Fresh off the wires: "Obesity Becoming No. One Killer"
What ideologically-motivated horse shit!
What they don't mention, on any of the TV spots, and damn few of the newspaper headlines, is that it's coming to the fore as the number one "preventable" cause of death. In case I need to remind you: death is not preventable. So why should we prefer one way to go over another?
But isn't this about reducing junk food? Empty calories and non-nutritave garbage passed off on an unsuspecting nation? Don't I want better food? Don't buy that packet-- that's just a logic-bomb designed to prevent leftist critique. If you think about it for more that one second, and don't have an alimentary superiority complex, it is pretty fucking clear that this is not what it's about at all.
Creating the sense of an emergency, an "epidemic," is no way to make the kind of improvements that need to be made. Look at the way anti-smoking has shaken out. First a segregation of "at-risk" groups. Second, intense alarmism designed to disorient the members of those groups. Third, targeting them for all sorts of under-researched, over-priced, and often dangerous medical treatments.
IT'S THE OLD ROCK-THROUGH-THE-WINDOW TECHNIQUE OF ADVERTIZING: FIRST YOU CREATE A SOCIAL PROBLEM, THEN YOU OFFER TO SOLVE IT. Only the standard is even lower now. They are only creating the perception that this is a great social problem. Any convenient "preventable" cause of death can be made into a public health emergency by aggregating the statistics carefully.
This kind of alarmist thinking, riding the wave of unprecedented social prejudice against fat people, is inducing a great number of people to undertake ill-advised diets and procedures, take dangerous drugs, and in general, behave very cruelly and recklessly towards themselves and other people. "Gastric bypass? Sign me up!" But if we convince people obesity is overwhelmingly dangerous, the dangers of drugs diets and surgeries seem acceptable.
Why are these bastards being so scolding about improving our health? They are trying to sell us a bill of goods. Concomitant with the brutal urban "Quality of Life" campaigns of the 90s, we have seen movement to associate "Quality of Life" with increasingly rigorous self-policing and punishment. The possibility of better food, and of a better life, is optimistic, uplifting and hopeful. Anybody who says different is a total ass and should be scornfully ignored.
Posted by Sam at March 10, 2004 08:42 AMgot that total pix
its the old
pay on the way in
pay on the way out
today +/- 15%
of ave household income
is eating related
expenditure absorbed
k corp market target
using the PROFIT BOYS STANDARD
1 TO 3
OUT to IN
GATE FEE
thumb rule
THAT GETS YOU A 5 % TARGET
on haul away the results
CHARGES
GUESS
NOW
LESSSS THEN 2 %SPENT DIRECTLY ON
FAT REMOVAL RXs
BETWIXT GYM SURGERY DRUGS ETC
potential 250% sector growth
that's nice dude... but do the fat folks just sit at home and die quietly, wallowing in the their fried chicken wrappers? or do they "buy in" to your medical establishment conspiracy?
yes, "eat right, exercise, die anyway" it's true... that's friggin' brilliant. americans are fucking fat outside of the northeast...
Posted by: tinydrtim on July 11, 2004 11:23 AMYou're missing the point -- this isn't about asking people with serious health problems to do or not do anything. It's the people at the margin it's important to talk about, and who are being aggressively targeted. It's important to de-legitimate social prejudice against "fat" people who may be perfectly healthy.
Hysteria about an obesity "epidemic" is being used to mask the way that prejudice is being cynically used as a basis to get people to undergo expensive and dangerous procedures.
Posted by: sam on July 19, 2004 09:33 AM