The word has done incredible damage to my body.

In the pages of Slate, Emily Duke, a woman who “loves carbohydrates,” shares her sorrows as a professional person of girth:

When New York state announced that Phase 1B of vaccinations would include those who are “obese” or “severely obese,” I knew I would qualify. My heart sank into my stomach. I am fat. I am a fat activist. Like a lot of larger-bodied people, I have embraced the word fat. Doing so allows me to buy clothes that fit, rather than those that could fit if I changed. 

The last three words of that sentence are perhaps worth keeping in mind.

It allows me to exist.

Which, we’re to assume, the word obese does not. It being less fluffy. With the power to send a fat woman into an emotional tailspin. 

Among all the radical self-love coffee mugs I’ve seen, “I love being obese” has never been one of them. The word obese elicits an unparalleled grief in me. 

Well, recognition can do that, especially if belated and previously avoided. And incidentally, if your world is one in which “radical self-love coffee mugs” feature prominently, I’d suggest something may be awry.

When I heard the [vaccination] announcement I had been waiting for, I spent three hours in the grocery store trying to figure out what I “should” have for dinner that night.

Three hours. One might call that a telling preoccupation. Ms Duke then detours, at length, into recollections of being in therapy, parental divorce, the “trauma” of dieting, and the woes of being told she is an “emotional eater.” 

When I heard the good news about my eligibility for the vaccine… I panicked that I was a bad fat activist. I felt like I was just one weigh-in away from losing my chosen identity because I can’t face a number on a scale… I’d need to know my BMI to ensure I qualified, and I wasn’t sure if I could handle it.

No emotional issues there, thank goodness.

For those in search of a lockdown project, how to make toilet-paper moonshine.

“I’m going to be turning toilet paper into drinkable alcohol.”

Via Elephants Gerald. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.

For newcomers and the forgetful, two items from the archives:

The Blurting. 

A leftist compulsion is pondered.

A more subtle and common example occurred in January, when the family headed out to a Burns Night dinner at a restaurant adjacent to the university. Before the food appeared, we were treated to a brief poetry reading courtesy of a local academic. I was tempted to roll my eyes at the prospect, but he did get the crowd in good spirits. Until a poem about food and good company was somehow given, as he put it, “a political edge.” And so, we endured a contrived reference to Brexit – implicitly very bad – and a pointed nod across the ocean to a certain president, who we were encouraged to imagine naked.

At the time, I was struck by the presumption – the belief that everyone present would naturally agree - that opposition to Brexit and a disdain of Trump were things we, the customers, would without doubt have in common… The subtext was hard to miss: “This is a fashionable restaurant and its customers, being fashionable, will obviously hold left-of-centre views, especially regarding Brexit and Trump, both of which they should disdain and wish to be seen disdaining by their left-of-centre peers.” And when you’re out to enjoy a fancy meal with friends and family, this is an odd sentiment to encounter from someone you don’t know and whose ostensible job is to make you feel welcome.

Trust Me, I’m A Witchdoctor. 

Guardian columnist denounces Western medicine as “outdated,” champions use of bush dung.

Video here, via Darleen. Because recreational sociopathy is very in right now. 

Anything else is an excuse, of course, a lie. The rationalisation – that trashing another random restaurant and menacing its customers, people about whom the aggressors know nothing, will somehow usher in a brighter, more fragrant tomorrow – can be dismissed as ludicrous and self-flattering, a moral non sequitur. But look carefully at what these self-imagined warriors for “social justice” choose to do – repeatedly, by default. See their go-to solution, their way to fix the world.

See how they enjoy it.

Because that’s what it’s about.

Update, via the comments:

As noted before, if someone’s preferred form of activism is to harass and bully random strangers, while feeling enormously self-satisfied about their own imagined radicalism – and while clearly exulting in mob domination – then this tells us very little about any issue supposedly animating them. Again, it’s a moral non sequitur and rather like saying, “I’m troubled by the plight of the Javan rhinoceros, so I’m going to start spitting at the elderly and keying random cars.”

It does, however, tell us just how narcissistic and spiteful these creatures are. And how low a priority their wellbeing should be.

Because you crave one, an open thread, in which to share links and bicker.

Oh, and here’s something savoury. 

Best enlarged.