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. 

Daniel Hannan on patriotic feeling:  

The first few days of the Olympics have been accompanied by a clutch of articles about how British patriotism has been rehabilitated, the Union flag reclaimed and so forth. Really? Reclaimed from whom? Other than in the imagination of a tiny metropolitan elite, when was it ever ceded? […] Watching the women’s race at Hampton Court, we were caught in torrential rain. Among the spectators were dozens of orange-shirted Dutchmen, accompanied by a brass band, which played on impressively through the downpour. When the water eventually slackened, the Hollanders struck up Rule Britannia, delighting the natives: true patriots, of course, approve of the national pride of other peoples. The idea that loving your country means scorning someone else’s is downright silly.

Perhaps someone should tell Billy Bragg, who informed Guardian readers that “our imperial instincts” prevent us “relating to our neighbours as equals.” “The English,” wrote Bragg, “are in danger of becoming an insular people, jealously guarding the right to make our own laws.” Mr Bragg – who once told listeners of Radio 4 that he had “learned all of his politics from pop music” – went on to claim that English sports fans dislike their national teams losing because of a “hangover from an imperial past.” More prosaic explanations were not entertained. 

Greg Lukianoff on campus speech codes and uncritical thinking:

I’m trying to make the point that, after 11 years of looking at college censorship, this is starting to have a negative effect on the way our country talks with itself. I think it harms our ability and inclination to debate if the one institution that’s supposed to be making us deeper, more honest, harder thinkers is actually saying “And if you disagree, kind of shut up.” 

When it comes to discipline, apparently schools need racial quotas. I kid you not: 

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional levels of school penalties, regardless of the behaviour by members of each group… “What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for.” 

See also Heather Mac Donald, who shares some striking statistics:

The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialisation that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.

And Nick Gillespie on Dallas and the downfall of Romanian communism: 

Dallas was the last Western show allowed during the nightmarish 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu thought it showcased all that was wrong with capitalism. In fact, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap communist-produced cars… After the dictator and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve 1989, the pilot episode of Dallas – with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in – was one of the first foreign shows broadcast on liberated Romanian TV.

The Guild of Evil recently started watching some reruns of Dallas, ironically at first. Now the mix of schemes, shoulder pads and ginormous hair is a regular treat. And I’ll thank you not to judge me. 

As always, feel free to add your own. 

A taste of Sébastien Montaz-Rosset’s documentary I Believe I Can Fly.

“I’m not sure I can hold on with my toes.”

Behold the Urban Downhill Mountain Bike Race in Valparaiso, Chile. It gets a little hairy.

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

I’m Other, Subsidise Me.

Omar Kholeif is professionally ethnic and terribly oppressed. Though by what he doesn’t say.

Mr Kholeif doesn’t mention any first-hand experience of vocational or artistic exclusion based on ethnicity, or any similar experience had by anyone known to him, which seems an odd omission as it might have made his argument a little more convincing. In fact, the only discernible obstacles he mentions are the limited market value of his chosen skills and the preferences of his own parents.

It Pays To Be Unobvious.

When clarity is “conservative” and evidence is unhip.

Occasionally, Judith Butler’s politics are aired relatively free of question-begging jargon, thus revealing her radicalism to the lower, uninitiated castes. As, for instance, at a 2006 UC Berkeley “Teach-In Against America’s Wars,” during which the professor claimed that it’s “extremely important” to “understand” Hamas and Hizballah as “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left” and so, by implication, deserving of support. Readers may find it odd that students are being encouraged to express solidarity with totalitarian terrorist movements that set booby traps in schools and boast of using children as human shields, and whose stated goals include the Islamic “conquest” of the free world, the “obliteration” of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people. However, such statements achieve a facsimile of sense if one understands that the object is to be both politically radical and morally unobvious.

At Last, Socialist Football.

Some kids play better than others. This simply will not do.

Note that “an opportunity to play” doesn’t seem to entail playing as well as you can. And I’m not quite clear how penalising competence squares with the professed ideals of sportsmanship. However, there is some encouraging news. The handbook helpfully urges talented teams to avoid the risk of forfeiture by “reducing the number of players on the field” and “kicking with the weaker foot.”

Take a big stick to the greatest hits.