Citing Sources

I hate books that list endnotes with page numbers and little snippets of the relevant sentence instead of connecting the citations to numbers in the actual text. There’s just a great satisfaction in looking at a page and seeing notes all over that (hopefully) prove the person isn’t just making shit up. When someone argues something on the internet (or when I argue something on the internet, for that matter) I don’t want just an assertion that “I heard this somewhere,” I want a link to proof.

In real life, this kind of attitude pisses people off. Like today when my mother was telling me that my (6′0″, 260 lb.) brother might be healthy now, but his weight will cause problems in the future so he has to lose it! And when I asked why she thought that, I couldn’t get an answer beyond a sudden defensive attitude and a “because that’s just how it is!” (Kind of the more emphatic version of “It’s as simple as that!”)

That’s one of the things that really attracted me to fat acceptance when I was first starting to discover it: people cite their sources. People don’t tend to go around saying that fat can be healthy without offering proof the way that people go around saying that fat is always unhealthy because “everyone knows that.”

(There’s more that pissed me off about that conversation with my mother, but I think that’s the subject for another post.)