Saturday 22 November 2014

No Death Penalty for Being Fat

No sooner did I write about the spectacle of a fat person losing weight, serving as inspo-porn for shamelessly empty-headed, does more construct-related grotesequerie rear its maggoty head.

diet or die

How about neither? Though one of them is guaranteed at some point or another, presenting them as two options together like that, I say no thanks to imposture. Even taking account of the sewer dwelling standards of 'obesity' bollocks, surely, surely this kind of taunting goes too far?

Apparently not. Its like an Invasion of the Brain Snatchers, sleep walking sickness. When it comes to 'obesity' the lights are on but people are switched off.

Nor is this any kind of warning. It's a direct threat. And to some, a promise

Again, I must point to this suppurating enigma at the heart of the crusade. Why insist weight must "prevented"/maintained or shifted via calorie manipulation rather than reversal/advance of the process (or processes) that led the body to attaining its size?

Why this route and this route alone?

What's so special, so sacred about it? The only other thing there must only be one thing of is god. Are you looking for a god bothering placeholder to believe in? Do you need a sense of certainty you feel is missing in your life? Do you want to return to a golden age of about 30 years ago? Or do you feel the need to unite with your fellow man on something you can all agree on? Why don't you buy something or get a real religion?

Fat people aren't yours. We aren't like a real life puppet show you can feel the frisson of excitement of staring into our eyes to see your handiwork register. We aren't your project.

There are reams and reams of every known product or service in an economy of any sophistication. Virtual duplication where things of the same kind differ barely, if at all. Anything to express choice even when its somewhat illusory. That's advertised as the shining path desire expresses itself through.

Can't find what you "want" because of the absence of some microscopic must-have?

Someone with a commercial interest will run around arms flapping like that really matters. Summon the best minds available on it. Inevitably someone comes up with something.... 

But the notion, that maybe there could possibly be another way of altering body composition and that is sacrilege. Entitled, spoilt, just for once, take responsibility, one strike and you're out.

You can see the displacement.

Because this of all places is really the place to draw the line. Whilst you put pressure on people to save you, healthcare, the earth, whatever. Consumer society is really tussling with it's own excesses. It just doesn't want to face that. Doesn't want the party to stop. That surfaces where no social graces are extended though. And so will remain until people face their own feelings about their own behaviour.

Like millions of others, I dieted, not because it made sense for most of the time I was doing it. I restricted because it was the only option to fulfill my stubborn aim. If I'd had an actual way, a better option or options I would have used those instead. Dieting only exists because there's nothing else and nothing coming. It is so shit that it needs to be the only game in town.

But the imposition of it being the only way has grown around the need many have for the idea of one way or the highway. Not the other way around.

It's not just that proto-anorexia is the seen as the way, the truth and the light, the saviour of all mankind, if not civilization as we know it. It's that its patiently such a useless, ugly mess. Everyone dreads and detests it. Contrary to the slimming related psycho-drivel, that's physiologically, not psychologically based.

Yes, I do know that mind is brain and brain is just a body part. I'm saying directly that this worldwide aversion is not a mental decision, it is the body's reaction sent to the mind to then be voiced.

In fact, our conscious minds seem rather susceptible to the merest suggestion of dietary restriction. Fasting, notions of clean eating, cleansing anorexia etc.,  is actually rather attractive to our minds.

Thin people are able to be the most vocal about this visceral disdain for obvious reasons. The centrality of energy to our existence makes our bodies recoil from being cut off from what sustains existence, for no good reason. 

Yet this is the way decided upon, no matter the upheaval, the invasiveness, the wastefulness, the,  jealousy, resentment, hate, disorder, the collateral damage and the continued failure this generates.

I'd be lying if I said I cared overly right this minute. All I know is this makes it clear that "losing weight" isn't the object.  It's about, this, the way it is now and keeping it that way for as long as possible.

This mess in and of itself is fulfilling a function to those invested in it. 

That's freakish and truly embarrassing so, the same old excuses come thick (yes) and fast. 

It's about morality, personal responsibility. Why then wouldn't say the medical profession object to treating genocidal dictators, serial killers, child molesters first? People can be cynical about lawyers, but they regularly air the possibility of successfully defending the potentially guilty and convicting the potentially innocent.

Imagine the potential qualms about saving the health, the life of someone who has or would go on to kill or use that health to hurt and damage others?

D'you not think they might start with them before they got to mere fatness? What better way to impose a non-judicial death penalty than by letting them die from whatever bodily process medics can leave to just keep going where it may.

Oh what's the matter, is that barbaric? Are you against capital punishment? But its just capital for fat people isn't it?

One of the women in the above links, Jennifer Bodek had a brother die when she was 15, followed her mother at 18. Do people need to die because of what may be have been triggered by grief? And no, that's not a cue to turn hate into pity.
And what about weight that's been triggered partly or wholly by crimes committed against their bodies? They are to be ultimately accountable in a way those who committed crimes against them will not? Is that the morality being referred to?

Then there's the towering: "Fat people are ugly."

Have you seen disease in action? Plagues, pustulence, body disrupting bacteria? It's not pretty. The subtle: "Fat people smell." Medical professionals examine folks piss and shit, tend to suppurating wounds, pus filled lumps, encounter necrotic stench. 

Never remotely convincing. A lazy pisspoor effort all round. You get an F.....for fail.

Nor is it the case that there are no leads. It doesn't surprise me that adjusting something like insulin levels can not only undermine excess hunger triggering, but can also increase the body's use of energy.

You know they can block the onset of precious puberty?

How can that be oh so much harder than at the very least stalling adipogenesis for those people who are just relentlessly and aggressively gaining? Is fatty tissue acquisition really more complex than changing shape, internal organs, gaining actual parts and features you didn't have before and so forth?

Intractable depression is a metabolic problem, so being able to adjust it has the potential to be a treatment pathway for various neurosis as well as heart disease which is connected to depression and anxiety disorders. And no, not because depression makes you lazy.

My guess is that if your depression seriously abates due to diet and exercise, you didn't have it. It's effectively self diagnosed in the main. 

Even anorexia, in my view, should be reversed rather than making anorexics impersonate hyperphagia, that in its way is a cruel and unnecessary shock to their state of mind. Forcing them to be the battleground for their neurosis and their will.

And the two are intertwined, reversal and advance of weight have the same basis. Denial of alternatives to reversing weight has meant the death penalty for other than fat people.

And what about that? Wasn't support for it supposed to be unspeakably primitive and bigoted? I always wondered whether support for that-once unashamedly rock solid- ebbed through shaming or the progress of rational argument-which are what again? It's wrong for the state to kill etc.,

It's odd to see so many of those quick to issue a death penalty for being fat, are the same vociferous shamers of anyone supporting it for the most heinous of crimes. I can understand not recognising the form of something in another context, we all have that in some way or another-but with something so supposedly heartfelt, you'd think some part of the mind would recognize this intellectual faux pas.

Begs the question, does there always have to be something a person can do-or in this case be-that means they deserve to forfeit their life? And if that isn't the most unspeakable things, does that impulse inevitably drift elsewhere? In this case, merely an unpoliced area? Literally, fatness has become a criminal justice issue, without either criminality or justice. 

Some kind of thwarted urge to punish the guilty is at work here. Yet it is those same minds that felt the urge to stymie that in the first place.What gives"anti-death penalty" advocates? Did you know your deep ethic beliefs were shallow and that really, you're just a person who believes what's fashionable amongst your class?

That you're really moved according to what is and isn't shameful to those of your class who can really think (or dominate). Do you truly believe in anything at all? Do any of us? Or is it a particular state of being?

No more do evil acts decide the imposition of the ultimate penalty, but merely what's unguarded. And you wonder why people often default to the on the defensive even when they're in the wrong? Who can blame them? When a simple and consistent mea culpa can bring you the most capital of punishments?

I cannot support the DP, apart from directly, there's the inevitable race/class bias. Even I though I have had cause to wonder whether my objection is based ultimately on morality or squeamishness.

But if I was to change my mind, it would not be mere slimness that inspired a change, that's for sure.

No death penalty for being fat.

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