Marketing is only manipulation. It wants to manipulate me into doing something I otherwise wouldn’t have.

Since I don’t know how well their manipulation works, my only option is to only buy things that I have never seen an ad for.

To make sure I can still buy anything at all, I block/avoid ads where I can.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of products that most people don’t even know exist. Hell I keep finding new tools and wondering why I’ve been doing things the hard way for so long.

OTOH, fuck all the advertisers who use shady tactics to make sales, and especially fuck all the people who pray on the naivety of others to steal their money. I was just showing a customer an email I got the other day stating her domain hosting was past due and required immediate payment, and she asked how I knew it was a scam. Uh, hello, because —I— am hosting your domain and website (and this is exactly why I share this kind of stuff with people, to make them think before they blindly write a check).

I’m down voting you because I agree lol

I literally just came from another post that was talking about this.

not unpopular!

As much as I disagree, I upvoted you just for being brave enough to say that.

I downvoted because this is a popular opinion. MCU is the same thing. Most people probably don’t have a strong opinion on Star Wars either way, but for the people who do there are plenty who think it sucks.

New Star Wars sucks for sure. The originals are much better.

Sure.

But that doesn’t mean go out and harass fat people. Trust me we fucking know. You can’t lose weight instantly. Some of us may actually be working on it.

Also fat people have the right to be happy. People hating on “happy at any size” is just being assholes for the sake of it.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately and your comment is interesting. Your first sentence is definitely phrased in a more controversial way than the rest of your comment, but I can’t help seeing it as very similar to “Being depressed is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against depressed people.” Is that an unfair comparison?

I know that treating fatness/obesity as a disease is kinda controversial but I feel like folks give people dealing with mental health a lot more grace than people dealing with health issues related to being fat. I’ve also heard that for some people they can be perfectly healthy at a higher weight (though this is clearly not the case for many fat people who are seeing health impacts). I guess I’m assuming that a lot of fat people would potentially like to be less so, but can’t (for any number of reasons) quite get there. This seems really similar for me to people dealing with depression, anxiety, etc who want to change things but keep falling back into the problem.

I guess my question is do you have bias against people who can’t escape other bad cycles like mental health or even stuff like alcoholism? Or is it more just that you think it’s fair to judge people without the discipline/willpower to get out of a state they didn’t want to be in, like you did.

I especially hate when everyone’s conclusion is genetics. That’s such a minuscule percent of obese people that it’s ridiculous.

I totally get that, same here.

But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).

So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.

It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.

After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.

Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they’ve started with. Which isn’t even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you’ve been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.

To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it’s one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.

I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it’s missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to “just go out more” or an anxious person to “just stop breathing so fast” or an overweight person to “just eat less and move more”, but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you’ll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it’s an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.

Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.

There are a lot of people with eating disorders that result in them being overweight. Some people who have been neglected and abused as children can turn to food as their only source of comfort. If you have not been safe as a child, you will likely not have a basic sense of safety as an adult. If no-one has been kind to you and took care of you, you will likely not know how to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.

So, you use food to feel safe and to get a sense of comfort. You use it to numb the feelings, to feel something nice. Because you do not have the resources to cope with the world that others that were loved as children do have, you do not know how to deal with it another way. And you survive and fight to make something of your life after all that has happened to you.

And then you get overweight. And society will tell you that it is your own fault. That you should show more restraint. That you just should eat less. That you lack willpower. That you are repulsive. That you are inferior to people who are not overweight. That you are unlovable. Basically, that you are everything that they used to tell you that you were when you were a child.

And you try to lose the weight, but you feel awful. You feel unsafe. You have nothing else that gives you a nice feeling. People will compliment you and be nicer to you and say that you look better. But you are constantly stressed. You think about food day and night, constantly, until you break. And you eat and you gain the weight back, and more. And you will feel like a failure, and you will feel unlovable and repulsive. And you do not know how to deal with these feelings in any other way than by eating.

And so, the stigma around being overweight actually makes it more difficult to love yourself and to be kind to yourself. The focus on food and the idea that everything will be okay if you just lose the weight will make you put all your effort into weight loss, instead of solving the real problem. Namely, that you need to process trauma and find other ways of coping with feelings and the world.

I think this is what is happening to a lot of people who are overweight. And they might not even be aware of it. They might think it is just about food, because that is what everyone is telling them. That they should just work harder at losing weight. That they just should have more willpower.

But I think that many people who are overweight do not lack willpower at all. They have survived horrible things. They did not get basic life skill lessons that others did. They did not grow up with a sense of safety and feeling good about themselves. But they survived. And they try to make something of their lifes. And that takes a lot of willpower. And for them to get better and to lead a more happy life, they need help with learning new ways to cope, they need their strength to be acknowledged, they need to be accepted, and, above all, they need to be loved.

Unpopular opinion follow-up: You should be using proper units of measurement.

Don’t get me wrong. I can perfectly infer from the story what you’re saying. But 150 or 250 lbs just doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does the height or what people write in the other comments.

Hmm I think that for a lot of people, it wasn’t a choice to get fat. I know a lot of kids who are already obese and they aren’t even in their teens.

However, I do think it’s a choice once you’ve realized it and have the ability to actually do something about it.

Kinda related but unrelated: it irks me when someone comments how easy it is for me to be skinny, bc it isn’t. As a previously underweight person, I think gaining and losing weight are just as hard. I had to control my diet, work out, and have a lot of self control to not lose the habits I was building. I folded and stagnated a lot, and yeah it was demotivating but I still had to make a choice to keep going.

I would’ve thought you would’ve learned kindness out of that ordeal. Didn’t people make fun of you? How’d it feel, even if you knew they were right? It’s just rude and inappropriate. There’s no need. eve

But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”

Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.

I feel the same but with genders. To be clear if anyone identifies to a specific gender, I’ll respect that. However I don’t see why genders are necessary. We are all unique human beings and there’s no need to label everyone to a specific gender.

No. I need to feel special.

/s

How is this unpopular?

Lapdogs have been around for thousands of years. It’s only very recently that they’ve been bred so extremely that they can’t breathe.

Modern dogs shouldn’t exist and all breeds sould be put down for the good of nature

If it wasn’t for their response to the pandemic, I might be inclined to agree with you.

It is very hard to have rational disccussion when people disagree on the basic observable facts, ignore the “rules” of debate, and are struggling with critical thinking. You can meet difficult people on all the political spectrum, but certain idealogy attract more difficult people, and certain stuff mainstream conservatives believe right now has absolutely no basis in reality.

As a pansexual I feel that Bi and Pan have enough differences to both be justified while the others are micro labels (not invalid, just less useful as labels).

But I recognize I’m drawing that line very conveniently for myself.

Here’s an unpopular opinion: you don’t need any labels at all. You love who you live, you fuck who you fuck, you can advertise what you’re looking for if you want to but all this identity business obscures the reality that humans are far more diverse and interesting than the boxes we build for ourselves.

Most people who call themselves straight would fuck someone from their own gender if there weren’t cultural expectations against it hammered into them from and early age. Most people who call themselves gay would wander if they found someone they connected with. Very few of us rest at one end of any spectrum or matrix. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, and far more mobile than we might realize.

Atheism isn’t a religion, likewise asexuality is not a sexual orientation, but the lack of one, I say.

I agree. All the little bitty addages don’t make sense. You can be bi and still have preferences. Just keep it simple gosh dangit.

And here I thought pansexual meant you really like cookware.

Out of interest, why? Shouldn’t it be the other way around, that bi is a subset of pan?

If we’re splitting hairs, bi should be a sunset of pan.

Also, there is some need for a fourth “none of the above” label…

subsets of bisexual

What does bi cover that pan doesn’t :-)

Not understanding what words mean isn’t an unpopular opinion, you’re just wrong

Not about the first bit, that’s arguable

You definitely DO need more labels than straight, gay, and bi. For example: asexual or sapiosexual, those don’t fit into any of the 3 you listed

That is not a controversial opinion, is it?

It’s not theft, IF the government puts that money to good use e.g. health care, education, maintain roads, utilities, …

That’s not an unpopular opinion.

But the leading cause of climate change is overpopulation.

There were 3 billion humans on this planet in 1960. There are 8 billion humans right now. And all those humans are producing waste, using energy, etc.

Even if we reduce the per-capita ecological footprint, we’re outbreeding the gains we make.

I upvoted because this contributes to the discussion of the question, but fuck you

This would only make sense if morality, or caring for others was somehow genetic AND unalterable. My parents aren’t bad, per se, but most of my moral and philosophical growth came from other people. Be it teachers, random people, philosophers, or Breadtube.

I’ll be dead before then and if I don’t make offspring then so will anyone I care about. Y’all have fun destroying the planet lol

I think it depends on the environment you’re in. In my social circle, among family, friends, and coworkers, almost all of them believe that socialism is a poverty cult and a terrible idea that will lead to more human suffering, so when I express any socialist opinion, it will be unpopular in my environment. Obviously here on Lemmy, it’s the opposite and socialism is popular here.

You sound deranged

Milk chocolate on greasy pepperoni pizza is delicious and fuck your mother!

Nuclear isn’t just benefits. There are major costs and risks. It’s sad how both sides are so ignorant to the arguments of the other side. And no one is an idiot to came to different conclusions.