We are on the same page, aren't we?

I read a really good piece based on an interview with Christopher Hitchens at the weekend. I know a lot of folk cannot stand him, as it is I still retain a gratitude for his take down of  the Mother Teresa's sainthood. I've seen her work, seen her interviewed in India when she was still in the land of the living. And yet when I became aware of her name being used to denote sainthood, I was nonplussed to say the least.

The first couple of times didn't quite register, then it happened to be a woman inserted her name in place of saying someone was saintly, or not. There was that weird pause where you've heard and understand everything, yet realise there is a great big hole where those two should connect.

Finally, it dawned Mother Teresa was the embodiment of sainthood therefore could be used interchangeably with the term. I swear my first reaction was," you have got to be kidding". And do you know what? I'm not sure I could have told you exactly why. I just felt that was a mistake.

Then along comes Hitchens amongst others to puncture that balloon, although I do notice all her most prominent critics are men, I felt relieved, I wasn't just being funny. It's not that she didn't have admirable qualities that her achievement was not amazing, or that her work was worthless. I don't feel that. In spite of all that, I just felt there was something deeply unwholesome about her attitudes. Indeed this critique feels more balanced than others.

During the interview, he said something in reference to religious belief that really summed up the whole of my frustration with the way FA tends to point itself;

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Aaaaaaaaaahhhh; that relieves some of the tension!

Time and time again I've thought we continually refer to the senselessness of fat hating tripe, of its profound  (to itself) necessary ignorance which it has little choice but to maintain, or be destroyed by the cold light of reality.

Yet, we keep treating it as if it has some logic. Why? When asked to 'prove' what is evident, we scuttle off to try and find what will often be dismissed rather than responding; "you prove reality is anything but what we are saying". A little like religion what they are asserting has not been backed up in real life, so why do we not have the confidence to make that clear, all of us, so that they are aware that they are on the back foot, as they should be.

Instead we are.

I've been guilty of getting caught up in this myself when maybe I should just keep quiet, I've been excluded from some discussions anyway. FA ends up pandering to what it dismisses and assumes that same level. I have to ask, do people in FA believe the obesity crisis is a lot of rot, or not? Are we all speaking on the same page on that?

If we are, when are we going to stop arguing as if we aren't? As opposed to saying why we are saying what we are saying? In a way that's far more of a derail that weight loss dieters who wish to turn FA into WW's bourgeois outreach.

For all I know it possibly encourages this impulse. I recognise the primacy of simplify, but even simplicity comes out of deep roots, shallow simplicity is hollow. It adds to the feeling that 'we are not taken seriously', which is sometimes code for we don't feel serious.

I'm going to have to drop my referencing of Ditchkins seeing as he's come out against the kind of proselytizing atheism, that is wearing my last nerve with Dawkins and his ilk. Tee hee, (to that last link). If you become merely the counterpoint to something, you will begin to assume the same level as that thing. Atheism has got nothing to do with religion, in essence it is something in its own right it is more than just 'irreligion' thanks. If you reduce it to that, it will become like (your idea of) religion.

There's another noteworthy thing he said, referring to religion, but very applicable to the crusade;

it's religion, he contests, that is "cosmically hopeless, as is all the related masochism that goes with it – you've got to spend your entire life making up for the vermin you are. What is that if not degrading? We don't do that to people.

Emphasis, mine.

This is what shocks me about all the non-deists and secularists on board with the crisis. I cannot understand how belief in it is compatible with humanism. If you claim that those you believe in are greedily suicidal indolent fools for the heck of it or without strong minded intrusive intervention, doesn't that pose questions about your own judgement and intellect?

* edited for something approaching clarity

Bulldog, greyhound

Talking about elephants and zebras or bulldogs and greyhounds, in terms of weight. Some of us are bigger and some smaller physically. Yes, but that is not the whole of why some of us are or become fat or thin, nor does it matter, but the issue of lack of alternative is important.

Now I know that such is the extent of investment in WLD, that it dies very hard indeed, harder than Bruce Willis it seems. But when it is said, diet's don't work, that's it. Yes, that means those in FA especially who say, " I can lose 20, 50 100lbs even at the drop of the hat, so I feel bad about saying ddw, because they do for me!"

Let me ask you a question. Are you fat? Yes, well, then it hasn't worked for you, your failure is just less acute and that's to do with body variance. What about those people who say, "diets work, look at the example of this or that person". Again, are you fat? Yes, then they've not worked for you. What about those folks who say, "I've lost x pounds" really? Has that made the obesity rate go down? No, then really, who cares?

Let's get away from the idea that the problem with diets is fat people just can't believe they could ever achieve semi starvation. I never doubted the underlying principle of diets, which is restricting calories to use up stored energy. I've said, the issue is not that, but the defenses that provokes.

It's like, the problem is not jumping off the building, so much as that gravity will act to make sure you land at speed. Which leads us to say, we cannot fly. I could say we can jump, or I could say, we can get into an aircraft, but I'd be laughed out of town, rightly so.

Since when does anything but quackery depend on belief? I'm not sure whether I 'believed' in kiddie aspirin-I didn't know any better- when it was first given. I'm thinking it worked or not regardless. Something that works, works, whether you believe in  it or not, or belief is the active ingredient.

But even if dieting did work, so what? Why would it have to be the only way to do things? Imagine if we demanded that everyone eats nuts because look they work for X, or everyone should take penicillin because it cured Y? Yes, that's nice for X/Y, but if I have a problem with nuts/penicillin, what does that have to do with me?

There are all the varieties of product under the sun for everything possible, no matter how unnecessary, but suddenly a supposed life or death matter must have only one solution that works for everyone. Right. Like God.

Until we have something to alter our weight, the greyhound/bulldog analogy can be used to explain variety, but not fatness in itself, if you are a fat greyhound or a fat bulldog, you are not fat because you are either.

If you're 300 lbs and couldn't get below 190, whilst exercising 4 hours a day on a starvation diet. This is not because you were or were not made to be fat, it's because you were not made to diet. What you are describing is the cul de sac effect of your metabolism responding to your own attempt at metabolic adjustment.

It doesn't mean you're not a Great Dane, it doesn't mean you are either. We can see some people are very big and tall, or small with big feet and hands, but we can still see whether they are fat or not-even though some look fatter than others, overall.

I have never looked as fat as I am, some don't, it's something to do with the way you're put together. What I'm saying is, the failure of dieting, does not indicate what you are meant to weigh, if even that's the right way of looking at it. It doesn't matter, but I think that the reasons for being fat and why we are fatter today are more than pre-determination.

Choice or not, no excuse

Shoshie makes a good point about excusing fat hate on the grounds of fatness being a choice being a bad faith argument. It makes me laugh now that people are saying discriminating on the grounds of race is beyond logic, as if that stopped it. As if discrimination is rational. 

And they don't get that point at all, it doesn't matter whether you 'choose' to be fat or not, hating fat people treating us like second class citizens is morally wrong and cannot be justified on any grounds of reason whatsoever.

The extent to which people are seeking to justify what they claim is right is truly pathetic. If its right to hate, don't justify just keep hating and don't complain when others hate you for some reason similarly (un)justified.

After all, anyone can say x or y state /stance/ behaviour is a choice, I'm now allowed to hate you.

The whole idea of fatness as a choice doesn't really hang together. Eating is said to be fully consciously decided, if so, why diet? Why not just stop deciding to eat things at source, rather than choosing and then interrupting that after the fact? Why have a plan to eat, when it is your elective and conscious choice in the first place.

Weight in general would be a totally different business, people wouldn't die from being thin. Being unable to keep on enough weight to allow their bodies to survive.

Its hard to see anorexia existing either. Starvation wouldn't develop into a momentum of its own which is really what anorexia is when you get down to it. Calorie restriction out of control, that would not happen if that was all a switching on and off of will.

When we think of choice we tend to go by the definition of cool elective choice from more than one option. Fatness is not much like that in the main.

Indirect choice is another matter. Choosing certain things and other things coming as a result of it, now that's another story.

Hate costs

 A pathetic convention  fuelled by the desire to justify what people have already decided to feel.

HATE.

Some may fool themselves on that, but at a cost we are all paying. The cost of obesity is the cost of being suckered by the crusade, you get what you pay for. I for one have no intention of taking any more of the bill than I have already.

Note costs are somethng that can be easily manipulated by those dealing this propaganda. Prescribing expensive butchery and its often expensive aftermath-physical, mental and financial for its victims-drugs and other 'treatments' clearly working to lower the rate of obesity (nope) and maximising profits for those who are in charge of propaganda and prescribing. Before anyone accuses fat people of draining the health care system follow the cash, it's not going into our bank accounts.

Nice work if you can create it and are conscience lite. Unlike stigmatized drug users who they may have borrowed this 'accusatory cost' technique from, they stay away from social costs, it's not so easy to throw more fat people in jail, take away more of their children for proper abuse (not the fake one of not starving your children), into mental health facilities or illicit drug use/addiction rehab centres etc., and all the other costs fat people don't seem to major in. Which is interesting, given that we are supposed to be so unwell, that it should be causing ripples elsewhere.

Do you hear endless griping about the costs of thin? I'm probably the only fatty around mean enough to point that out! And even I couldn't care less, what do I care to divide people by weight and whine about what they're costing moi? I'd be embarrassed to run myself so wrongly.

But you know what this 'debate' tends to miss? The personal, financial and social costs to fat people of this wretched crusade. I can say being 'obese' and by that I mean internalizing the obesity mandate, has cost many of us dearly in many things of value.

I’m not just talking of the haut morality of our fat hating 'betters' who tell us happily they would see us die in agony for the possibility of saving themselves pennies, no, I mean things that people who value life and being able to do your best for yourself and those around you.

I have been able to contribute less, because I was less in every way but the most important to the moral giants du nos jour, weight. And when I finally had enough sense to wake up, it's sometimes been taxing to disentangle myself from too. Made more so by the intransigent surround of fat hating. I have had to deal with the consequences, using only my own inner resources.

Not one penny have we received for this and we're still expected to pay for the policies of hatred as always, even though we don’t agree with them one little bit. I don’t whine endlessly to haters because ultimately, I have to take the reins on that one, I should have known better, mea culpa.

And that is exactly how haters should feel, they’ve got exactly what they've been trained to want, what they've put first above all else, us harrassed, hated and ridiculed. I doubt they are paying financially for it, but I wouldn't mind if they were they deserve the bill for their own nastiness. We've had to pay our own, why should we care any more about their possibly mythical payments, anymore than they care about our actual ones? I have absolutely no idea why they think that has to come for free it's all for the haters, it's all about them it's not serving fat people, better get brave on the phobia if its too dear chère. If you are not prepared to pay, are you really sure you want to have the e-meaushun?

When you lead with hate you are not leading with health, effectiveness or anything, but hate, if it's not effective that's because you didn't lead with effectiveness silly, the truth will out.

That has been a general consensus, hate first, second and third, deny it if you want but we have been told times without number "We want you to feel bad about being fat,  we want it to cost you peace of mind, self respect, anything and everything" and so on.

And whilst you're at it, take a good look at where everyone's money is actually going and look into what they are prepared to do to fat people. That’s what you are up against, so get wise, or they will bleed you dry , how else do you think they could have taken the health system for all they have, when the authorities whine on about limiting costs? They've managed to do this to a group that are despised as a group of 'self inflicters' protecting their source in case it becomes too much and we can all be taxed. They are not taxing fat people, they are taxing everyone, especially those on low incomes. That has nothing to do with being compassionate towards me or any other fat person.

It's to do with deciding whether haters hate fat people enough to be potentially drained dry and suckered. IOW, if you want to hate fat people you must understand you are foregoing some self respect. Again, that isn't so evident relative to what we are dealt but that doesn't change the fact of it though, it only obscures it.

How many times, you are being played.

Presumably, haters think 'thin privilege' will save them, maybe they think obesity operators really respect them and wouldn't treat them so mean "They'll call me, they won't just hump and go....." they only mishandle fatz right?

Think again, because the clock is ticking.

"You have to persuade me"

Apparently, fat people are supposed to dedicate themselves to persuading people who've clearly and consciously made up their minds to hate them. This reminds me of those prostitutes who say their clients insist they tell them how great it is for them and how big they are and so on.

Is it not enough that you're getting what you want, you now demand one should pretend this is the main focus of one's existence?

It seems to be a cry for validation. If fat people try to "persuade", they can pretend they came to their decision through a balance of argument, rather than the desire to hate. That opportunity must not pass. There can never be enough people to hate.

The ally ship

Despite the title, I don't feel I'm the one to ask about allyship. If that's even a word. When I got into FA, I assumed that because fat people had never begrudged the attention given to the bodily traumas thin people spoke about, they would feel the same. Given we'd been so silent for so long, I presumed people would get a sense that we were not doing it lightly or without thought.

That we'd gone through something to get to this point. I even figured that precisely because we'd listened so intently to people's attitudes about fatness, that they'd feel a sense that it was time to hear us.

I'll explain that before I proceed. In order to have certain conditions, you have to have a reasonably acceptable body. For instance, body dysmorphia requires you to have an acceptable body;

Patients with BDD believe they look ugly or deformed (thinking, for example, that they have a large and 'repulsive' nose, or severely scarred skin), when in reality they look normal.

This is how fat people are expected to feel. Not feeling this way is felt to be unbalanced.

So, I think we can stand to hear about things that have nothing to do with them and respond supportively. Though I must admit, I find it hard to take BDD that seriously. In the age of plastic surgery, it was predictable that pretty people would feel ugly and that would be seen as sobworthy. It's the prettiness that makes it so.

As a person who's part of what's deemed an "ugly class", it's hard to take seriously the pain of those not deemed such, being terrified that they might be.

Think about it.

I'm not entirely sure I expected any need for the role of allies. I expected most people would take time to accept any idea of change. I did think though that they'd be a rational minority who would realise we had reasonable things to say and would offer rational critiques of what's actually been said.

I had no idea that was so difficult and that the hostility would be so universal. Fat acceptance is such a small thing, being an ally seems rather clunky. Like it's been lifted from more serious battles. 

Premises, premises

This is from Friday 7th November 2008

Note: apparently blogger thinks I am unable to decide for myself when my posts should go out. So in it's wisdom it has decided to post it where it wants to post it. Due to this incompetence, I've had to tell you where it is supposed to be.

Premise logic a previous statement from which another is inferred. An underlying assumption.
Fat acceptance isn't widely recognised and people do not want to know about it, the truth spoils the delusions they want to shore up. What we have instead of fat acceptance versus whatever, is a fat haters monologue split into two. So our part is written by the fat haters and its basically whatever they think is the opposite of what their view.

We are treated (and sometimes treat ourselves) as if we have not grown up in the same society having been formed by the same influences regarding weight eating and so on. We are as saturated with dieting culture and its assumptions as much as anyone else. The difference is, we are trying to get away from it. We are escaping because we have broken ranks with the delusion.

That is an important distinction, we are not necessarily going towards something that we can clearly see, our momentum is away from something else. Our aim is not set in stone, although it is assumed and presumed to be. That impression comes from the nature of fat hating, it is seen as the only rational viable, or possible view. Disagreeing with it, becomes the opposite of it-when a view is drenched in moral goodness, it posits itself against the forces of badness, so FA has that mantle thrust upon it.

That is useful to shore up convention, what FA actually is, isn't. The greater dynamic of people in FA is that of fleeing something- internalized fat hating and all that triggers, supports and deepens it.

This is why many FA views and underlying assumptions come directly from what we are seeking to get away from. It's inevitable, due to the grip it has held over everyone and the lack of consistent powerful opposition. We share with the mainstream views in many instances; dieting fails because its hard-when its hard because its a failure-or weight loss and weight loss dieting are the same-they aren't or people on lower incomes are less active-they do physical jobs and so on. We could be more rigorous in our questioning of them, on general principle, that is even when they don't stand out as wrong, but as a matter of course.

I think some of the problem is our desire to stick with the mainstream, rather than to find our truths, what they mean and where they lead. Sometimes its as if it's enough to just get away from something horrible and that in and of itself creates something better. I've never encountered that mentality before and I feel it's over optimistic, to put it mildly.