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 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.
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.
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.
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.
(Something, by the way, I would have been afforded as a dude, and that Pao would have surely been ridiculed for until the end of her career. It's sad that institutional forces have forced her to act "distant, even a bit robotic" in these situations.)
Maybe, what I should be asking, is where you are getting these ideas from. What makes you believe that men can burn bridges and women can't?
I agree, but we were discussing motive. It's not unfair to expect reddit's leadership to have some insight into its userbase.
If I took ownership of vogue tomorrow and introduced articles about bmx racing, that would be a dumb move. I could complain that the readership doesn't understand bmx racing - but ultimately I hurt the bottom line.
I'd disagree, the fatpeoplehate subreddit is basically the same thing as /r/trashy /r/cringeanarchy and other other popular subreddits that are regular fixtures on the popular page.
It's a thoroughly unpleasant website.
Once that boundary is set it all becomes a matter of the viewer's morality. You likely think that it's wrong to dislike (or at least not to coddle and treat them like they're wonderful snowflakes) people who let themselves go and even glorify obesity; they did not. What's relevant is that as long as a group keeps to its own circle I feel we have no standing in judging them because my moral values are no better or worse than theirs.
Er, not from what I remember. And even still, if a subreddit, even without meaning to, encourages real-life harassment, that's toxic. The fact that they had to keep banning people for being toxic leads me to the conclusion that it just drew toxic pieces of garbage.
There are plenty of ways to encourage someone to lose weight that don't involve typing the word "hate" when you want to get to a community discussing weight loss. Or you could recognize that people have the right to eat and be however they like, even if you don't like it. You have the right to be an asshole and point at them and tell them they're fat and going to die early, but Reddit has the right to prevent you from using their platform for doing that.
There was an interesting idea that I heard last week regarding the whole Charlottesville Nazi incident. It was something along the lines of the Paradox of Tolerance. Essentially, being tolerant of intolerance leads to intolerance. So, in order to keep tolerance alive, you have to snuff out intolerance, before it becomes systemic. You have to become intolerant of intolerance.
Ellen Pao is (ostensibly) intolerant of intolerance, and that, in and of itself, isn't a bad thing. I don't particularly like her, but enforcing Reddit's own rules was one of the better parts of her tenure at Reddit.
This view of Pao as an automatic victim is special pleading and ironically, denies her the agency of a full adult that feminists claim others refuse to grant women.
I have zero doubt that her gender/ethnicity was a major motivating factor for the majority of people involved in this backlash and that a white male in the same position would have pretty much gotten a pass from the same people.
/r/fatpeoplehate and /r/revengeporn where two incredibly toxic subreddits, and I was personally happy to see them go.