Crazy? Sounds like a fun card game, to me.

The part where sex is exchanged for another valuable.

Here's a free pro hint for next time: Read, comprehend, comment - in that order.

Still works that way, in a way.

When the government dramatically raised university feeds in my country, several commentators were half-jokingly commenting that politicians voted yes mostly in order to ensure a steady stream of young student prostitutes.

Money for sex usually also means money flowing from an older generation that had time to acquire it to a younger generation.

Yeah, it's a bit sad.

Consider yourself lucky, then, and pray that it lasts. The people around you are not made of such strong stuff, and I can't be sure that you are either.

It actually is a bit different for the Republicans, in that they are caught in an internal party schism of a scale we've not seen on either side since desegregation, if even then. It's difficult for the less right to look good to the more right, undirected pushing against the Democrats is one of the few ways they have to do it.

Do not forget that ObamaCare was rammed through without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.

It's the unfortunate case that Republicans don't generally support Democratic bills. Witness the recent student loan bill. There is not much question that a better educated populance means a better economy and a stronger nation. It's a truism that we could just pay for college education in a number of fields and reap economic benefits of many times the spending. Indeed, we used to do more of that and the country was stronger when we did.

You meant "you wouldn't approve" rather than "you wouldn't understand".

Positioned correctly, it isn't all that socially reprehensible to state the sentiment that you don't believe you should pay for people who drive their motorcycle without helmets, people who self-administer addictive and destructive drugs, people who engage in unprotected sex with prostitutes or unprotected casual sex with strangers, and people who go climbing without using all of the safety equipment they could.

You don't really even need to get into whether you hold human life sacred, etc., to get that argument across. It's mostly just an economic argument, you believe yourself to be sensible and don't want to pay for people who aren't.

The ironic thing about this is that it translates to "I don't want to pay for the self-inflicted downfall of the people who exercise the libertarian rights I deeply believe they should have."

OK, not a bad position as far as it goes. Now, tell me how we should judge each case, once these people present themselves for medical care, and what we should do if they don't meet the standard.

You just said it did, because when you break a leg, you get a temporary handicap placard.

Still my point remains. Even if you broke your leg yourself, you can't will it to heal and it will magically do so. But you can lose weight by behaving in the correct way (diet and excercise).

Or, in other words, it is your choice to remain in that state. I don't care how you got there, for all I know you could've been captured by a lunatic with a fat fetish and force-fed seven times a day for half a year.

I don't blame anyone for being fat. I do blame everyone who remains so. And that's the difference. I can't blame someone with one leg for not growing the missing one back. It's simply not within his powers to do so. Losing weight absolutely is within your power.

Those aren't "facts", those are idiocities.

The human body changes over time. You don't expect a 5 year old to eat and drink the same things as a 5 month old, do you? So why do you expect that the same diet for a lifetime will have the same effect all the time?

When you're 40, your body is not the same as it was when you were 20. You can see it in sports, if you're competitive it is very clear. In many sports you can still compete with the youngsters, because experience and training compensate for changes in biology, but I don't think anyone actually active will deny the basic fact that the body changes. So you need to change your training regime and your diet with it.

Change. It's really the most basic fact of the universe. Why is our brain so stupid that it treats the world as constant, when the only constant phenomenon in it is change?

And the fact that we make fatties comfortable, that the public agenda is "don't be ashamed of your body" instead of "get to the fucking gym you loser" is a primary reason, even if they nicely call it "social factors" in that research.

There's nothing new there. We've known for basically as long as nutritional studies as a field exists that the human body is designed to store away extra food, because it evolved in a time of scarcity and still thinks that the plenty won't last.

We've known for hundreds if not thousands of years that people who have enough food to eat constantly will put on weight. For hundreds of years being overweight was a status symbol.

However, it is very recent that the combination of constant food full of fat and sugar and a lifestyle with very little physical effort has allowed people to grow far beyond anything nature has ever imagined.

And it is just as simple that when natural pressure drops away, you have to do the work yourself, you need motivation and discipline and some information on the right food and sports.

No, I reject your conclusion and that research, for semantic terms. "It is quite hard" is very different from "not possible". Of course it's possible. Most people just lack the motivation, energy or discipline to do it.

And that's why we should work on the social factors, because in the short run, we can't change the biological ones. Shaming along is not enough. But imagine that - somehow - we turned society into a motivational factor, where people would tell you to not accept your body, but eat better and exercise more, with the right combination of shaming and positive feedback.

Wanna bet most fatties would not look like overfed elephants anymore?

That's true, and one of the reasons I avoid places where they allow smoking - I smell horribly when I come home and there's no way I can stand myself without a shower.

But there's a marked difference between a non-smoker whose cloths and hair picked up the smell and a smoker, who practically oozes it from every pore. It's true. I've stopped hooking up with smoking girls after I noticed that even if they hadn't had one for a whole day, I could still smell it coming from their skin.

Exactly. The 0.1% or so of fat people who are so because of a medical condition already have a medical diagnosis. They don't need a second one.

For almost everyone who is fat, the medically correct terminology for their condition is called "laziness". Not just to not excercise, but more importantly to not spend the effort on eating right, and on finding the right mix between diet and sports.

There's no excuse for being fat. If you are fat, it is because of choices you made and keep making every day.

The difference is that you can't put your leg back. You can lose weight.

Sign me up.

I own a small company. Very small, but I have hopes. If this ruling gets through, I'll make it inofficial company policy to not hire fat people, just like I'll never hire a smoker (and trust me smokers, we non-smokers smell it as soon as you enter the room, if you've had one in the past few hours).

I know that many small companies have reservations hiring women because if they get pregnant, you've lost 10% (or so) of your team. But at least that's something that is temporary.

So judges - yes, please, turn more people into liabilities. I've been on both sides of the fence, working for employee rights as well as on the employer side. Giving disadvantaged people special rights has one effect in the real world - pushing them further out and making them less desireable as employees.

So... thinking about it... yes, please make it a disability with all the special rights that come with it. That'll make sure fatties have a harder time finding a job, which just might provide motivation for some of them to finally get their life together.

While there are elements of a mild addiction, it's not a disease. It falls into the same category as, say, a shopping habbit, or a strong sex drive - things that you are quite capable of having under control, and some control can be expected from an adult.

At the most, yes.

99% of the cases, at the very least. There are one or two actual bodily malfunctions that cause obesity, but they are extremely rare.

I do agree with everything else you've said.