https://evolutionistx.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/microaggressions-and-isolation/
“The source of most microaggressions, in my experience, is not a conscious desire to be a jerkface to the other person, but differences in personality that cause endless friction.”
It all began with Benthamite utilitarianism: maximal pleasure, minimal pain / harm.
Then liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered that people consider VASTLY different things pleasurable. So he decided that policy should just focus on minimizing pain / harm and leave pleasure to the private decisions. An it harm none, do as ye will.
This had an effect of creating an overly fearful society. If and when people want to have them some dangerous fun, and the policy is blind to fun but is against danger / pain, it will tend to suppress it. Hence the modern world got nerfed. We call ths
What we are discovering today is that people also find VASTLY different things painful.
Well, good riddance to utilitarianism then. If and when people have incompatible utility functions, you cannot max them all out. You can’t even minimize pain. What’s the next ideology?
Also, read Kristor here, he has some interesting things to add. Basically, that to make utility functions compatible, you need a common cult, a common culture – something perhaps akin to a state church.
http://orthosphere.org/2015/08/13/disutilitarianism-a-post-scriptum/
(A related problem is the difference between rights and pain. People can demand that other people should not violate their rights. But it is not realistic to demand to never cause them any pain. For example, most people generally don’t find huge morbidly obese bariatric people sexually attractive. This must be surely painful for them. Living as a sexual outcast in a highly sexualized society is surely a painful, marginalized experience. But it is not realistic to demand it as a right. Nobody has any sort of inherent right to be found attractive. This is why the “fat activist” movement is so weird. They don’t have any actual rights violations, manufacturers cater to them more and more, most people are not jerks to them, only a handful people and even they tend to just crack jokes not spew hate. They are in pain, and they try to manufacture that as a rights violation, with fake grievances (“discrimination”) because this is apparently what today people listen to. Of course, the only ones who actually did anything remotely wrong to them, besides themselves, are the fast food companies.)
I suspect that fat people do actually face a lot of practical discrimination in society–difficulty getting a job, no one wants to date them, etc., and on top of that, they feel bad because they know they’re unattractive. The results are often kind of useless, as all that dieting and shit doesn’t tend to work for most people, which leads to more feeling bad. So I suspect the FAM is mostly about trying to get fat women back to a point where they can feel okay about themselves instead of hating themselves, and concentrate their energies on other things.
The bigger problem is that we’ve got a society where people are rewarding for claiming victimization status, so of course everyone has to invent some victimization or other.
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I haven’t seen the difficulty getting a job part (office jobs like accounting seem to work OK) and fat people can just basically date each other, this why I don’t see much of a problem here. It is actually getting more and more normalized – fat couples dating in restaurants, of course, and having fun eating together. Becoming an “eater” subculture with its own norms.
I suppose part of the problem is that that the diet industry simply approaches the problem metabolically, instead of looking at the psychological addictions / depressions / other problems that lead to overeating. It is basically like telling an alcoholic to just switch to non-A beer, easy. Easy physically, not easy psychologically. I think people who are 100% healthy in the mind simply enjoy moving around and don’t enjoy being so stuffed that moving around feels sluggish so they regulate their weight automatically. I totally see a feedback loop like depressed -> comfort eating -> fat -> even more depressed -> comfort eating etc. and thus this should be addressed as such.
But it seems psychological culture is really backwards there. Even with far more well known problems like alcoholism, self-help groups like Reddit’s stopdrinking sub focuses on stopping drinking as such, instead of treating the underlying depression or whatever created that habit the first place.
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