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[Frumple]

We've got a few that speak pretty cheerfully about regular heavy drinking. Call it alcoholism and you might get a different response out of 'em, but framing doesn't change the act itself, nor what it leads to.

[Reelya]

Poking around at some obesity research, and got reminded they also fall back on cultural relativism. Some cultures like obese people, and since all cultures are equal, obese people are also equal in every way, including health. So thinking obese people are unhealthy is also racist, too boot, and you don't want to be in with those dirty racists, do you?

Listing all the logical fallacies in the above statement would be much longer than the actual statement.

[scriver]

-snip-

Sure, and you're tilting at a bit of a windmill here. What I'm saying is, you care a lot about making this about who's at fault. It just seems more reasonable to me to say to people, "Yeah, you got fucked, and that sucks, but nobody owes you a solution and you're the only one who can fix it, and none of that's changed by how much you deserve a solution". Both you and the person trying to change the ideals and portray it as being wholly outside of their control are way too hung up on what people deserve, because you think it matters for some reason.

Thing is, it seems reasonable to me to qualify as "you got fucked" the psychological problems that lead people to eat compulsively or as a cheap sort of self-medication. Ditto the metabolism efficiency that can make one person gain weight on the same diet another loses weight on, because it screws with the "Calories out" part of the usual simplistic motto. And it doesn't seem fair to me to say that if two people make the same decisions, one should be called irresponsible and the other responsible based solely on the outcome.

I could go on, but it doesn't really matter what I think is fair or what you think is fair. Reality doesn't give a shit. So what, exactly, do you think victim-blaming is going to accomplish, here? Other than to make you feel good for being smart and objective and rational. And other than making the other people in your tribe feel good when they hear you and think to themselves, "Yeah, this guy gets it." Is it going to help you convince people who don't already agree? Is it going to motivate people to change their behavior? Has that literally ever happened?

Or is it just going to convince people that you're an asshole who doesn't really want to help, and whose words should therefore be disregarded? Because it doesn't matter what you think is fair. It doesn't matter how many facts you have. If you're going to give people an emotional motivation to do the wrong thing, you've misunderstood how facts are supposed to be used, and are unfairly inflating your ego.

+1 agreement

On a related topic, some things that annoy me a lot about discussions on this is the confusion of labels at work here. For example, "fat" as a word covers just about everything from and including pudgy to super obese blobage. So when people say "you can be fat and healthy at the same time they're not necessarily saying "people can be obese and still healthy", but there always seem to be people who refuse to not interpret it that way. And you can definitely be healthy and fat at the same time, particularly if "fat" includes people like this girl. Which is from an Australian documentary I had on in the background one or two weeks ago, and was their example of a "fat" person who was also healthy. Which is pretty ridiculous because to me she isn't fat at all, I'm just bringing it up because it shows the huge breadth (hurr hurr) of what the label "fat" could mean.

[TempAcc]

The generalistic usage of "fat" is maliciously employed on both ends of the argument. There are hilariously large people (altough we're talking about tumblr tier people here) who use the phrase "you can be fat and healthy" in a way that "fat" can (and often does) actualy means obese and anything that isn't anorexic. Then there's those people who use "fat" to point to anyone who is slighly larger than Michael Jackson's dead body.

EDIT: added something to the second paragraph because I actualy forgot to type it, pls forgiv

[Neonivek]

The generalistic usage of "fat" is maliciously employed on both ends of the argument. There are hilariously large people (altough we're talking about tumblr tier people here) who use the phrase "you can be fat and healthy" in a way that "fat" can (and often does) actualy means obese. Then there's those people who use "fat" to point to anyone who is slighly larger than Michael Jackson's dead body.

To me, someone being Fat should ONLY refer to someone being Obese or greater... Period

Anything else is just outright name calling.

It doesn't help that, generally speaking, society is INCREDIBLY sizist. To the extent where the number of fat people on TV who aren't the target of ridicule could be counted on one hand.

I mean there was Agent Wallice from Smallville who I am ASTOUNDED they actually had an actress who wasn't thin play her... and she was as badass as she needed to be. (By the way guess what! the DC reboot made her super thin again... Because even DC hates fat people again)

[Helgoland]

We've got a few that speak pretty cheerfully about regular heavy drinking. Call it alcoholism and you might get a different response out of 'em, but framing doesn't change the act itself, nor what it leads to.

If you want to make that analogy, heavy drinking would correspond to eating big meals, or unhealthy food, or whatever. Only alcoholism proper - and that's not a term that should be used lightly, since it's a very serious illness on par with or even surpassing heroin addiction - would correspond to clinical obesity. Nobody in the drunk thread would condone continuous heavy drinking if it leads to health problems or if there's a family history of alcoholism.

[Frumple]

... except yoink, at the least.

[Eric Blank]

WTF: We've been arguing about being/getting/accepting/denying being fat/its related health issues and so on and so forth for four pages.

You guys really know how to internet argument.

[Aklyon]

4 default pages or longer ones?

[Eric Blank]

default, though 60 straight posts worth of argument is a known carcinogen in the state of California. (along with literally everything else)

[Sergarr]

It seems that my latest light bulb accidentally an artifact. By my vague estimation, it has already outlasted all the previous ones and shows no signs of stopping. Wonder if someone added too much wolfram to the wiring inside or something.

It's an incandescent light-bulb. These ones are usually not that long-lived.

Aaaaaand it just broke. Figures.

[IcyTea31]

Did it break on its own, or by some external force? Both possibilities strike me as WTF-worthy.

[Akura]

How to not put out a fire you have accidentaly started.

I already had my fill of stupid today even before watching this*. And the second video on the list is "10 steamers get swatted live"**.

I've already seen a major 3-car accident today. Then just before getting home, there was some idiot teenage doing stupid things on his bike, while replying to his friends' calls to stop that that's dangerous with "I don't care!".

*The starting of the fire. While his response to the fire was not smart, fire tends to make "oh shit" that last rational thought someone has before fight-or-flight kicks in. It seems he couldn't decide between fight or flight. Also, according to one of the comments on that video, a female neighbor of his died in the fire.

**Swatting is the act of someone, presumably a losing player of an online game, looking up an opponent's location, then calling the police on them. This is a stupid, dangerous thing to do.

[Sergarr]

Did it break on its own, or by some external force? Both possibilities strike me as WTF-worthy.

Well, I may have chosen the wrong word. It flashed with a blue electrical spark and stopped working when I tried turning it on. It didn't, like, explode or anything like that.

[Zangi]

google 'chrome' on yahoo [..] bing]

you mean search, right?

google is a company

google is also a verb.

I use google way too much.