Tag Archives: sanity

Congratulations America

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Well done America. You have put aside my lingering doubts about your national sanity (although looking at the red-blue map of the US, it seems there are an awful lot of nutcases) and the elections are all but over. Phew. A double sigh of relief; not only have you avoided putting a screaming nutter with nothing to offer other than “I was a POW” but the coverage on the UK news must surely soon dwindle. You have no idea how much that cheers me up!

Today however, it is still very much headline news. I can sort of understand this, it is a monumental change and is historic in that the Obama is the first black President. Wonderful. I do find it monumentally racist, however, that lots of commentators have suggested black people were going to vote for Obama because he was black. It carries the implication that black people dont have political viewpoints, the same issue arose around Hillary Clinton and Sarah “Crazy Eyes” Palin. Why would women vote against their political views simply to elect a woman into office?

Anyway, hopefully this will see the end of our 24 hour news coverage of the election campaign visiting places no one in the UK will have ever heard of. Of politics that have no impact on us and a government we have no say over. Maybe we will be able to get back to the days when a soldier dying in Afghanistan can make at least some headlines (maybe he is less news worthy because he was a Gurkha?). Or when a riot in the UK injures police and closes off half a city. Or even rocket attacks in Gaza if you must showcase world news.

Not long now.

The Trap- BBC2

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The Trap – on BB2, on Sundays at 9pm for the next few weeks – is well worth watching. It is mainly brilliant. It’s rare to find television that addresses fundamental issues about our current society. If it’s any indication of how good it is, Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn in Saturday’s Guardian – which introduced it as unmissable – was probably the only totally serious piece Brooker has written in that column.

The programme looks at our ideas about freedom, where they originated and how they serve to cage us. Ian Curtis traces our current views of individuals as totally self-serving to inventions that were necessary to make Rand Corporation cold-war game theory work, through anti-psychiatry’s attack on institutions and Thatcher-inspiring economists to a situation where, as Brooker put it

“conventional human traits such as sadness or irritability are reclassified as aberrant medical conditions, Narcissism and selfishness, however, are normal.”

I can’t say I can go along with all the arguments – I can’t believe that R.D. Laing was truly so influential anywhere, nor that anti-psychiatry can be blamed much for the medicalising of normal behaviours. Curtis’s argument here is that Rosenham’s experiments, by showing that psychiatrists misdiagnosed mental illness, shook the medical establishment and led to the application of non-human computerised automatic diagnoses. When applied to large numbers of non-mental patients, the diagnostic questionnaires showed that half of the US population had a recognised mental disorder. The questionnaires provided an “objective” set of standards of normality that became a model for the population as a whole to judge itself against.

I don’t know where the argument is going with this, yet, but it seems a little far-fetched. I don’t think the detail is really important. Tonight’s programme was very impressive and important. It looks very broadly at the action of ideas in our society, from their origin to their implications.. It should really make you think.

Food for thought

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The old themes keep coming back here. We really need some startling new things to blog about. Still, here goes…..

A 14 or 15 stone 8-year-old seems to sparked a huge moral panic all by himself. The media keep showing this kid and getting really worked up about him. Oh my god! He’s obese! Government ministers have even opined on the question of whether he should be taken into care. (There was a case conference today that decided he coulld stay with his mum, for the time being and if she agrees to cut his weight and so on.)

Now, on the face of it, unless there is a lot more happening in his family, I can’t see that a fat child is really such an urgent cause for intervention. Does anyone have any idea of the kind of suffering that some kids go through, with no assistance from anyone? Has the care system suddenly become a much more favourable option than being overweight?

What is really depressing about this story is that “fat” kids often get bullied. Nothing special in the fat bit, though, kids get bullied for any behaviour or characteristic that the bullies define as an offence. Adults are not supposed to reward bullying, let alone join in and take it to another level.

I doubt if the worst child bully in the world could come up with anything like the public pillorying of the child and his family. If the kid was a criminal, the media wouldn’t be allowed to name him, let alone plaster his picture everywhere and publicly debate his weight and his family circumstances. This kid and his family aren’t harming anyone, except possibly increasing his chance of getting certain diseases. Can anyone seriously believe that an 8-year-old is not going to be damaged by this experience of being in the public eye?

But obviously, it’s more important for us to show our social cohesion by all joining together to condemn him and his mother.

(Scapegoat rituals are so bloody powerful… You would hope that rational people could move beyond them or at least use symbolic scapegoats, as the obviously wiser amd more humane people of the past did.)

His weight is probably bad for his health, but I can’t honestly see what concern that is of mine. I don’t have enough faith in nutrition to believe everything we are told about it anyway. I have my own beliefs about food and health but I would hardly demand that everybody eats what I eat or exercises as I do. I thought that human diversity was a crucial survival strategy for our species.

If it is now OK to attack everyone who doesn’t meet my moral and physical standards, I can see a dozen candidates a month due for public naming and shaming as people who shouldn’t be entrusted with kids. I would be only too happy to voice my opinions on their apperance, their intelligence and their weight. And, of course, my opinion is necessarily always right…..

My point is that I have a mass of personal prejudices, based on highly dubious aesthetic grounds. However, if I don’t like someone’s appearance or expression or voice or way of life, I don’t claim any right to impose my standards on them. This is pure self-interest, lots of people object to me and I wouldn’t like to have them impose their values on me, so it seems only fair.

This argument is increasingly being overlooked, as our society becomes ever more willing to impose health fascist criteria on everybody. We can all join in this game. Whole sections of the media rely for their content on the alleged excessive fatness/thinness of “celebrities” or on peddling weight loss and exercise programmes. The food industry is constantly working out ever more complex ways to adulterate our food on the grounds of making it “healthier.”

Guess what, as a society, the more obsessed we become with our body size, the fatter and fatter we get. That’s working out well then.

A comment on this blog took us to task for joining the anti- “Doctor” McKeith clamour, largely on the grounds that we must be “fat” if we didn’t accept McKeith’s legitimacy. And that, having assumed we were “fat”, the commenter could more or less take the moral high ground.

I always want to say, so, if I don’t break the health rules (whatever they may be at any moment) I’ll live forever then? Great. That’s a weight off my mind

More on McKeith

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It seems I am not alone in getting some satisfaction out of seeing McKeith have to admit she is not a doctor.
“Back off, man; I’m a scientist.” also picks up the topic with its “Bless” post.

The post picks up on McKeith saying how she feels “bullied” and she claims ” I’m entitled to use ‘Dr’ because I have a PhD in Holistic Nutrition, which I studied for four years to get.” Now that is funny. Obviously she is joking…

Anyway, the Back off, man; I’m a scientist makes the reasonable comments:

This is a woman who goes on TV and makes “an obese woman cry, in her own back garden, by showing her a tombstone with her own name on it, made out of chocolate”, who said to another “‘Do you want to see your daughter get married and have babies? Because the way things are going you’ll have a heart attack at 40″.

She’s made a career out of making fat people cry, so just let the satisfaction flow.

Well Said that man!