Page 1 of 1

Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 3:55 am
by Anakin McFly
I only just heard of her from a front page Reddit thread where people are celebrating that she lost a gender discrimination lawsuit and has to pay lots of money to cover the legal costs.

I did some googling and can't figure out why she's getting that level of hate. The biggest thing I found was this article: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/11/8767035/fa ... reddit-ban on how she was responsible for banning r/FatPeopleHate, due to how its members had a habit of targetting, mocking, and bullying selected fat people on the internet, sending them hate mail and death threats and stuff. But banning that was just the decent thing to do, and while its members were probably annoyed, the sheer level of vitriol being directed at her is so out of proportion that I'm more baffled than disturbed.

(It's not even a free speech issue - which is why she said she's not banned a lot more questionable subs dedicated to misogyny / racism / sexualising female corpses etc. Whereas this particular sub was deliberately rallying its members to harass people online.)

Is the desire to openly abuse fat people more universal than I thought? (not the abuse, which is universal, but the desire to do so joyfully and openly.) wtf humanity

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 4:31 am
by aels
She banned five subreddits apparently and then people threw a tanty because how dare their freezepeach to be massive dicks be hindered on a privately-owned website: http://jezebel.com/reddit-crybabies-pro ... 1710677493

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 4:32 am
by aels
In answer to your question, I'm guessing that the type of people who want to be unbearable shits to fat people are also the type of people who want to be unbearable shits to women. They found a tenuous reason to hate Ellen Pao and so they went for it, because they are unbearable shits.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:03 am
by thesalmonofdoubt
Is the desire to openly abuse fat people more universal than I thought? (not the abuse, which is universal, but the desire to do so joyfully and openly.) wtf humanity
I think the simple answer to this is, yes, the desire to make oneself feel superior to someone else by dint of abuse is pretty darn universal - fat people are easy targets

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:19 am
by Anakin McFly
Thanks for the link! I didn't know she was the one behind the other bans. Although I share the Vox writer's concern that this would just spread the nastiness elsewhere, now that they're not all in one place that can be conveniently ignored.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:31 am
by CashRules
Correction: feminism is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 5:31 am
by aels
[none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:02 am
by Derived Absurdity
You must not have been on reddit for the past few days. She banned a few subreddits, including r/fatpeoplehate which had over 150,000 subscribers (yes - 150,000) and the entire place just went nuts. Since your average r/fatpeoplehate subscriber has the maturity of an egomaniacal third-grader, they spammed the front page with pics calling her a nazi cunt and photoshopping her onto porn and whatnot. This was basically how it was for a few days.

It seems to be exclusively FPHers that hate her so much. I think. The backlash started fairly quickly. But yeah, as I keep saying, Reddit is composed almost exclusively of terrible people.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:26 am
by Anakin McFly
Reddit is composed almost exclusively of terrible people. ... You must not have been on reddit for the past few days
You seem to have been. [none]

But yeah, I missed all of that. Which was a good thing.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:33 am
by Derived Absurdity
Almost exclusively, I said! But yeah, it was bad.

And also Ellen Pao, being a CEO, is almost certainly a bad person. So I don't feel sorry for her, like, at all. I doubt she cares what Reddit's dumbass userbase thinks of her anyway. But that's not the reason she's currently so hated, she's hated because she pissed off a bunch of twelve-year-olds.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 8:58 am
by Whitey
Yeah, she banned subreddits and now some babies are crying because they probably belonged to them. And are crying about free speech when the entire reason those subreddits were banned were because they were targetting and harrassing people from other subreddits. One of them was FatPeopleHate. Which was full of people mocking and hating people for being overweight. They weren't constructive and trying to help, they literally hated fat people.


I've seen what's on fatpeoplehate, occasionally it would rise to the front page if I browsed /r/all, they're just vile. They're most likely the ones who are doing all the stuff against Ellen Pao. She's meant to be no saint anyway but the level of vitriol and hate she's gotten is way beyond that.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 9:00 am
by Whitey
Also the thing I found funny about FPH was that they would insult and hate people for being overweight, but if you saw pictures of most of them, they're almost all skinnyfat with minimal muscle mass, while they're more healthy than fat people they're hardly prime physical specimens themselves.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 9:03 am
by aels
I think I might be skinnyfat [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 9:31 am
by Whitey
The difference would be that you're not mocking anyone for their weight. Also you have legitimate health stuff.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 9:33 am
by aels
Whitey wrote:The difference would be that you're not mocking anyone for their weight.
That's what you think, fatty [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 9:56 am
by Whitey
aels wrote:
Whitey wrote:The difference would be that you're not mocking anyone for their weight.
That's what you think, fatty [none]
[sad5]

I'm going to go tell on you to Sofia and she'll call you all sorts of horrible Spanish names. At least I think they would be horrible, she might just start flirting. [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:31 am
by Anakin McFly
I am definitely skinnyfat. I remember one doctor telling me that I had a really high bodyfat percentage for a skinny person. [sad5]

But I've been working out and am now the proud owner of 2-pack abs.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 10:44 am
by Derived Absurdity
What the hell is skinnyfat.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 11:16 am
by Whitey
Skinny, with a low bmi, you won't look fat but you'll be unhealthy, you don't work out.

Can also mean that you have a healthy bmi but clearly when you take off your clothes you're chubby.

Nothing really wrong with it, it's just funny when skinnyfat people mock obese people for being unhealthy. They generally cling to bmi as a perfect analysis of health too.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:15 pm
by Derived Absurdity
Oh. Well I might be that, I dunno. But I do know that bmi is bullshit.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:23 pm
by Whitey
It's a decent general guide, but it's far from definitive. If someone has a high bmi, but you can see they're clearly a healthy weight, then bmi can be ignored.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 12:52 pm
by Derived Absurdity
It might be a decent guide for a general population, maybe, but not for an individual, not when it doesn't take into account height, age, gender, ethnicity, metabolism, or muscle density. On an individual scale it's basically worthless.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:06 pm
by Whitey
It does actually take into account height, that's literally one of the two things that it uses.....

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:22 pm
by Derived Absurdity
That's not what I meant. It always regards taller individuals as having a higher BMI regardless of their actual weight because it ignores basic scaling laws.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:25 pm
by Whitey
It may not take it into account well but on a basic level it's one of the things it attempts to take into account.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:32 pm
by Derived Absurdity
Not from what I can tell. It doesn't take height differences into account at all. It also ignores gender differences in height - women are on average shorter than men - and the natural change in height that occurs with age.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 1:58 pm
by Whitey
When one of the two measurements you use to generate it is height you can't say it doesn't take it into account. It doesn't do it well though.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 2:02 pm
by Derived Absurdity
I meant it doesn't take height differences into account.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 2:03 pm
by aels
lol whitey u are gendoing

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 2:28 pm
by Whitey
Derived Absurdity wrote:I meant it doesn't take height differences into account.
It does though. Badly, but it does. It will give a different result if I'm 6'2 at 180lbs, than 5'3 at 180lbs. That is height being taken into account. It's obviously not as simple as that and like you say it doesn't take scaling into account amongst the other things you mention, but to say it doesn't take height or height differences into account is blatantly wrong.
aels wrote:lol whitey u are gendoing
STFU [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 4:07 pm
by Cassius Clay
I kept thinking you were talking about Ellen Pompeo for some reason. I was wondering why the hell she would have so much power over reddit.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 4:12 pm
by Cassius Clay
And this thread made me google images of skinnyfat. [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 6:39 pm
by Blade Azaezel
thesalmonofdoubt wrote:
fat people are easy targets
Only because there's so much of them to hit. BAZINGA! [none]

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Thu Jun 18, 2015 11:30 pm
by Derived Absurdity
It doesn't take height differences into account with any degree of accuracy.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2015 6:23 pm
by Monk
Whitey wrote:Also the thing I found funny about FPH was that they would insult and hate people for being overweight, but if you saw pictures of most of them, they're almost all skinnyfat with minimal muscle mass, while they're more healthy than fat people they're hardly prime physical specimens themselves.

Not necessarily - many overweight people are quite healthy (e.g. they exercise, eat well, have good health vitals and whatnot). Obviously the more overweight someone becomes, the less this is true, but many skinny-fat people are actually far less healthy than many overweight peeps.

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2015 6:28 pm
by Cassius Clay
^ I was thinking this.

Because, with everything else equal, a big muscular dude with some fat is probably healthier than a skinny person with poor muscle mass to fat ratio. Though the big guy might appear "fatter".

Re: Why do so many people hate Ellen Pao?

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2015 6:47 pm
by Whitey
Cassius Clay wrote:^ I was thinking this.

Because, with everything else equal, a big muscular dude with some fat is probably healthier than a skinny person with poor muscle mass to fat ratio. Though the big guy might appear "fatter".
Oh yeah, that's true. Though when I talk about fat people I'm more referring to people who aren't muscled and suchlike underneath it all.

It's reminding me of when I've seen a personal trainer put on loads of weight just so he can lose it and prove a point.....when it's not strictly fair as he already had strength and fitness underneath all that and would be far more able to lose the weight than someone who has been fat all their life. And he'll almost certainly have been in better shape than a skinnyfat person.