26 Comments

  1. Shame the twatteratti can’t grasp the principle of TLDNR (Too Long Did Not Read) then perhaps – only perhaps – they would not be such pedantic, sanctimonious, bullshitting windbags. Fat chance, I feel.

    From what I just looked at before they bored me to sleep, I am reminded of an old saying : “You can’t educate pork” although your header on teaching pigs to sing would seem to reflect much the same sentiment…

  2. Ditto, Dioclese. These know-alls just can’t miss an opportunity to show how right-on and knowledgeable they are, can they? Which means their comments are just sooooo tedious (“Look at how clever I am, with my facts and figures and future projections and … and … and …) One wonders how on earth they restrict themselves to 140 characters (or whatever the limit is) on Twitter. Maybe that’s why they can’t help but get verbal diarrhoea in comments section – it’s a symptom of suppressed self-righteousness, I guess. I didn’t even get a quarter-way through the whole section.

    But it does make me very, very glad that I don’t “do” Twitter, if that’s the calibre of person one meets on there …

    • I suddenly had around double the amount of visits I normally get and they mostly came via Twitter. A couple left drive-by comments, but ME bless him (or her) stayed for the long haul. Arguing for state intervention here, though, is always going to be a losing battle.

  3. I marvelled at your dogged patience with ME, Longy.
    Your arguments were self-evident enough:
    1. BMI is an impossibly crude indicator of obesity.
    2. Human beings are not the property of the State.

    • Succinct summation.

      Gotta give him (her?) 10/10 for persistence, though – even if the argument was rampant bollocks from start to finish.

    • Jesus, he don’t give up…

      At the last count we’re up to 131 comments. Apparently, not believing the figures from the public health charlatans makes me paranoid. That’s the point when I usually lose patience with people – claims that one’s opponent is mentally ill usually irritates me. I’m rapidly growing bored with it.

    • In the end, because he has no idea of when to walk away with grace, I had to close the comments on that piece. He went from being mildly interesting to being a tedious statist cunt who went on, and on, and on, and on, repeating the same claptrap despite it having been soundly debunked multiple times. Eventually my patience ran out.

  4. The problem, as I see it, is that there is a big difference between legislation that mandates seatbelts be fitted as standard to all cars, and legislation that mandates seatbelts be *worn* by all car drivers and passengers.

    The first ensures a meaningful choice is provided and prevents manufacturers making basic safety an expensive optional extra. (I.e. It levels the playing field.)

    The second *removes* choice from individuals. One should be free to choose.

    However…

    …shouldn’t the freedom of emergency services personnel from having to witness the traumatic results not count for something? Not wearing a seatbelt removes that particular freedom from them. Why should you have the right to do that?

    I contend that this therefore isn’t quite as binary an issue as is being suggested. There may be a case for some *limited* legal force to mitigate scenarios like the above, but I’d limit it to this:

    If your actions force another person to have to sacrifice their freedom from being affected by said actions, you will be held personally liable. If you are killed by your actions, your last will and testament are automatically voided and all you own goes to those affected. Yes, this can include your family, but it also includes the poor bugger who had to scrape your remains off the railway tracks because you chose to risk crossing the level crossing despite all the flashing lights and the barriers.

    *

    On the sugary soft drink issue: low-sugar, and even no-sugar options are *already* available. The problem isn’t the choice, but the *taste*.

    Taxing high-sugar drinks therefore doesn’t change the available options. It just makes one of them a bit more expensive. Quite why someone who hates the taste of Coke Zero is expected to start drinking something they find revolting just because their normal can of Coke went up by 20p, I’ve no idea. They’ll just pay that extra 20p.

    Such a tax therefore does not solve the underlying problem, which is that the alternatives just don’t taste as good. Tax hikes won’t fix this. This “solution” is only a sensible one if the actual problem is HM Treasury’s liquidity.

    • Yes, he clearly is. He is also a statist drone, repeating the garbage and propaganda put out by the health lobby despite the physical evidence that clearly contradicts it. It’s on a graph, therefore it must be true. Jesus! You are obese because the public health lobby says you are, not because you are fat or anything.

  6. Or “I hate everyone who doesn’t believe as I do. They’re obviously knaves or fools.”

    • Quite so. A useful idiot as I pointed out in the comments to that piece. The kind of fool who believes despite the evidence. This stuff really is a religion. I’ve had forty-odd years of health scares from Lysteria in eggs, BSE in beefburgers, AIDS (we were all going to dieeeeee!!!! – and we didn’t), swine flu and so on. None of it came to pass – much like the ice age that was supposed to happen. These people love scares because it gives them power and don’t like it when some of us fail to scare because the little boy is crying “wolf” yet again.

      I’ve seen it all before. It was poppycock the first time. It still is. But the haters love it because it gives them an excuse to spout their bile and hatred. We saw this in ME’s misanthropic comments about people shovelling food in their gobs and the nasty undercurrent about people who were not “average”. The desire for the state to interfere in their eating habits. Such attitudes are reprehensible.

      • “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” H.L. Mencken

        • And our friend ME clearly believes in the hobgoblins. This is because they produce “official” figures and pretty graphs, so it must be true – never mind reality. Those of us who are not convinced and prefer to look at the world around us and draw different conclusions, so are not scared of the hobgoblins are paranoid, apparently. If I didn’t think he was a pompous, self-righteous, sanctimonious statist prick before, that convinced me.

  7. There was also the link to the bollox about people being obese not because they had a high BMI but because they had a low muscle to fat ratio or something. Redefining what the word ‘obese’ means even further. This would suggest that if there were an actual problem it would be lack of exercise rather than sugary drinks that was the cause. So, 20p on the price of stuff that I never drink anyway is going to make me work out more?

    • This was always the problem. According to BMI, I am on the high side of normal. Another point and I become overweight. FFS, you will find more fat on a greasy chip.

  9. ” According to BMI, I am on the high side of normal. Another point and I become overweight. FFS, you will find more fat on a greasy chip.”

    Yep, that is pretty much me to a tee. I used to be “overweight” according to my BMI, at one stage I was a couple of kilos away from being “obese”. Now, with all the triathlon training, I’m down to my “normal” weight and I’m starting to look emaciated. Tri training manuals actually have recommended intakes of carbs, protein and fat to prevent this from happening.

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