Sorry for the lack of new posts this week — I’ve been rather worried about my health, and unwell. I’m planning to write all weekend and get a few days ahead for a change…
For now, have some links:
We can’t have nice things, unless we make sure some people have nicer things
The bestseller that didn’t exist
Andrew Rilstone on John C Wright
Fandom Lenses reviews a Monkees show
Dialectics and the third Doctor
Sci-Ence! Justice Leak! 
Hmm. Not convinced by the dieting one at all, which comes across as very whiny — constantly claiming that the body is “unfair” when it comes to weight-loss, as though it has some kind of moral responsibility.
The conclusion that it lands on seems to be that everyone is already the right weight for them, which is … contestable. For a start, I know that I am about 10 kg heavier than I ought to be, and anyone who disagrees should duke it out with my doctor. Yes, it’s very comforting for us to be told we’re perfect just the way we are; but it won’t stop us suffering from elevated blood-pressure, diabetes, etc.
It’s not a matter of whether you should weigh less for optimal health, it’s a matter of whether there’s any practical way of getting there short of, as she says, living permanently as if you were starving. Certainly my own experience, of having been told since I was three that I need to lose weight, and of having *once* in the subsequent thirty-three years been able to dip below the “obese” level (after having spent six months living on less than a hundred calories a day, when I was sixteen — it was all back on again by the time I was eighteen), suggests that it isn’t possible to get one’s weight out of a fairly narrow range for any length of time.
I’ve also seen, separately, results suggesting that neither diabetes or high blood pressure are directly caused by weight — rather, diabetes is caused by excessive dietary sugar (which of course can link to weight) and high blood pressure seems to correlate more with the stress people are under than their weight (and many fat people are under a LOT of stress).
But those results aren’t really the point of the link — rather the point is that no matter how much anyone *wants* to lose weight, no matter how much it would be *good* to lose weight, it’s just not possible to do so in any predictable, consistent, way.