viz.

To add to the conversation, the benefit of the Jim Crow comparison is
that it highlights the proposed legislation's unreasonableness as
well as the way that it infantilizes those with BMIs over 30 (i.e.
you must not be able to control yourself, so you don't get to make
your own decisions), just as Jim Crow legislation did. But the
comparison seems more interesting when I think about both of these
instances in terms of choosing one's politics based on appearance -
or, rather, how others are able to implement their politics based on
one's appearance. Jim Crow laws allowed one group of people to
discriminate against another group based on physical appearance, and
this law does the same.

But to follow up with Melanie's initial point, is it irresponsible to
visually align one kind of discrimination (fat hatred) with another,
when the legacy of the latter was/is so atrocious? I would agree with
Melanie in this particular instance. Sandy Szwarc doesn't
contextualize her use of the image in a responsible way or offer an
in-depth explanation of how the two might be connected (unlike in
Nate's post).

I would strongly disagree. She very much does, but you have to be a regular reader of her blog to understand the vast and intense amount of discrimination and hatred experienced by fat people today. It is irresponsible to place judgment on her work from a single brief post to her regular readers.

Fat is the last acceptable form of prejudice today and fat people experience horrific discrimination in healthcare, employment, housing, etc..

Let's talk about searching for context.
I don't think that the post denies the fact that overweight people suffer discrimination; the question is rather can you link one form of discrimination to another without taking into account the extensive and exclusive histories of each? I think this is an important question to ask of arguments and it is an ethical obligation to mark important differences between similar and same.
I also don't think the post is "irresponsible" in "plac[ing] judgment" on the writer that commits such an act of analogy. Not only is the post about the post and not the blog, this claim indicates an understanding of the format and audience that are contradictory to the blog form/forum. The author at hand composed a public document that presented a problematic argument. She published it in a blog, rendering her argument open to an audience of readers that includes the entire web community, not simply "her regular readers."
This kind of claim really bothers me because it attempts to close down or shut off conversation about public texts in a public space. There is an implied hierarchy here about who has the right to criticize.

Nowhere in her post did she say that this bill was the SAME as racial prejudice; she was illustrating fat discrimination by showing a similarity in how blacks were treated by restaurants in recent history. You are making this into far more than anything she wrote or even implied. As a regular reader of fat discrimination literature the parallels are quite striking between fat and discrimination against many other oppressed peoples. For your to dismiss the parallel by making a pseudo-argument is something that might make it valuable to examine your own uncomfortableness with the parallel.

Welcome to the visual rhetoric blog. Here we investigate the arguments made by visual culture in all their varied iterations. While nowhere in her post did Szwarc directly mention racial discrimination, she led with the image that MK reproduced on Viz. Rhetorically, she is directly associating segregation (an organized, long-standing, sometimes violent form of discrimination that has its roots in social, religious, and scientific discrimination and...oh, I don't know... SLAVERY) with the Mississippi House Bill. Are there commonalities? Sure - it's state-sponsored discrimination. But they are not the SAME and I do agree with the argument that such an analogy is ultimately irresponsible. If one carefully revisits the conversation surrounding this post, one would note that there is an acknowledgment of discrimination and that a point of discomfort lies in the careless/thoughtless appropriation of another (or an Other) form of discrimination. I would go further and say that NOT addressing her visual argument in the text of the post only aggravates this issue.

Secondly, what I am uncomfortable with in your posts is not your opinion, but rather the manner in which you attempt to shut down conversation. This is the second post in which you attempt to do so; this time you insist that the blogger is "making this into far more than anything she wrote or even implied" (patently false, since Junkfood Science consciously chose the image to accompany their blog post) and then calling the analysis a "pseudo-argument." While I think an engagement with the visual argument at hand is appropriate, an attack on the blogger is not. This is not usually the best strategy for building a conversation. Blogs such as Szwarc's and Viz. rely on the idea that investigating the strategies and implications of arguments - not just what is said but how it is said, how the argument works - is a culturally relevant tool and an important scholarly exercise. Let's focus on building that conversation instead of shutting it down.