what if no one were fat?

[piranha]

i should stop reading clueless shit; it depresses me. but then i wouldn't get to read all the amazing clueful responses to it either. like this one:

love letter to a fat man (via firecat).

what a beautiful response to a hateful article. careful when reading the article itself; it might fill you with dread in its cold, casual assessment of numbers, and only numbers.

i left the following feedback at MSN's site:

I will no longer peruse your site, because this hateful article made me sick to my stomach.

What if no one were fat? By Shirley Skeel.

What if nobody were Jewish? Sounds familiar?

I'd be more interested in What if nobody were hateful. Imagine the savings; they'd outdo the posited ones by some orders of magnitude. But Shirley Skeel and those who thought this piece of unmitigated dreck worthy of publication suffer from a nasty failure of imagination. And that's absolutely the kindest thing I can say about them.

Comments

[ckd]

MSN, eh?

How about the savings if nobody used Windows? Sounds good to me....

[wcg.livejournal.com]

What if no one were stupid?

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Well, it would have been a lot less lively on LJ this week, I tell you what.

[firecat]

Another "what if" I like, via an old sniggler, Mike "Tuch" Tuccinardi:

"What if everyone kept the 10 commandments? Think of all the money you'd save."

(Written as part of a discussion of installing locking hub caps.)

Re: what if no one were fat?

[eagle]

Among the many other offensive problems with that article, the economics are bullshit even when taken on their own terms. Even assuming all of those numbers are correct, she's talking about a *one time* gain of 3.5% of GDP. One-time gains in GDP are meaningless; the only thing that matters over time is growth, and this would change nothing about the growth rate. Over any reasonable time frame, there's no meaningful payoff from this change even within the ideological framework of the article compared to expending the same resources on changes that improve productivity growth (such as putting the money into basic research).

[daev.livejournal.com]

This is studliriffic. I don't understand why people get so upset about other people's shapes when they're healthy enough!

healthism

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

hm. the "healthy enough" is a bit iffy as well. there is a lot of linkage made between weight and health, which, as it turns out after more careful studies, isn't at all as obvious as most people seem to think, and is often just plain not true.

and furthermore, my health concerns the average stranger who seems intent on commenting on my size exactly how? as if one could judge that just from looking anyway. i've been very healthy at a high weight and very sick at a low weight.

Re: healthism

[daev.livejournal.com]

I can understand why someone would be bothered by another person being unhealthy -- it's just unconscious empathy -- but, yeah, it's none of their business!

And did you see the original stupid article? She starts with some facts about people costing American business because they're out sick a lot, and then without thinking just slides right over to "fat people." How about starting with "sick people" first, which means getting some of that scary national health care, and giving workers sick days so they don't come in and spread their flu?

And then you get to the other articles on the site, apparently some sort of world epicenter of moronic thought processes. There's "Want a second date? Pay for the first" whose Neanderthal generalizations should be the poster child for "why do feminists get so cranky when someone starts spewing sociobiology?" And there's another one which bashes spouses who dare to buy their own things without checking first with their other half, and backs up the assertion that this is a problem by pointing to credit-crazed shopaholic debtors. If someone couldn't afford a textbook for their course on logical fallacies, that whole web site would be an inexpensive alternative. Not free, though, because lost brain cells are irreplaceable.