A Grip on your Heart

There's a saying, the best way to create a bully is to bully someone. Equally, the best way to learn to be victimized, is to bully others yourself. Watching them for the signs of your impact of your actions on them, unwittingly trains that aspect of your own consciousness. You become ripe for someone else to exploit that in you.

The reverse of that is also true. Defending others from bullying trains your own defences.

You'd be surprised at how effective that can be. Seems, fighting back is more effective, from being in the ring for others. Defending others exercises your own defences.

It's harder from a standing start, let alone being wrong-footed by a sharp change of direction. The reason why I was so ready for FA, was not because of self absorption, in some ways, I wish! It was because a lot of the themes I speak of, I had witnessed in others before 'obesity' reached it's current pitch of impacted almost banal disdain.

Whether through race, sex and class. A lot of the consequences of its themes were not wholly unfamiliar. 

Even on a lesser more simplistic level. I'd noticed the way others on the medical shit list, i.e. drug addicts were pathologized. Then had many of their thinking, reactions and behaviours, pointed out as evidence of their innate pathology. Yet, a lot of this turned out to be just them displaying the human nature that's in all of us.

Sound familiar?

I noted the overwhelming defensiveness of "normalcy" which increasingly seems a construct born of the kind of big tent conglomeration of factions you see in political parties. What's surprising is its viciousness. Being "normal" is seen as boring and everyday. Underneath that, it reveals itself to have a vicious and visceral thuggishness, violence generating, constantly on the prowl for potential threats of revelation of its not quite so natural as all that -ness. Many artists have explored that in books and films.

I'm sorry, I drifting a bit into the purple.

People are slowly beginning to wake up to the implications of 'obesity' or, defining being human as a disease state, whether they realise that or not. It's a cliche that the way unchecked power can manage to get one over on people, is to start with those who are seen as worthless and deserving of any old treatment.

One of the many downsides of creating excessive and unnecessary social hierarchies is that authority's bad behaviour cannot be so easily seen, let alone assessed until it gets to those who's value is taken more for granted. At that point, much time has been lost-if it isn't too late. Even then, the ability to return fire has been stifled, if not stymied.

The American Heart Association just published new set of guidelines for defining risks of heart disease.

After another group of medicos defined humanness above BMI 30 as disease. The AHA are now staking their claim to interfere in people's lives on the pretext of prevention. As fat activist types have repeatedly tried to point out, heart disease as "obesity related" is disingenuous. This is where  'obesity', heart disease collide.

Apparently, hyping up risk to brand people as sick, in order to gain a control over their lives, thoughts actions and behaviours, is somehow a bad thing. Imagine that! It isn't when its people you don't care for. It's increasingly clear that between the grotesquely indulgent hate-fest that's been going on, no real discussion has been had about some of its more major themes;

• Using health dangers, realistic or contrived to gain a hold over people's lives in a way that is as invasive as any devout religion.

• The seeming irrelevance of basic notions of medical consent

• Reckless hyping of health risk, use of panic to unseat people's ability to engage with information on a rational basis. iow, getting people to act from a place of fear rather than reason. [Often by trading and manipulating deepest fears].

• The undermining of  the promise to "Above all do no harm."

• The ability of science and medical professions to bypass public accountability and eschew consultation

• Turning the process of being human, from biology to behaviour into disease processes

• The increasing blurring of sanity with insanity, health with ill health

• The use of the physical/physiological to define character, morals behaviour and thinking

• Framing illness and disability as individual choice and as cost

• The reintroduction of sickness as the wages of sin/incorrect behaviour etc.,

• Turning human behaviour into something that can or should be dictated to by med professionals

• Infantalizing adults with the irresponsible bandying around of the mis-used terms such as 'addiction', 'illness' 'disease'.

• Pathologization of childhood and children through this

• The irrelevance of privacy, from employers, society in general as well as other professionals

• The promotion of disordered eating and eating disorders, mutilation, drug dependence.

•  Being judged in a legally binding manner outside the aegis of jurisprudence, therefore the absence of access to professional, expert defence

• The taxing and potential impoverishment of you on said basis

• The pathologization of human basic needs, food, eating, and so on.

• Depoliticization of inequities and social pressures. Re-framing societal hierarchies as individual concerns i.e. things out of ones control, being defined as within ones control and the responsibility of those on the receiving end. 

Some of us have tried hard to get a discussion going but our spoiled identity (shockingly so), got in the way. When you are the disease, your voice becomes obscured to the point of silence or are perceived as an atonal whine of pathology. Now others are getting to share in such attentions.

We shall see.

This is happening in America, so I should feel removed by distance. But it's not that simple. These kinds of decisions creep elsewhere, insidiously. The places where discussion usually happens are still stuck deep in the cult of anorexia worship and 'obesity' quackery of the crudest kind. Little to no worthwhile discussion of this has been able to happen. No deviance from the 'obesity' construct and its trail of false or inflated pathologies is permitted or able to occur in terms of where people are psychologically.

Which means that this sort of thing flows into that.

I am feeling tired of this shit right now. It don't think I've ever experienced a situation that's so easy to grasp, so easy to stop from getting out of hand, where it has been made almost impossible-artificially so-to get people to consider the implications of the direction this is all taking.

Right now, I just don't care. I feel, to heck with it and everyone concerned.