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I want to speak up in favour of r/fatpeooplehate. The various weight loss subreddits (such as loseit, keto, intermittentfasting) often have personal accounts of

I want to speak up in favour of r/fatpeooplehate. The various weight loss subreddits (such as loseit, keto, intermittentfasting) often have personal accounts of being undermined by family and friends when trying to follow orthodox medical advice. It is hard to avoid getting fat when family and friends are already fat and encouraging you to join them. sangharakshita (a Buddhist teacher) preached that the central problem of the spiritual life – for most people at least – is to find emotional equivalents for their intellectual understanding. That is wise and true. But if it is misunderstood as a restrictive claim (this is only a problem for spiritual life, for the rest of life intellectual understanding on its own suffices.) then it is dangerously misleading. It is not enough to understand calories in and calories out intellectually. You still have to cultivate the emotional strength needed to escape your own rationalisations, the rationalisations that other people push on you, and actually put down the fork. Much of today's USA thinks that it is OK to eat yourself into an early grave. Gluttony has become so accepted and endorsed that getting fat has become socially contagious. When people reject this, there is a phase of being angry: how did I get sucked into such a dysfunction social consensus? One chocolate bar at a time? Then what? r/fatpeoplehate is angry and anger is ugly, but it is also important and necessary. People want to escape the social consensus and, people being people, they cannot do that on intellect along. They need space to vent and be angry. You can see an example of fat-people-hate at https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/2075965/10239491 FPH is on the side of the people that it nominally hates. It wants people to change, to come to the light side of the plate. The people who banned r/fatpeooplehate don't literally have blood on their hands, that is not how type 2 diabetes works, but they ought to have gangrenous, amputated toes on their conscience.

etplayer 9y ago
Does one not think that there could have been a better way to encourage people to lose weight than to laugh at them, ridicule them and, to be honest, hate them? I'm not so sure if I consider your analysis to be a valid representation of the intentions of the people there, though I have little experience with the community itself, this model of "helping" people seems very alien to me, and contrary to what I had (intellecutally) understood to be how people behave on the Internet. I think also ultimately it is the choice of the person to find their encouragement, as much as it is very difficult. Diet communities are built around the idea of individual desire to improve (which is why posts like "Three weeks in and it's great!" get upvoted there) rather than having it 'forced' upon them.
- greenshackle2 9y ago
  I don't think he's saying it's supposed to help the people being laughed at - it's supposed to help the reader, by de-normalizing and shaming fatness, so they are motivated to become or stay thin. The target is collateral damage. I don't really buy it, it's transparently a post-hoc rationalization for a sub engaging in the age-old business of being nasty to low status people because it makes us feel good and superior. You can click on "view the rest on the comments" on that voat thread he linked to to see what's it's really all about.
unholiness 9y ago
Just so that people can get a fair view and not judge from a cherry-picked post, here's a link to the top part from this month[0]. It's a pretty broad sampling of: - Laughing at fat people - "I hate this bitch in this picture"-style hatred - A post literally pointed at the victim at Charlottesville, "exposing the truth" that she was fat, saying they "wonder why" she died. And in my memory, /r/fatpeoplehate was much more toxic than this at the time it was shut down. [0] https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/top?span=month https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/top?span=month

etplayer 9y ago

Does one not think that there could have been a better way to encourage people to lose weight than to laugh at them, ridicule them and, to be honest, hate them? I'm not so sure if I consider your analysis to be a valid representation of the intentions of the people there, though I have little experience with the community itself, this model of "helping" people seems very alien to me, and contrary to what I had (intellecutally) understood to be how people behave on the Internet. I think also ultimately it is the choice of the person to find their encouragement, as much as it is very difficult. Diet communities are built around the idea of individual desire to improve (which is why posts like "Three weeks in and it's great!" get upvoted there) rather than having it 'forced' upon them.

greenshackle2 9y ago
I don't think he's saying it's supposed to help the people being laughed at - it's supposed to help the reader, by de-normalizing and shaming fatness, so they are motivated to become or stay thin. The target is collateral damage. I don't really buy it, it's transparently a post-hoc rationalization for a sub engaging in the age-old business of being nasty to low status people because it makes us feel good and superior. You can click on "view the rest on the comments" on that voat thread he linked to to see what's it's really all about.

unholiness 9y ago

Just so that people can get a fair view and not judge from a cherry-picked post, here's a link to the top part from this month[0]. It's a pretty broad sampling of: - Laughing at fat people - "I hate this bitch in this picture"-style hatred - A post literally pointed at the victim at Charlottesville, "exposing the truth" that she was fat, saying they "wonder why" she died. And in my memory, /r/fatpeoplehate was much more toxic than this at the time it was shut down. [0] https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/top?span=month https://voat.co/v/fatpeoplehate/top?span=month