Time for another classic sentence from the Guardian. And so, via Julia, let’s bathe in the mental radiance of VJD Smith, a “feminist mother of two who works in publishing”:

As a teen anorexic, I found diet yoghurt ads hard enough. I don’t know how I’d defend myself from the everyday body hatred now.

And another, 

These days you don’t even have to buy a magazine to absorb the body hatred. 

Stoicism and a sense of proportion are not standard fare at the left’s national newspaper, and so we also get quite a bit of this: 

This evening, shopping at Sainsbury’s, I was greeted by the following headlines, in bold capitals and at eye level, as I entered the store: WEIGHT TORMENT (New! magazine), OUR BODY WARS (Star), BODY PANICS! (Heat)… The very existence of these things can mess with your head. You can try to avert your eyes as you head for the fruit and veg but if you look back once – sneak even the slightest glance – all this can send you straight to the cake counter for yet another miserable pre-starvation-diet binge.

Such crippling intrigue, all at eye level. In bold capitals, even. 

Ms Smith, a grown woman, has yet to embrace the incredibly radical solution of not being interested in Heat magazine, which is, I think, a little odd. For a grown woman. Such magazines, and their readers, were ridiculed 20 years ago in Absolutely Fabulous. And it is, after all, quite possible to breeze round the local supermarket without finding oneself emotionally gripped by the latest travails of Kerry Katona or the Kardashian sisters, none of whom I could reliably identify, or by the latest breathless opinion on hemlines, weight loss or pubic waxing. And yet many of the Guardian’s supposedly sophisticated and freethinking columnists – feminists, even – find not being interested inexplicably difficult. 

Chris Snowdon on the dishonesty of ‘minimum price’ lobbyists and the prohibitionist tendency: 

There is much more that could be said about this thinly veiled piece of lobbying. The inexplicable lack of a control group, for example, or the mystery of why official hospital records were not enough for the authors – instead they created their own “estimates” of how many people died. But the bottom line is that these people are lying with statistics. The result – and almost certainly the intention – of their study is to make people believe that fewer people died of alcohol-related diseases in British Columbia between 2002-09 as a result of minimum pricing. “Nearly a third” fewer in fact. 

Theodore Dalrymple on an appetite for doom: 

The apocalyptic pessimist… believes that the end of the world is nigh, and secretly is rather pleased about it. If he is of a scientific bent, he does the following: he takes an undesirable trend and projects it indefinitely into the future until whatever is the object of the trend destroys the world. For example, he might take the fact that Staphylococci reproduce exponentially on a Petri dish to mean that, within the week, the entire biosphere will consist of Staphylococci and nothing else. Man will be crushed under the weight of bacteria. Paul Ehrlich is of that ilk. His belief in the end of the world precedes his belief in any particular cause of it. 

As Fabian Tassano said,  

Thinking, it will be recalled, is the activity one performs before one has arrived at the answer. 

And Tim Worstall parses the logic of Green Party leader Caroline Lucas: 

60% higher is an interesting definition of lower, isn’t it?

Note Ms Lucas’ use of the term “demand management.” Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

Meanwhile, in the Arts. 

A video compendium of conceptual performance and physical theatre. Contains nudity, writhing and vegetable slurry. 

Magdalena Chowaniec, Amanda Piña and Daniel Zimmermann perform Neuer Wiener Bioaktionismus: “Three young Viennese artists/dancers from Chile, Poland and Switzerland translate the actionist mystery into a vegetarian orgy in which dead carrots take the place of the massacred lamb. A portrait of our time.”

I Demand You Demand My Art. 

The Observer’s Elizabeth Day asks, “Should artists have to work?”

Stipends allowed Bettina Camilla Vestergaard to travel to Los Angeles and spend six months sitting in her car at taxpayers’ expense while “exploring collective identity” in ways never quite made clear. Oh, and doing a spot of shopping. For art, of course. After sufficient time had been spent idling and, as she puts it, “slowly but surely reducing my mental activity to a purposeless series of meaningless events,” Ms Vestergaard struck upon a deep and fearsome idea. Specifically, to let strangers deface her car with inane marker pen graffiti. This radical feat allegedly “explored” how “identity and gender is constituted in public space.” Though, again, the details are somewhat sketchy. The freewheeling disposal of other people’s earnings also allowed Ms Vestergaard to film herself and her friends looking bored, tearing up grass and pondering the evils of capitalism. And, in an all too brief moment of awareness, wondering if what they do is actually any good and worth anyone’s attention. The resulting videos, all bankrolled by the Danish taxpayer and showing highlights of four days’ artistic inactivity, have been available online for over a year and have to date attracted zero comments and no discernible traffic except via this blog.

The Pure Ones Will Guide Us.

Meet Joan Brady: novelist, umbrage-taker, colossal hypocrite.

Corporations, see, are wicked. They “chew us up and spit us out,” and how could anyone with a soul want to be part of that – especially an artist like Joan Brady, for whom purity is everything? Of course, this being the Guardian, Ms Brady’s display of indignation is just a tad selective. Despite the author’s outrage, I somehow doubt that Whitbread will be getting their prize money back. I think we can also assume that our morally lofty wordsmith won’t be withdrawing her novels from Waterstones and Amazon, both of which have no doubt aroused very similar umbrage from many small booksellers. And it’s perhaps worth noting that Ms Brady’s latest novel, The Blue Death, is published by Simon & Schuster, an imposing division of that even more imposing multinational corporation, CBS.

We’re Compensating You for That Face.

Unattractive people need affirmative action too.

Oh, come on. Who wouldn’t want to be regarded as officially ugly?

As usual, I’ve hidden chocolate and booze in the greatest hits. 

Chris Snowdon ponders fatness and what mustn’t be said about it: 

This week, lots of outraged people – mainly on the political left – got themselves in a tizzy when public health minister Anna Soubry pointed out that childhood obesity rates are disproportionately high amongst low income groups… Why the controversy? Soubry’s greatest crime was to not use the most politically correct language. She used the word poor instead of deprived or underprivileged. As Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum said: “It was the tone of what she said. It was arrogant and condescending.” As for the facts, he conceded: “Yes it is true that the lower down the social scale you go the more likely people are to be obese.” On Twitter, big boned Labour MP Diane Abbott tried to whip up the mob. She reckons that pointing out the well-known association between poverty and obesity amounts to “blaming the victim.” This is the same Diane Abbott who wrote in 2011: “Studies about the predictors of obesity in the UK have shown that the poorest are most likely to be obese.” 

I don’t see fat people as “victims,” nor do I feel the need to “blame” anyone for something that is none of my business. Even if I did, the incomes of those involved would have nothing to do with it. Abbott, on the other hand, wants us to blame the food industry for making people like her grossly overweight. She won’t take responsibility for herself and she doesn’t expect anyone else to. As a state socialist, she holds institutions accountable for all human outcomes and believes that the only solutions lie in a more coercive government. Terrifyingly, this woman could be Britain’s next health minister.

Ms Abbott, a woman of substance in only the physical sense, is hardly alone in holding such ambitions. There are those, including writers of Observer editorials and Lancet contributor Professor Boyd Swinburn, who wish to save us from “passive overeating” by restricting our choices, including where we may eat, and by making food more expensive. The state, we’re told, must “intervene more directly.” Yes, we must be supervised by those who know better. Because you simply can’t be trusted when there’s pie nearby. 

David Mamet on gun laws in theory and practice (and much more besides):  

Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife. It awakens anxiety, passion, fervour, and, indeed, hatred and chicanery, both in pursuit of private gain and of public good. Those who promise to relieve us of the burden through their personal or ideological excellence, those who claim to hold the Magic Beans, are simply confidence men. Their emergence is inevitable, and our individual opposition to and rejection of them, as they emerge, must be blunt and sure; if they are arrogant, wilful, duplicitous, or simply wrong, they must be replaced, else they will consolidate power, and use the treasury to buy votes, and deprive us of our liberties. It was to guard us against this inevitable decay of government that the Constitution was written. Its purpose was and is not to enthrone a Government superior to an imperfect and confused electorate, but to protect us from such a government.

And Jeff Goldstein on dreams of a disarmed citizenry:

As Ace rightly notes, “as the goal is admitted, let us have no more discussion of these ridiculous diversions.” It’s not your folding stocks or flash suppressors or bayonet lugs they’re after: it’s your ability to remind them that you are free people, and that their power is contingent on you. And would-be aristocrats grow weary of such presumptions from the riff raff, particularly those they imagine in a cabin somewhere eating possum stew off of the tits of their first cousins.

As always, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. 

More psychodrama on campus:

Only hours after students installed a “Free Speech Wall” at Carleton University to prove that campus free speech was alive and well, it was torn down by an activist who claimed the wall was an “act of violence” against the gay community. “What we wanted to promote was competition of ideas, rather than ‘if I disagree with you I’ve got to censor you,’” said Ian CoKehyeng, founder of Carleton Students for Liberty, the creators of the wall. Installed on Monday in the Unicentre Galleria, one of campus’ most high-traffic areas, the wall was really more of a 1.2 x 1.8 metre wooden plank wrapped in paper and equipped with felt markers. By Tuesday morning the wall was gone, destroyed in an act of “forceful resistance” by seventh-year human rights student Arun Smith.

Yes, I know. Forceful resistance. Against free speech. By a human rights student.

A human rights student who last year promised to ensure “every voice is empowered and every student’s voice is heard.” Well, maybe not every voice. It seems there’ll be some pre-emptive and unilateral vetting.

But wait, there’s more.

“In organising the ‘free speech wall,’ the Students for Liberty have forgotten that liberty requires liberation, and this liberation is prevented by providing space … for the expression of hate,” wrote Smith in a 600-word Facebook post in which he identified himself as an anti-homophobia campaigner. Calling the area around the wall a “war zone,” he intimated that it was “but another in a series of acts of violence” against gay rights. In a Tuesday afternoon Twitter exchange with a CBC reporter, Mr Smith dubbed free speech an “illusory concept” and declared that “not every opinion is valid, nor deserving of expression.”

The punchline cometh.

In truth, the wall’s only overt references to sexual orientation were pro-gay, such as “QUEERS ARE AWESOME,” “Gay is OK” and “I [Heart] Queers.” The only comment that verged into anti-gay territory was a scrawl reading “traditional marriage is awesome.”

Some kinds of stupid have to be educated into the kids.

Update, via the comments: