Chat/Comment thread

There's no evidence that weight is a proxy for health. Of course, facing the facts would just get in the way of simplistic, moralizing shaming of the fatties, right Larni?And how about you, dude? You picked up quite a few Resident Evil 5 cheevos over the holidays, looks like. Time to put the controller down and burn off some of the figgy pudding (or whatever the fuck you eat for Christmas over there.)

I don't know if he's healthy or not, Larni, and the point is - neither do you, because weight is not a proxy for health. I mean the science on this couldn't be more clear.For all we know, he jogs 5 miles a day and does weights, has the heart and lung capacity of a racehorse, eats 1000 calories a day and is still fat. Genetics, not lifestyle, is the overwhelming determinant of weight. Why should he be? Because you hate fatties? It's one thing to come on here and smear a guy because of his weight, but demanding that he also smear himself in accordance with your own personal aesthetic is a bit fucking much, don't you think? Well, we've been shaming fat people, now, for about (oh, I don't know) 200 fucking years. Has it helped any fat people muster up enough "self-control"? No, of course not, because there's not enough self-control in the world to deal with a body and brain that are responding to weight loss by entering a programmed starvation response that makes you obsessed with fatty foods and causes changes in your muscles so that exercising burns 50% less calories.Mass-balance nutrition is dead. If people can't keep weight off with an 800 calorie-a-day diet and hours a day of regular exercise, the problem isn't "self-control", the problem is a body that is so determined to stay fat that it's prepared to override the will of its occupant. Nobody bats an eye at the notion that someone with a brain tumor in this or that part of their brain might do things for which they cannot meaningfully be said to be responsible. Well, we're now finding out that trying to lose weight has a similar effect on the brain if you have a certain gene. I think that throws all notions of obesity being a "self-control" problem right out the fucking window, but don't let that get in the way of your little English hate-the-fatties parade. (But guess what, asshole, I've been to your little island and seen the statistics on the English obesity rate, and you're all about ten years away from looking like Kansas Fucking City.)

It's not, actually. Take it from the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine:

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Given the enormous social pressure to lose weight, one might suppose there is clear and overwhelming evidence of the risks of obesity and the benefits of weight loss. Unfortunately, the data linking overweight and death, as well as the data showing the beneficial effects of weight loss, are limited, fragmentary, and often ambiguous. Most of the evidence is either indirect or derived from observational epidemiologic studies, many of which have serious methodologic flaws. Many studies fail toconsider confounding variables, which are extremely difficult to assess and control for in this type of study. For example, mortality among obese people may be misleadingly high because overweight people are more likely to be sedentary and of low socioeconomic status....

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The usual measure of leanness or fatness is the body-mass index, calculated by dividing the weight in kilograms by the square of the height in meters, and the optimal body-mass index is usually considered to be about 21.0. Above that level, the risk of death increases little until a body-mass index of about 27 or 28 is reached. Translated into familiar terms, a body-mass index of 27 to 28 corresponds to a weight of 162 to 168 lb (74 to 76 kg) for a 5'5" (165 cm) woman and 188 to 195 lb (85 to 89 kg) for a 5'10" (178 cm) man. Only for those with a body-mass index well above 28 does the relative risk of death reach 2.0. Furthermore, the association is highly age-dependent, as shown by Stevens et al. elsewhere in this issue of the Journal. It declines steadily with age until about 74 years, after which there appears to be no correlation between body-mass index and mortality.

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Even granting the existence of an association between increasing body weight and higher mortality, at least for younger people, it does not follow that losing weight will reduce the risk. We simply do not know whether a person who loses 20 lb will thereby acquire the same reduced risk as a person who started out 20 lb lighter. The few studies of mortality among people who voluntarily lost weight produced inconsistent results; some even suggested that weight loss increased mortality.

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Now, its true that neither of the authors of that article are specialists in obesity, but they are doctors which is a bit more than can be said of the completely anonymous authors of your Wikipedia article. And that article was written in 1998, which just goes to show how impermeable society has been to the scientific finding that weight is not a proxy for health. Oh, and you know that just by looking? Because you're a doctor? LOL!

I think he's fat-looking. I'm trying to tell you that nobody can judge his health just by looking. Fat active people are half as likely to die early than thin sedentary people because they're healthier. They're also fat, as stipulated! And likely to stay that way.Whether his BMI is 30 or 30,000 is irrelevant; that's just another way of saying "he's fat", not "he's unhealthy." BMI is not a proxy for health, either. You'd be surprised how many marathon runners have a BMI that puts them in the category of "obese."Weight is not a proxy for health. I don't understand why that's not sinking in for you. Well, I guess I do - the kind of righteous indignation you can feel at the expense of fat people is addictive, you're addicted to it, and your mind - like that of a creationist - is simply going to reject any contrary evidence long before your conscious mind will even notice it.Here's a fun study:

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A study on caloric intake in a large, nationwide population of children and adolescents has revealed the surprising finding that those who are clinically overweight and obese consume fewer calories than their healthy weight counterparts, beginning at around 7 years of age.

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The study, which was presented here at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) 2010 Annual Meeting, was undertaken to clarify the inconsistencies in previous research on caloric intake and weight in children. Researchers have assumed that variation in caloric intake at different ages was the basis of the variation in weight, but this had not been explored.

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http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/721613"Mass-balance" is dead. Eating the whole bag of chips isn't what makes you fat. Well, naturally. You're a bigot.

Eh, it'll be free to play in, like, six months or so. That's probably when we'll get into it, anyway. Currently we're up on Skyrim around here.

What does your honesty have to do with it? Of course you're being honest. I called you a bigot, not a liar.Let me change up the situation here and explain it through a lens I'm sure you'll be able to recognize. We have a guy here who was shown a YouTube video of a Ta-Nehisi Coates talking about World of Warcraft, and rather than respond to what the man in the video said, the guy says "man, look at that guy's black skin. I bet he can't hold down a job to save his life!" And then we all very patiently, if somewhat irritatedly, point out to that guy that it's actually a myth that black people are lazy, and that their higher rate of unemployment stems not from a poor work ethic, but from systematic racism in both the educational system and the employment market.And this guy responds "Come on, you can't look at Sambo there and believe that he's in any way as productive or as recently-employed as white people!" And then we all remind him that skin color isn't a proxy for employment status and that his impression of Ta-Nehisi Coates' paycheck-earning status is being colored by a pre-existing desire to believe oneself superior to black people.And then this guy says "well, ok, I take all those points - but I just can't look at that man and think of him as a productive, employed citizen!" At which point, what can we do but explain that when you have unsupportable prejudices against a class of person that you won't abandon - or even make the effort to abandon - when shown contradictory evidence, you're a bigot?And, great, now this guy is complaining that we used the "B-word" when all he was doing was "accepting our points" and giving his "honest opinion" of whether or not Ta-Nehisi Coates can hold a job?Come on. Put like that surely you can see how ridiculous you're being? Not to mention - if you had actually accepted the points when you said you did, you would not have gone on explaining how it was impossible to look at one of these fat fucking fattie-fats and think of them as healthy. Would you? How is it "accepting my point" if you then go on to reiterate your adamant position that all my points are wrong? Oh, boo-fucking-hoo! I'm sorry that I endangered the project of getting you to abandon your moralizing prejudice by expecting you to act like a fucking adult about something. Certainly if I'd realized you needed to be hand-held like a child in order to be shown how to be a decent person, I would have written a very different post.

Where did I claim that you did?I made an entirely fictitious analogy about a completely different guy in a completely different situation. How did you not understand that?Is the guy in the video a black man, Larni? Did he talk about World of Warcraft or the new Star Wars game? And is he, in fact, Atlantic.com blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates?Seriously, calm down and go back and read the post again. You've apparently understood less than 20% of it. This is the mental block I'm talking about, Larni - something is going on in your mind that prevents you from apprehending new information.

Not so; its actually true that the rates of unemployment are higher among African-Americans than among American whites. It's certainly the case that if you're looking at a black man, you're looking at a man who is less likely to be employed and more likely to have a criminal record than if you're looking at a white man.But its no more true that you can look at the color of a man's skin and determine his employment history than you can look at a person and determine their BMI and their overall level of health. I'm aware. It's nevertheless true. I never told you that he was healthy. It's not my position that he's healthy. What I'm telling you is very simple and I wonder why you keep ignoring it: you can't tell someone's activity level and health just by looking at them. Some healthy, very active people are going to enjoy long, healthy lives and never experience any of the conditions you've referred to and they're going to do it all while being medically obese. Even morbidly obese.High blood cholesterol? High blood triglicerides? Those are a function of diet, not weight. Now, they may very well be a function of the diet that made you fat in the first place - although we're finding that diet doesn't have much of an effect on obesity, since obese people actually consume less calories than the non-obese - but a fat person who eats a diet of mostly vegetables and lean meats (and if you read that NYT story I linked, you'll find the story of a woman who can't lose any weight on an 800-calorie diet of vegetables and one grilled chicken breast a day) isn't going to have any higher risk of those conditions than a thin person on the same diet. And conversely, someone thin may have incredibly high blood cholesterol as a function of a bad diet and bad genetics and they may simply be active enough to keep the pounds off.Weight isn't a proxy for health. It's just not that simple. You can't look at someone and tell how healthy they are. Like this kid:Hey, maybe the doctors are wrong and this kid is perfectly fine. Like I say, you can't tell just by looking at someone. Still, though, when you hear statistics about the US (or the UK) and its prevalence of obesity and the "health crisis" that is the direct result, keep in mind that those statistics are based on classifying people like Cian Atwood as "obese."

CS already mentioned some but here's a few more: City of Heroes/City of Villians, Champions Online. For that matter World of Warcraft did actually go free-to-play, on a limited basis: the free-to-play part is the "vanilla" WoW, the 1-60 areas of the "original" game before the "Burning Legion" expansion."Freemium" is probably a better term for these games; there's a "core game" that is free to play, and then a whole host of premium content that you either buy piecemeal or pay a monthly subscription for. As I say, I think SWTOR will move to the same model; if even World of Warcraft has free to play content, there's just no long-term hope for a subscription-model MMO anymore. I think EVE Online is the only subscription holdout (but you can play it for free, sort of, by buying subscription cards with the in-game ISK currency.)

The same say in what, exactly? UN resolutions are non-binding. The UN has precisely zero authority that doesn't stem from voluntary compliance with their requests.

Could you give even a single example of it happening? By Obama or anyone else?

The NDAA doesn't contain a "provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens." It simply contains no provision that prevents him from doing so.The text of the section of the NDAA you refer to says "Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States, or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States."It's the AUMF that allows the President, potentially, to detain indefinitely US citizens accused of terrorist ties; that act was passed in 2001 and signed by George Bush.You need to do better research, Dronester, as always. Obama isn't going to give you a pony or close the Iraqi embassy, no matter how hard you stamp your feet and pout.

Anwar al-Awlaqi was a casualty of a military strike on a battlefield. It's a stretch to refer to it as the "ordered killing" of anybody. The Constitution gives the President wide authority to determine military objectives; the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the US military from being used for law enforcement purposes within the US, but air strikes are hardly something considered the purview of domestic law enforcement.The US military has never operated under an assumption that Americans can't be the target of military action, otherwise fighting Civil War would have been impossible (since all citizens of the so-called "Confederate States of America" were, at all times, American citizens.) Anwar al-Awlaqi wasn't "labeled" as anything but a military target.I don't understand why it comes as a surprise that, when you take up arms against the US Army on the battlefield, they don't stop and check your passport.

That's always been something militaries do.I'm not understanding the objection. The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. He's Constitutionally empowered to determine military objectives. The sole limitations on military objectives are the US Constitution, our treaties with other nations, and the terms by which Congress authorizes military force.Holding a US passport (and there's no evidence that he actually did) doesn't immunize you against the military. It's not a magic anti-bullet shield. If Anwar al-Awlaqi had been arrested and taken into US custody, it certainly would have been illegal to execute him without a trial. But he wasn't. He was a casualty of a military strike.

It's a distinction without a difference. If the President orders an airstrike on an al-Qaeda training camp, they don't wait for people to clear out of it - indeed, killing the people who are training there is as much an objective as destroying the assets at the camp itself. Is that an "ordered killing"? If you fire an air-to-air missile at another airplane, the goal is not so much to destroy the easily-replaced airplane but to kill the expensively-trained pilot; is that also an "ordered killing"?How about snipers? While its not uncommon for military snipers to fire in an anti-materiel capacity, it's more common for them to set their sights on enemy officers. Is that an "ordered killing" as well? If it is, it's never been understood to be something outside of the appropriate realm of military conduct.The point of the strike was to take out Anwar al-Awlaki's capabilities to harm US citizens. As such, the targets were his resources, his vehicles, his associates, and his own person, since killing him would certainly neutralize him as a threat.I think you're displaying a certain naivete about what soldiers actually do. The reason they carry guns is to carry out targeted killings of the soldiers on the other side. Combat isn't just a thing where soldiers face each other and then spray bullets around, hoping that one side will get nervous and leave. They're taking aim and firing at each other with the intent to kill. Soldiers try to kill each other, it's not something new.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.