Monday, May 19, 2008

 

Alright - That's It!

I'm in the mood for a good old fashioned rant, and this article from the BBC gives me just the excuse I have been looking for:
Obese people are contributing to the world food crisis and climate change, experts say.

The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine calculated the obese consume 18% more calories than average.

They are also responsible for using more fuel, which has an environmental impact and drives up food prices as transport and agriculture both use oil.

The result is that the poor struggle to afford food and greenhouse gas emissions rise, the Lancet reported.
It seems like it is human nature to need a bad guy in any tough situation and if there is nothing we can do about the bad guy, we will tilt up some false bad guy just to knock him down and make ourselves feel better - generally victimizing someone who is already a victim. Where's the compassion in that?

There are basically two arguments here - obese take food from the mouth of the poor and the obese contribute disproportionately to global warming. Each in turn.

The obese are largely the poor. Check the statistics, obesity is largely a problem of the poor in developed nations, something which illustrates the second salient fact - food is plentiful and cheap. The poor are fat because it is something satisfying that they can do with what little money they have. The world's poor, sub-Saharan Africa, Pacific Islands, those sorts of places are poor and food-less because of political or geographical conditions, or because THEY WANT TO BE. The Sudan has a huge nutrition problem because of political circumstance. Some places are so isolated that the cost of food rises simply to get it there, BUT people that live in such isolation generally want to be there because they can move themselves to the food for a fraction of what it costs to move a lifetime of food to them.

So there we have it, obesity has nothing to do with hunger in the world, but the things that do have to do with it are insoluble so we tilt up the poor fat guy because we think he's ugly. (Does anybody besides me remember when black people were inferior because they were consider unattractive?)

The global warming contention is just pure CRAP. That is a naked attempt to tie "my cause" into the "cause celebre'" "Oh my God, all the donations, all the grants, are running to global warming - we need to make our efforts sound like they are part of that so we can get some of that money." Welcome to the world of the non-profit.

Global warming itself is such a tissue of barely connected facts woven into a cartoon without resemblance of theory that to make this tie into it is just ludicrous. In an automobile, the difference between a normal person and an obese person in gas consumption is in a percentage that would be undetectable to the person purchasing the fuel - even at today's gas prices. On public transportation, the weight of the bus or aircraft, or ship, its fuel and cargo makes the passenger weight load disappear in the significant digit truncation. What a pile of nonsense.

As to requiring more fuel burning to feed the obese, I thought we needed that fuel to feed to world's hungry?! Oh wait they will grow it naturally, without burning fossil fuels, remaining on the edge of poverty because such agriculture can barely produce at sustenance levels.

It's no secret I am an obese person currently of more normal weight, he said adopting the language of addiction. I have to make a choice, daily, to be thin or fat. Fat is a choice. But that being said, the psychology of obesity is such that demonizing it will worsen the problem, not help it.

What is happening here is that we are competing - COMPETING! - over which problem is worse, and then rather than simply ignore the problem that is "less worse" we tell them they are the problem.

Well, to those of you that think that way - GO POUND SAND! At all my 400 pound plus glory I still found the times and means to write checks to your sorry institutions to help feed the starving of this world. All you have done with this sorry pile of crap you call an argument is send me out to find the someone to give my money to that will both feed the poor, and understand that I have my own problems. Take this sanctimonious pile of horse manure and put it where the sun don't shine.

There, I feel much better now

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