I, Victim

Monday morning though it may be, I’m feeling pretty happy at the moment. As a white male, I’m responsible for everything that’s ever gone wrong ever, including the rise of Hitler, the sinking of Atlantis, Nelson Mandela being jailed, and Bin Laden being free. So imagine my relief when I found that I too qualified for the Left’s Special Victimhood Program – and I didn’t even need to get up off the couch to do it. Actually, getting off the couch would probably be a bad move all round, now I’m a certified victim of fattism.

That piece of research really is just the perfect example of modern academia. Physical Education teachers have a downer on fat kids ? Really ? You know, it’s really lucky we’ve got these grant-gobbling nogoodniks around to tell us these things, otherwise they’d be no way to tell that the knuckle-dragging mesomorphs did not approve of bloaters – other than subtle hints, such as listening to what they say.

Still, even this insight into the blindingly obvious isn’t the best of it. Here’s what the researchers have to say about their conclusions:

We need to educate PE students and teachers about the physical limitations of some of the people they work with.

Physical limitation ? Having no legs is a physical limitation, being fat is mostly a lack of limits. In so far as the fat would generally prefer to indulge rather than perform repetitive motions at the behest of a semi-literate Neanderthal, it’s a matter of choice rather than the cruel hand of fate stuffing cheeseburgers down anyone’s throat.

See, this is what’s wrong with the victimhood industry. Liberals profess to be terrified by the supposed epidemic of obesity sweeping the land, but then they turn round and claim actual fat people are hopeless and hapless victims. So, on the one hand we need fat permits for business (and this from a supposed Conservative) while on the other we’re not allowed to suggest that folks such as myself may indeed be less active than, say, Olympic sprinters. Or, to put it another way, yet again the Left wants to replace social pressures (‘don’t be such a slob’) with Big Government. Hey, it worked so well with the family, right ?

(Cross-Posted At TWA)

UPDATE:

English is hard!

Very Nuclear Family

Sorry if posts seem even more incoherent than usual, but I’m still coming to terms with being a family man. I mean, I’m still single with no kids, but after reading this post from Iain Dale, I realise that’s no reason to feel left out. After all, if we accept the Dale hypothesis that a family is just whatever random group of individuals happen to be occupying the same post code at the same time, well, I see no reason why people should be allowed to discriminate against monocentric family groups. After all, if critics are going to claim that single people can’t be a family just because a family needs to consist of more than one person, I have one word for them: schizophrenia.

But seriously, don’t think I’m criticising Dale’s post here. It strikes me as at least 1000% more honest than anything from his slippery ‘everything’s special’ leader. The only problem is that Dale doesn’t follow his own logic through to its natural conclusion. As Joe Single, I can see a case for paying relatively over the odds tax-wise to help ensure the next generation get the best start in life, but once we move outside the traditional family structure, what’s the case for subsidising even the most dysfunctional arrangements ? Or, to put it another way, if all lifestyles are equal, how can anyone justify taxing some and subsiding others ?

More profoundly though, what’s with the claim that all lifestyles are equal anyway ? We know that’s not true. The data is in – and has been for ages – some family groups do dramatically better than others. In and of itself, that’s hardly a compelling case for government intervention, except if you’re the type of deranged statist who thinks the government should issue fat licences. Oops.

Hey, how come all types of food aren’t ‘special’ ? Why aren’t Tories claiming that there are many different kinds of ‘healthy’ ? After all, in both cases what we’re talking about here is statistics. There must be plenty of folks still eating a full English breakfast every day well into their 80s, so how come the Tories want to set up their own CID (Cheeseburger Investigation Division) to clamp down on unlicensed kebab dealers, while claiming that kids could be raised by wolves with no harm done ?