Hosed Down

I'm having a bit of a moment, right now, due a video on a propaganda technique here dubbed "Firehosing".

[Vox: Why obvious lies make great propaganda]

Vox's video refers to a Rand Corporation Report by Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, its point is about firing off such a powerful and constant stream of obvious lies-like a firehose-is a distinct technique. As opposed to the usual lying that tries to sound like the truth. Firehosers almost make a point of stream of conscious-lying.

The authors named for major characteristics of "Firehosing",

1. High Volume

2. Rapid, Continuous, and repetitive

3. No commitment to objective reality

4. No commitment to consistency

Highlighting the last two as the most definitive. 

They don't care that much about the truth, much of their propaganda is either completely false or has a kernel of truth.

Paul says he comes from a background where "...credibility is king and the truth will always win". I know that one. What is happening is not belief in the way we understand it. It's more, the people peddling this have credibility invested in them plus influence and power, everyone else is going along with it, so its okay. 

People know all this doesn't make any real sense. 

This doesn't mean though that continuing to go along with this day by day, year after year, decade after decade has not warped minds. We can see this with the current idea that mutilating millions of people-largely women so far- is perfectly reasonable alternative to changing what passes for your opinion. 

Imagine that instead of dealing with letting go of an assumption, you instead wished to remove the part of the brain that lets a person know you are lying and push for mass removal, to reduce the chances you'll meet anyone who'll give you the dissonance of truth. 

Not because that will work you understand, it'll buy you more time to continue lying for as long as possible. The brain comes to accommodate and adapt to this lying so it becomes increasingly numb to how stupid it sounds and how dishonest it is.

There's a bit where the presenter is illustrating this, using a-who ate my sandwich scenario. He says instead of lying and saying no, the sandwich stealer responds; "You didn't have a sandwich". Reminiscent of "You've never tried to lose weight/diet/get healthy", when it is actually quite easy to tell people have, not least by the change in attitudes people have developed towards eating and weight. 

Still, we're told, we haven't tried. Causing a split to occur between knowing what you've done, and having the feeling that you have done it. Something I didn't know could be separated. It is the norm for the latter to be absent. People feel they haven't done what they can tell you they've done. Taken seriously what they'll tell you they've taken seriously and tried, when they can tell you they've tried way too hard for way too long. 

Being willing to not be seen as credible is okay, how many times have you thought that about 'obesity' promoters? "Food addiction", "with obesity", and recently, the food industry employs scientists to enslave you with sugar...The latest is being a disease where you are both the disease and the "host" of the disease, which is you..... 

You don't have to be credible, when you have power.

What really got me about the video is not the main players under examination-Trump and Putin, or even the technique in and of  itself, weird though that may appear. What shook me is hearing the way it feels to be on the receiving end and what that does to you.

The person who really hit the nail on the head for me was Masha Gessen. 

They just create sort of this unmanageable volume of falsehood.  

She says telling and re-telling obvious lies isn't about persuasion-yes!!-it's about power. For real. The presenter explains the power play is,

.....asserting that they are not constrained by reality. That everything, even things that are totally obvious to us can be challenged.

Gessen goes on to say;

The way they lie makes the obviousness of the lie part of the power play. "Yes I know that you know that what I'm saying is absurd. And I assert my right to say whatever I want to whenever I want to"

This to me is what fat shaming really refers to. You are not really being shamed because you are being called fatty boom boom or even "unhealthy", but really, because you are outside the loop that can lie in this way.

That is your shame. You are powerless, you are weak, you are a victim. All you have is facts and truth. Really, your position is flipped, fat people telling the truth are branded lying, even though reality backs up what we're saying. There should be no argument against the failure of calorie restriction induced weight loss, or that the body regulates its own weight or that hunger is not emotion, but it makes little difference.

You are a "liar" because you are not telling the lies that have the power.

The usual response, to fact-check, or try to, when the people who produce the 'facts' are the ones lying, things get even trickier. At least people know Trump lies and others back up that observation, but what if virtually no-one ever backed that up most of the time and on the rare occasions they did, conditionally, sometimes overridingly so? Gessen again;

There's nothing so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth.

The presenter says; "It's kind of like a schoolyard bully, degrading you by forcing you to argue the obvious."

Exactly. Gessen;

And I think that's kind of how it feels like when we fact-check trump, it's sullying. 

Exactly. Exactly.  It is degrading to keep pointing out that people cannot be disease, and for that to be treated as an argument rather than an obvious fact.

You feel like you've engaged with something that actually shouldn't be a part of the public sphere.

Treemenduhs.

This is precisely how I feel about 'obesity' and its crusade. It shouldn't be part of anything to do with science, medicine, health or anything. The body should be studied as it is, not an idea projected onto it that's obviously wrong. No one should have any time for this sort of regression into obsolete notions.

So this very simple human assumption that you can know what's true, that assumption is taken away from you, you have to work for the truth. The hope is that you'll give up and get exhausted.

 In the case of health, that is the modus operandi. People laughed at the lie that alcoholism was a disease, but that didn't stop those peddling it. Now if you say anything else, people feel that's wrong somehow.

As it is with 'obesity', no matter what you or the public say, 'obesity' promoters will keep going, they'll keep promoting.

The ultimate purpose of firehosing is to rob concepts like facts and reality of their power. 

In the end Gessen says,

There is no truth and no lie. There is only positional warfare. Whoever has a better position. Whoever objectively has more power owns reality.

Absolutely.

The American Medical Association, The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Surgeons, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American Urological Association, the Endocrine Society, the Obesity Society, the Society for Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions and by World Health Organization, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Finally, in 2015, the Nagoya Declaration identified ‘obesity disease’ as a pathological state caused by obesity and requiring clinical intervention 

This is the sort of thing you are dealing with. And they expect to prevail.

Sated

This "Insatiable" trailer ruckus gives us an opportunity to look at  'obesity' really is about.

....the main character, Patty, is ....Debby Ryan wearing a fat suit.
In the trailer, an overweight Ryan (wearing a prosthetic fat suit)

That split between a (slim) person inside a fat suit is the 'obesity' construct. The entreaty heard across the globe-'obesity' is bad for you, requires a "you" that is separate from 'obesity'. The "you" is a slim person "living in a fat body".

It's non-anatomical take on a fat(ter) person's body, through the eyes of someone that isn't, but is trying to conceptualise it, from the outside.

Before we were familiar with the notion of our bodies as an arrangement of self-regenerating parts. The brainfart of imagining a person ensconced in fat, rather than a body that is simply bigger means there is a lack of separation found in Munchausen's-by-Proxy, when a carer uses someone else to be the vehicle for them to falsify illness.

Think Eminem's lines about being made to believe he was sick when he wasn't in "Cleaning out my closet".

'Obesity' is the stigma-not stigmatised as promoters of it are currently trying to pretend to salvage their dead conceit. That which is forbidden is taboo. Being substituted means you don't appear.

Incidentally, prosthesis; "an artificial device that replaces a missing body part".

The target is sci-fi but real people have become fodder for drugs and mutilation, to the extent that an NAFLD crisis is cheerfully being predicted-for when even more aggressive drug pushing is in play.  How coy of them not to mention the liver and kidney failure that accompanies being treated as a drug silo.

All blamed on 'obesity' of course, a biological non-entity.

The drive to define people as slim person in fat suit is not hatred of fat people, it's never losing the reflected image of slimness, eerily like the myth of "Narcissus". A fat person coming into view interrupts that reflected/reflection of slimness. That must be kept intact at all times, unlike fat bodies.

Antipathy is both reaction and facilitator of force. What it doesn't explain is insisting on a means that cannot deliver such a universality of reflection. And appearing enraged by this, even whilst continuing to rigidly enforce this.

Refusing to accept the failure of CRIWL seems to have given people a sense of weight hierarchy, making what would have been fleeting, feel permanent, and somehow right. These fee fees have overtaken and subsumed all else.

We're so accustomed to being this welded to your size-indeed the assault on fatness is always based on the notion that recognising your size with above equanimity preserves it- "Normalization of Plus Size and the Danger of Unseen Overweight and Obesity in England"-we don't realise that its probably abnormal to be this attached, psychologically speaking.

Fat people's response-holding little allegiance to their size, which seemed like a weakness, is what a proper sense of perspective looks like. It's not that you aren't permitted to notice your size or even to want to preserve or alter it. It's the fetishization of particular size as representing a whole set of inherent value(s) without which you know longer feel like or recognise yourself.

If you are unhappy or dissatisfied about your size, that shouldn't have any affect on how you fundamentally value or view yourself. You should be focused solely on how the body works and how to change it efficiently. Not on propping up a brutal and failed method, by mutilating and/or drugging. 

Even if others take issue, it shouldn't have that much of a hold over your idea of self. Any desire to be able to alter weight, merely demands an understanding of the mechanics of the body.

Activists like Sofie Hagen have managed to cotton on to what 'obesity' is, but think they can bump the slim+ fat suit out of the way and step into its place. 

Let fat people play the role of fat people. .....it’s much nicer to look at a thin person in a fat suit – it gives the illusion that fatness is a thing that we can just take off, removing the awfulness that is before your eyes. 

That's 'obesity' cultism to a tee, make fat people play a person in a fat suit. Robbing fat people of their own idea of self. If something is there not to see you, but to maintain contact with a fractured volatile (weight-based) self, then stepping in front of that will merely obscure that view, you won't be looked at any more than now. That suit may look unconvincing to us, but I'll bet that's closer to the composite in people's heads.

It's not sight but thought that is the issue. The only way to change that is to refuse to play the slim + any more, disregard and block it at every turn. Whether that's pointing out that 'obesity' has nothing to do with you and you won't have it used on your medical records et al, always batting it back and defining yourself as a person.

This is in the hands of fat people, not slim. They've shown you their hand. They're prepared to do anything they can get away with to preserve you forced to play slim + and the insistence that you must build your life around calorie restriction.

No matter how they brand change or window dress, pretend to be sympathetic, fight "obesity stigma" and so on, that will never change until you wear them out trying to press it on you.

If we all do that, what can they do? Civil disobedience should be our default.

Fat actors should play what they are, people Becky Williams in Empire or even, "Sierra Burgess is a Loser". The premise of the latter one has its issues, but it appears to be about a person. The trailer even features a response I can't remember being highlighted when someone comes at you with ire that should knock you over, only to respond in a calm even distracted manner. 

Whoever wrote that seems to be observing someone closely enough to spot that. Whether good or bad that's the most important thing writers need to grasp with any people. Leave your stereotypes, jettison 'obesity' its bollocks and has nothing to do with real people.

Observe people, truly observe, you will be surprised and inspired. If you wrote from there, you would blow everyone away.

Fat people are bullied, unbullied and even bullies, but all fat people look at themselves through this lens-until they stop, against the grain, including their own. This would not be happening if this was simple bullying. The rage shown in the trailer for Insatiable is about that, not being fat. It comes from being subject to what you know is unjust treatment and the frustration of not knowing how to stop it.

Fat people don't want revenge, their own lens the same as its other people's, they feel what is being said is fair comment. They wish to resolve their "faux pas" as swiftly as possible. The pain is similarly acute, but its of feeling that you are falling short morally or ethically.

That's another difference full of possibilities for those keen and clever enough to observe it. 

Not being able to look through oneself as a whole being, creates a basic dissonance at the root of one's sense of self that 'sensitizes' making other things stick that otherwise wouldn't. 

No Extension

I had one of my periodic inclinations to write a post about the politics of 'obesity' recently. What derailed the post intended was coming up hard against another clear explanation of what the 'obesity' construct is really means in this preposterous effort by a person paid to teach youth *shudder*.

Incidentally, it throws a tipping point in society's upward curve in body mass the influence of American Negritude on Caucasoidal integrity....file that under btchplz. Nothing to do with the science-blocking refusal to do real research rather than a panto version of it then....

From the nag's mouth;

It was obvious that the young women in my classes were concerned about being accepted for who they are -- excess weight and all.

They saw those extra pounds as an important extension of them as human beings, not as a problem to be solved.

Emphasis mine.

"Saw those extra pounds" as if its some kind of outré phenomena to recognise your whole body as wholly your own. How is it possible to be this idiotic, without shame?

"An important extension of them as human beings," That is exactly where what the term 'obesity' defines starts from.

Here, human being =slim.

It is solipsistic in the extreme expressing as it does the mind of someone else coming up against the difference that is you, unable to expand their frame of reference to accomodate such minimal divergence from themselves.

Seeking instead to subordinate it to their own idea of themselves.

A balloon could theoretically have more or less air in it. That doesn't compute, instead a smaller balloon is contained, in a larger balloon. As if the very idea of a bigger person engulfs the (smaller) observer. Like really? You want people to see this struggle?

Have you so little sense of ambition? Lols.

This smaller balloon in a bigger one is the basis of the 'obesity' construct ideation, its notions of 'obesity' causing this or that issue and "obesity-related".

The bigger balloon you are supposed to be encased in is attacking the smaller balloon within, the real you, the slim person screaming to get out of a fat body. 

This is why I put 'obesity/obese' in quotes, to remind people always that has nothing to do with the way any sane person sees themselves or can see themselves-from the inside out.  Why would I see myself as a locked within a bigger structure when its all me?

'Obesity' is embarrassing for these reasons, not because, wobbly bottoms. Any humour in that pales into insignificance when one asks oneself, "How did wanting to be slim come to this madness?"

Feeling like you've allowed this to be foisted onto you is part of fat people's so called "low esteem." Fat people don't have low self esteem, they have this shit to deal with and they are responding appropriately to that.

Having too look through the 'obesity' cult lens instead of your own. Having to keep going round in the same quack circles, rather than try to understand the genuine complexity and beauty of the way the body regulates its own cells-because people aren't done with pretending this is "science". That's fat shaming. Knowing your place and being kept in it.

Anyone who's been seriously troubled by advance stages of bullying know exactly how it feels to have to act as if bullies lies are real. When everyone turns against you and your friends can't stand by you because they'll be swept away by hate....

Don't make the error of assuming this has anything to do with whether you wish to be slimmer or not. You are not required to compartmentalise your body into mythical parts. Your body is whole no matter whether you want its physical dimensions to be lesser or the same (or greater).

It's as if the impact of the 'excess weight' coinage causes this mind to split another person's body from itself. That's a real dumb-dumb right there. And you're stuck in that.