RL Anger
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@Tyche said:
Obviously with the head tax, there will be those who cannot pay their fair share. They could be exempted on condition they give up the right to decide on how that money is spent. So instead of a head tax, we'll change it to a poll tax. It's going to put a much larger burden on the rest of us though, perhaps closer to $20000 a year. But that sounds like a fair exchange. I could go with that.
Did I fucking stutter?
For a professed conservative, you put up some awfully stupid ideas. Poll taxes are anathema to the concept of reining in the government's power.
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TL;DR: <rant>Thin people exist. "Fat" is not a synonym for "realistic".</rant>
Why the everloving flying fuck is "realistic" always code for "fat" in certain media circles? It's as if people have forgotten that, you know, thin, fit people actually exist. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not on-side with so-called "fat shaming" in the slightest. (I'm absolutely the last person on the planet who's in a position to fat shame, after all!) But this recent thing of not just thin shaming but actual thin erasure is getting on my fucking nerves.
Using an example from this execrable bit of reprehensible reportage:
Every day at lunch time I see literally over a thousand young women walk past me on their way to the canteen who look, in terms of body shape, like the image to the left. I'll see maybe a dozen who look like the image to the right. Where I am, the image to the left is the "realistic" one and the one to the right is the "unrealistic" one if you want to go by numbers.
I'm sorry, Americans (as well as Brits and my fellow Canadians) that you've normalized obesity to the point that healthy and fit individuals are not merely "unrealistic" but apparently entirely absent from your worldview. But you know? Thin and fit individuals do exist. There's a picture I shared of the Wuhan flood in another thread:
The woman in that picture? She exists. And indeed she's not even exceptional. When school is in session I literally see a thousand who look just like her walk past me every day, and I work on a tiny campus.
So, fat shaming? Yeah. That's bad. It's terrible. Do it in my presence and you'll find out what it's like to have a significant fraction of a ton sitting on your chest. (Yes, that's me making a fat joke at my own expense.) But you know what's equally bad or perhaps even worse? Pretending that a huge number of people (counted in the billions) don't exist, or shaming the ones you find, because you've internalized and normalized obesity.
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@WTFE Oh... Lara Croft needs a flatter butt?! /RIM-SHOT!/ >.>
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squint The girl in that picture looks much more like the Lara Croft on the right than the left. The original Lara on that picture is actually has fairly unrealistic proportions just looking at the size of her waist, which is tiny. And when you find women with waists that tiny, it's uncommon for their figures to be quite that hourglass curvy.
I mean, the Lara on the right isn't even fat. A lot of the times these "corrections" are less about thin vs fat as they are about extreme hourglass figures that drawn and animated women tend to have with ittybitty Barbie waists.
Either way, it's not equally bad or worse, since fat-shaming is connected to actual discrimination, which reduction of portrayals of thin women in media is not.
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The Lara Croft on the right has thunder thighs and hips way wider than her shoulders. I'm not holding up the one on the left as especially realistic. (It's a fucking cartoon caricature in a game, after all!) I'm saying that the one on the right is perhaps an American's (or Brit's or Canadian's) idea of "realistic" in that the three fattest major nations on the planet would tend to see that.
And note, I'm also emphatically not saying that everybody should look like the one on the left (even in non-caricature form) nor that someone who looks like the one on the right is somehow a bad person. I'm saying that erasing the one on the left as if people like this don't exist is a bad thing.
@Roz said:
Either way, it's not equally bad or worse, since fat-shaming is connected to actual discrimination, which reduction of portrayals of thin women in media is not.
But you know what is actual discrimination? The backlash of "thin-shaming" that I've increasingly seen over the past decade. If we're to go with the typical shit I see in certain political circles, my wife is unhealthily thin. She's probably bulimic, the narrative goes, or at the very least anorexic. (Yes, I've had assholes have the nerve to say this in response to photographs that have my wife in them.) Never mind that she's one of approximately 600 million people for whom this is ordinary weight and build (along with that chick in the flood pic). They seem to utterly miss the point (big surprise there!) that fat shaming is bad because body shaming in general is bad.
Shaming people for their body, whether fat, thin, tall, short, long-fingered, stubby-fingered, dark-skinned, light-skinned, blue-eyed, black-eyed, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum is bad. Period. The fact that currently one body type is in vogue in media (thin) is not an excuse to dump on people who hold that body type. Fat people mocking thin people is just as bad as the opposite. Indeed I'd argue that it's worse because fat people are on the receiving end of such barbs a whole lot (trust me!), frequently being held up as examples of people with "poor self-discipline" and some form of "moral failure" and thus should know better how hurtful and unjust it is.
Demanding that all media everywhere match three fat nations' conceptions of normalcy is an additional pile of idiocy atop all that, especially when you get what would amount to "Thunder Thighs Croft" waddling around athletically through mazes and traps….
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No, thin-shaming is not discrimination. It is a stigma and it's shitty and damaging, but thin bodies don't face discrimination at, say, their jobs, where overweight people are routinely less likely to be hired or promoted. I'm not saying thin-shaming isn't shitty, I'm saying there's a difference between stigma/shaming and discrimination. It's not worse for fat people to mock skinny people, because fat people are living in a world where systemic prejudice means their opportunities in life are fewer than skinny people's.
You can't agree that maybe the left picture isn't realistic because it's a cartoon caricature and then say people shouldn't erase that body type as if it doesn't exist. Because if it's an unrealistic caricature, then it doesn't exist. At least, not at all commonly.
The reason that this kind of artistic reimagining of female characters happens is because the vast majority of them are significantly smaller than the average woman. And, like, the fact that you're calling that image which looks to me like probably around a size 10 or so (still smaller than average) to have "Thunder Thighs" and would "waddle around" is pretty gross.
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36-18-34.
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It is exactly this type of argument that has made shaming, of any kind, into what it now is. People have transformed dickishness into "them vs. us". OUR pain is far worse than your pain. WE face systemic discrimination. YOU only face social insecurity and animosity that could lead to some mental disorder or other issue <insert any number of things here>. That's not nearly as bad as not getting a job you probably wouldn't have wanted to work at anyway because of the discriminatory assholes who work there.
How about WE don't trivialize ANYONE? Stop all the body talk. Period.
Edit: let me add this excerpt, for anyone who thinks there's no systemic discrimination involved in skinny-shaming:
"It's a feeling that Frances Chan — the Yale University student who was nearly expelled for being too thin — can relate to. Last December, Chan went into the student health clinic to get a breast lump checked out, but was, instead, accused of being anorexic and threatened with suspension unless she gained weight."
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@VulgarKitten said:
Stop all the body talk. Period.
I would like that, too.
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The thing that really gets me about the "normal" bodies they put on the women is that they are unrealistic, for those women; tomb raiding, former marine, fighters these are all people who should be fit, and it would be completely unrealistic to be the "normal, better" bodies. Men don't get the same treatment in games. Why aren't people complaining how ripped they are? There should be more pot bellies on me in games!
MY other beef is the media saying women are too sexualizes in games for having the fitter figure - no, women are sexualized in games when they wear what amounts to a band-aid for a bra.
But you can't show too much, or it'll scandalize children... while they tear and shoot people's head's off.
Games aren't realistic, and they aren't meant to be. They're escapism.
And I'm saying this all as a not tiny woman: I don't want a "normal" female in games. It would break my immersion.
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@Roz said:
The reason that this kind of artistic reimagining of female characters happens is because the vast majority of them are significantly smaller than the average woman. And, like, the fact that you're calling that image which looks to me like probably around a size 10 or so (still smaller than average) to have "Thunder Thighs" and would "waddle around" is pretty gross.
The thighs in that picture are larger than the head. I'm a pretty fat guy still and my thighs, at my peak (4 pounds shy of 400!) were never larger around than my head.
Those, my friend, are thunder thighs.
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If the technology were there to let people exist as a brain in a jar fed by nutrient fluid and connected to the internet existed, I would not be the only one to do it, but I'd be first in line.
I'd probably go into cybersecurity, too. Can I get into your stuff? If I can, it isn't secure.
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@Corruption
I am reminded of an X-Men character._004.png)
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Wasn't there also a TMNT villain like that?
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M or Krang you make the call.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@WTFE I love you. Tell your wife I'm sorry but I kind of want to steal you. You can be my MSB boyfriend.
I have an anorexic friend. Not anorexia nervosa, but she has problems eating due to some illnesses and stress which is medical anorexia. She's thin and beautiful (two separate things) and she is allowed to be unhappy with her body. I'm fat and I'm allowed to be unhappy with my body. There's this rule that if you're smaller than someone, they will shut you down when you complain.
I'm a size 8, so smaller than 'average' and I'm still fat. I hated being told 'I wasn't obese!!!' when I was MORBIDLY OBESE and I hate now being told 'you're smaller than me so you're fine!' now when I say I'm overweight. It's not even that nice sort of 'I think you're beautiful' but negative. I've lost friends because I was point blank told how dare I lose weight with fibromyalgia and hypothryoidism. That I was a liar and don't have them. What? God forbid you complain that something isn't available in your size.
I hear more now than I ever did before on what I'm going to eat. Is that all you're eating? Have dessert it won't hurt you. Oh you can eat more than that. Aren't you hungry? Ugh. I'm not commenting on your food, don't comment on mine. There's a constant barrage of negative messages like men like meat not bones. I'm so over it.
Fun? What is this fun thou speakest of?
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@Luna I heard a lot of that growing up from my own family. If I don't eat what was on my plate plus a second helping I got asked how come I don't like that food, etc.
Then people do it to each other in adulthood. Talk about pointless social programming.
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American society still has a frontier philosophy about food. Eat all you can and eat it fast, because you need to get back to work and you might not get to eat again until tomorrow. Compounded by the Depression, when for a lot of people it was "who knows when you'll get to eat again period."
When you have that mentality toward food combined with an abundance unprecedented in human history... yeah. It's changing, but slowly.
I like food too much myself. Sigh.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn -
@The-Tree-of-Woe said:
American society still has a frontier philosophy about food. Eat all you can and eat it fast, because you need to get back to work and you might not get to eat again until tomorrow.
Ugh, this was pushed to comical levels in my family. I had a sister who was "never hungry," but ate off of everyone else's plate because family dinner was mandatory, so the other siblings and I quickly learned to bolt down our food like we were in the ghastly trenches of the Great War and expecting a shelling at any moment. To this day, friends and coworkers tease me about it because I basically just lift the plate and smash it into my face.
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I will say, I wish some of our ingredient standards were as stringent as Canada's.
On the other hand, Canadians cross the border into Buffalo to go shopping for meat, no shit.
“Real magic can never be made by offering someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
