Should there be an obesity tax?

Yes we should put children like Harvey Price in cages before a flight because his disability offends you.

Just because you dislike it and believe in misinformation doesn't negate the fact that what the OP proposes is a sickness/illness/disability tax.

No I mentioned one condition and one causation. Listen to experts in the medical field not some angry man on Boards.ie. People have obesity, what you're doing is adding to the stigma which continues the cycle.

Nobody, in full health, chooses obesity.

It's a miserable life, exacerbated by people like you.

You’re betraying your intelligence. You don’t understand choosing food in a supermarket doesn’t mean you have choice.

What about the binge eater who chooses the cheapest pack of biscuits so they can purge till their throat bleeds, is that a choice?

The mother of an autistic child who will only eat nuggets, have they a choice?

Look up empathy in the dictionary.

Yes it’s my bowel that started this thread.

If you can’t debate me, report me, it might speed up my request for deletion.

You asked for "debate" above. I am not sure I can offer that but I can at least offer you conversation if you want it. Which is not clear because you indicated you were leaving but then demonstrably stayed. So if you want to patronize people that they should look up the word "empathy" then you might return empathy in kind and realize you are giving off mixed signals here which can confuse. I am also not sure lecturing people on empathy in the same breath as making snide comments about their intelligence is a good look?

I believe every good conversation starts with steel manning the other person. So I have to start by saying I 100% agree with you pushing back on those who just shout that obesity is a choice. Such people are over simplifying the issue in the same way as saying that alcoholism is a choice. There is absolutely no nuance in such statements.

Rather what things like obesity for many people is - is a long series of micro choices. Many of which seemed mundane, irrelevant, or insignificant at the time. All of which summed over probably a significant span of time to leave the person in a situation that is difficult to dig back out of. And individually not all of those choices were in and of themselves bad ones either. It is quite possible in this life to even make a series of micro good choices the sum result of which turns out to be bad. Such is life alas.

In other words choice absolutely was an element over time but not remotely in the way that people sloganeering "obesity is a choice" are giving credit for. And certainly it does not give us a pedestal to automatically assume any or all of those choices were bad ones. Some likely were. Others not so much.

At the same time though I think appeals to exceptions and medical cases such as you have made are a red herring. People with binge eating disorders or extreme mental and medical issues or purging to the point of bleeding are an important and valuable conversation in and of themselves. We can have that conversation and oceans of empathy for such people without curtailing or impinging on any conversation of what has most obese people obese most of the time.

So in that sense I fall somewhat between you and the sloganeers above on the continuum in this conversation. Likely closer to your end of that continuum than theirs I am guessing. But certainly we are likely to find significant day light between us all the same were we to go looking for it.