Wrong. It's IQ. Which is increasingly linked to SES, but IQ is the variable on which the rest depends.

Exactly. Heaven knows, examples abound of children born to wealth, with no disabilities and above average intelligence, achieving precisely nothing. Lack of grit, right there.

Beautifully put. I don't know what the answer is either, but I do know that dismissive replies when people like you and me express concern is not helping anything.

What I am advocating for here, is a more empathetic and informed understanding of obesity as a TREATABLE health condition that has to be treated at the individual level, as well as the environmental and social levels.

Pre-fucking-cisely. If you lose so much weight that you can't function and are risking your own health and life, you get hospitalized until you get your shit together. This is not the solution for people who gain so much weight that they can't function and are risking their lives and health, but equally, neither is…

The thing a lot of your critics are missing is that any individual could do things that make him or her healthier. I know marathon runners who smoke. They're entirely healthy, now, but no doctor on the planet would disagree that stopping smoking would both improve their bodies' function right now and cut the risk of…

I know this is like two weeks old but have to jump in: YES to this. Good God. So much of my FB feed is accomplished, mature women with interesting lives posting their elation at losing 5 lbs or their suicidal self-loathing if they gain 5 lbs. The worst offender in particular posts things like "I'm a lazy fat sloth, I…

Motherboy XXX!

Author is too dumb to tell the difference between a promise ring (engaged to be engaged, basically) and a purity ring. Don't get too upset about anything she says.

I've been thinking of you. That statistic blew me away the first time I heard it, too.

I read it as sincere, too. If Susan Boyles felt like there was something wrong, and it wasn't identified, and now it is and she feels like life makes sense, she sounds like a few people I know who've had similar experiences and do, indeed, feel a sense of peace.

I'm working on that myself. It can be wonderful, but it can also be a gravitation suck of nasty, even in relatively good places like here.

No, but buying into (false) charges about how well-connected, empowered and successful a hated minority is puts you in some extraordinarily bad company. "Ignorant" is about the kindest way to describe that sort of thinking. The very kindest.

Very well put.

Beautifully and eloquently put, and you're far more polite than I'm able to be to this sort of casual bigotry.

Please, tell me more. I let my subscription to Der Sturmer laps, so I'm sadly behind on this sort of argumentation.

Good job calling it out with class. A lot of the time people escalate the vitriol, which contributes nothing, and obscures the point.

Squee, I have a sister in the "looking for horns" sorority! Were you offended? I was afterward, but was too flabbergasted at the time to react at all.

I know! It's not like anything bad happened to Jews, anywhere, ever, right?

Whoa. Never heard that one. *off to Google*