The Royal Society for Public Health is suggesting that unusual, unhealthy or minority pursuits should be criminalised in order to set a good example to others. They want people to be arrested, fined and possibly even imprisoned for being poor role models. In a liberal society, the only appropriate response can be made with two words or two fingers.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayPerry de Havilland (Wiltshire) · Civil liberty, Law & Regulation · Self ownership · Slogans & Quotations · UK affairs August 15th, 2015 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
I’d like to add a further quote from Chris Snowdon’s article:
Back to Perry’s quotation, the ‘poor role model’ aspect itself assumes the societal wrongness of self harm, rather than the societal wrongness only of harm to others. This is beautifully discussed in Dr Eamonn Butlers recent monograph: Classical Liberalism: A Primer published by the Institute of Economic Affairs on 16th July 2015. Download by PDF is free and printed copies are available at a modest charge.
Best regards
I would say one finger.
No, not that one. The trigger finger.
Banning smoking in beer gardens is only step one.
Step two is, ban beer.
Step three involves searching the facility for anyone still smiling, and discovering why.
This is my problem with socialized medicine. Government accountants will eventually realize the state can save a whole lot of money if it can turn people into drones who live like like monks. Drinking, smoking, transfats, sex, dangerous hobbies… it’s all costing us money, comrade, and we expect you to stop. Once they win on smoking they’ll just move to the next thing on the list.
The whole point of socialized medicine wasn’t so that people would have access to healthcare, because people had access to health care anyway. (In America, it’s illegal to turn people away in Emergency Rooms.) Rather the push for socilized medicine (as well as socialized health INSURANCE) was to negate the excuse that your self destructive behavior is not at anyone else’s expense and thus none of their business. Now your self destruction IS literally at my expense. And it’s this excuse that allows “I own my own life” to be negated. Socialism (or socialism, small ‘s’) is the idea that everyone is owned by everyone else, because you affect everyone else. It’s a means of turning men into chattel. It doesn’t really matter if the chattle are owned by a philosopher king or by a mobocracy.
” . . . to negate the excuse that your self destructive behavior is not at anyone else’s expense . . . ”
I think it goes deeper than that.
The more that can be denied to you as you fall out of favor of The Party (or The Elite, or The People, or whatever label you give to those who run things), the easier it is to control you.
Sorry, Comrade, but we only have enough dialysis machines available for half the people who need them, and so we have to make choices, and you do not exhibit the proper revolutionary zeal to justify putting you on the list above those who do. Work harder to demonstrate your devotion to my new five-year plan, and don’t keep complaining that Comrade Smith built his new beach house with dialysis funds, and maybe you’ll make the list next year.
And that doesn’t work if someone can simply privately contract for dialysis with their own funds without having to brown-nose the bureaucracy.
And that doesn’t work if someone can simply privately contract for dialysis with their own funds without having to brown-nose the bureaucracy
Which reminds me – this goes beyond trying to control your actions, it extends (as Orwell predicted) to controlling your thoughts. I recall a discussion a while ago in which I suggested that lower taxes were a good thing, and a perfectly polite lefty naif countered with the need for funds for the NHS, concluding with the knockdown argument that without lots of tax, there would be no kidney dialysis machines. I queried whether he thought there was some fundamental law of physics that prevented dialysis machines being manufactured, purchased and owned by private persons, including private hospitals and he – quite genuinely – thought I was taking the piss. Decades of NHS propaganda have led millions of people – including this poor fellow – to believe that dialysis (and other non trivial medical care) is literally impossible without the government.
Lee Moore: Of course, your lefty naif has never taken a look at the economics of MRI, CAT, or LASIK in the US. Or even dialysis under non-NHS systems, I’d bet.
“They suffer from the secret fear that someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves.”
The familiar position that a government-supplied benefit entitles the government to require something of the beneficiary fails utterly because no one is forcing the government to supply the thing. It is a gift, voluntarily made, and places no more obligation on the recipient than any other gift does.
That’s until you get to the nudge-nudge-wink-wink judiciary, of course.
This is a clear example of evil.
Evil is what such a policy is – and the word evil should be used to describe it.
These people must be fought – they are the enemy.
My workplace does blood pressure testing and several months ago mine was slightly high. Two weeks ago I had a retest and all was normal.
“Have you reduced salt and fatty foods?” says the nurse. “No, I started smoking again and now I drink vodka every night” says me.
She said that was all wrong, to which I replied “Well it’s worked, hasn’t it? Vodka addicts all have smooth arteries when they’re autopsied because it’s dissolved the fat, and smoking does in fact help people relax.”
No reply was forthcoming since my blood pressure had indeed returned to normal thanks to the restorative powers of alcohol and tobacco.
As for the Royal Society for Public Health, anyone who likes ordering people about has something wrong in their mentality. Bullying is what it is.
Leaving aside the philosophical and moral arguments (with which we’re all familiar) against government hectoring us into adopting allegedly “healthy” lifestyle choices, from a purely practical perspective that advice is more likely than not to be completely wrong. The history of government health advice and the various bogus scares it has trumpeted does exactly inspire confidence. That’s because what passes for government “science” is often politically-driven or the result of truly shoddy research (conducted by second-rate “scientists”). Consider this article.
I wonder how soon before you’ll have the Royal Committee of Public Safety? The French were ahead of you by two centuries, comrads! Once the government has eliminated all the differences between people, things will be so much more efficient! The survivors will all be healthy-looking non-individuals, and the place will be so much roomier- you’ll love it!
At my last workplace, they started with that health-screening BS. I knew it was BS after the first one, when I got a screed warning me about my ‘borderline obesity” – I’m 6’ 3″ tall and weighed 190# at the time.
The next one, they drew some blood, stuck it in some silly-ass desktop machine and it returned an absolutely-astronomical blood-glucose level. Like, borderline-coma level.
The woman doing the testing began to read from her prepared script about the dangers of diabetes, and I interrupted her and said – are you a doctor,or a nurse? Are you actually qualified in any way to interpret what we’re seeing here? Well, no, she admitted. So the fact that I’m sitting here, smiling sweetly and obviously not in any distress whatever, doesn’t give you any feeling of dissonance visa-vis the number on that digital display, which claims I’m at death’s door?
I don’t know anything about that, she said, but here’s what the script says when I get that number.
Any chance the machine could be wrong? says I.
Oh, no, she said, no chance of that at all!
Most government and private bureaucratic activity in the area of healthcare and ‘health improvement’ is complete nonsense, because it tries to align an extremely flexible and variable system (the poor, hollow husk that is Us) with a rigid and predictable framework of statistics, numbers and algorithms. The fact that it is total nonsense (think good-fats-vs-bad-fats, salt intake, water intake, the food pyramid and a hundred other state- or insurance-fostered healthcare interventions which have proven to be more-or-less total bunk) will not prevent it from being used to force lifestyle changes on the entire populace. It now makes work and profit for far too many people for common sense or real-world experience and science to be allowed to intervene.
llater,
llamas
Let’s not forget “good and bad cholesterol”. First off, we NEED cholesterol. 25% of the brain is cholesterol. And cholesterol lowering drugs makes one testebly stupid, and plaque in the heart isn’t caused by excess blood cholesterol of any type. Oh, and here’s a nice to know bit of knowledge, HDL & LDL aren’t even cholesterol. They’re lipoprotiens.
Richard, Alcohol thins the blood and lowers blood pressure, even many hours afterwards. The American Heart Association reluctanlty admits that people who drink at least two drinks a week fare far better cardiovacularly than those who don’t drink at all.
PS Christopher Hitchens conveniently misremembered this as two drinks a day, lol.
What Thailover said. We now “know” (I knew this 30 years ago, but it’s taken government pseudo-scientists this long to catch up) that ingested cholesterol has no relationship to blood-level cholesterol (the body manufactures its own). And salt is not only necessary to life but perfectly harmless in normal quantities for normal people. The “food pyramid” is total crap (which is why they keep tinkering with it), and physicians don’t study nutrition in medical school so their opinions on a “healthy diet” are generally no more informed than are those of the man on the street. Our obesity “epidemic” is directly attributable to the government telling us to avoid fats and fill up on carbohydrates.
And don’t forget all those scares they periodically drop on us. Alar on apples (total fraud). Mercury in tuna (it turns out that fossil tuna have the same mercury levels as modern ones). Chlorofluorocarbons destroying the ozone layer (untrue). DDT killing birds (also untrue; in my opinion Rachael Carson was the largest mass murderer of the 20th century). The list is endless.
You can pretty confidently assume that everything the government tells you about health and nutrition, or warns you against, is 180 degrees wrong.
I don’t see that those who are trained in nutrition, e.g. dieticians, are any more knowledgeable about what in the diet, in what amounts, combined with what else in the diet, in what amounts, causes what in “the human body” (it seems rather clear that metabolisms differ in significant ways, so it depends on which human body). The docs rely on what the nutritionists tell them, except for the ones who ignore everybody else and go on their own experience…like Dr. Atkins or his predecessors. Sometimes they’re right and everybody hates them (it’s the Right Thing to Do), sometimes they’re wrong and some gullible fools believe them. How to tell which is which…. ????
I think that people my age were very lucky. We were born at a time when protein–from actual fleisch, if you can believe that, and ideally lots of it from red meat–and plenty of it was considered important. We were encouraged to enjoy the benefits of the egg, and milk. After that, we were told to eat our veggies, and some fruit. Starches (translation: potatoes, in these parts, plus rice and bread) a good thing, but not of course as a replacement to any of the above. Corn, of course, is a vegetable, and do NOT try to separate Midwesterners or Americans generally from their corn. Fats: not to be either overdone nor avoided; not much said about them one way or the other. This was called a Balanced Diet and was in our grade-school Health courses.
Some parents were prejudiced against ice-water. And some wouldn’t let their kids have pork-tenderloins (breaded deep-fried pork loin pounded thin and served like a burger–think pork instead of veal in your weiner-schnitzel, for those not au courant with the fabulous “Pork T”), because they might not have been cooked thoroughly enough to kill the trichinosis worms, which were still a problem in those days. Fortunately my mom didn’t worry about it, so when we were lucky enough to have an extra shekel or three, we were allowed them. YUM.
Of course kids were often sent outside to play when young, and hard to get to come in for supper when a little older. Active little buggers, mostly, except of course for the Readers. And their nasty parents used to give them Chores. Ick. I was expected to help out in the garden. All 400 sq. miles of it. In the heat of the summer. Child labor!!!! I truly hate gardening. And who can tell the difference between a carrot and ragweed. Tomato plants are prickly and make you itch. Although real juice tomatoes (unavailable today) are one of God’s Special Treats.
We did get hit with the margarine bit, but that was largely economic: Margarine much cheaper than butter if your grandpa had sold off his dairy herd.
And some of us, by the time we were teenagers, wondered about the poor people in the slums (in those days we had slums) who were fat. After were learned, in the late ’60’s or early ’70’s (?), that Meat Bad, Carbs Good, some of us wondered if perhaps this was because, being unable to afford healthy foods like meat and veg, they ate a mostly-starchy diet?
(That last is merely my own impression. Both parts of it. But to this day I have pictures in my head of immigrant Italian and Eastern European women in the Lower East Side and suchlike, where by the way I’ve never been, heavy and living on pasta with some kind of tomato sauce, easy on the meat. That’s the Italians. Potatoes, for the others. I suppose a teenager’s impressions don’t really count as Science, nor even “astute observation.” Oh well. I always throw it in when ranting on this subject.)
llamas, you’ve reminded me of my experiences in the office of one of my GP’s. (Actually more than one, but especially pronounced here.)
Among other things I have high blood pressure. I go to the GP either for a checkup or because I am suffering from some Dreadful Flesh-Eating Disease such as the flu, and of course proceedings always start with having my BP taken by some technician. (It seems office docs rarely have nurses these days….)
The numbers would come out absolutely spectacular. I mean, something like 70/40. The girl would duly write this down and disappear. (You have to ask for the result, which I always do, of course.) I got in the habit of saying, “That can’t be right. If it were that low I’d be dead!” “Oh. Well, that’s what it says.” After a bit of a wait, the doc herself would show up and we’d go through the charade again. Usually we would eventually get a more realistic reading…something in the area of 115-160/65-95 or even worse, depending on whether it was taken before or after I started BP meds. But at least believable….
(Do not worry, dear friends. My BP is fine nowadays, except when I make the mistake of reading certain websites.)