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Saying nasty things about people is good One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma. For many a year we have been enjoined to cease stigmatising the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads, because it really isn’t their fault — and as a result an important means of combating these social ills has been thrown away. Stigmatising has a point; it is not just fun to shout abuse at fat people, it is socially useful too.
– Rod Liddle, who talks some sense, although he is a bit of a yob himself.
Update: some people have asked if I support all of his argument. I do not. For a start, obesity is not something one can define precisely; secondly, it can add to the generally authortarian, bullying atmsophere in which we live if it is deemed acceptable to make all kinds of fun of the largely-built, or whatever. But Liddle is quite correct to locate the issue of personal responsibility and to get away from the victim-culture angle that is so often exploited by the medical profession and their political friends
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Johnathan, please tell me you’re not actually agreeing with that. Please.
To be blunt; anyone who thinks the fat crusade is about health is living in fucking La-La Land. It’s about stigmatising of the untermenschen; it’s the conceit of an arrogant ruling class on the dowswing of the puritan phase of their values cycle (which varies between maintaining class distinction by ostentation, and maintaining it by claims of moral superiority).
It’s not just fun shouting abuse at fat people; it’s fucking evil too. I mean, really, really nasty. Fat people are a social ill? No, you’re a social ill Rod “asshead” Liddle, and so is anyone supporting this level of monstrosity in our society.
I’m sorry to be so emphatic, but I can’t believe the stupidity of people who buy into these hate campaigns and really, I wish you’d all just die or something.
What Ian said. I think that shouting abuse at a randomly chosen fat person is an utterly vile thing to do, really without qualification. Even disregarding the fact that this may not be party or entirely that person’s fault (there is a genetic factor to pretty much all obesity, with the extent to which it is so varying from person to person), social stigma for behaviour that is actually harmful to other people is other thing. Thinking that it is okay to abuse people for lifestyle choices that affect only them is something else entirely.
In reply to Michael Jennings:
While it’s true that obesity has roots in genetic make-up, lifestyle choices are the deciding factor for the majority of people, i.e. what they eat and how active they are. If it was purely down to genetics, the obesity rates would’ve stayed on the same level throughout history, which is clearly not the case.
And those lifestyle choices that lead to obesity do affect others. As a resident of Britain I’m helping to pay for the medical treatment of obese people, who are more prone to a variety of diseases (heart disease and diabetes for example).
Shouting abuse at randomly chosen people is vile, but pretending that it’s entirely not their fault and that their lifestyle choices don’t affect others is dishonest and hypocritical.
I shout at skag-heads all the time. Sometimes I even threaten them with violence and on 2 occasions I’ve had them arrested. But this stigmatising occurs in and around my property. Once they are off my property they can be obese, high and drunk all at the same time for all I care.
Liddle’s proposal could catch on fast (already has in certain quarters) within countries where social welfare programs are seen as the most humanitarian means of helping.
Remember the fat lady who was refused entry to New Zealand and all that talk of refusing smokers medical aid (aid which they may have been paying for most of their adult life).
Which is why I choose my victims very carefully.
[/pisstake]
Seriously, this stigma and intimidation of people to change thier lifestyle is just bullying. We don’t accept bullying in any other sphere, schools or workplaces, so we shouldn’t with this.
As long as it isn’t hurting/disrupting anyone else, so what?
Yes indeed. However there are those who’ll be only to happy to point out that obesity, smoking, drug taking and alcohol consumption does effect everyone because everyone is forced to pay into the same collective kitty.
Add rumour of recession to the mix and you’ll have fire yielding mobs combing the streets for stigmatising duty in no time.
your postings are increasingly misanthropic, jonathan. we come to libertarianism from many directions, and i’m beginning to get a pretty clear sense of where you’re coming from.
Arabella Weir is on the other side from Liddle (Link), and I find myself strongly objecting to both points of view.
Unhealthy people can choose to eat less and do some exercise. Or they can choose not to. It’s shouldn’t be anyone else’s responsibility to hector them into making that choice.
Oh really? Most of my posts, Giddle, are comments on things where I am defending freedom of one sort of another against various attacks. I am a natural rights, minarchist libertarian. Nothing very “misanthropic” about that. Maybe the tone of my posts have been a bit grumpy of late; there is a lot to be grumpy about.
If you want to make insinuations, kindly have the balls to say what you mean in plain English.
Thanks.
I want to shout at a randomly chosen fat person.
In fact, I want to shout at John Prescott. I randomly chose him from a list of fat people I know.
As for the rest of them, they can get on with being fat.
This is all about missing the point.
Fat, Drunk or Stupid – these are all personal choices, and it isn’t anyone’s business which of them is you.
The actual point of all this is that these ‘sub normals’ are an easy target when the real issue is about giving our tax income to other people.
The real argument should be about removing this cost from the tax bill of everyone else. Get rid of benefits, the NHS, and all the other forms of government forced monopolies and get people to pay their own way.
If you are fat, you pay higher medical insurance, although, if the truth be known, plump people actually live longer than those who are within the state approved BMI figures – but why let the truth get in the way of the 2 minute hate?
This is a rather interesting topic: one that will perhaps get quite a bit of attention in the immediate future, especially in the UK.
On this, I have a few basics.
(i) We should all be allowed to like/dislike other individuals for whatever reasons we have, and without necessarily having to account for them.
(ii) Everyone should show everyone else tolerable courtesy and non-interference, unless there is good cause (which would normally be in response to a lack of same).
(iii) We should be allowed to associate and dissociate according our likes/dislikes, as bounded by tolerable courtesy, including deciding who to employ and who to accept as customers/clients.
However, and this is where it gets difficult, there has been historically, considerable unfair discrimination on certain grounds. These include race (or more particularly skin colour) and also sexual discrimination (particularly against females). Laws against such discrimination have been introduced by many countries, and (in my opinion) have had a desirable corrective effect.
However, we now see something of an over-correction. This comes in two main forms:
a. Excessive claims of racial or sexual discrimination, where such discrimination either does not exist or is vastly over-stated.
b. A desire in certain sectors of society, including those with political power, to extend the remit of anti-discrimination law ever more widely (though, of course, under their control).
The result of both of these is to criminalise normal societal interaction. It is of course the case that criminalising normal behaviour has the very undesirable side effect of somewhat decriminalising truly criminal behaviour. This is through two main processes. Firstly, it is through the dilution of criminality, by attaching the label to a greater proportion of the population (and their behaviour). Secondly it is by dissipation of law enforcement effort, which makes a society less law-abiding (in the old sense) though less law enforcement against true criminality, and less prosperous by the very inefficiency of the extended law enforcement.
The difficulty that I think we are faced with is one of balance: retaining the ability to freely associate and dissociate with others according to our choice, versus protection from the grosser forms of discrimination (and its sidekick: bullying), through tribalism, excessive self-interest or personal psychological deficiency.
In this, I find it always useful to ask why, when someone asks me to join them against some other ‘tribe’ or even against some other individual. I look to what is their self-interest, or the interest of ‘their group’, versus what is of wider interest to society, and that bit of society that includes the intended ‘victim’ and, separately, that includes me.
The easy cases are those where politics is involved. Politicians with a weak case of their own look first for the identification of enemies whom they might share with the greatest constituency, thus capturing that constituency as voters/supporters.
Returning to the subject of Jonathon’s original post (the morbidly obese, the terminally drunk and skagheads) we see (or at least I do) that not them, but the bleeding heart new-liberals who want to love them better, were the desired constituency of our (mostly) left-wing politicians. More recently, the desired constituency of those same politicians is the righteous middle class, who are very concerned about the disintegration (though it is only partial) of UK society. So the ‘previously disadvantaged’, in need of our support, now become the problematic underclass, in need of our correction.
Interestingly, I am rather more impressed than I expected to be by Cameron’s latest position – a man that I struggle to dissociate from a windmill and all the lack of scientific and economic judgement that ‘backed up’ his purchase. On this issue, he strikes me as seeking more to (bravely) persuade a constituency to his view (it’s best for them and society for them to ‘get a grip’ themselves) rather than pandering to the views of the obvious pre-existing constituency (because he has that one in the bag already).
Best regards
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma.
This must be some other Rod Liddle rather than the chain smoking one who writes for the Spectator I presume.
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma.
This must be some other Rod Liddle rather than the chain smoking one who writes for the Spectator I presume.
One mechanism for ensuring the individual does take responsibility for his or her health is social stigma.
This must be some other Rod Liddle rather than the chain smoking one who writes for the Spectator I presume.
Human beings being what they are, there is no excuse whatsoever for encouraging them to pick on others. Even if it does serve some social good you can be damn sure they don’t need the encouraging.
These sort of campaigns always happen to end up in oppressive government action, but that is, I suppose, logically accidental. However, they are intrinsically destructive of civilized and pleasant society.
What business is it of anybody else’s what a person does with their own body? Is it not a fundamental liberty that the harm principle does not apply when a person gives informed consent?
Besides observing that a lot of the hype about obesity is actually based on some very iffy science, even if it was true, it’s nobody else’s business. You can sky dive, or hang-glide, or race fast cars, or get fat if you want to. And while people have the right to stigmatise others who do things they don’t approve of, in many cases this is not something that should necessarily be considered a nice thing to do. And it’s quite probable the stigma isn’t deserved.
There’s some interesting research that’s been done the Ad36 adenovirus in connection with obesity. I’m not sure it’s so safe to claim that it always isn’t a disease.
There are so many excellent reasons to dislike someone that I wonder why you would pick obesity. If I should want to stuff my face and outgrow my wardrobe (not just the clothes in it), what business is it of anyone’s? Mind you, I’m only about 175# at 5’10” at the moment, but I resent someone else foreclosing the option.
Rudeness, bad temper, egotism, dishonesty, or bullying should be met with scorn. Those are violations of others’ dignity and rights. Merely being unattractive? Practicing vices that don’t currently appeal to me? None of my business. None of yours, either.
The real shock was seeing something described approvingly as “socially useful” on this website – you must be having an off day.
Each of us has a moral imperative never to fail to pronounce moral judgment.
However, it is important that we take this in its proper context.
When a man is called upon, explicitly or implicitly, for moral judgment, and he fails to pronounce it, he is giving a default judgment. At best, he has dismissed and neglected the good, and at worst, he has given silent sanction to an evil.
When no moral judgment is expected, however, delivering eloquent moral tirades is unnecessary at best, and is usually just noise pollution. Remaining silent only constitutes failure to pronounce moral judgment when moral judgment is called for.
We ought to condemn evil, lest we create the climate of moral apathy that emboldens evil. However, this does not require us to tenaciously torment every random person we meet over every infinitesimal aberration of moral character.
All the more reason for private insurance instead of socialised medicine, since the latter can be used to justify endless assaults on personal freedoms in the name of “saving money”.
Most of my posts, Giddle, are comments on things where I am defending freedom of one sort of another against various attacks
That would include the freedom to have a drink on a train and the freedom to climb onto the roof in a post-championship-winning moment of euphoria I would hope, if we’re all to keep a smile on our faces in these dark days?
If you want to make insinuations, kindly have the balls to say what you mean in plain English.
I wasn’t aware that I was doing anything other than writing in plain English.
Oh, erm…I thought saying nasty things about people was good? Are we tweaking the rules here, you silly Pooteresque hack?
Oh dear, my idea that travelling on a tube full of pissed passengers was not always fun has really gotten up your nose, hasn’t it? Since when has yobbery been a mark of libertarianism? Please explain that to me. By the way, I did point out that on private property – key point – the owners of said can construct what rules of behaviour they want. That is also a key point of liberalism. What you are talking about is licence, something quite different. It is people like you that give libertarians a bad name.
Probably not my best headline. We all have our lapses. Now go off and calm down.
I think the important thing to remember here is that when we talk about “liberty” it is of course implicit within the term that liberty is for nice people. The last thing we want is scruffy fatarse chavs thinking they’re going to get it too. That would be intolerable. I mean, they drink beer. Out of the tin.
Seriously. It doesn’t take much analysis to realise that the ramping up of disapproval of enemy groups- smokers, drinkers, fat people, drivers, etc etc is the basic modus operandi of the progressive left. Don’t fall for it. It’s useless even trying to be a libertarian if you don’t understand that. “I’m a libertarian but you know, some people were singing coarse songs on my train home last night. Dreadful. They were all fat. Something must be done“.
I think this is a good point badly made here – that societies maintain ‘order’ due to social pressures. He’s just used bad examples – a person’s health is only their own business.
When insidious forces remove those social pressures by encouraging blanket tolerance, then people run amuck. For example, child benefit and social security hasn’t changed much in England in the last 30 years. It was always possible to kick back and sponge off other people by having ten kids. England has never had a serious ‘find work or starve’ dole system. People have sought work over and above just kicking back because of societal pressure.
When those pressures are removed, whole groups simply go for the easy option.
While I can’t really recommend ‘shouting abuse,’ I do feel that social pressures play an important part in maintaining a society that functions well without requiring constant government interference. If societal pressures are removed, to maintain the same level of order, non-societal pressures must be used instead – i.e. if whole communites have no ‘do not steal’ morality and intolerance of casual theft, that community must be much more heavily policed to maintain the same order and benefits to those within it.
Lascaille, you make the point better than I did; I do rather regret my original headline – I fear it may have raised several commenter’s blood pressure.
Come on Ian B, the class card that you play here does not really cut much ice with me; after all, upper and middle class folk are just as capable as the poor of behaving like jerks, getting very drunk and offensive, and so on.
And remember, if we do not have the Welfare State and its ability to shield people from their own folly, then social pressures, even taboos and stigmas, have a sort of role to play in keeping people on the straight and narrow. This has nothing to do with prudishness, or kill-joy attitudes, much as the hedonists might claim. It is about the notion of individual responsibility and consideration for others. And you should have been familiar with this blog long enough by now to know that I have objected to things like smoking bans in privately owned places, etc.
I’m not “playing a class card” here Johnathan. I’m saying that you can’t begin to understand what is happening politically and socially in this country without a class analysis. What we have here might be called “the tyranny of the bourgeoisie”; the imposition of bourgeois values by force. Now just because a particular value is bourgeois doesn’t mean it is necessarily bad. But we do need to recognise that many of those values are entirely irrational and driven by a tribalistic desire to maintain class distinctions. Currently, the bourgeois class is gripped by one of those particularly intense waves of insanity that come and go, and thus define themselves by being joyless, carbon neutral, sober, cadaverous wretches. Well if that’s what they want to be, let them. But I’ll be fucked if they’re forcing me to be one- or rather more to the point, if they want to make my life miserable because I’m not one. Because the key thing is, they don’t actually want us to be skeletal, sober, carbon neutral non-smokers. They want to set a standard which we fail, so they can feel marvellous about how pure they are and thus justify their right to rule as superior beings. And because kicking people who are already down is a hobby of which some people never tire.
Time for a musical interlude I think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NvgLkuEtkA
Ian, I kinda agree, but be careful. It’s not a long step from your viewpoint to stating that the proletariat ‘cannot’ meet standards that others can demonstrably maintain and thus turning a class distinction into a genetic distinction – and from there saying that laws must exist to save them from themselves.
I also don’t think there’s anything particularly ‘bourgeois’ about being healthy, drinking sensibly and not smoking.
It’s also awfully tempting to point to poor people who are fat, smoke and drink and say ‘you wouldn’t be so fucking poor if you didn’t eat so much and smoke and drink.’ You can’t really argue with that, can you? Arguably they smoke and drink to ‘drown their sorrows’ but maybe the only way to get ahead is just to face down your sorrows. What’s the other alternative? That MP a while ago was lambasted for saying ‘the poor smoke and drink because it’s the only joy they have.’ Is that what you’re saying again?
I was at one of the many events in our community celebrating Independence Day. Near to where our chairs were, there was another group. They were young mothers about 20ish with infants. They talked loudly enough that it was clear they didn’t care who heard them. It was clear that they had chosen to have the babies. It also became clear that none of them were married. There was not a husband or even a boyfriend in sight. The only reference to any may have been a passing reference to “her [the baby’s] father”. To my fairly strong certainty, none of these women came from money or independent means. I think it is a given that they are collecting every benefit they discover or are introduced to.
I was careful to try to not display any of my feelings. I would have ruined a lot more people’s days than theirs. But you who know me can imagine my thoughts.
The clincher came when I went away for a while and came back to find someone had placed a rather nice (actually very nice) stick flag in one of our chairs. I noticed several of them around including one on the same blanket as one of the babies. I asked that baby’s mother where the flags came from and she replied:
– accompanied by a mild expression of revulsion for that thing that had landed on her baby’s blanket.
It is time these people who will not tolerate any direct disapproval or stigmatization of their lifestyle choices felt that disapproval in the elimination of their handouts. Let them try begging from their benefactors face to face and see what happens to their attitudes and choices.
This is one of the seeds of it’s own destruction socialism carries within itself. By forcing the subsidy of others, socialism foments an unending series of petty resentments and full-blown social conflicts between perceived benefactor and beneficiary groups, and sub groups, and sub-sub groups… So insidious is this anti-social appeal to our lesser nature that we are able to see UK libertarian minarchists embracing the personal social stigmatization of the obese, and in America we see so-called conservative Republicans transformed into the great white defenders of the welfare state in their angry stance against illegal Mexican migrant workers.
No good can come of it.
yours/
peter.
I find it interesting how one should not express social stigma against groups, and yet it is perfectly OK to express social stigma against those who express social stigma …
It must be confusing to be Ian B at times …
It’s not the least bit confusing Alasdair, for anyone who can understand the relative merits of addressing the nice lady in the local newsagent shop with “Hello Beryl, nice day isn’t it?” compared to “Hurry up, fatarse”.
Bullying fat people (“expressing social stigma”) is a behavior you choose; being fat is not. Should it really be necessary, on a libertarian website of all places, for me to point out the moral distinction between how you act and what you look like?
Eating a lot of rich food is a behavior, but one that you can’t detect from a person’s appearance – and one that doesn’t seem to really implicate morality, nor to call for catcalling. Regular exercise similarly. (And while it’s possible for a normal-sized person to become morbidly obese through compulsive overeating, or for an obese person to become slender via the good offices of compulsive self-starvation, either bullying or congratulating someone over an eating disorder also seems less than decent.)
Yelling “Yer ugly!” at people in the street is the behavior of badly-brought-up brats, not thoughtful adults. And having adults wandering around pretending that their misbehavior is “socially useful” is no good thing. Sheesh.
Jaed, ‘being fat’ is not a behavior you choose? You are denying that there is any link between calories consumed, calories used and calories retained? You deny that if you ram down more calories than you burn on a daily basis that it will result in weight increase, and that if you routinely consume less calories than you burn that a weight decrease will result?
Lascaille, why are you so certain that overweight is caused by overconsumption? Consider, for instance, that most of the evidence on dieting is that it doesn’t work- weight can be reduced by severe caloric restriction, but the weight returns as soon as the person stops “dieting” i.e. eating a severely restricted diet, which is why the store shelves bulge with diet aids, but there are still lots of fat people in the world. Consider also the argument that if I drink more fluid than I need, I will balloon up until I explode. What’s the flaw in that reasoning?
Ian, there’s nothing illogical in what you say, but if ‘the weight returns’ when overweight people stop dieting, consider that it’s likely that they have become used to eating more calories than they require. Obviously a short-term calorie intake reduction to below the ‘sustenance’ level will cause a loss of weight, but then a return to consumption of calories over and above the sustenance level will cause a weight gain.
There is simply no way that a person can gain weight by more than the weight of the food they eat on a daily basis, consider it that way. Suggesting somehow that ‘overweight’ people are a special case and can extract 1500 calories from 1000 calories of food is fantasy.
I’m not saying that Lascaille and to say that I am is effectively a straw man.
The key thing is that the body isn’t a linear system. It’s homeostatic. It regulates itself. It has to. Look at it this way; there’s no way without complex (and only recently invented) methods of calculation that I can know how much energy is in a meal I eat**. So my body has feedback methods to tell me when to eat (hunger) and when to stop (I feel full); but even then they aren’t carefully measuring out every calorie. It’s easy to eat more calories than my body might need over the next few hours, so my body regulates by adjusting its energy consumption; when there are a lot of calories available it’ll use them up on cellular repair and other housekeeping, it’ll make me feel more active etc. If there is less energy available, it’ll conserve it by reducing my activity level and shutting down maintenance. And so on. It is simply unscientific and wrong to pretend there is a simple energy in-> body mass increase relationship. My body has an idea of how much energy it needs, and how much to store and attempts to maintain those levels, just as with every other animal on the planet.
Dieting is controlled starvation. It is reducing calorie intake below the level below which the body cannot maintain itself. Obviously weight will be lost if you starve somebody. Nobody is disputing that. But if a person needs to constantly “diet” to keep their body within politically correct parameters, they are continually starving themself. If they return to eating normally, the body will think the famine is over and start stashing what spare energy it can to build itself back up to what, in its homestatic control context, it “wants to be”. People who only stay thin by careful “healthy eating” are deluding themselves. They are starving themselves, and generally have to convince themselves that the constant hungry feeling is good for the soul; which is why they’re every bit as fanatical and awful as ex-smokers and anyone else in a constant state of denial about something they used to enjoy. The difference is that giving up smoking is clearly a health benefit, of course, but the psyschology of the ex-smoker and the self-starver/exercise addict are the same.
Study after study has shown that diet losses don’t stay off for the majority of dieters, for the reason given above. Very few of us have the fanatical level of willpower to want to spend our entire lives feeling hungry and listless as our body craves food and reduces energy availability to conserve its stocks.
Me, I’m a naturally thin person. It’s easy for me. I stuff myself with fry-ups, chips, roasties and cream cakes and never put on an ounce, thanks to my skinny genetics. That doesn’t mean I get the right to feel morally superior to somebdy else who only has to look at a chip to bloat. Fatness is being portrayed, deplorably, as a moral issue and it is nothing of the kind. It’s a matter of human diversity. There’s no evidence at all that forcing people below their natural weight has any health benefit and logic would suggest it is harmful.
If you want everybody to be thin because that’s considered more beautiful, fine, find the skinny genotypes and genetically engineer your kids. I’ll happily donate my skinny genes. But if you think skinny people have some kind of right, let alone duty, to degrade and insult fatter ones, then damn you sir.
**Indeed, when I was a child I had no choice at all over how much I ate; the portions were decided by parents and school dinner ladies and I was obligated to consume them.
Lascaille is correct, but none of this is relevant. A person’s weight is their own business. Personally, I find seriously overweight/underweight people highly unattractive – so what? I don’t have to associate with them (unless the state somehow forces me to).
Can somebody tell me what words or phrases in my above two comments (one of which hasn’t appeared yet as I write this) caused them to be smitten?
Alisa, I am aware of that but a few commenters here seem to have chipped in with the ‘being fat isn’t a decision, it just happens to some people’ argument which I think needs to be stamped on thoroughly. Yes, a tiny proportion of the population are affected through eating disorders which makes them overweight, the same as a tiny proportion of the population are affected by eating disorders that make them underweight. The reality of the situation is that most people’s weight and health are directly under their control. Food is not an addictive substance.
Lascaille, my last comment which answered you above post has been smitten (I have no idea why); but the reason some of us have dared to chip in with a dose of reality is that your view is not based on science, medicine or reason. It’s a moral objection and however much you may want to believe it, you’re still just moralising. Food is not an additictive substance, but then there is no evidence that people get fat because they eat more than thin people. If weight was “directly” under peoples’ control, there would be no need for diet books, diet products and so on. You simply aren’t including reality in your assessment of the situation. You’re just making things up, frankly.
Telling people they’re fat because they don’t starve themselves is bunkum of the highest order, and it is that objectionable view that needs stamping on thoroughly. The idea that we’re all supposed to be the same weight is as ludicrous as suggesting that we should all be the same height or skin colour.
I have no moral position on this at all. Fat, thin, it’s all irrelevant to me. What is not irrelevant are your assertions that scientifically objective measurements such as calorific values of food and calorific consumption are not valid.
There is no way the body can store tissue mass (be it as fat, protein or any other form of tissue) if the calorific inputs to the body are less than the calorific requirements of the body.
Some people burn more energy at rest than others (they fidget.) Some people have naturally faster or slower metabolisms than others (their body temperature errs towards the top end of the curve rather than the bottom.) Some people like food more than others.
There is still no way around the fact that you cannot just ‘get fat’ if you eat a diet that takes into account your individual circumstances. Obviously a person doing manual work all day will require more calories to maintain their weight than a person who performs a sedentary task all day.
I do not say that ‘some people get fat because they eat more than others.’ The ‘than others’ is meaningless. Some people get fat because they eat more than their individual circumstances require.
And with regard to peoples weight being directly under their control, I am correct. People can lose or gain weight through exercise of conscious control in exactly the same manner as people can stay at a job they hate, build a house, quit smoking, learn kung-fu, etcetera. They have to _really want to_ and they have to _stick to it_.
Diet products also exist for obvious reasons – people like certain foods but they contain more calories than they need. They can either give up those foods and lose weight, eat them occasionally and lose weight, or eat a diet version of the same thing which hopefully fulfills the desire for the foodstuff in question without providing more calories than required.
You seem to be insinuating that there is some sort of ‘mysterious weight gain’ syndrome where people suddenly bloat up for no apparent reason without changing their diet. Very strange.
Lascaille, my fuller answer which addresses your points is still frustratingly held in Smite Control, why it was smitten is something I cannot fathom. But it included an explanation of the fact that the body is homeostatic; it adjusts its systems to maintain an equilibrium. Your statement that you can’t put on weight if you don’t eat more than your body “needs” is simplistic. The body takes what it needs from what it consumes, and it adjusts itself to circumstances. If energy is in short supply it will reduce activity and maintenance (e.g. cellular repair etc) until energy is available.
Now it’s true that a person can’t gain weight while starving, but this is a red herring. Let us say the body has a use for 2000 calories today. If I eat 2100 calories (too small a difference to judge without scientific assessment), what happens to the extra 100 calories? According to you, they just turn straight into fat.
Clearly this is crap. If it were true, we’d all balloon up. The only way we could stay at a stable weight would be to constantly eat less than we need (which is what self-starvers do). You have to recognise the fact that even the majority of fat people reach a weight and stick there. Some people are a bit plump for instance, perhaps a stone beyond their government approved BMI. They don’t just keep getting fatter, they stay around that weight. If the body were not homeostatic that wouldn’t occur, since any excess would just keep getting added to the fat store and never used.
Also your appeal to self discipline is disingenous. Yes, anyone can lose weight, if they really want to. But to do so requires a lifetime of self denial. It means feeling always hungry. It means watching every meal and underfeeding forever. Only people driven by obsession can maintain that. Others eventually fall off the wagon. Because they’re tired of being eternally hungry. Because their body is telling them to eat more food, because it’s trying to get back to its “programmed” weight. When you factor in that only genuinely excessive “morbid” obesity is a health problem, and that indeed fatter people live longer than skinnies, there is no point to this life of misery at all.
It reminds me of something a girl on t’net once said in a discussion about celibacy. “Sure you can learn to live in a cave and eat grubs and never go out too, but who would want to?”
Anyway, the point is that you’re entirely ignoring that the body has all manner of strategies for moderating its energy usage- adjusting activity, maintenance, simply flushing out excess food, etc. Like fat-haters in general, you pretend that a particular body has a fixed demand and fatties exceed that, apparently out of sheer evil. The body’s demand is not fixed, and you can only thwart its desire to maintain a particular weight by starving it.
And what sets that weight? Genetics primarily, just as with all our other physical attributes. If you took your blinkers off and looked at the British people, you might notice the same as I have (having made a point of making these observations due to the current obesity panic, and living in Chavland as I do). You might notice that a population of chavs and chavettes, which one can reasonably presume are all living similar “unhealthy” lifestyles, divide rather starkly into skinnies and fatties. Many of them are very thin despite living on chips- think of a stereotypical “wiry” indigenous British male with veiny arms. It suggests to me strongly that there are two distinct genotypes at large, a thin one and a fat one (often you’ll see a skinny and a fatty as a couple- one would presume their lifestyles and eating habits are broadly similar). You can starve a fat one down to a thin one with rigorous dieting, but as soon as they stop starving, they’ll swell up again. There is no ideal BMI that fits every human being on planet Earth. We are a very diverse species.
But, I appreciate that nothing will change your mind. This is a moral crusade, and that appeals to people enormously if they’re lucky enough (or have sufficient ongoing willpower to starve themselves continually) to be on the thin side of the divide. We all like to feel superior.
Ian B is quite correct. While weight is related to calorie intake versus expenditure, the cause and effect relationship is largely the other way round, with weight affecting the rate at which energy is burnt and the appetite, rather than the appetite controlling weight.
There has been a lot of research done on this, much of it starting around WWII when food was short and starvation was common. When people eat too much or too little, the weight changes at first, but then levels off as the body adjusts. You can eat half as much as you probably do now indefinitely without dying, and you can stuff yourself as hard as you can for as long as you want without ever gaining more than 10% on your natural weight. The body has a sophisticated regulatory system that balances your energy budget to within half a percent. The idea that you can get fat through greed is as biologically implausible as the claim that you can faint because you forgot to breathe enough, or that you can improve your health by constantly holding your breath. If you gain weight, it’s because there’s a biological reason for it, not simply because of lack of willpower.
Most of the claimed ‘obesity epidemic’ isn’t in fact either unhealthy ‘obesity’ or an ‘epidemic’. The problem is that the BMI charts were drawn up not from any scientific study of health effects, but by simply looking at the spread in the population and drawing arbitrary lines at certain percentiles. But this was in the 1950s when food was short. As people became better fed, the average weight went up, but so did life expectancy. In fact, there’s a good deal of evidence that being heavier is healthier – this is often called the ‘obesity paradox’ by medics, but is only a paradox if you fail to throw away falsified preconceptions. Extra fat gives you the resources to survive illness, and the stress of dieting on the body damages health, which makes perfect sense. There is a limit beyond which it becomes unhealthy again, but it’s a lot higher than convention suggests.
People naturally gain weight as they get older. Gender and age explains most of the variation in people’s weights, genetics explaining 75% of the remainder. (The PPAR-delta gene, for example, when artificially turned on in mice and rats causes them to lose weight despite eating a high calorie diet and taking no exercise. How does that work, if you think it’s purely down to calories eaten?) There has also been a lot of interesting work on the Ad36 adenovirus, antibodies to which are found in a much higher proportion of overweight people, and which has been found to trigger obesity in trials on lab animals. It’s thought infection causes permanent damage to the hypothalamus, where appetite is controlled. Food intake explains very little of the variation – and it has been found that there is no statistically significant difference between the food intake of fat children and thin ones, and differences in exercise taken are small. And despite claims that the modern generation is more sedentary, experiments (involving strapping accelerometers to actual children) have found that they are all as active now as they ever were.
Scientifically speaking, it’s all complete tosh, a fraud. It’s a combination of advertising by the immensely lucrative diet industry, combined with the anything-enjoyable-is-bad-for-you modern puritan ethic that seems to drive the Greens as well. It’s an excuse for nanny state interference in every detail of people’s private lives. It’s a direct breach of Mill’s principle “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”, the principle that with informed consent a person can choose to accept risks, and even certain harm to themselves. It’s a way of training people to self-restraint, to denying themselves what they want, that inures them to all those other restraints against what people want that society wishes to impose.
And when they start refusing people medical treatment, when they start taking people’s children away from them for being too big, when they start regulating and confiscating children’s packed lunches, and banning the advertising of certain (perfectly healthy) foods, and locking kids in schools to keep them out of the fast food shops, all in an utterly demented effort to force people into the same virtuous-ascetic mould, when they start setting up government-controlled weight databases with employers so they can target their nannying, and everybody looks at it as if these were all perfectly sensible measures to take, for people’s own good, it’s like the world’s gone crazy and nobody’s noticed.
Over himself, the individual is sovereign. Don’t give them an inch.
Ian B,
Agreed – longer agreement awaiting smite.
This is just an excuse for yobbos to scream insults at people who don’t dress and act like them. Wear black pants and they scream out “emo” at you.
Next it will be throwing water balloons from cars at people is an acceptable if the recipient falls into a category determined social abnormal.
At some schools wearing your socks up is gay, others wearing your socks down is gay, others half way is gay. How do you decide which is the socially acceptable norm and what is worthy of stigmatisation?
Ian B, I did not return to this thread for a day or so, but I am not going to let you get away with that one. I am not saying, of course, that I only want “nice” (whatever that means) folk to have liberty. That is not what the post was about. The post was about how, in the absence of a welfare state or authortarian set of regulations, we manage to create certain widely acknowledged rules of behaviour to ensure that human beings can tolerably get along. I certainly do not – again, read my post – say that laughing at individuals who are very fat, etc is a nice thing to do, although I think it is perfectly acceptable for a person to feel that he can voice such opinions in general. (I would never insult a drunk on the grounds that he might be armed).
It is an error to imagine that if you remove any form of social stigma against, say, extreme drunkeness, laziness or general yobbery that this will somehow all very fine and proof of how relaxed and tolerant we are. That is a false prospectus. It is also a case of setting one’s sights pretty low in terms of what liberty can achieve. It would be nice, for once, for libertarians to celebrate how their values enable humans to achieve excellence in their lives, rather than just about tolerating the right of humans to live like drunken bums.
I also contest, again, the idea that frowning on certain forms of behaviour is all about putting down the chavs, or whatever. This gets the argument the wrong way around. Arguably, the traditional UK working class has been grossly let down by the way in which the liberal elites, particularly since WW2, have sneered at the desire of people for “respectability”. Far from liberating the proles from the chains of Victorian, narrow morality, what has happened is that there is now in this country a large underclass of people who have very little idea of rules or social norms whatever.
And the results are pretty evident when you open the newspapers, Ian.
Johnathan,
Isn’t shouting out insults in the street counted as ‘general yobbery’? 🙂
I don’t think the problem is that people think we shouldn’t encourage good behaviour through social stigma, the problem is that they disagree with the particular examples in the article of what is good or bad behaviour. Society has chosen to stigmatise some behaviours as ‘bad’ without any actual justification, just a lot of myths and pseudo-science. While it might be a good thing for society to use stigma in general, it’s not so good that it has chosen to use it for these.
The worry for the libertarian is that stigmatised behaviours are most easily regulated, so if someone wants to ban something, running a media campaign to create a new social stigma is a logical prelude. This appears to be what is going on here.
If you had made your points about stigmatising rudeness, pride in ignorance, littering, vandalism, or street violence, I doubt you would have got such an argument. But obesity (and many other ‘health’ issues) is an artificial issue, like the dangers of genetic engineering or global warming. If we’re going to have social stigmas, let’s try to encourage those based in reality.
All i can say is, fat people are disgusting.
I just walked into the pool area of the hotel i am staying at, and saw about ten 200plus pound women.
I wasn’t sure if i was at the pool or a manatee exhibit at the zoo…