Let the fat people kill themselves off

[Lucifer]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nati ... nworld-hed

I'm reminded of a song...

Can't stop eating,
Can't stop eating,
Can't stop eating,
She's so fat!

[TiTnAsS]

This doctors a hypocrit, hes probably fat to!

[Phytotron]

"I told a fat woman she was obese," Bennett says. "I tried to get her attention. I told her, `You need to get on a program, join a group of like-minded people and peel off the weight that is going to kill you.'"

I don't see anything wrong with that statement. Add to that the hippocratic oath, and it was right proper.

* Sound-off/rant alert *

I'll probably catch some heat for the following commentary, but yo, there are far too many fat people in this country (and, apparently, Europe). One of the worst things about it is that, as some may have noticed, there has been a sort of socio-cultural movement in play to normalise or even glorify obesity, begun and sustained of course because such a large portion (no pun intended) of the general population is overweight or obese. A major component of this is the "big is beautiful" campaign. I'm sorry, fat is not attractive (nor healthy, obviously). Now, I don't make fun of or degrade fat people; that's simply cruel. Nor am I defining 'fat' as, for instance, a woman having proper hips or a full rear-end. The waif/rail thing is unattractive as well. And I wouldn't even suggest that everyone should have an athelete's body (I sure don't). Rather, I'm referring to those who are actually overweight and obese in medical terms. It's not normal, healthy, intelligent, or beautiful (unless you have a fetish for that sort of thing).

So, that's why you get a lawsuit like this, as well as absurd talk show segments -- because of this movement. Sorry lady, the doc didn't insult you; he told you the truth as a physician. If you want to ignore it and eat yourself to death, there's no law against it, but don't get pissed at the doctor for giving you the appropriate diagnosis just because you'd rather be a lazy pig. And also understand that you'll be costing yourself, and the rest of us, more now and in the long run than if you lost the weight.

Another farcical aspect of this whole phenomenon is that most people in the US call themselves Christians, but there's plainly a whole lot of gluttony going on despite that.

(Footnote: I don't say this just to bash the Christians. Even though I'm an atheist and a Skeptic, I think the Seven Deadly Sins -- the words themselves -- still make a rather good, if incomplete and unelaborated, basic secular guide for naming immoral or unethical behaviour -- when stripped of any religious or supernatural connotation and reasoned on their own merits.)

[/rant]

[TiTnAsS]

Very well said osc ..

[Lucifer]

* Sound-off/rant alert *

I'll probably catch some heat for the following commentary, but yo, there are far too many fat people in this country (and, apparently, Europe). One of the worst things about it is that, as some may have noticed, there has been a sort of socio-cultural movement in play to normalise or even glorify obesity, begun and sustained of course because such a

You know, this big is beautiful thing has been pissing me off all along. There's chubby and hot, and there's fat and nauseating, and the two don't overlap. I looked at my mother-in-law one time during my sister-in-law's wedding rehearsal lunch or whatever it was, and I realized that she was so fat, she could sit in her own lap.

Now the woman's been diagnosed diabetic in a big way and given a maximum of 5 years to live unless she significantly alters her eating habits. The woman's insane! She goes to her church and asks them if its ok for her to be fat, and Mormons being what they are they all tell her "no, it's perfectly normal and healthy". So she forgets what her doctor told her, decides (as she did with my wife and various psychiatrists) that her doctor is incompetent for not being able to see clearly that she's a healthy human being and goes to another doctor. She repeated that process until recently they had to give her high blood pressure medicine and insulin and required her to check her insulin levels at 4 hour intervals, and if it was low she had to give herself a shot. And what does she do? "Oh, I didn't feel like taking my medication today." What's that old saying? "Take your medication today so we don't have to bury you tomorrow". And she'd displace enough dirt to fill Crater Lake.

Fat isn't good, period. You don't get fat by just eating, ok? Your body regulates its weight by such neat measures as getting full when you've had enough, and triggering hunger when you need more. If something's wrong with this system (controlled in your brain somewhere and therefore subject to modification by any unusual condition in your brain), then you get fat. You can also get real thin.

Ack. I don't know what's worse, really. Big is beautiful, or men don't like you unless they can count your ribs.

So, that's why you get a lawsuit like this, as well as absurd talk show segments -- because of this movement. Sorry lady, the doc didn't insult you; he told you the truth as a physician. If you want to ignore it and eat yourself to death, there's no law against it, but

Aso from the article:

"I have been in this lady's shoes. I've been angry and left his practice. I mean, in-my-car-taking-off angry," Haney said. "But once you think about it, you're angry at yourself, not Dr. Bennett. He's the messenger. He's telling you what you already know."

Another farcical aspect of this whole phenomenon is that most people in the US call themselves Christians, but there's plainly a whole lot of gluttony going on despite that.

I think I've said this before here, but I know I've said it plenty of other places. We've got at least 5000 years of human wisdom tied up in religions of all shapes and sizes, and a great deal of that wisdom led to the foundation of civilization. We can't afford to ignore it, even if it is clothed in absurdity.

(I think that was supposed to respond to the paragraph I deleted in the quote, oops)

[TiTnAsS]

somewhat off topic: You guys know we have the most intellegent and nicest forum on the web...no joke.. every other forum ive read had TONS of flamebait and stupid people typing responces like this.

i r not hippy for you to do

mabye... in concclusion

Just had to throw that out there ....

[Phytotron]

I think I've said this before here, but I know I've said it plenty of other places. We've got at least 5000 years of human wisdom tied up in religions of all shapes and sizes, and a great deal of that wisdom led to the foundation of civilization. We can't afford to ignore it, even if it is clothed in absurdity.

Actually, it goes quite a bit further back than that -- we're talking millenia, even prior to the development of the hominid line. Humans have evolved what is called a moral sense. All other documented social species have exhibited one as well, if particular to their species.

Um, I've been drinking a bit, and am vury tired, so I'm not too keen on elaborating on this, so I defer to a few authors:

- E.O. Wilson (Sociobiology and Consilience)
- Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate)
- Michael Shermer (The Science of Good and Evil)
- Richard Dawkins (ayep)
...and evolutionary psychology in general

So, the point is, the moral sense preceded civilisation and religion. Neither religion nor civilisation invented morality; they simply formalised and codified it. And then you also have what has been called gene-culture co-evolution, and.... I'm tired.

[Lucifer]

So, the point is, the moral sense preceded civilisation and religion. Neither religion nor civilisation invented morality; they simply formalised and codified it. And then you also have what has been called gene-culture co-evolution, and.... I'm tired.

I wasn't trying to trace it back to a "who did it first" thing, just pointing out the relevance of the material regardless of its source.

(I've long suspected that religion grew out of a simple series of connections. Man makes fire. Man makes children. Man makes tools. Man makes everything, and everything is made. Leads logically to "Who made man?", but I"ll let the experts beat on it, it's not really my problem)

[Phytotron]

I wasn't trying to trace it back to a "who did it first" thing, just pointing out the relevance of the material regardless of its source.

Oh, I didn't necessarily think you were. I just like to throw in my little tidbits on subjects, eh -- when I think there might be something interesting to add or some bit of knowledge I've picked up to pass along. It can be taken as just an independent comment sparked by another comment.

[Lucifer]

I wasn't trying to trace it back to a "who did it first" thing, just pointing out the relevance of the material regardless of its source.

Oh, I didn't necessarily think you were. I just like to throw in my little tidbits on subjects, eh -- when I think there might be something interesting to add or some bit of knowledge I've picked up to pass along. It can be taken as just an independent comment sparked by another comment.

Aha, right. Now to properly complete the thought.

See, the Bible has some interesting rules. The Golden Rule (which is the rule of the jungle, only the jungle enforces it) is codified in Moses' law (which is inherited from the Mesopotamians). There's other things, like "Don't eat pork". It's not that pork is so bad for you, it's that previously it was difficult to raise domesticated pork and eat it without getting tapeworm or some other parasite. Nowadays, technology and inspection procedures have made pork relatively safe to eat, safer than chicken even. Then there's things like "Eat fish once a week". Now we know that fish and other seafoods contain those type 3 omega fatty acids that are good for your brain and what are the nutritionists recommending? Eat fish once a week.

Then the stuff about coveting your neighbor's stuff. That's not to save you from hell, that's about being friendly with your neighbors. If you envy your neighbors for the things they have, you feel shitty yourself for not having them, and so forth. Then you might do dastardly things to get your neighbor's things. Well, doing dastardly things is, well, dastardly. So it really just says "be cool to people". Keeps you out of trouble with them. It adds the ability to filter out bad neighbors by who doesn't follow this rule, so you can know when someone's going to steal your shit by how much they covet your stuff and take action to secure yourself before they do anything dastardly.

There's all sorts of useful advice in there, too much to sum up here, that is for the most part presented as God's commands, and law that's passed down from On Holy Mountain. So my point is that it doesn't matter so much why the Bible says to do something, you should be able to apply your own critical thinking skills to figure out that a lot of it is a good idea. That fact is further supported by all the other religious works of religions that existed in different parts of the world that contains much of the same material.

So there you have it. Don't be fat because God told you it's a sin, don't be fat because it's stupid and you know better, and if your damn doctor tells you then you need to run scared and get it taken care of instead of whining about how your feelings were hurt.

[Phytotron]

Well, again, I think most of what you're talking about are advisories having to do with the various practicalities associated with civilisation, which have then been integrated into religions cannons. And of course those exist; I'm not disputing that. (Though, what also exists is the simple fact that most modern religions, especially Christianity, are memetic mongrels patched together from previously existing religions.)

But to clarify, when I mention the moral sense and gene-culture co-evolution, I'm not referring to anything that has at one point been reasoned out* by someone who sees a situation in society, analyses it, and comes up with a solution.

Rather, the moral sense is something universally inherent in the human brain (with exception to sociopaths). To quote myself , "Much of how humans think and approach the world—both in terms of unconscious instincts, as well as higher cognition—is rooted in various mental faculties which find their homes in various neurological structures and architectures in the brain. The structures of the brain, like the rest of the body, have genetic underpinnings which have been shaped by the selective forces of evolution down through the ages. Additionally, the human brain overall has undergone very few changes since the Upper Paleolithic Age, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors still lived in small tribal units, in physical surroundings that had to that point gone unchanged for millennia."

This is the basic premise of evolutionary psychology, and the moral sense is included. It's part of human nature -- simply, we evolved morality. We are a hierarchal primate social species, in which we need to be able to interact with each other in order to survive as a collective whole. How do we do that? The so-called golden rule, for example, is a perfect, evolutionarily adaptive basis for that.

All of us have, in our genes, the capacity for great good and great evil (used here as adjectives, of course). Genetics determines roughly half (in terms of variability) of our behavioral tendencies, including personality, temperament, and moral and immoral behaviors. The other half is determined by culture and environment, including parents, siblings, family dynamics, teachers and mentors, and especially peer groups.

Again, rather than writing a whole freakin' essay into a web forum, I'll just defer to those authors and their books mentioned above for greater elaboration. I'm lazy, too.


* I hate having to point out this distinction, but there's a difference between something being "reasoned" and "reasonable." A reasoned idea needn't necessarily be reasonable.

[ishAdmin]

I leave this forum for a while, and now you guys are picking on fat people!

Just a little fyi. There are many 'fat' people who consume less calories than 'normal' weight (whatever that is) people. There are many 'fat' people who are more active than 'normal' weight people. Nutrition, metabolism, insulin response, and countless other factors are all extremely complicated. Many 'fat' people are quite desperate to lose weight, and are unsuccessful no matter what they do. Their best shot at losing the fat is through aerobic exercise, but even that comes with mixed success. Please don't assume people are fat because they somehow choose to be through lack of effort or bad eating habits.

And if anybody has a problem with the above, I'm going to eat your dinner!

[Lucifer]

I leave this forum for a while, and now you guys are picking on fat people!

Just a little fyi. There are many 'fat' people who consume less calories than 'normal' weight (whatever that is) people. There are many 'fat' people who are more active than 'normal' weight people. Nutrition, metabolism, insulin response, and countless other factors are all extremely complicated. Many 'fat' people are quite desperate to lose weight, and are unsuccessful no matter what they do. Their best shot at losing the fat is through aerobic exercise, but even that comes with mixed success. Please don't assume people are fat because they somehow choose to be through lack of effort or bad eating habits.

And if anybody has a problem with the above, I'm going to eat your dinner!

There are also many 'fat' people who say all of those things so they can deny they eat 5 4-course meals daily. I've seen it.

[root down]

no fat chicks

[TiTnAsS]

Only chicks like the one in RDs avatar