Thread: Obesity
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Old 10-24-2009, 05:23 PM   #17
lbb
Location: Massachusetts
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,202
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Re: Obesity and Aikido

Buck, your "friendly" warning is taken in the spirit in which it was issued. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me that you should make whatever statements you want (and particularly if you don't proofread what you write), and then cry "rudeness" if someone says that you're saying things that just aren't so. I'd like to see a citation of an airline policy to charge more for people who weigh 270 pounds. I'd like to see the logical connection between a societal bias against heavy people and the existence of legally protected categories. And, as much as I trust insurance companies considerably less far than I can throw them, I'd like to see some better reasoning than a shaky paper-chain of "if THIS unlikely thing were true, then THAT improbable event might happen, which could pave the way to THOSE other unlikely events". I think there's a good discussion to be had on the subject of whether aikidoka are in good enough shape, on average, for what we're doing (or want to do). I think there's a completely different good discussion about societal biases against heavy people, although that discussion should take place somewhere other than this forum since it has nothing to do with aikido. I think there's another good conversation to have about the license that insurance companies have in creating arbitrary criteria to exclude people from coverage, although that's a discussion that needs to be based on facts and not on statements like "and then they COULD say this and they COULD do that and they COULD deny you coverage", and it's also not a discussion for aikiweb. So, maybe you could identify which of these conversations (or some other conversation altogether) you'd like to have. Jumble them all together, and they work at cross-purposes IMO.
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