Monday 22 August 2016

"The Economy Must Take Priority"

The current Prime Minister Theresa May recently released a paper on her government's policy on "childhood obesity". It was much criticised as weak and she was effectively said to have bowed to the pressure of big fud rather than to the plucky quangocrat public health grifters.

That's suppose to be choosing ill over good if you're unsure.

I simply cannot make myself give a fleck about that mess, but I was mildly diverted by her comments. I decided to read them in context, to get a feel of what made her back peddle even on plans already deemed by 'obesity' wallahs to fall short of their demands.

I can't pretend to have a secure sense of what Theresa May's about, but one thing I do get from her is she appears to be nobody's fool.

I trotted off, still ropey search skills in hand and was justifiably taken aback. I could find no further comment from the UK Prime Minister in any of the numerous farticles I had to hold my nose through.

Found a deluge of Jamie Oliver though. The sorority might want to consider the potential for knicker-twisting, revealed by journalistic standards.

Every article, at least the early on in a story's life-cycle should quote the PM's comments on her own government's policy before responding to them with opinion and editorial. No-one needs the whinging of mostly male "experts"who had nothing of any real value to say.

Especially as this fragment rose above the senseless dirge as an actual cogent response-share it or not. The economy comes before "childhood obesity". Now maybe the context was more conciliatory, I wouldn't know.

Does she know what a lot of child hating shit 'childhood obesity' is? Or is it just her pro biz instincts speaking? Either way, she's giving voice to what people call "real talk".

It's a bit like gyms who have more subscribers than they could accommodate if they all turned up at once. Continuation of the 'obesity' contrivance depends on not acknowledging the unviability of its failure of a 'cure'- that failure being defined as the failure of the individual.

Even the astute Gina Kolata's recent interesting piece on that biggest loser study was framed as "...why so many people fail to keep off the weight they lose."

May's response is why even if you saw things only in the mainstream way fat people are and have always been set up to fail and blamed for both that and the failure of the means of regulating weight.

Usually what appears to be sides of 'obesity' debating are phony polarities. In this case, those who demand calorie restriction comes about through "individual responsibility" and those who demand the regulation of business.

It's a faulty distinction, regardless all the real toxic stress falls on the individual. It's just anything less than 100% assault on the mind's and bodies of people, including children, is deemed soft. An unacceptable let up on the unconscionable. Like complaints about criminal justice; prison's are too much like holiday camps, if they do not grind the person down with systemic punishment.

May like others of her political cast responds to entreaties to regulate business as they would an assault on a person. I cannot say the reverse is true of those who are seeking to curtail business, they're too disconnected by their use of the de or should I say, unhumanizing 'obesity' moniker.

They just feel it might be more effective to price people into starvation rather than persuade them that anorexia performance isn't the acme of personal and parental achievement.

Neither are bothered by the notion of a life of battling self induced starvation.

May is correct in letting that cat out of its bag. The food and restaurant industry replaced heavy industry. Dismantling the former to replace with the expanding service industry has been the policy of many governments. Without it, it is hard to imagine how many even well off economies could have embarked on this course.

That is why no government, Labour or Conservative is stupid enough to go down that road. They're happy to talk the talk though.

Setting pathologized bodies, devalued bodies against these odds explains a lot of why fat people cannot get out from under being pathologized in the style of rage or phony pity. Blaming fat people holds this together.

It's called having your cake and eating it too. Keep the (de)industrial strategy encourage its replacement, yet insist on something that would require a curtailment of its replacement that would be economically speaking an unknown quantity. Whilst I know beyond doubt few give a damn about fat people, young or not, I doubt the economy could have stood it at any point. Even now, what seems doable only seems that way due to allowing food-commerce to get the hold it has. 

That is what Theresa May means when she says, the economy comes before any pretence of concern about child welfare. It always has and it always will. Forcing that into capitulating to business interests convinces only those who want to kid themselves that they don't know this.

There's not and has never been any reason why children need to be exposed to the psychological conditioning of scotty burger inc. That was about selling the children for the economy, stupid.

Pro-biz or more pro-prospect of employment for people who would otherwise be even more employment-challenged than they are?

Keeping society together right now depends on what the 'obesity' activists are attacking, precisely because they know neither fat children nor adults matter.

That my friends is the class angle on 'obesity' and the food industry.

Fat phobes dream of people under eating in a thriving food sector, through "willpower" or "discipline". Public healthists think they can have both if the calories get stripped out of prepared foods. Ironically the business friendly right are too dizzy on punishing someone to even make that airy-fairy concession to reality.

The economy will always take priority.

Britain's nuclear weapon system recently came up for review. Arguments where openly made that not renewing nuclear weapons would cost jobs. Never mind any other consideration of having those weapons.

On the one side fat people are boxed in by the desire of white coat brigade to evade what will have to be a professional reckoning. On the other, by people who've developed a neurotic compulsion to starve fat people, of any age.

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