I've been holding off from posting since all that's come out lately has been a bunch of negative stuff. On Friday, the BBC ran this piece of shit (see sweetmachine's funny response). Then in the Sunday Times Online, this nasty bit of totally illogical fat hatred and misogyny came spurting out of a person called Rod Liddle (maybe his name is code for "little rod" and that's why he's so angry). There is a terrible series this week in the Washington Post that's basically a bunch of fear-mongering about "childhood obesity" (I won't even link to it... but I'll link to this wonderful deconstruction of it). And if you've been reading the comments section of my blog, you know that we've had some "visitors" stopping by -- one person who came on rude but actually seemed to respond to my engaging him/her in discussion in the comments, and another person calling him/herself "anonymous no. 2" who was too condescending and sarcastic for me to bother with (what's with the name, anyway? -- it's bad enough calling yourself "anonymous", but being "anonymous no. 2" takes a special kind of coward).
So I was really happy when I saw this awesome article about the scapegoating of fat people for our addiction to oil. In reading it I felt like it could have been written by my own Admiral Seamus, but I guess this dude Raj Patel beat him to the punch. The article also made it onto Common Dreams, which makes me doubly happy since, as I've pointed out before, some of the worst fatphobia comes from liberals. So far the comments on the Common Dreams post have mostly been positive, but even in the positive comments there are still some people making dim remarks like, "Well, we know fat is bad, but..." Oh well, baby steps, right? At least the comments are better than the ones made (presumably) by the Brits on the Guardian's version of the article. Clearly we still have a long way to go.
A comment on comments: I've been thinking about turning on comment moderation again, but decided against it for now because I'd like my thoughtful readers to be able to comment without hassle. So instead, I've decided that I'm just going to delete any and all obnoxious comments. It's my damn blog, after all, and I don't want to subject my readers to any more of the fatphobia that they witness elsewhere on a regular basis. So a note to would-be commenters: if you call me a name, wish death on me, direct mean sarcasm at me, or otherwise rub me the wrong way (and yes I have gotten all of these -- the one with the death wish was several months ago, and I deleted it), you will have wasted your time because your comment won't see the light of day.
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