Tuesday, October 17, 2017

Triggered and fat-shamed!

Google maps had a new feature that showed how many calories you would burn if you walked somewhere instead of driving. Ace remarks,
Thus begins the newest internecine squabble on the left, between the environmental zealots who don't want you to drive anywhere, and the Fat Acceptance Tumblrinas who get #triggered at the thought of hoofing it a few blocks.

Keshia Hannam reports at Fortune,
Google‘s mapping team has reportedly ditched an experimental feature for its iOS Google Maps app that estimated how many calories users could potentially burn by walking a route. The calorie count revealed itself when the user called up a driving route that covered a short distance, in order to promote the option of walking instead. If a walking route was chosen, calories were displayed in the step-by-step directions, but not on the map itself. The calories were communicated in equivalence to the amount of “mini cupcakes.”

The attempt at what looks to be a promotion of healthy lifestyle choices was castigated online, where people took to Twitter to suggest the feature could “shame” and even “trigger” those with eating disorders (which in the U.S. is said to be around 30 million people).

Ace writes,
Welcome to the Brave New World where neuroticism and hysteria are valorized as positive traits of a virtued person, and "#science" consists of militant parody-religious lunacy.

...All these "reporters" #Triggered and starting an online outrage mob.

Mediocre intellects sometimes long to be considered great intellects. We have an entire pseudopolitics which teaches the mediocre they can become smarter if they just become neurotically hysterical about every damn thing.

It's an easy way into the intellectual elite -- just become a basket-case who cries over nothing at all and you're in the #SmartSet.

Progressive culture is valorizing lunacy, and little wonder we get more lunacy in a system rigged to bestow social capital to lunatics.

No comments: