I'm very glad you have a policy and a FAQ. I tried to convince Metafilter they needed one about 2.5 years too early. I think every public community that is big enough really needs one.

Big enough usually means big enough so that the community no longer shares sufficiently common values. Depending on the community, this seems to translate to something between 50 and 150 folks involved and participating.

So thank you!

An artist who turned into a friend, Angie Reed Garner, keeps a LiveJournal, which is all the more interesting, I think, because she recently moved to Lahore, so there's stuff about that part of her life in there too, sometimes.

Cycle23, I said "Being fat may be mostly genetic.", not "eating fatty shitty food won't make you fat, it's ALL DNA". I think there may be a difference there. I trust you can find it.

Teresa, thank you for the response and the pointer. I didn't post the comment above to say that this discussion was particularly poor, just that I'm tired of this kind of discussion.

It's awesome that the discussion you linked to could also happen here on BoingBoing, and overall I found the discussion positive, but it would be cool if BoingBoing would also support more scientific treatments of the minority opinions.

Ones like:
- Being fat may be mostly genetic.
- Eating food without the assistance of eating disorders doesn't make you fat (i.e. the oft-cited advice to stop eating when you're full does apparently work for many people, even fat ones - they don't just keep getting fatter)
- Dieting doesn't work.
- Eating especially fat food or especially rich food or especially pleasurable or especially sweet food won't make you fat (unless done in excess or unless your genetics bias you toward being fat anyway and you're thin only because you starve yourself).
- There aren't "obesifying" foods.
- Many alternative sweeteners may be quite hazardous to ingest.
- People (who aren't on diets and) who are fat eat the same amount of food as people who are skinny (who aren't on diets).
- Theories of metabolism set points and how dieting to take fat off isn't as easy as it's portrayed as being.
- Dieting actually contributes to depression and neuroses and can lead to unfortunate results for folks who can't conform to the norms and body ideals promoted by pro-dieting interests (social groups, companies, etc.).

If you'd like, I can provide citations. Recent ones, even.

It would also be cool if BoingBoing posters would think twice before posting about facile things (like restaurants serving gigantic portions of foods that are high calorie) that might lead to the discussions which I've already noted I'm (and I assume others are) tired of.

Part of what I think the social progressivism that I associate BoingBoing as a whole with is about is rethinking patterns of thought and ways of doing things that we take for granted and that remain unexamined.

To me, supporting or exploring the newer thinking about how being fat may not just be indicative of laziness or excess is something that would be in BoingBoing's interest to promote, from the point of view of reexamining unexamined thinking that may not in fact be realistic thinking.

I'm thinking you guys (the creators of BoingBoing) probably don't care, because you are hip and probably all thin, cool type people (whether this is because you count calories/diet, I do not know).

But you must know that there is a significant membership of yours, or passive readers of yours who are fat, and who, further, do not diet, and have no interest in doing so, nor in counting calories.

Surely a blog as cool as yours has noticed the growing national awareness of the fat acceptance movement recently. And the growing numbers of studies coming out that do not attribute fatness to laziness or other synonyms, or necessarily to one's diet.

We (as I am one of these people) are probably tired of your posts like these, where you talk about calories, which leads to talking about eating patterns and dieting and healthiness. Why? Because I think we have had enough of those sorts of discussions in public fora.

I'm not discounting the great discussion of foods (that sound sometimes interesting and sometimes not) that also derives from this original post, but I think it's possible to get there via other means, and not just decrying how bad for you a particular food is.

Just a datapoint for you. I don't wish a flamewar and I'm not trying to troll, just trying to give you honest feedback about your post topics.