Category: Rants

Using this type of data in a lot of my research, I'm a sucker for the periodic feature stories about extreme points of the Census; you know, America's richest / poorest / least populous / etc places. CNN had one recently about Franklin County, Mississippi. It's the place where, according to the Census, no one is gay. That's right. Statistically, it is 100% gay-free. It's some sort of Mormon/evangelical paradise!

Of course the premise of the story is not to be taken literally; there are gay people in Franklin County even if they do not report it on the Census. More accurately, Franklin County is the place where no one admits to being gay, even if the neighbors know.

Franklin County is, as the data and the author's description reveal, a shit hole. Let me put it this way. If your idea of heaven is the dead space between Natchez and Brookhaven, MS then you're in for a treat. Otherwise, I hope you like unbearable heat, poverty, and isolation!

And yes, that is the "Homochitto National Forest." Why? Because life is beautiful, that's why.

This is a good illustration of a dilemma I've been mulling over since adolescence. Why is it that we're always pining over "Real America" as a society when it's such a crappy place?
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These are rural communities where there is nothing to do, full of planted fields, white people, and humorless Christians. Their levels of poverty and ignorance give the most dilapidated urban areas a run for their money. Please remind me why we're supposed to want the rest of the country to be more like these places.

Seriously, does Franklin County sound like the kind of place you would live willingly in the deepest reaches of your nightmares? It has 8,000 people. It's in the middle of nowhere. The residents (all caveats about Southern hospitality and politeness to strangers aside) sound like the kind of people you would go far out of your way to avoid having to spend the rest of your life around.

Conservatives can't even pull the Liberal Elitism card here, because they don't want to live in these places either. That's why they're flocking to the suburbs over the last 30-plus years. This isn't about gay people being welcome or not welcome in rural Mississippi (hint: they're not) but rather why anyone wants to live in these places. Everyone who has the financial and professional means to leave these places does so. So why is it that every four years the media waxes eloquent about Real 'Merica and Hillary Clinton's "Hard Working Americans" (uneducated white people) and other symbols of the Norman Rockwell 1940s America that no longer exists, if indeed it ever did.

As Garrison Keillor wrote many years ago:

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman's Wharf is overpriced, and the bus tour of Haight-Ashbury is disappointing (Where are the hippies?

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), but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco, Texas. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don't believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what's important is: In San Francisco, it doesn't matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of this country.

Franklin County, MS sounds like a horrible place and I hope never to screw up badly enough at life to get marooned there. The lack of (Census-recorded) gay people there is not damning evidence in itself, but is a symptom of the larger problem with our cultural emphasis on the virtues of small, rural America.

No thanks. Hell, I'll take supposed nightmare places like Detroit or Cleveland over the rural Land That Time Forgot. Whether you personally like living in one of these places is not relevant here; the point is that the country would do well to work at being less like these places, not more.

Public opinion research tells us that individuals' partisan identity crystallizes in early adulthood and is resistant to change as we age. The same is generally true of our attitudes on political issues, albeit with more wiggle room. As the political environment changes and as our views and priorities change (I believe sociologists still use the term "life course effects" to reflect the evolution of outlook that comes with major life events like college, entering the workforce, marriage, parenthood, home ownership, retirement, and so on) we are more willing to change our tune. If the bottom suddenly falls out of the economy, we become a bit more favorable toward things like unemployment benefits. When we buy a home we start to care about property taxes. When we're retired or about to retire we become much more pro-Social Security/Medicare. We do, in short, shuffle our priorities and change our minds in a systematic way.

As long as they're not doing it at apparent random, it's never a sign of weakness for political figures (or ordinary people, for that matter) to change their opinions over time. Thoughtful people tend to do that. It's not a sign of intellectual weakness. I used to be in favor of capital punishment; as I learned more about, and gave more thought to, the issue I changed my mind. Please don't think less of me.

There are bonus points to be won for entertaining these changes of heart and mind when it is politically unpopular to do so.
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No one gets a round of applause for coming out against Jim Crow-era segregation in 2013. Once opposing segregation became overwhelmingly popular, taking that position skirted the fine line between Evolving Opinions and political opportunism. Coming out against segregation in the 1920s – now that would be worthy of a hat tip. That involved some risk. That meant accepting the risk of taking an unpopular stance.

As all of the data from the last 20 years show, there has been a dramatic change in Americans' attitudes toward gay marriage over time. It has gone from a political third rail (Remember when gay marriage referendums used to be put on ballots because the right knew that people would come to the polls just to vote against it?) to a rapidly moving bandwagon in an astonishingly short period of time. Whereas people used to be hesitant to speak out for it, people are becoming more hesitant to oppose it for fear of being perceived as backward, bigoted, and behind the times.

Politically, being pro-gay marriage is a relatively easy thing to do now.
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For Democrats, it's downright popular. For Republicans, it has majority support among the younger generations and the Unspeakable is being spoken now even among the older ones. Gays now serve openly in bastions of macho-hetero symbolism like the military, major corporations, all levels of government, and throughout the media. Even in the bone-headed culture of professional sports, gay-bashing is met with immediate rebuke these days (remember Chris Culliver, or Kobe Bryant scolding homophobic fans on Twitter?)

All of this is a lead-up to the question of why Hillary Clinton came out in support of gay marriage in March of 2013, and whether this is supposed to impress anyone. For all her strengths, HRC has been remarkably risk-averse in her political career and has come up woefully short on this issue time and again. It's the reason that many people, myself included, have criticized her as a political opportunist, a party insider who advances into new territory only after it has been made safe by others. It's not exactly a heroic move at this point, and it's difficult to believe that there was no point before now – just months before the Supreme Court may be about to resolve the issue and after almost every Democratic elected official of any note has already endorsed it – at which she could muster the courage to take a stand.

A key criticism from the left of both Clintons and their DLC-type followers within the party is and has been that they adopt issue positions based on popularity rather than taking positions and explaining why people should support them. What Hillary Clinton has done with the gay marriage issue is a perfect example of that. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad she has come around or "evolved" to what I believe is the correct position on the issue.
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That said, her unwillingness to support it before it was declared Politically Safe to do so is a good example of why she couldn't rally Democrats behind her in 2008 and will have trouble doing so in 2016. Fortune may not always favor the boldest, but it certainly does not favor the least bold.

One thing I never do in the classroom, despite it being fairly common in my field, is to have students debate political issues. That's not the point of political science. I'm far more interested in evaluating their level of knowledge than in letting them talk about what they think. They spend enough time talking about what they think. No one cares. Opinions are for the internet.

Yes, there is some value in the point-counterpoint format. But in the classroom it strikes me as more of a time-killing tactic than legitimate pedagogy. It's one step short of showing episodes of The West Wing because Prof has a hangover. I assign papers in which the students get to practice defending a viewpoint by constructing a logical argument based on evidence. In my opinion that's more useful.

The other reason I don't like debate-style exercises is that there are surprisingly few issues in politics have two relatively equally balanced sides to the argument. I mean, modern American politics is basically the Democrats mumbling something quasi-logical while the Republicans scream something that makes no sense whatsoever. What am I supposed to say, "OK class, today we're going to debate de-funding the National Science Foundation. This group will be the 'pro' side…." We'd get more accomplished if we played Candyland. Defending ridiculous viewpoints is going to teach them one of two things. They will learn to make nonsensical arguments unabashedly, or they will learn how to say a bunch of bullshit that sounds like a persuasive argument but isn't. The former is Sean Hannity, the latter, George Will.

Regular NY Times readers among you may know where I'm going with this, assuming you laughed as hard as I did when reading the recent story about young conservatives defending "Traditional" Marriage ("Young Opponents of Gay Marriage Undaunted by Battle Ahead") If these young people had not freely chosen to do this for a living – and presumably they're getting paid pretty well from the right-wing slush fund, especially for people with no particular skills – I might feel a little sorry for them. For people defending an ideology based on individual freedom and minimal government, constructing an anti-gay marriage argument involves willful ignorance or staggeringly complex mental gymnastics.

And the other side of the issue – the case for what proponents call traditional marriage – is simple, they say.

"In redefining marriage to include same-sex couples, what you’re doing is you’re excluding the norm of sexual complementarity," said Mr. Anderson, the Heritage Foundation fellow. "Once you exclude that norm, the three other norms – which are monogamy, sexual exclusivity and permanency – become optional as well."

The result, proponents of traditional marriage say, would be further rises in divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.

OK, sure, this argument makes no sense, being essentially an "It's bad for society!" argument from people who purport to be against what they call the Nanny State telling us what to do. But at the same time, wow, that is some epic bullshitting! Well done, Mr. Anderson. Made it sound all fancy 'n stuff!

I've never been one to read nobility into the idea of fighting a lost cause. To me it seems sad rather than some sort of victory of the human spirit against unfavorable odds. The reader gets a sense, based on their comments, that they see themselves as the protagonists in 300, fighting a lost cause in a way that will be remembered forever for its heroism, fidelity, and bravery. All I see is reasonably bright young people who could be doing something useful with their lives but instead have chosen to be the Washington Generals of the gay marriage debate.

One of the interesting things about the study of public opinion is that Americans all have basically the same values. The difference is in how we prioritize them and how consistently we adhere to them. Politically, most people consider the concept of equality and our constitutional rights to be core values, but we often abandon them when we feel sufficiently threatened by scary brown people. Whenever I read this type of research I think about my own priorities. I value things like logic and consistency more than anything. It displeases me when things are unpredictable, especially in personal interactions. I don't like emotional reasoning – although like everyone, I do it myself sometimes – or people who have a million exceptions for every principle in which they claim to believe.

So, let me pose a question: If those two sixteen year old boys in Steubenville were charged with armed robbery rather than sexual assault, would you feel bad for them? In a way, I would.

Please remain calm and keep reading.

I would feel bad for them insasmuch as I think crime is a social problem with social causes; people do not fall from the womb with their switch turned to Evil and, as adults, decide to sell drugs or steal cars because it's thrilling. I think people react to the way they're raised and they generally choose the best of the options available to them. For many people living in the typical post-industrial shit hole like Steubenville, selling drugs is the most lucrative profession available to them by far. So if these guys were two common street criminals ("juvenile delinquents", if we're making an After School Special) conservatives would argue personal responsibility and punishment while the rest of us would argue mitigating circumstances and rehabilitation.

I don't feel bad for those guys because they had good grades or played football or were Nice Boys or anything else of the sort. In fact "Feel bad for" is the wrong phrase altogether. My point is simply this: We cannot believe that our justice system is fundamentally fucked up, which it most certainly is, and that crime has environmental causes and then suddenly become throw-the-book-at-'em Personal Responsibility chanting right-wingers if the crime they committed is especially offensive to us. Searching the archives I'm estimating that I've written 75-100 posts over the years about prison, law enforcement, miscarriages of justice, and the like. I don't think prison makes anyone better, ever, unless we count becoming a better criminal. And I think that we, as Americans, often scream for tougher sentences and harsh punishments to project our own sense of responsibility onto whichever sacrificial lambs were too poor to buy their way out of court.

In the context of the juvenile justice system, the sentence handed out to those rapists – and they will now be labeled so for life, as they should be – seems appropriate and unexceptional. If you were expecting or wanted more (drawing and quartering has been proposed, pending the availability of horses) I'd encourage you to examine your own motives. Why? Do you suddenly believe that the purpose of the justice system is to punish? Do you believe that incarceration fixes people?

Replace the phrase "feel bad for" with pity. I pity those boys because they are products of a society that has told them for their entire lives that what they did to the victim (of which there is only one here) is acceptable behavior. When I say "society" I don't mean Steubenville; I mean the whole country. We all live in Steubenville when it comes to creating…I'm not fond of the term "rape culture", but…creating a society that excuses, condones, victim-blames, shames, and does everything else except tell boys and men don't drug people and fuck them while they're unconscious. Read that part again. That's what they did. They hatched a plan to drug the victim and then have sex with her repeatedly while she was essentially inert. We live in a society so messed up that it is not immediately apparent to two 16 year old boys that this is wrong, or a thing they should not do. Instead they believed it was a thing Boys do while Being Boys, that the victim deserved or earned it, and that no harm could or should come to them for doing it.

That, my friends, is our fault. My fault. Yours too. That is our collective responsibility. Ultimately the perpetrators are responsible for their actions. But the rest of us bear some responsibility for what they believed. It's acceptable, she deserves it, we shouldn't be punished. They believed that so completely that they videotaped it and posted it on the internet, for Christ's sake. Most people – though not all people – don't take video of themselves committing crimes, and they're certainly not stupid enough to show all and sundry afterward if they do. Neither the attackers nor their friends and community thought that – pardon me for being emphatic – drugging a girl and having sex with her while she was unconscious was a crime. It was some sort of prank. Ha ha. You know, like that time you recorded your friend getting hit in the face with a pie.

You can take the Bill Bennett point of view if you want and conclude that these boys did not understand that what they did was a crime because The Evil lurks within them and they are Bad Apples and without morality or whatever. Or you can ask, How bad must the messages we send to, and examples we set for, young men be if by the time they reach near-adulthood they think it's acceptable to drug people and rape them? That they would in any way be surprised or confused to be arrested and prosecuted for doing so?

I believe they should be punished, but that we focus on them and on the punishment to avoid addressing our own contributions to this culture of acceptance, of victim-blaming, of excuse-making, and of misinformation? It's easy to say "Hang 'em high" or "The bitch wanted it" and then walk away. The difficult part is reflecting on our own contributions to a system that sends men into adulthood with such a warped set of beliefs about women, sex, and the boundaries of their own behavior.

One of the things I enjoy about social networking is that I rarely have to seek out news items of interest anymore. A quick scroll through the ol' Facebox gives me a selection of political reading material ranging from the mundane to the fascinating. My policy of not "friending" morons, high school classmates, or moron high school classmates pays off.

A former student who is now several years into a successful career in journalism shared a rather dull news item about the House Republican budget proposal accompanied by a stock photo we've all seen before:

Then I looked a little more closely and realized that the photo was not the same "Paul Ryan holding binder next to podium" shot to which we were treated in 2011 (during the debt ceiling BS) and most of 2012. This is a new Ryan-Binder shot. Like, a recent one. And he's no longer holding the Roadmap to Prosperity; that's the Path to Prosperity, thankyouverymuch. They're quite different. Unlike the Roadmap, the innovative Pathway proposes

I left that sentence unfinished on purpose. Is there anyone, even the most casual follower of American politics, who cannot finish it on his or her own? If so, it may shock you to learn that it proposes repealing "Obamacare", cutting taxes, reducing spending (Pentagon excluded, of course), and balancing the budget through miraculous, unprecedented economic growth that is sure to happen as soon as we pass more tax cuts.

I've seen Babe. I've been to funerals. I've paid to see Episode II: Attack of the Clones in a theater. Yet reading this news item is among the saddest things I've ever experienced. Can you wrap your mind around a group of people so sad, so bereft of the slightest intellectual spark, that they are resorting to the exact same tactic they've been using unsuccessfully for two solid years – standing Paul Ryan next to a podium holding up a binder full of the same ol' shit – because they literally cannot think of anything else to do? They frantically flipped through the playbook and realized that this is the only play; even if it doesn't work, they have no choice but to keep running it.
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Paul Ryan is poison, which is why the Romney campaign basically kept him on Fund Raiser Only duty for the last two months of the election. Balancing the budget is an idea that is not only implausible, but which also has almost zero appeal to the voting public (Technically the concept is popular, but people find the things that would be necessary to accomplish it positively abhorrent). There is no grand public backlash against health care reform, despite the constant flogging of Fox News and the for-profit medical industry.

Nobody likes any of this stuff – Paul Ryan, 1990s Gingrich-esque balanced budget rhetoric, railing against Obamacare, promises of magic beans that grow from tax cuts. The Republicans know, or should know, that nobody likes any of it. They have evidence (I bet a handful of them are swayed by that sort of thing, no?) that nobody likes it and that this strategy does not work.

They know it doesn't work because they just tried it. For two years. And here they are doing it all again anyway because they cannot think of anything better to do, or perhaps anything at all.

When we can look at a news item and sincerely question whether it is from March 2013 or October 2011 it might be time to retire that "Party of Ideas" slogan.

The media – even the liberal portion of it, alleged or in reality – just can't get enough Bipartisanship. Since the best solution to any problem inevitably lies halfway between opposing viewpoints, we should show everyone how non-partisan we are at every opportunity. In practice this means that liberals have to say supportive things on occasion about Republicans. We must do so to prove that we are Serious People.
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So last week we were told, in Salon's case quite explicitly, that we needed to cheer Rand Paul during his 13 hour filibuster over drone strikes on U.S. soil. The idea passes the smell test; executive power, particularly the power to use force, is opposed by both libertarian conservatives and liberals in general. Unfortunately the whole filibuster spectacle was more a reflection of the paranoid worldview of the Paultard/survivalist right than of the reality of the issue.

The issue in question was whether the president could order an armed drone strike in the U.S. against an American citizen "in an extraordinary circumstance" like a terrorist attack or serious attempt to overthrow the government. In other words, Holder was not arguing that a drone strike could be ordered against citizens in non-combat settings. And in the event of something like a rebellion or a terrorist attack the president already has extensive power to use force against citizens and non-citizens alike in the U.
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S. What difference does it make if drone strikes are added to the menu?

Now some of you will accuse me of being naive and too trusting that such a power would be used with discretion or that the scope of events for which a drone strike could be used will not be expanded. But the fact is that the government, should it desire to kill you, has much simpler and more efficient ways to it than by armed drone. One of the dirty secrets of Predator and similar systems is that they have a remarkably low success rate. They crash all the damn time and their Hellfire missile system – which is an anti-tank system adapted for drone use strictly because of weight requirements for the small airframes – are woefully inaccurate. They were designed to hit armor at short range from a shoulder-, vehicle-, or helicopter-mounted launcher. They were not designed to hit cars driving at escape velocity and certainly not a human-sized target. Long story short: drones are just about the worst, lowest-probability tool in the military arsenal for killing somebody. We use them in Afghanistan because it's bloodless and politically costless when they fail, crash, or get shot out of the sky.

In short, a lot of commentators appear to have fallen for the old "Serious People are bipartisan" appeal again.
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Paul's schtick was about bunker-dwellers' fears that the government plans to hunt them down, kill them, and steal their stash of freeze-dried shelter foods / impressive collection of Anime porn. If a president wanted to do that – and again, god only knows why they would – the ability to use a drone would be irrelevant.

So Rand Paul is basically just being the typical Paultard, inveighing against the government's plans to kill us all and round us up into camps and whatever else Alex Jones sees when he closes his eyes at night. No, we should not cheer him on for that.

Let's say that John Boehner and Barack Obama decide to spend some social time together. So they agree to meet on Friday evening at 2Amys on Macomb Street in DC. They arrive at the restaurant and chat amiably. They settle on ordering pizza. Disagreement erupts at this point, as Obama wants mushrooms but no onions whereas Boehner wants onions but no mushrooms. Hours pass with neither side budging.

Would it be accurate to describe the two parties as polarized? Far apart? From one perspective they are. They are at a clear impasse and they refuse to give an inch. But look at the bigger picture. They've already agreed upon almost a dozen things.
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They agreed on Friday. Then they agreed that evenings are clearly better than during the day, and that their goal should be to spend some time getting to know each other better, i.e. going to dinner rather than going to a concert, because they want to be able to talk. They agree on a restaurant. They even agree that of all the things available on the menu, they should have pizza.
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And they agree about every aspect of the pizza except the toppings in question. They are stalemated, but it would be more accurate to describe them as intransigent than as polarized.

One of the strange aspects of our two-party system is that it is possible to argue quite persuasively that the parties are too far apart, yet it is possible to make an equally persuasive argument that they are too similar. Often people find themselves believing both, and making one argument today and the other tomorrow. The answer lies in the fact that in the current political context the parties excel at disagreeing; about what they disagree, however, is often quite narrow. Dining out versus cooking at home is a big disagreement. Bickering over the mushrooms after we've already agreed that we're going out for pizza is not.

As we watch Obama's Attorney General argue that drone strikes in the U.S. are legal and constitutional, or to look at the administration's record on terrorism/security issues in general, it's impossible to shake the feeling that this is basically a continuation of the Bush administration with cosmetic changes. We conclude that the parties are too similar. Yet we can also produce dozens of examples of ways in which the two are radically different, even without changing the issue dimension to something other than national security. Yet here we are with a government that has already agreed that we should put missiles on robot planes and give the president authority to kill people, including U.S. citizens, with them…haggling about where he can do it. I can see the argument that within the U.S. versus outside the U.S. is a significant distinction, legally. But look at how far down the rabbit hole we already are, and how many things have already been decided.
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This is the real drawback of our political system and process. With only two parties and the end of the political-ideological conflict between socialism and capitalist democracy that defined most of the 20th Century we're left debating most – albeit not all – issues within a very narrow ideological range. We've all agreed upon the End of History and that free market capitalism is the final form of human social organization, and that America shall be a hegemonic military power, and that our politicians shall be beholden to the financial interests that back them, and that we will argue only in the margins (except on "social" issues, where legitimate disagreement is permitted because the titans of industry don't give a shit about them). So we have already settled on policing the world and are now arguing about how best to do it, just as we have decided that the financial industry will shape our society to its liking and we are now arguing about whether a handful of regulators should be tasked with watching them do it.

Oh, and if the pizza analogy at the beginning were real Congress would solve it by rejecting both mushrooms and onions in favor of green peppers, so nobody would be happy. Except David Brooks.

(This is one of those extra-special read-it-all-before-bitching posts. Reading comprehension is important here.)

Matt Roth wrote a Baffler piece nearly a decade ago that stands as one of the best things I've ever read ("Living the Delayed Life with Amway"). Unfortunately it's not online, but it details the struggling freelancer's personal experience with Amway – the notorious "direct marketing" company that was the Next Big Thing in the 80s/90s and has been criticized for its cultishness and uncanny resemblance to a pyramid scheme. While the FTC has ruled that it is legitimate, as the majority of its revenue comes from the sale of products rather than from member fees, Roth makes a compelling point: if Amway isn't a scam, why does it feel so much like one?

This is an elegantly restated version of the Duck Test idiom ("If it walks like a duck…) Our perceptions are not always 100% correct but if something meets all of the criteria for being a scam, you're safer assuming it is than to assume the opposite.

The introductory analogy complete, this is the part of the post wherein I bring up the actual topic. If the recent surge in interest, academic and popular, in "fat studies" – research purporting to show that mainstream medicine's conclusion that obesity is unhealthy, or that obesity is even a condition, is wrong – is not basic science denialism along the lines of anti-vaccine theories, climate change denial, or "creation science", then why does it have all of the characteristics of denialism?

STOP. Here are some things I'm not talking about here: fat shaming, stigmas about weight, the media-driven obsession with thinness, or any other aspect of size/weight/appearance as a social phenomenon. Neither am I suggesting that people should/shouldn't lose weight, or gain weight, or anything else. My point is simply that the supposed evidence underlying the idea that the current medical consensus (obesity = bad for one's health) is wrong has all of the trappings of an argument that in another context would readily be identified as total bullshit.

First, it is based largely on a selective or distorted interpretation of evidence. Recently an article flew around the internet with eye-catching titles like "Overweight People Live Longer". It is based on a study published in the Journal of the AMA. The sole finding of the article is that BMI (Body Mass Index) has a small positive effect on lifespan, irrespective of cause of death (so the sample included, for example, people who died in accidents).
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But for the past 20 years, Fat Activists have been telling us that BMI is a load of crap. Why is BMI suddenly a valid measure of weight/health/obesity?
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Oh, because the results of the study are telling you what you want to hear. Cool.

Second, it makes wild assumptions backed by scant, shoddy evidence and ignores mountains of evidence to the contrary. The idea that people cannot lose weight, or cannot keep it off after it is lost, is supported by one or two dubious studies. The converse – that healthy weight loss is possible and can be maintained – is supported by decades of research. Why is the one study that supports your argument the only one worth considering?

Third, it borrows heavily from the climate denial/anti-vaccine movements in its belittling of "so-called experts". This recent Guardian (UK) column illustrates the point nicely. Did you know that doctors are not to be trusted? That they're just a bunch of know-it-alls whose opinions are no better than yours? Beware the "beady eye of a disapproving GP" who doles out the "type of medical finger-wagging (Academy of Medical Royal Colleges) advocates." The National Health Service has a plan to "pester patients about their weight in every encounter," which is not what doctors should do (in the opinion of people like the author who seem convinced that obesity is not inversely related to overall health and longevity).

Fourth, there's a conspiracy. From the same article:

AoMRC's proposals are not about health promotion, but contribute to a narrative of blame, punishment, prejudice, stigma and anti-fat scapegoating that is horribly familiar. The only thing that looks healthy in this context is the twinkle in the eye of the diet industry CEOs, who are laughing all the way to the bank.
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Ah, yes. The diet pill industry, and the pharmaceutical industry in general. These are the same people who are pushing all those unnecessary polio vaccines on your kids for profit. Aside from the fact that this makes no sense – pharma would make money by encouraging doctors to keep patients obese/unhealthy so they'll be stuck on more meds, and certainly the trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry can outgun the "diet industry CEOs" – why is the Fat Activist not equally skeptical of the role of the trillion dollar junk food industry? Surely it's in McDonald's interest to push the idea that eating garbage is not detrimental to health. I guess skepticism only works in one direction.

This is not to say that Fat Activists, as they self-label, make no valid arguments or, to reiterate, are not entirely correct about the social dimensions of obesity. But their overriding problem is that the attempt to uncouple obesity and health/well-being/longevity has the same goal as that of global warming deniers: to convince you that the vast majority of evidence, as well as the medical and scientific consensus, is wrong. The only way to make it look wrong is to engage in the same tired rhetorical tricks and logical fallacies that have underlain quackery and denialism for centuries.
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Something that bears such a striking resemblance to bullshit should be treated as such until conclusively proven otherwise.