Last month, it was this:
A report published by the government predicts more than 12m adults and one million children will be obese by 2010 if nothing is done.
And this month, there is this:
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell has called for “stick-thin” models to be banned from the catwalks during London Fashion Week…
Ms Jowell said “stick-thin” models pressurised girls to starve themselves.
Damn these wretched sheep! Can they not get anything right? One minute, they are stuffing their ovine faces with calories and the next minute they are starving themselves. Have they no pity for the suffering of the Nagging Classes?
That the BBC can earnestly report, almost simultaneously, two flagrantly contradictory agenda-driven hysterias is symptomatic of the fact that we have too many paid worriers with too little to worry about.
I am sure that ours is not the first civilisation to undergo spasms of a sociological St. Vitus’ Dance nor will it be the last. But have there ever been so many popular hobgoblins surrounding the subject of food and eating? Could it have something to do with the fact that ours is possibly the first (or maybe second) generation that is more than one rainy season away from famine? Is it all just a part of the struggle to find a cultural narrative within which to fit this apparently easy abundance?
Who can say? But the sheep will graze on regardless.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -C. S. Lewis
Priceless. The post was worth reading just for that.
I have similar feelings about the panic over the high number of teenage pregnancies and the falling birth rates in the UK and elsewhere. The UK Government seeks to discourage the former (with good reason, perhaps) and bemoans the latter for the pensions and geriatric care crisis that is said to loom as a result. A lack of joined-up thinking or two separable phenomena? Methinks we need all the sprogs we can make.
On the subject of pensions and geriatric care, wouldn’t obesity, smoking and binge drinking (all Government preoccupations) help to drive down their cost by reducing the average age of death? If so, why intervene? I’m sure it’s not that simple, but it’s a thought.
When you are social property, every aspect of your life, from your diet to your sex life to your most private intimacies are all grist for the “concerned” monitors of all that is good and desirable.
The all intrusive state, in the western, paternalistic model, doesn’t crush the individual with a monolithic, respressive police apparatus, it nibbles and nibbles and nibbles, like ants at a picnic.
While you’re off playing a little softball or frisbee, all the goodies disappear, carried away by an endless line of little, overachieving pests, any one of which could be crushed with ease, but which, counted by the millions, end up eating your lunch while you’re not looking.
My opposition to this state is not for fear of a Hitler, although unlimited power can and does breed unlimited depravity, but because it empowers and emboldens every intrusive little busybody whose just consumed with the need to stick his or her nose into the minutiae of everybody else’s business.
I object to surrendering the control of society to people with punch-me faces, and a hideous lack of manners.
That the BBC can earnestly report, almost simultaneously, two flagrantly contradictory agenda-driven hysterias is symptomatic of the fact that we have too many paid worriers with too little to worry about.
I don’t dispute the agendas, but you’re simply frothing if you suggest there is not a spectrum of people, in this case girls, some of whom are becoming obese, whilst others are bulimically thin.
For me, hope resides in the people who are not at either end of the Gaussian-ish curve, but mean, modal or median folk don’t make for good press coverage to seel newspapers, at which the selfrighteous and picky may then cry “foul and disjoint lies!” whilst equally well ignoring the middle.
Did the comment I just posed get deleted, did I forget to press the submit button, or am I losing my mind? I don’t see anything listed as deleted, as I’ve seen in other cases when other people’s comments got deleted, so I’m going to repost my original comment. Maybe someone could tell me if my original comment did get deleted, as I am rather confused at the moment.
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Clever, but:
1) It is possible for both the number of obese people and for the number of anorexic people to increase at the same time; this increase is obviously at the expense of healthy people (a bimodal distribution is not desirable). Both of these trends are probably a symptom of modern decadence, and not enough Darwinism. Government has been preventing stupid people from killing themselves (and encouraging them to reproduce) for too long. Combined with the systematical dismantling of a Darwinistically proven culture (say what you will about Christianity and the rest of the “reactionary old culture,” but aside from Christianity constantly getting its ass kicked (ethnically cleansed) by Muslims in the south and east, it lasted a lot longer than the insane socialist ideology infused in most people nowadays will).
2) Unwanted teenage pregnancies are a bad thing as unwanted teenage mothers make terrible parents (raising socialists and (other) criminals). The people who should be having children are those smart enough to be able to raise them properly. If the government wants to help, perhaps they should stop subsidizing stupid people (welfare) and penalizing hard working ones ((progressive) taxation, indoctrinating guilt). The increase in unwanted teenage pregnancies and the decrease in decent mothers are both due to a shifting attitude toward sex and motherhood. Ever since the left managed to stigmatize motherhood (you don’t want to grow up to be a housewife do you???) and convinced women that working as a cashier (or some other rubbish job) is somehow more productive and beneficial for society than actually producing and raising the next generation, Western civilization has been going down hill (the government socialists who run the education system could have also helped in this instance by keeping their mouths shut and actually teaching kids math, science, and logic instead of indoctrinating them with pre-digested ideas; too late now).
3) The people who are becoming obese, smoking and binge drinking are mostly the ones who are supposed to keep the Ponzi scheme functioning (not the old people).
Cheers.
The UK government “worries” about teenage pregnancies wrt crime and anti-social nature of the offspring but their “answer” is not to solve the underlying problem and cause – quasi-passive encouragement via the Welfare system – but to create another army of do-goodery interventionists to fuss and interfere around the offspring.
Regardless, the BBC have also recently posted a story about town planning being the “cause” of obesity. Let us hope we do not then put blind faith into a group of people (town planners) who caused the problem in the first place!
This is all bollocks,
It really is. I have had relationships with two women who had successfully recovered from eating disorders. In neither case was Naomi Campbell et al to blame.
We demonize yet don’t understand. I suspect Ms Jowell would say something similar to me but mean something very different.
Eating disorders are complicated things which have a similarly complicated etiology. Reducing the cause to the dress-size of a model in Milan or London is typical of idiots like Ms Jowell.
Neither recovered as a result of anything state-funded such as the therapy that they both considered to be utterly useless. They did it because they wanted to and they were supported by friends and family.
The arrogance that something as fundamental as the food we individuals consume is a matter the state can usefully meddle in is breathtaking.
The idea that the state in the form of Tessa (I never knew it had been re-mortgaged) Jowell is awe-inspiring.
Although if they put our beloved deputy PM in a hamster wheel I think I could crack a smile.
I agree that state intervention in this matter is wrong. If “obesity” is becoming a problem then what really are the causes? Advertising of junk food, sweets etc? The fact that people want ready meals so that they don’t need to learn how to cook? Cheap takeaway food?
Any ideas?
Obesity is caused when we eat too much and do too little (pat answer, but true). It need not be a problem, if obese people accept that they are shortening their lives, then die or choose to lose weight. The only reason it is a problem is that we are sold the lie that we are never responsible for our actions, and then expect compensating for our free choices (worse than that, we get that compensation!).
Anorexia is, in my (limited) experience a symptom of deeper mental or emotional problems. It has nothing to do with thin models. It is, however, easier to blame underweight “celebraties” than to ask why life in Blair’s Britain is giving rise to so many emotional problems.
For the most part perhaps, but not exclusively. My problem with girls becoming mothers before they have the material resources and emotional maturity properly to deal with it is that they often miss out on the educational and other opportunities of youth that will stand them in good stead in life. That and becoming dependant on the welfare state, which amounts to much the same thing.
Agreed.
My point exactly. If, as a government, your plans for providing for the needs of the elderly and infirm depend in part on tax revenue from sales of tobacco, alcohol and even VAT on take-away food, why try to obstruct their consumption? If successful, this would likely lead to an increase in the number of people for whom they would have to provide and (ceteris paribus) reduce the amount of money available to do it. Hoist by their own petard! Conversely, not interfering and raking in the cash could be, in economic terms, a win-win.
I have nothing against old people; I hope to be one myself in the fullness of time. It’s better than the alternative.
Regards,
It is only to be expected that those whose livelihoods depend on there being a constant flow of panics will do everything in their power to manufacture such a flow. The situation is even more farcical in the psychological academy, as that science is discernable through neither a priori reasoning nor practical experimentation, leaving the experts with the opportunity to invent whatever disease they wish and to pathologise whatever impulse they need.
Thus, we have been treated, since the birth of sex and freedom, maaaan, in the 60s, to one sanctimonious panic after another, about epidemics of those who cannot read (dyslexics), those who cannot sit still (ADHD), and those who cannot find themselves a good woman (asexual). In each case, soccer moms and their ‘special’ offspring were only too happy to have their deficiencies as parents or people converted into a disease which needed to be cured through a hearty injection of public money.
At the same time, perfectly healthy instincts have been rebranded as psychological abnormalities. So, patriotism has become racism, which was also the fate of being able to notice certain ethnic realities; a normal family life has become sexism; cogniscence of the demographic catastrophe and personal dislocation created by homosexuality has become homophobia. Indeed, a desire for normality has been taken as proof of mental abnormality.
When one starts to believe that the sick is the healthy, any contact with real life can be a painful experience. That is perhaps why so many of those who benefit from and believe in the new religion of Psychiatry choose to hide behind hate speech laws and insistences that no criticism of anyone can be brooked, unless the critic “knows what it feels like to be a single mother/dyslexic/ethnic bandit”. Those who appeal to feeling over argument and guilt over fact are true theocrats, not some old lady who just likes to kneel and pray to some higher being occasionally.