and IHerHO also partly due to weight) and rapid fatigue. I reminded her of my promise and said she needed to lose some weight. She agreed and complied, and feels much healthier (though she too needs to improve her muscle tone, for her own health).
It would be very wise if people who find heavily built people repulsive or in other ways lacking made the distinction between natural body build and excess weight gain due to unhealthy lifestyle. The latter is correctible; the former is not.
It would also be wise if they recognized that nobody died and left them judge of other people’s lives. That, however, may be too much to ask.
You think so? I’ve always thought that he seemed sincere in his concerns for the health problems that come from an unhealthy lifestyle, and firm in his conviction about not ridiculing people for their weight.
A) Whatever. My point is that you can quantify stupidity to some degree. Just the same way you can quantify being fat to some degree. Are all fat people obese? NO. Don’t nit-pick semantics because everyone has a different concept of what it is to be fat as well as stupidity.
B) How does this change my argument? Both of the words I listed (fat and stupid) are offensive. My point was why is there a double standard?
John Carter of Mars is right on the money on this topic. It sounds like the complainers are trying to be victims. This is the Pit.
If you want to do away with insulting words, you have to do away with them all, otherwise you are being hypocritical.
You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
There is a whole thread in IMHO dedicated to the stupid things that students have done. (just for the record, I have read and enjoyed that thread, this is not a flame of anyone posting there) Cite after cite of kids saying or doing stupid things, all out there for our amusement. Kid after kid who are just trying their best to understand displayed for our ridicule. Whole classes of children (and teachers, too) are described as erupting in laughter at these foolish comments.
Is anybody anywhere around here saying that it was wrong to laugh at this stupidity? Is it wrong for us to laugh at the stories? Of course not, because WE are the intelligentsia of the SDMB, and nobody laughs at our intellect.
If someone were to mention how in highschool some fat kid got laughed at in the boys locker room, that would be a sad, sad, story, wounding the poor kid’s psyche. We would all talk about how cruel children are, and how evil the gym teacher was to join in. Laugh at the class dunce and we can all laugh about it, because he’s just a dope, and we’re not.
OK, so let me get this straight.
“Pit Etiquette”, volume 1.
Q. I don’t like someone and I really want to show it. What terms of abuse are acceptable?
A. Consult the handy list below!
“Goat-felcher” OK
“Motherfucker” OK
“JDT-lover” OK
“Satan’s spawn from everlasting Hell” OK
“Shit-eating necrophiliac son of a goat-felching whore” OK
“Fat” ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT OK
“Slut” Only OK if you’re obviously not using it to refer to sexuality, only cleanliness (no one can decide this except the person using the insult)
I think I got it now.
Oh shit, no wonder I didn’t understand. I have vol 2…
But there is a little bit of a difference there. We’ve all said and done stupid things in our life, but we haven’t all experienced the humiliation of being singled out and publicly ridiculed because of something that they are all too aware of.
I found the stupid student thread funny because I can see myself or someone I know in almost all of those posts.
I’m afraid, Redboss, you goat-felching son of Richard Nixon, that I will use any terms of insult I damn well please. Insults fly pretty thick on this board, especially The Pit, and I see no reason why fat should be verboten as a perjorative.
I read BBJ’s post, and I saw nothing wrong with it. There are plenty of fat, selfish jerks who NEED to be told they are fat, selfish jerks. A dose of reality is saluatory for us all.
As someone who is at least 30 pounds overweight and is even now fighting the temptation to raid (with permission) the boss’ chocolate supply, I can tell you this: Fat is neither beautiful (try standing next to Cindy Crawford or Hugh Grant and see how many people of the opposite sex, or gays for that matter, will pick you over the other) nor healthful (this is The Straight Dope and one would think all the realms of medical evidence indicating the problems of obesity would count for something).
Those people who are fat because of genuine medical problems deserve our compassion. The rest of the fat people need to eat less and drag themselves away from their TV’s and computers to get some exercise.
Don’t worry Liquid, kabbes didn’t like my opinion in this thread either…
Is $cientologist acceptable?
fer cryin out loud.
I read both pit rants. In both cases, the OP described the target of their derision in certain ways. They described the specific behavior that they disliked, gave a gender, gave some hint as to age (one was a teen, the other an adult) and used the descriptive term fat.
Now as far as I’m concerned here’s the fuckin’ criteria:
-
If it describes the reason for why you’re ranting, include it. This would involve the description of behavior that warrented the rant.
-
If it makes it a bit easier for all of us to talk about the issue, include it. This means include the gender. It’s awkward as all hell to keep on saying he/she or ‘one’ when some one knows the gender involved. If the English language had some genderless pronoun that denoted a human, then we could forego the gender item.
-
If it gives us additional essential information about why the behavior is pissin’ us off, include it. This would include (in most cases) age (since if it’s a toddler we have a different level of expectations than for a teen - ‘gee why isn’t Timmy out working’ well Timmy’s only 18 months old)
I fail to see how the descriptive term ‘fat’ gave us additional essential information about the rant. I suspect that in each case, had the object of derision been skinny, the derision wouldn’t have been one iota less.
That was why I felt (and still feel) that in both cases (**BBJ’s ** in particular since she went on and on about how much he ate. One began to wonder how much time she spent at work clocking this guys eating habits) the item was included as an additional derisive piece.
Haven’t seen anything from either OP to suggest that assesment is incorrect. They failed to note, for example, racial background, religion, what color eyes the person had, what color hair, if they were left handed or right handed, long hair or short, facial hair etc. All of those are additional descriptive pieces of information. Why was ‘fat’ necessary if not as an additional flame? Again, if we believe what the OP’s posted afterward, it was the behavior of the person in question that made them angry.
Poly of course is right - tho I’d have phrased it ‘who the fuck died and made you king?’
My objection to using “fat” as an insult is that it so rarely has anything to do with what’s being included in the rant. “Stupid” usually does, especially when you’re ranting about another person’s behavior that falls short of the ability to pour water out of a boot before putting it on (“You didn’t come to any classes, you flunked all the tests, and now you want me to pass you? Here’s your boot, mister.”). “Slut” is iffy, especially with the ambiguous meaning.
The selfish jerk’s fat did not take all those extra donuts, he did. The lazy brother of a roommate is not held captive by his fat; he just won’t do what’s necessary to be a reliable housemate.
It just seems to me like it’s an unthinking, unnecessary lagniappe for a rant that would be much sharper if the writer stuck to what the person did rather than an unassociated trait the writer also dislikes - especially when that trait is prevalent in other people who have done no wrong. If the writer wants us to join in with sympathy, they’ll be better off sticking to the topic at hand.
Yes, that applies to other insults, and yes, we should be consistent, but traits like “can’t pour water out of a boot” and “hasn’t dragged a comb through her hair in a week” are pretty much always insulting. “Eats too much and doesn’t exercise enough” strikes me as being not so much that way.
Redboss, thank you. While there are some strong arguments against what you’ve said here, I greatly appreciate the sentiment. For the rest of the rant-writers, please understand that I’m more likely to read your complaints with sympathy if you drop the unnecessary and unrelated fat insults.