• zippythezigzag@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    I thought it was"fat". It almost seems like she’d be mad at any term that describes her as she is, like as if she is ashamed to be something thats completely within her control not to be.

    • FiveMacs@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Bingo…you won yourself a hamburger. Not from mcshits though, they want to be a luxury food so no one but the Uber elite should spend money there going forward. Plus their salt patties are nasty

  • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I forget what comedian said it, but if you’re discussing two words and you cannot even say anything except the first letter of one of the words, that’s the worse word.

  • thesporkeffect@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    As always - if you’re saying a word is comparable to the n-word, and you are able to use your word in public as a non-black person, it’s not like the n-word

    • Otkaz@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Wasn’t really all that long ago when non-black people very commonly used that word in public and probably still so in certain communities. Having said that, obese is a medical term and I don’t think it compares in anyway to the n-word.

        • MutilationWave@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Definitely did not. I grew up in West Virginia and idiot rednecks used it before and after the OJ trial. Decent people did not before or after.

          I mean like way before they did, but they weren’t decent then.

      • GiantChickDicks@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Absolutely. I moved from urban Southeastern Wisconsin to the upper peninsula of Michigan in a rural area. I love visiting that spot, and I got a job offer five years ago while on vacation. I snatched the opportunity to move to my favorite place and uprooted my life in under two months. I didn’t last two years before coming back.

        The amount of times I got into verbal altercations with strangers and acquaintances over their use of racial slurs, most often the N-word, made me become a homebody. I was a bartender, though, so you can’t exactly hide.

        That’s not to say I haven’t heard it in public all throughout Wisconsin. The difference was how comfortable people felt using these words and sharing openly racist views and stories like they were bragging about it. It felt like an area where people breathed a sigh of relief and took their hoods off. I couldn’t stomach staying in a place where certain friends of mine couldn’t comfortably visit.

        Still, all that is nothing compared to what I saw and heard living in Tennessee. It’s sad and frightening how many communities are like this.

    • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Frankly that’s something I do not understand. Why this single specific word? We have dozens of terrible offensive words. Why this specific one is considered so bad we cannot even talk about it directly, even when merely discussing it? I would think discussing it and not directing it at someone would be pretty reasonable. As with every single other word.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          In my opinion, the intellectually disabled too. Unfortunately, many people make all kinds of excuses why that word, which has been used to bully the disabled for decades, is an acceptable one.

          • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            To my non-American ears “negro” sounds far worse actually. Probably because of how rare it is in comparison.

            • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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              4 months ago

              It was used in place of black for a longer period, and wasn’t necessarily considered a slur in and of itself. But of course if you say it with a sneer, even “black” can be used as an insult.

              For example a lot of books (even written by people of color) used “negro” and “coloured” etc. interchangeably up to the mid-late 20th century. But in modern context very few people use it in a manner that isn’t derogatory.

              • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                I still have trouble referring to a person as ‘black’. It feels like a slur, or at least an inappropriate racial caricature (they’re not really black!) and it still surprises me that it’s become the acceptable and inoffensive term.

                The n word almost seemed more mild, being about the same thing (an inappropriate way to describe race from skin colour), but linguistically removed (I’m not a native Latin speaker*) so I can feel it’s just a word, no need to be intrinsically good or bad.

                • Or Spanish, whatever
                • orphiebaby@lemm.ee
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                  4 months ago

                  From my experience, black people want to be called black. I’m a white kid, but was raised in a foster family with three black siblings and other black family, including some that lived in a ghetto in another city. It was the 90s and early 2000s, so we watched some BET, we watched the Boondocks, we listened to thug rap, we watched shows with black characters such as All That and Cousin Skeeter. Because it was all a part of my brothers’ culture, and they felt attached to it, and “black culture” was cool to all of us. And in anything we participated in I’ve never heard a single African-American who didn’t call themselves “black” and be fine being called that. Maybe there are some rich people like Obama or Tom of The Boondocks who wouldn’t call themselves “black”, but they seem to be of a different lifestyle and culture than that.

                  I’ve also sometimes made the argument in defense of “black”, that “African-American” is mildly politically-incorrect itself— not that I have a problem with the term, just the hyper-vigilant enforcing of it. Because it’s not synonymous with skin color itself, it’s a statement about where they came from. We don’t call white people “European-Americans”; and what do we call non-black African-Americans from, say, Egypt or South America? So… yeah.

            • I'm back on my BS 🤪@lemmy.autism.place
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              4 months ago

              To my Hispanic ears, “n—o” sounds like an Anglophone saying “black”. Even when used derogatorily, my immediate first thought is that they pronounced it incorrectly, then the rest of the associated matters kick in and I realize what they are really saying.

              Imagine if in the Hispanosphere , the word “black” was almost synonymous with the n-word.

              But yeah, don’t use n—o in English to refer to or describe anyone.

          • Lemminary@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            It’s weird being told that a regular color in your native language could get you beat up to a pulp in another country.

        • TheEntity@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Probably no, not in this specific form, that being said I don’t want to compare one tragedy to another. There are lots of disgusting parts of the human history, and that’s certainly one of them.

          • JoeBigelow@lemmy.ca
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            4 months ago

            The only equivalent I can think of starts with k and is a slur for Jewish people, and it’s much less commonly heard.

              • Nutteman@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                We killed them and displaced the rest so damn fast that we forgot all the major slurs for them

              • Juniper (she/her) 🫐@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                4 months ago

                “Savages”, "Redskins”, “Squaw”, and so on.

                Some news headlines even refer to the second one as “the R-word”:

                CNN: The terrible R-word that football needed to lose

                Politico: The R-Word Is Even Worse Than You Think

                These are extremely harmful words with hundreds of years of genocide behind them. I imagine the only reason they aren’t censored like the N-word is is because Native Americans make up a proportionally smaller population due to the effectiveness of the genocide, and because the reservation system is in contrast to racial integration as with American black people in so much as it limits interactions between them and racist whites who would overuse a dehumanizing phrase to the same extent.

            • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Ironically enough, that word was coined by Jewish people who had been in the US for generations to describe newly-arrived Jews from Eastern Europe. Still offensive but somewhat different from the n-word.

      • Klear@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Non-American here. I also didn’t get this, thinking it’s just puritanical bullshit. Some Americans seem obsessed with auto-censorship.

        Anyway, I finally understood while watching Django Unchained. It’s an extremely dehumanising word, meant to separate people (who have rights) from things which do not. It’s a tool to be able to do this distinction and then do unspeakable evil to specific people because they don’t count as people and so it’s alright.

        Now remember that slavery was ended* only relatively recently, segregation was a thing during the lifetimes of many people and this mindset of black people not being even human is still prevalent…

        The word is meant to be always used in hostility and it’s still being used like that today. That’s why you want to steer clear of it.

        • BluJay320@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 months ago

          I think a lot of the conflict around the word is centered on the fact that many black people use it (obviously without the hard r) in casual reference to other people, often even people that aren’t black. It’s essentially become equivalent to “dude” or “brother”. So some people don’t see how it’s wrong to use it in that context even if you aren’t black.

          I’m not saying I agree, mind you. I’m just making an observation

    • TheV2@programming.dev
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      4 months ago

      No, you’re thinking about a different scenario. What matters is not if you are black, but if you are the target of the word you are comparing to the n-word.

      She, as an obese person herself, proposed that “obese” is equivalent to the n-word. She didn’t censor her word the same way a black person doesn’t have to censor the n-word. That’s not a contradiction. It would be, if she wasn’t obese.

      Not that I care about the actual point, just wanted to talk about the logic. My bad, if my assumption that she is obese, is wrong.

      • teegus@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Sooo you’re saying it’s understandable for someone with a PhD to not have basic common knowledge?

        • AWTM_James@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          I mean, sure. As someone who recently went back to school and is around a bunch of PhD and PhD students, they’re really, really smart… about their specific area of study. But more than some of them are fucking stupid when it comes to other, normal things

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Ok I looked her up, I had to know.

        She’s a “fat-affirming” dietitian and her PhD is in “body positive medicine”

        Her name is a blatant pun.

        I don’t think I’m reaching when I say not only is the account fake, this person doesn’t exist, but that it was made to make fun of fat people.

    • AWTM_James@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Also, I don’t agree with the OP and think it’s fucking dumb, but let’s not forget that “retard” used to be a medical term as well

      • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That’s the way these things have always gone and probably always will. Retarded, imbecile, idiot, these were all effectively clinical terms (or whatever best approximated clinical practice in their eras) - they didn’t hold an insulting intention initially. People co-opted the terms to make fun of each other, as we do, and so professionals had to shift the clinical vocabulary so they weren’t using commonly hurled insults when discussing patients. And that means new words people can use to make fun of each other, yay! Which of course they did, necessitating another rotation. Pretty hilarious if you ask me.

        The most recent example in my own life - my wife is in her mid 30s, and is pregnant - some medical professionals call this a “geriatric pregnancy”! But because some folks are getting offended by that term, they’re starting to use “advanced maternal age pregnancy”. Bit of a mouthful, I think they’ll get to keep that one.

        Anyway. Carlin had a great bit on this phenomena, he’s the one who pointed it out to me.

      • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        As was “negro” - and that’s kinda the point; just because a word is “official” doesn’t make it not discriminatory, just that the discrimination was backed by the power of institutions.

        I don’t 100% buy the argument that the two words are equivalent, but I can see how “oh you can’t come here you are obese” could feel similarly arbitrary as “oh you can’t come here you are black”

        • anivia@lemmy.ml
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          That comparison is so bad that I’m not sure you are making it in good faith. Being mentally handicapped or belonging to a minority is not a choice, being obese is.

          If you make the conscious choice to be obese you really can’t complain about the consequences the same way the former can. And you especially can’t complain about people referring to you by the medically correct term

  • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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    4 months ago

    Despite popular believe, people doesn’t and can’t suddenly turn black as they pleased, while body weight is something you can at least control through dedication.

    Until next time ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

    • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Yep, the same way people can take full control of their depression, alcoholism or other psycological issues. It’s all about just rolling up those sleeves and deciding not to have the issues. So we can safely assume that all heavier people are a result of them actively choosing to become heavy, so we should always treat them as such.

      • NightShot@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Just because something is hard doesn’t mean your out of control. And I know hard - nothing comes easy…

        • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          There are a variety of reasons, and of course there exists people who are in full control of their weight, but decide to not do anything about it. What I’m hinting at is that there are also a lot of people who suffer with deeper psycological issues. We don’t really tease depressed people with nick names and expect them to just snap out of it at any time. Hence I feel like we should generally treat heavier people with respect instead of assuming that it’s their active choice.

          • NightShot@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I don’t really think there is anyone with full control of their weight.

            I wouldn’t call obese a nickname - fat would be the equivelent of the n-word

            You can’t be 300-400 lbs and not call it an active choice…

      • swampwitch@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I mean medical intervention is a common way to try mitigate mental health issues. For many people it can never truly go away, but the effects can be lessened. Similarly, there are avenues to help with obesity, whether it be the psychological or physiological aspect.

      • DillyDaily@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        At the end of the day, alcoholism, depression, and obesity, they are unhealthy states of being.

        They are not something people choose, and while there are treatments, it’s not something everyone can control.

        That doesn’t mean we should simply accept this state of being. People living with depression deserve better, people living with alcoholism deserve better than for us to say “it’s out of their control, they can’t help it, so we shouldn’t judge, let them be” when what they need is better support and better treatment options.

        Likewise, obese people deserve better than “eat less, move more, fatty!” but they also deserve more than “all bodies are beautiful, just let us be”

        I say this as someone who was a fat kid, and a fat teen, and a fat adult. I had a BMI of 50 for a most of my life. In my mid 30s, I got it down to 28, and still going.

        So I say all of this is as someone else who was fat, obese, and morbidly obese. Obesity should be viewed the same way we view depression and anxiety, though depression and anxiety also need some better PR.

        Being obese may not not always be a choice, but the the ultimate end goal of how we view obesity as a state of being is to find ways we can all manage our weight. Because obesity is not healthy, for those who can’t easily control their weight, life sucks, they are patients in need of treatment, not morally failing people, but also not “perfect plus sized activists who are healthy at every size”

        Because while bodies and sizes vary and we can do healthy things at every size. Obesity is inherently unhealthy. Obviously being bullied won’t solve anything, but neither will society politely ignoring how hard it is to live a full life while suffering from obesity.

        Being black isn’t an inherent health issue. It genuinely is just a different state of being. 99% of problems unique to black people are social issues, not medical issues… So the comparison between obesity and substance abuse issues is more helpful than trying to compare being obese to being BIPOC.

        • DrFuggles@feddit.org
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          4 months ago

          Congrats on your weight loss journey! May I ask if there was a specific thing that motivated you to start and keep going? And how did you turn your mindset around?

          • rekorse@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            For me it was understanding the idea of equilibrium. The way I use it is to mean the state of something given enough time that highs and lows have evened out.

            A practical example is with common diet mentality of dieting until reaching a goal, and then stopping the diet. The diet is a peak, not dieting is a valley, over time youll end up back at the same weight or more. Basically the problem is that modern diets give people high expectations when studies show the most likely scenario is that the weight is lost, and gained back plus some.

            So what will work. If we think of this long term equilibrium, the dieting doesnt work because they aren’t permanent changes. So if we agree the only way to stay healthy long term is to make permanent changes, we can agree that making cumulative small permanent changes that affect diet will ultimately result in lost weight.

            Sugar is the easiest to target IMO. Dairy, meat, and fish also are good things to target too as they cause other health problems besides weight gain. Switching to mainly water is another thing. Even taking on a new hobby or exercising a slight bit more will result in a net loss as less time is able to be spent on eating and more energy is spent physically.

            Plant based whole food diets usually result in weight loss because they are less calorie dense, so you will feel full with a fraction of the calories in your stomach. Alternatively you can lose weight with calorie dense foods, but you will likely have to deal with hunger more.

            Once I started thinking more like this, it was easier to come up with my own changes rather than shopping around diets with absurd restrictions. You know yourself best, make small changes and keep trending in a good direction, and if you make a “mistake” do your best to forget about it and immediately get back to it.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Not him, but I found my will to lose weight when a close family member was told their liver was failing and they had a few months to live, due to cirrhosis from their obesity. I knew I was on a similar trajectory and my bloodwork showed a hit to my liver function.

            Good news is that my relative also found the will to get healthy and their liver improved more than the doctors thought could happen and so we both are doing much better. I’m even under 25 BMI now after losing 40 lbs. Also amazing to be able to move around like I used to as a teenager again.

            As to how, not very helpful but just using that fear to drive willpower to just suck it up and eat less and exercise even when I really want to be doing something else. It means to some extent just living with usually being a little hungry and almost never filling full for me. Changed the food for less calorie dense stuff and avoiding refined sugars of course, but still have to reduce food intake.

      • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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        4 months ago

        Are you claiming that depression, alcoholism, and other psychological issue cannot be treated? Are you saying that to someone who went through severe depression period twice in his life and on his path to recovery for the second period only recently? Or are you saying people will become severely obese even when eating the same healthy amount of healthy food as other non-obese people?

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I think there’s a danger in oversimplifying.

        On the one end, some people do have a hard time or maybe even actually impossible time to fight their obesity.

        On the other end, a lot of people are dismissive of trying to lose weight and hide behind “body positivity” and “obese people can’t help it” when they could really get a lot of results if they actually took it seriously. A relative of mine has been obese for decades, even as the diabetes came on the general take away they had was “apply medicine, keep living how I like”. Then when their liver started failing due to the fat and got the prognosis that they were probably going to die in a matter of months, they found the motivation to lose 40 pounds, in the goal of extending their life a little. Now they have what is, by all appearances, a healthy liver again. They also have much better mobility, reduced joint pain, blood sugar that doesn’t need medication anymore. Though they are still stuck with a lot of the damage already done, losing weight has been a great boon to their life, and something they always had dismissed as being something other people could do but they were just stuck that way.

        • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          On the one end, some people do have a hard time or maybe even actually impossible time to fight their obesity.

          Correct, so unless you know for a fact you’re not talking to one of these people it’s probably best to keep your mouth shut.

        • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Well we’ve had fat hate for much much longer and most attitude about fat by most people is still hate, especially by fat people themselves and that has never helped decreasing obesity.

          In your example, it took clear evidence of imminent death to find the motivation to lose the weight.

          I would posit that the public hate and self hate about being fat is not helping. And whenever I hear complaints about body posivity around fatness, what I think I’m hearing is the fat hate enforcers being upset at being denied. I imagine they quite like being able to hate freely and feel superior “for a good cause”.

          I suspect that fat hate has never helped anyone, and probably made things worse.

          I think framework of being is a personal moral failing, just doesn’t work and perpetuates the problem. Like many other “forever problems” like drug use and homelessness.

          I think it’s safe to assume that problem that persist through entire lifetimes simply are bno ever going to spontaneously resolve themselves through sheer will power, especially not today where it is being sapped away by commercial interests.

          • jj4211@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            We don’t have to abolish the word ‘Obese’ to avoid ‘hateful’. This started with someone being offended at the mere word ‘Obese’ and elevating it to a racial slur, then a comment saying a lot (likely the vast majority) of obese people can improve their situation.

            We shouldn’t be mocking and laughing at someone because they are fat, or harping endlessly on it, but it’s sufficiently bad that when my doctor saw me being obese, he never directly said anything, just said things like “make sure to eat plenty of vegetables” and “being active really helps people be fit”. When Rebel Wilson decided to lose weight, people acted like she somehow betrayed obese people, that she abandoned her role as a model of body positivity.

            The pendulum has swung too far to the point where people get too offended at the plain statement of being obese means health issues.

            • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              The pendulum hasn’t even stopped swinging toward the “more fat hate camp”. What you perceive as"too far in the anti hate direction" is merely the begin of slowing down in the more hate direction.

              This entire discussion is a ad absurdum attack by the “more hate” camp to counter this slowing down. It is the endlessly repeated clip of the angry blue hair girl of the antisjw craze.

              And it’s going to take way way more than that to smoke out the hate mongers out of their last refuge.

        • yamanii@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Keyword: some. The number of people that actually have a dysfuncional thyroid gland is extremely low to the percentage of obesity in a population, like your example, the majority needs a push since it’s more of a mental thing, even therapy can help it.

      • Annoyed_🦀 @monyet.cc
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        4 months ago

        MJ turning white is because of Vitiligo, he use makeup to cover up the skin condition.

        Also he’s black by birth, not a choice he made either.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          And even on his level, he had to deal with systemic racism. It took two years for MTV to start broadcasting videos with black people in them, including videos already made by Michael Jackson (although it’s not true that Billie Jean was the first video by a black artist on MTV. That honor went a couple of weeks earlier to Pass the Dutchie by Musical Youth).

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      while body weight is something you can at least control through dedication.

      Generally not.

      There are quite a lot of disorders affecting eating habits, and there are quite a lot of conditions that mean that even on something like a keto diet you’ll get obese (or extremely thin).

      So no, if you are not obese, you most likely are not more “dedicated” than some person you know who is. You are just healthier. Most likely since birth, and there’s nothing they’ve done wrong.

      Obviously it’s still bad to be obese.

      • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        Try staying fat while eating nothing.

        Try staying thin while eating a whole cow each day and injecting fat into your veins.

        If both are impossible, then you can control your weight.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    all medical terms get turned into hateful insults–moron, idiot, imbecile, r*tarded which is approaching but will never achieve n-word status-- all used to be actual medical diagnoses. “obese” will go the same route and be replaced by something else, which will also eventually become derogatory and be replaced

    funny how “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker”, and “tits” are almost everyday words now

  • Jimbo@yiffit.net
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    4 months ago

    Bigga please, I got my mind on much bigger things to say the least

    My latest beat just sound like they was released by David East

  • Remy Rose@lemmy.one
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    4 months ago

    Not saying that the person in the post is correct in conflating those words, I don’t think that’s accurate at all.

    However, it is disheartening to see so many ill-informed comments about fatness here… It’s way, way more complicated than just “calories in/calories out”. Even the extent to which it’s unhealthy is more complicated; obesity is linked to higher risk of heart disease, but also linked to higher probability of surviving strokes/etc. A lot of the problem stems from the fact that BMI is a nearly useless metric.

    • sploosh@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Human beings are subject to the laws of physics. If you eat more calories than you consume and do not otherwise eliminate from the body, they will still be in the body. The body stores them as fat. This is simply the mechanics of biology. If it weren’t, things like Ozempic would not spur massive weight loss.

      We have more obese people now than have ever existed. Countries that do not have US/Mexico levels of easy access to heavily processed, calorie-dense foods do not have obesity problems like we have. Clearly, calling people names and making them feel bad is not a good way to get them to adopt healthier habits. However, there are plain, uncomplicated things that people can do to lose weight that will work, but they will ONLY work if the people want to change, are honest with themselves and truly stick to the changes they need to make.

      Losing weight is absolutely within reach of 99% of obese people, but comments like this reinforce the absolutely incorrect notion that getting healthy is some big mystery that’s for a different class of people to solve. It’s defeatist and makes it seem like a problem that a person can’t solve on their own, which is straight up wrong.

      The plain, uncomplicated things you can do? Find out how many calories a body of the weight you want to weigh uses in a day. Limit yourself to those calories. Given time, you will be that weight if and only if you stick to the plan. It may shock some people how many calories they actually consume in a day, especially if they drink soda or juice with any regularity.

    • snow_bunny@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, CICO is a subtraction problem, but it’s just one part of a massive system of nonlinear equations when it comes to health.

  • Enkrod@feddit.org
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    4 months ago

    Fun Fact:

    A northern German youth-slang word for “Bro” is “Digga”, which is a friendly way to say “Fatty”, from “Dicker - dick” (lit.: Fatty, fat/thick), but with the implication of being very dear friends, “dicke Freunde” (lit.: thick friends) just has the meaning “close friends” with no implication of being fat and “dick miteinander sein” (lit.: being thick together) is also an expression of closeness, not of weight.

    Interestingly, Digga is being used in exactly the same way as black people in the US use the soft n-word with each other. “Mein Digga!” (lit: my thicky) is 1:1 analogous to “My n-word!”. It’s common for tourists to do a double take when they hear some very German and very white youths yell at one another “Ey Digga!” and many German rappers definitely use it as a stand in for the soft n-word, but It’s use and etymology is rooted in the old dock workers culture of Hamburg and has absolutely nothing to do with the n-word.

    • janNatan@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      I’m from the USA, and when I first heard “digga,” I was certainly confused! It seems the youth say it even more than the generation that invented the phrase now.

      Anyway, English speakers have an old phrase that is similar and might help some understand the usage of the word “thick” here. The phrase is “thick as thieves” - meaning thieves stick together.

    • Superfool@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      That is not what she is saying.

      She is equivocting a medical term with a racist term, and by extension implying obese people as oppressed victims.

      She is objectively wrong.

    • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin. It becomes a slur based on how and when it’s used.

      I agree with feeling ‘obese’ is a neutral, objective term for the physical/medical fact. But then, coming from a non-Anerican context, I used to have no sense of the N word being so offensive, any more than any other random insulting (or even affectionate!) term.

      In the wrong context, ‘obese’ can certainly be hurtful and inappropriate. I can imagine, for some people, it’s a trigger word of years of pain and mockery.

      • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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        4 months ago

        But neither is your skin colour expressed in Latin.

        Niger is Latin… Nigger is not.

        While I’m generally not sensitive to these things, claiming something that’s factually not true as a defense of the word is just not okay. Use the word if you really want to use it. If you use it in any other way other than academically (such as discussing the word in of itself)… don’t surprise pikachu when people shun you for it.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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            4 months ago

            Not according to the etymology. https://www.etymonline.com/word/nigger

            1786, earlier neger (1568, Scottish and northern England dialect), negar, negur, from French nègre, from Spanish negro (see Negro).

            All of these languages are latin-based languages… So there must be a latin root. If you dig further you find

            from Latin nigrum (nominative niger) “black, dark, sable, dusky” (applied to the night sky, a storm, the complexion), figuratively “gloomy, unlucky, bad, wicked,”

            So yes negro exists in the middle but not as the source necessarily… It would have evolved (if I read the etymology correctly) as Nigrum -> Niger -> Negro/neger/negar/negur -> Nigger.

            • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Good thing the N word is being censored here, otherwise we might actually learn something.

              I fucking hate indiscriminate censorship. In some context the word is important in order to learn and educate

                • yamanii@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  How would I go about to see this post outsife ot my .world? I can’t even click the link because it removes it from the URL, this is so fucking stupid.

                • madcaesar@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  Oh that’s good to know and also fucked up, I thought they stopped that censoring bullshit. Thank you for letting me know.

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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            4 months ago

            Jeez, you’re really out here word policing when it’s clear we’re simply talking about the word… You know… not actually attributing it.

            You act like just saying “Negro” with no context is any better.

            Just like your namesake, you’ve added nothing to the discussion except a bit of toxicity.

      • Etterra@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Look I’m a fat American and here at least nobody I’ve ever heard has used “obese” as a slur. You hear actual insults, “fatass” comes immediately to mind but there’s plenty of others; I’ve heard plenty of them personally. The OP in the pic is a fucking doctor according to her obscured user name and needs to be far more responsible. Obesity is party of a medical status - being called a land whale is an insult.

        Further, the N-word has centuries of racist cultural weight behind it. The word “obese” is far more recent and isn’t used as part of the systematic oppression of an entire ethnic to group - one that makes up an enormous amount of American population.

        This isn’t even apples and oranges. This is cantaloupes and blueberries. Not watermelons though, that has racist baggage too.

        • LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          She’s off her rocker to compare the two, but I do want to say people are policing medical terms as being offense, so maybe she was trying to express (very poorly) that obese should be considered offensive like using the terms retarded, idiot, or what not that started as a medical diagnosis/meaning, and now can be viewed as hurtful. I don’t agree with it because the reasonsaying the term retard is insulting is because the person you are calling it isn’t actually fitting the medical diagnosis, and therefore using a medical term to put other people down. (Doubt it is used by doctors today, they likely have found different ways of expressing a person’s mental growth in terms of comparing to average growth, growth within science and all that). So if we were calling people who were not obese obese to put them down, maybe it would start to make sense, but it hasn’t occured around me much. That said, I have seen jokes made around belimic people calling themself a fat ass for eating say a slice of pizza, but even most movies have moved away from joking about such anymore.

      • redisdead@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I never used or seen used ‘obese’ as a slur.

        Fatty, yes. Absolutely, all the time. Obese, no.

        If you’re ‘triggered’ by being called a fatty, stop being fat.

        • milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          If you’re ‘triggered’ by being called a fatty, stop being fat.

          Now that’s a bad take.

          We shouldn’t mock people for things they struggle with, even if we think they could just stop.

          • redisdead@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Struggling with actual problems, sure.

            Struggling with being unable to stop shoving burgers in your mouth is not an actual problem.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              And saying things like that is exactly why obese people have so much trouble having the confidence to start losing weight. And no, it is not as easy as you are suggesting. We live in an era of processed foods and food deserts where people are so overworked and often with such long commutes that they don’t have the energy or the time to cook a healthy meal when they get home.

              Telling those people to stop shoving burgers in their mouth doesn’t help anything.

              Also, and I can’t believe this is the second time I’ve had to say this to someone today- have you ever been insulted into making a lifestyle change? I sure haven’t.