Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you’re about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.

It’s cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can’t evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn’t be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.

Germany’s driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.

Problem is that there’s no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn’t a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.

Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who’s allowed to drive.

This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.

There’s a few places that didn’t get cars until later and “no thank you” was a very common reaction. We really ought to just ban private ownership.

I’ve since dropped this position because the world has changed, and so has my view. Heart Disease kills more people than anything, and now we effectively have a cure for obesity. Obesity should now be seen as smallpox or polio - something to be eradicated. No excuses, and now they’re actively limiting the supply of this - forcing more product out of the hands that need it and into the hands of people like musk

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.

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.

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.

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.

And, independently of their tax status, they shouldn’t promote political candidates.

My unpopular opinion is that people who keep throwing this stupid idea around have no clue what they’re talking about.

Religions / churches are non-profits. Their only revenue is post-tax donations. The people who work at the non-profit churches still pay income tax. The moment you start taxing a church, you allow them to function as a corporation. Not taxing churches is a fundamentally great thing.

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.

And we’ve nowadays taken it even further, in spoken Finnish we’ve even got rid of the “hän” and mostly use “se”, which is the Finnish word for “it”. The same pronoun is used for people in all forms, animals, items, institutions and so on, and in practice the only case for “hän” is people trying to remind others they consider their pets human.

Context will tell which one it is.

No. I need to feel special.

/s

I’ll go one further: I get (and respect) the utility of they/them pronouns for a singular entity, but it IS clunky and confusing. English is ever evolving but when I hear a “they” it is still very much more abstract and plural than a more specific he or she.

Whatever: it’s my shit and I’ll gladly deal with a nanosecond of confusion and adjust if it allows people to maintain their dignity. Point is, by insisting that there’s nothing confusing about they/them in reference to a single entity feels disingenuous. I know moderate people who are otherwise live and let live as well as receptive to basic human dignity who are turned off by the confusing abstraction, switching tenses, etc.

They/them isn’t the elegant, seamless drop in that people say it is and it hurts the messaging. I get that being rigid and forceful is necessary with the rampant transphobia and “i’m just asking (bad faith) questions” going on, but I still fuck up semantics and tenses like whoa

That sounds like a solution that should make everyone happy. However, the crowd arguing against more pronouns would also argue against this, just because they’re impossible to appease.

That’s not an unpopular opinion.

Maybe in the past, but nowadays there’s no rational discussion to be had with someone who doesn’t think you should legally be allowed to exist…

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.

Yeah this would have been believable 2-3 years ago but not post pandemic.

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

I have had plenty of conversations with people irl. Most of the them with people who are to the right of me on the political spectrum. What I found in the conversations that were fruitful, was that our disagreement on larger issues, such as economics or personal freedoms, tended to stem from disagreements on smaller issues. To paraphrase my friend, “We are using the same words, but they all mean different things.” It seems to me that there are some elementary differences between progressives and conservatives that change how we rationalize the larger issues. That’s how the two groups can, based on the same information, come to two different conclusions.

That being said though, I think Fox News and other conservative news channels have created information silos. Not everyone who is conservative has necessarily had access to the same body of facts and evidence that progressives have. I think a good portion of people who are stuck in those silos would change their views if they had a more balanced news diet.

I was going to post my rant about conservatives as a top level comment, but I didn’t think it was unpopular enough.

I agree with your central premise that there is a disconnect of understanding and perception between progressives and conservatives.

However, it’s not that conservatives haven’t heard a convincing argument, or something that accounts for their perspective. This is part of the fundamental disconnect, and you’re an excellent example of why people don’t know how to put things in a way others will understand.

Conservativism is not a principled ideology. It is the political justification of narcissism in every form. Conservatives like being conservative because it gives them a free pass to be selfish and egocentric in their political beliefs. There is no foundational value system or policy that is inherently conservative.

The conservative ideology defines the self and the other. Nothing else is fixed. Whatever is good for the self is good, and whatever is bad for the self is bad.

That’s it, that explains every conservative position ever held by any conservative since the invention of conservativism in the 1800s. From Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wanting to roll back many of the reforms of the French Revolution, to Donald Trump becoming the Messiah, conservatives identify the self, and then do anything to benefit the self. Granted, Francois-Rene was a much better writer, but he was no less inconsistent in his desire to promote ideologies that benefitted himself and his peers.

Conservatives will couch their positions as staunch defense of tradition, and general opposition to change for the sake of change, but that’s window dressing. They don’t believe in stoicism or absolutism or really anything they claim to believe. And that’s why you cannot have a rational debate with a conservative. That’s why you won’t ever convince them to change their minds on a subject simply by pointing out flaws in their logic or perception.

The only method that has ever worked at getting a conservative to shift or compromise is by showing them how it will benefit them. Why is this policy good for the self? What value will they receive in exchange for easing up on their intransigence? If you can convince a conservative to abandon an ideological position, you can be sure it’s because they believe the new position is better for them.

Look at any conservative leader in history, any political pundit, any legislator or writer or conservative iconoclast. Viewed through the lens of narcissism, their intentions, their hypocrisies, their inconsistencies, they are all laid bare. There is no deeper meaning, no mystery to why they have had sudden changes or seemingly flip flopped on an issue. It’s not that complicated.

So no, it’s not that people don’t know how to have rational discussions these days. It’s that conservativism is anathema to rational thought, and it always has been. It’s a license to be as hateful or ignorant or selfish as you want to be, and you needn’t worry about defending your positions from things like facts, or realty, or reason, because those are tools of the other. If the other opposes you, they are evil and their reality, their facts, their reason is equally evil. They don’t need to be refuted, they need to be destroyed by any means necessary. The self is good, therefore anything the self needs to do to win is good. Lies, deception, personal attacks, intimidation, threats, violence, all of them are justified by the belief in the righteous self. There is no bar too low to be stooped under, no treachery too vile to be considered, no accusation too false to be levied. A conservative with scruples is a conservative unchallenged.

How is this unpopular?

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

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.