From today's Sun Says column
SUGGESTIONS that fatties could lose council tax benefits if they refuse to lumber down to the gym are pie in the sky.
After all, smokers and drinkers aren’t penalised for the huge cost they impose on the NHS.(1)
But Westminster council does a valuable service in highlighting the national obesity epidemic.(2)
Radical thinking is needed to slim Britain down.(3) Millions of adults and kids are grossly overweight.(4)
Burying our heads in a bucket of chips can’t hide the truth: many of us are gorging ourselves into an early grave.(5)
Lardies always have an excuse: they are miserable, or it’s their metabolism, or it’s the fault of supermarkets selling dud grub.(6)
But nobody is forced to scoff themselves silly.(7)
And nor should everyone else have to pick up the bill for their self-indulgence(8) and lack of willpower.(9)
1) Smokers and drinkers already pay their normal share of NHS costs through normal taxes (£100 billion x 1-in-5 people who are smokers/heavy drinkers) plus another £20 billion a year on top via booze and fags duties, ergo, they pay for about forty per cent of the cost of the NHS. Even the most exaggerated estimate of the the "extra costs imposed on the NHS by drinkers and smokers" is only somewhere in the region of £5 billion a year and do not minus off all the costs which smokers/heavy drinkers do NOT impose on the taxpayer (like not living for ever).
2) An epidemic is the rapid spread of an infectious disease. Being fat is not an infectious disease.
3) No it isn't.
4) Not true and so what if it were?
5) Fucking bollocks. So how come 'healthy life expectancy' keeps going up, quite rapidly as it happens?
6) Again, fucking bollocks. I've never asked a fattie why they were fat, thus I have never heard a fattie explain/make an excuse for his fatness. Frankly, I'm not interested in their reasons/excuses any more than it's somebody else's business why I smoke.
7) So what? Nobody is forced to go sky-diving or skiing, or to live so long they get senile dementia either.
8) If I had to pay for their food, then I'd be a bit miffed. But by and large, true fatties are so inactive, there is an equal and opposite saving because they are less likely to end up in A&E following a sporting, sky-diving or skiing related incident.
9) One of the glorious things about the human race is their utter lack of discipline and willpower. That's the way we are!
It's a crowded field
3 hours ago
5 comments:
Read that article again. It is an absolutely masterful piece of fence-sitting. The first paragraph says those noxious proposals from Westminster are "pie in the sky". And then the rest of the article explains how important they are. The Sun Says ... that it can't make it's mind up. But it's going to not make its mind up in a very strident and campaigning kind of way.
AC, that is what I thought when I read the first sentence.
But what they mean is "this is pie in the sky because although an excellent policy it will not happen" and not "this is pie in the sky because it is a stupid and unjustifiable policy".
Maybe you're right. Who knows. This is the Sun after all.
Given the last paragraph, I trust they would support stopping wasting all that money on NHS anti-obesity campaigns!
You're right about genetics. I saw a documentary about twins, which looked at separated adopted twins (a classic group for nature vs nurture) which found that the only thing that made any difference was exercise.
It's not just genetics. No-one can get fat without eating too much and no-one can avoid getting thin if they don't eat enough. What genetics determines is what is enough and what is too much for each person. But genetic factors do make a mockery of the "one size fits all" policies of the government.
OTOH the article is typical Sun: manufacturing sub-humans for the Righteous to look down their noses at. Now that Jews and blacks are off-limits, they give us dolies and fatties to sneer at.
Post a Comment