Comparing a health condition to ethnicity is peak whiteness.
Nevermind the fact that melanin is a very practical and healthy trait.
Her tongue also moves, omg
If you hadn’t said anything I’d still be thinking this was a still image. Thanks for ruining my day
It’s quite literally the medical term… i… I am an obese man, I am an obese man mostly of my own doing, their might be some psychological or socioeconomic reasons, but it’s mostly the fact that food is good, exercise sucks, and impulse control. I wasn’t born this way, I wasn’t treated as nonhuman for something beyond my control, and obese is not used for the sole purpose of being derogatory.
Those two words are very, very different. Even if you are obese because of a thyroid, or injury, or whatever, a doctor can, and will call you obese in your medical reports. And if you can’t handle that because you can’t handle that slight uncomfortability, no wonder you are still obese.
Yeah, it’s a sterile medical term that unfortunately takes on other meanings that people dislike. For example, I had a friend who went off the deep end and started claiming that obesity was made up by doctors and began trying to convince me to think likewise. It was kind of eerie to see this otherwise rational person fall for this type of denial over something that made them uncomfortable.
It doesn’t help that some doctors were shitty to him about his weight (a fair and very real complaint) so he insisted it was a systematic problem within the medical establishment to oppress. I don’t doubt it happens but it’s a bit extreme to think it’s solely used to that end and that it’s not a handy label for managing weight and conducting research.
I do agree that if you are obese and have unrelated medical issues the doctors will very much say “you need to lose weight”, and call it done. And that is x10 if you are a woman, for some reason. Yeah, these problems may not be so bad if I was not obese, and they may not have existed is I wasn’t (bulging disks my back, in my case etc.), but the truth is, I am fat, I still need my problems fixed, go ahead and do the surgery to trim the disk that is pinching my nerves to fix my back because otherwise I can’t move and I will just get fatter and my back will just get worse. Perpetually.
It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.
It is just laziness and they have a blanket scapegoat to use to get out of doing their job if you walk in and are overweight.
(Please take the following as pondering general discussions of obesity between doctors/patients and not specifically directed at you.)
This was a really thought-provoking summary for me, your belief that doctors are telling people to lose weight out of “laziness.” If a suggestion like this is lazy, are patients who don’t listen to their doctor somehow not lazy?
The idea that doctors make weight a scapegoat seems prevalent in American healthcare (probably because we’re generally obese). It feels a lot like projection of one’s “laziness” (mentally it’s much more complex than that) onto a doctor, even though that doctor has probably seen hundreds of cases with the same predictable outcomes and knows that appropriate weight management would head off more serious treatment.
Frankly, I think doctors are anything but lazy when they are “forced” to order and perform risky and invasive treatments on a patient who refused to meet them halfway before the treatment became necessary in the first place. I get it, nobody likes being told what to do, especially when it seems (and literally is) so personal. But doctors also don’t like to be told what to do (“fix me!”) when a patient deigns even the gentlest suggestion to take some control of their issues at hand.
I am now 30lbs below my highest weight. The severity of my issues (joint pain, lethargy, depression, etc.) has palpably lessened losing that 30lbs very inconsistently over the last four years. If anything, I think doctors need to better read the psychological resistance many people have with weight loss and then illustrate to, rather than tell, patients how to attain weight loss in ways that don’t seem restrictive.
That 30lbs of mine, could I have done that in 30 weeks or fewer? Sure, but I didn’t want to feel perpetually hungry. In fact, I never even set a goal weight. Instead of thinking “Idgaf about my weight” or “I must lose 20lbs by Christmas!!” I just made the tiniest changes, the biggest one being taking advantage of times I wasn’t hungry by (gasp) not eating.
… Shit, I guess lazy weight loss works, too!
I mean, they really are, it also happened to me, I’m not that big, I weight 115kg, almost fell down a hole on the sidewalk but my foot twisted high and I was able to keep my balance.
Now my foot was hurting real bad for days, went to a doctor and he said that I should lose weight to fix it, even though I told him what happened, so I just went to another one that actually gave me a solution via physiotherapy and now I’m good.
I guess I work in the medical field and I know a lot of doctors are overwhelmed and are really only looking for the quickest way to get you back out the door. They aren’t “lazy” … I guess, just overworked. But also lazy. I live in a rural town, good doctors don’t come here.
I’ve been bedbound for five years. I have managed to stay a healthy weight by harassing my mother every time she buys unhealthy food. I ain’t got that kind of self-control!
Apparently you do?
Self control is a lot easier to exercise when you remove the immediacy. If a bag of chips are next to you not eating them can be really hard.
Not buying them in the first place? Usually much easier.
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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.
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John Mulaney
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
Nobody wants to be an original it seems. Just borrow from another with a small modification to make it fit your situation and go with that. If youre a chunk dont be a punk. Own it, dont rent
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
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.
it changed with the OJ trial
Wait, for real? Sauce?
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.
i thought it was meaning in media, like the news and other stuff. not everyday life
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.
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.
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.
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
Django Unchained
Isn’t it ironic that a movie with so many uses of that word helped you understand that word better?
To me it seems a very good reason to believe that people shouldn’t be afraid of the syntax of the word, but definitely oppose the use when the semantic is the despicable one.
There’s an equivalent for homosexuals
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.
Is one of the other words associated with 200 years of chattel slavery?
Negro is pretty gosh darn close, but I guess it’s just not quite as derogatory.
To my non-American ears “negro” sounds far worse actually. Probably because of how rare it is in comparison.
I agree with you. But after studying Spanish I understand the origin of the word, so I’m somewhere in the middle on it.
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.
Call up the UNCF and let them know immediately!
(Yes, I know they mostly brand themselves as the United Fund now.)
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.
How about when people they don’t think they’re racist whisper it? I hate and love that.
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
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.
It’s weird being told that a regular color in your native language could get you beat up to a pulp in another country.
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.
The only equivalent I can think of starts with k and is a slur for Jewish people, and it’s much less commonly heard.
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.
What about something related to the indigenous peoples of the Americas?
We killed them and displaced the rest so damn fast that we forgot all the major slurs for them
“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.
And things even worse than slavery towards them. And that a lot of racists who would likely shoot black people still use that word on purpose. And that there’s still a lot of those people.
The OJ Simpson trial. No joke.
I couldn’t remember where the quote came from, thank you, I tried to search for it but it was surprisingly difficult
All quotes should be credited to Michael Scott if you dont know the original.
- Michael Scott
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.
Nobese then ?
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
funny how “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker”, and “tits” are almost everyday words now
So much so that there’s a song about it!
Singing Family Reunion at their concert is a memory I will never let go
STEP ONE, INSTEAD OF ASS, SAY BUNS
LIKE ‘KISS MY BUNS’ OR ‘YOU’RE A BUNS-HOLE’
Buns-hole gets me every time
I wonder if those prior medical terms had precise definitions. Obese is BMI >= 30 and morbidly obese is >= 40. BMI itself has some issues but works ok as a general assessment for most people.
And now apparently autism. Why us? Autism doesn’t cause you to be useless or stupid, most of us aren’t recognised in public and a high percentage isn’t even diagnosed, there is no reason to shit on us.
The reason is bigotry. If you really want to get into it, a big reason for the stigma against autism is the damage done by Autism Speaks.
what did autism speaks do, or still doing?
They’re behind just about every negative stigma surrounding autism. Mainly that it’s a debilitating disease that ruins the lives of everyone around them and needs to be cured, as well as that autism is caused by vaccines.
We’re taking it back at [email protected]
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Lol, no she’s not.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, CICO is a subtraction problem, but it’s just one part of a massive system of nonlinear equations when it comes to health.
Obese is a medical term though and Dr … PhD should know that.
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
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.
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It is, though—women having children later in life are at higher risk for complications for both themselves and the baby. It also has a higher risk of birth defects.
Why does that upset/startle you? Pregnancy at age 35+ is associated with more risks than pregnancy in the 20s.
I’ve heard this called the “euphemism treadmill”
As usual, George Carlin should be the go-to for matters of language
I see that someone wrote their thesis on it.
I like it, very succinct way to get the point across.
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”
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
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Hello yes my name is Dr. PhD I have many college and come to bringun you the health. stat.
Not necessarily, a PhD isn’t a medical degree
Sooo you’re saying it’s understandable for someone with a PhD to not have basic common knowledge?
Oh yeah. A PhD means you hyperspecialized for years. You get one by being the expert and advancing your field in, usually, one tiny tiny area. For anything that isn’t that tiny area? Likely to be a stupid as anyone.
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
I’ve got one, and there are many many thing I’m an idiot on
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.
Your medical status is not a racial slur.
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.
Shut up.
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.
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.
Struggling with actual problems, sure.
Struggling with being unable to stop shoving burgers in your mouth is not an actual problem.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Nigger is a diminutive (or at least derivative) of negro, is it not?
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.
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
Yeah… While admittedly discussions like this one are far outweighed by the negative uses of the term; when discussion is happening where clarity is more relevant than appeasing the euphemism treadmill censorship sucks.
https://lemmy.saik0.com/comment/3423797 should get you to the original version. My instance doesn’t censor.
It’s your own .world instance that’s doing the censorship.
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.
Oh that’s good to know and also fucked up, I thought they stopped that censoring bullshit. Thank you for letting me know.
Negro. Jeez, you really out here saying those words huh?
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.
Chris Rock… There are two types of obese people. There’s fat people, and then there’s Biggas and the Biggas have got to go!
Oh my god. Get off the cross, we need the wood. Also you’re causing stress fractures.
