Most of the time when people say they have an unpopular opinion, it turns out it’s actually pretty popular.
Do you have some that’s really unpopular and most likely will get you downvoted?
Fuck ALL advertisements. Yes, even “unobtrusive” ones, especially yours. If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time. If you want to connect, I’m all ears. Otherwise, fuck off capitalists, fuck off advertisers, and fuck off useful idiots who want to waste my finite lifespan in this miserable universe showing me ads.
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).
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.
For sure. I’m not against promotion in the large, but the constant and intrusive advertisements within other tasks, such as web ads that take up valuable screen real estate, or TV/YouTube commercials that keep me from the programs I want to watch.
Like my username is literally PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S. I have no problem getting PM’ed or emailed stuff. For example, I’m subscribed to a number of mailing lists from sites I ordered from. Guitar Center can send me all the emails they want [1], sell me all the crap they want, because I can opt out at any time, and I have a work email so I can put them aside for later.
[1] To the specific email I gave them, which I do check.
I would argue that if there’s a product that nobody knows exist that’s not necessarily because we need to allow constant intrusive ads, and more indicative that people don’t actually need the product.
I want to say that in any given day, 60% of the ads I see are from big, well known companies who don’t need me to see them to know they exist. Shit like Liberty Mutual (I swear I see more of their ads than anyone else and THEY ARE ALREADY MY INSURANCE PROVIDER), Coke, Pepsi, etc. 39.9% of the remaining 40% are advertisements for shit that I just don’t care about. I don’t care about the newest tech toys. I don’t care about the newest car mods, or random shit I can put on my desk, or stupid extra kitchen gadgets. Fully 40% of the ads I see are trying to convince me that I should buy a product that I straight up don’t need because the ad looked cool. Why should those ads be allowed to exist? Why should I be constantly bombarded with ads for services that I either already know plenty about or for things that are trying to manufacture a reason for their existence?
Only about 0.5% of the ads I see are actually for things I did know know about and that seem useful to me, or like something I would like. Probably even less than that, I’m drunk rn and estimating.
I keep throwing away ads from Comcast trying to sell me on the virtues of their business internet packages. Guys, I left you because your lame-ass shit was expensive as hell, slow as hell, and you couldn’t even be counted on to meet a single appointment in 6 months to bury your damn line you left laying across my yard.
I agree with you, there’s a lot of companies that just need to be silenced. You’re allowed to send me ONE ad, and you better make it good because I don’t ever want to hear from you again.
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.
Since I don’t know how well their manipulation works
I do. It works really fucking well. $900 billion per year well.
I hate ads as much as the next guy, but without ads get ready to start paying for things. You go to a news website, sorry you need to login and hand over your credit card to access anything. Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
I brought this up the last time I talked about this, but to be clear, if we must choose between advertisements and paywall, then we should choose advertisements as the lesser evil. However, we must never accept the fallacy that advertising or paywalls are the only possible choices! More generally, we must never accept the fallacy that a market is the only acceptable way to distribute goods, a corollary of which is the idea that any acceptable solution needs to compete on equal terms with existing products in a market.
Not saying this is necessarily a bad thing but it will fundamentally change how the internet works and it potentially could limit informational access to poor people.
Well the first part at least would be a welcome change. The issue in my view is the very fact that poor people are treated as second-class citizens in information access or any other field of endeavor.
Youtube? Sorry you need to login and pay up to watch anything. You want to Google,Bing, Duckduckgo something sorry you better pay up can’t sell you data to advertisers anymore.
I very genuinely want those sites to fucking die so I don’t have to coexist in a world where they dominate the internet. I would be literally thrilled to join a group of like-minded people who have to reimplement the conveniences of the modern web from scratch for free.
Why on earth is a paywall an evil and worse than ads? This idea that everything on the Internet needs to be free-as-in-beer is the toxicity that has resulted in our entire world corrupted with ads. A News organization needs money to pay journalists and to send them to where news is happening. A video service like YouTube needs to pay for massive amounts of storage and servers. If you want quality professional content, and not just fake blogging thinly disguising advertising, you need to pay writers.
The alternative is that is it all corrupted with ads, or by the “rich uncle” of the day like a musk or a zuckerberg or whatever with an ulterior motive.
If you want the provider of a service or product to be beholden and at all responsive to you, as a user, rather than someone else, you need to be a customer, a paying customer. That’s your only real leverage. If someone else is the real source of their revenue stream then their every act is geared to please them and not you. That’s what we have now.
If you want to socialize it all instead, like a PBS, I’m fine with that, but good luck.
If I want your shit, I will find you. If I appreciate your shit, I’ll pay you for your time.
This literally won’t happen because you will never find my content without ads.
… what’s your content? If you’re not comfortable posting it, them what type of media is it? Not to rub it in, but getting your content from you, your fans, or someone who contacts me currently is the only way I will ever get your content, as I ruthlessly block advertising in every aspect of my life.
To be clear, I’m not against self promotion. For example, if you went into a video game forum and posted links to your game, that’s not advertising in my view. More importantly, I would probably actually be interested in a new video game by you if I were browsing a video game forum. Hell, if you randomly PM’ed it to me or emailed it, that would be fine too.
I make games and stuff. Let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to get noticed on the internet. There comes a point where whatever you’re selling will be popular enough in a closed circle that it spreads through word of mouth but before that you need to get an audience. That means some shameless advertising in social media and maybe buying some ad spaces. If you don’t get that momentum whatever content you’re making might be dead on arrival. A lot of people and companies making ads don’t actually like annoying others with them, but it’s really hard to get anyone’s attention now that there’s like a billion new things releasing every day.
Independent repair/handyman business pays google to place ads in their results when you search for relevant terms. In the past this was done through flyers & newspapers & billboards and such. If the business made absolutely no effort to advertise their service, then you would never be able to find them when you’re looking for that service, except for through word of mouth (which is arguably a form of advertising in itself.)
Don’t get me wrong, I hate ads too, and they’ve become far too prevalent in popular media. But they exist for a reason.
Edit: we also should have the right to block and deny ads as we wish. And at the same time, advertisers should have the right to exist. Google’s recent DRM and crackdown on adblockers should be met with forceful government intervention, in an ideal world, due to their debatable monopoly over their sector.
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. 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.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Edit: Added metric units
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 don’t believe that anybody deep down is happy at being fat. That’s a lie and they know it.
Nobody I know who’s lost weight has said they were happy with the Extra weight.
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.
This is a fair question. I guess maybe my statement could’ve been less broad. If just “being fat” is the primary problem, that’s what I take issue with. If the problem is deeper, and being fat is a secondary issue (like a result of depression, hypothyroidism, or some other mental/physical ailment), then that’s a different situation. My stance in that case is that the person should be actively trying to treat the primary problem. I know depression almost never just goes away. Sometimes it even sticks around with therapy and medicine, and that sucks hard. But at least they’re trying.
This is an old thread, but taking your first comment into account, doesn’t this make them guilty until proven innocent in your eyes? If your first thought is “what a fat lazy fuck” without knowing their story? That seems unnecessarily judgmental, and I can’t help but wonder if it comes from a place of insecurity, maybe left over from your own history with weight
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
I agree with this take.
I like Star Wars fine. If they make something, I’ll probably watch it. But I don’t consider myself a fan. I don’t keep track of the lore and would be hard pressed to tell you the plot of anything I hadn’t seen recently. Which is a long way of saying I’m in the don’t have a strong opinion camp.
Religion is nothing more then social engineering on a grand scale.
Most conservatives, however deeply red, are not intentionally hateful and are usually open to rational discussion. People just don’t know how to have rational discussions nowadays and the few times they do, they don’t know how to think like somebody else and put things in a way they can understand.
People nowadays think because a point convinced them, it should convince everybody else and anybody who’s not convinced by it is just being willfully ignorant. The truth is we all process things differently and some people need to hear totally different arguments to understand, often put in ways that wouldn’t convince you if you heard it.
It’s hard to understand other people and I feel like the majority of people have given up trying in favor of assuming everybody who disagrees with you knows their wrong and refuses to admit it.
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.
If it wasn’t for their response to the pandemic, I might be inclined to agree with you.
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.
