Old thread isn't showing my text, so I made a new one.
I got into a political argument with a colleague.
I tend to avoid political talk due to that old adage. I mentioned how the health service was underfunded due to Tory cuts.
She countered by saving it's because of staff doing agency work. So a nurse at one hospital doing agency work at a different hospital, instead of overtime at her own. Apparently, they get triple pay via the agency. Her argument was essentially the NHS is adequately funded but the funds are mismanaged and poorly spent.
I also mentioned that if there were enough nurses to start with they'd probably wouldn't have to use agencies to begin with but she did not agree. Whilst agency fees may be a factor in the NHS funding crisis, it is probably a drop in the ocean compared with chronic Tory underfunding.
She moved on to how schools are struggling because there's too many immigrant children in schools like in Boston and teachers are struggling to cope with this and increased class sizes. I thought of rebutting her by saying increased class sizes are due to chronic Tory underfunding but what's the point, eh?
To complete the trinity of bigotry, she said there's too many immigrants coming over here claiming bennies and having too many children. I tried to point out that it's mostly younger healthy migrants who come here to work and don't use the NHS as much as the elderly do. Also the fact that birth rate is declining, who do you think will support the elderly population?
She religiously gets the Daily Heil™ everyday, so I don't know what I was expecting.
Whinge ticked due to blowing off steam and mindless rambling.
>>11448 What exactly does a feminist author of works including "the anti-diet guide to permanent weight loss", "a program to conquer compulsive eating", and "how fast food ... [is] creating new forms of child abuse" have to do with your fictional pro-obesity movement?
Mate you can live in denial all you want but this fat shaming etc nonsense is very much real. Fringe Internet lunacy perhaps, but in the year of our Lord 2017 that doesn't mean as much as it once did.
In 1978, Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue achieved exactly what it set out to, putting fat and body image at the centre of contemporary feminism. Quotes:
"A feminist perspective to the problem of women's compulsive eating is essential if we are to move on from the ineffective blame-the-victim approach and the unsatisfactory adjustment model of treatment."
"Feminism argues that being fat represents an attempt to break free of society's sex stereotypes. Getting fat can thus be understood as a definite and purposeful act; it is a directed, conscious or unconscious, challenge to sex-role stereotyping and culturally defined experience of womanhood."
"My fat says 'screw you' to all who want me to be the perfect mom, sweetheart, maid and whore... In this way, fat expresses a rebellion against the powerlessness of the woman, against the pressure to look and act in a certain way and against being evaluated on her ability to create an image of herself."
This is not some fringe rant on a Tumblr blog. It's a book that was an international bestseller at the time and is now a set text on many university courses. From a blurb by Naomi Wolf: "Virtually all feminist debate on body image owes its existence to Susie Orbach's enduring formulation".
Orbach doesn't frame being fat as simply an inconvenient fact. She doesn't merely gloss over the obvious health issues. She frames fatness as a positive act of rebellion. She isn't some weird extremist relic of the 70s; she regularly writes for the Guardian and has presented documentary series for Radio 4. She is firmly within the mainstream of liberal feminist thought.
If you take a cursory glance over the references in the previously-linked Wikipedia articles, you'll find abundant evidence for the existence of the fat acceptance movement. There are multiple organisations advancing the idea that obesity is essentially irrelevant to physical health and that long-term sustained weight loss is essentially impossible (the Health at Every Size movement). There are numerous academics advocating this view - Linda Bacon, Jon Robison, Barbara Altman Bruno.
A couple of years ago I posted on .gs about how I can miraculously eat whole tubs of ice cream every other day and remain apparently lean and fit. Other posters suggested I was invisibly fucking up my insides and my cholesterol will be throught the roof.
So perhaps I will experience health complications down the line and contribute to the crisis. But I won't be shamed for it like a fat person would, because I don't look the type.
Oh, if I only I was fat, then I could have pejorative remarks made about my body that would definitely change my dieting habits, no really they would!
>>11469 Fat people, on the other hand, are always fat in public.
If it's a question of body image is presented in media, you may as well get upset about toothpaste adverts showing people using more toothpaste than is needed.
Let's be honest; fat people are really disgusting. Their apparent greed and lack of control is really filthy. If I were to wipe out a group of people, it would be fat people. They aren't that far removed from animals.
>>11472 If you see someone doing something dangerous, it's natural to warn them. Say if you see someone about to put their hand in boiling water, you'd tell them to stop. If someone puts their hand in boiling water in the privacy of their own home, you wouldn't know to warn them. If someone is fat, you see it.
>>11473 Er, yes. Proper chubbies wear it on the outside, whereas visceral fatties (like our lad with his ice cream) have the privilege of giving themselves a heart attack without anyone judging them for it.
>>11475 I'm not really sure what you're arguing for here. One lot gets the privilege of dying early because they didn't get as much warning but not experiencing harassment either directly or through the media, the other gets the privilege of knowing they need to make a change in order not to die, but also experiences harassment either directly or through the media.
One? Not a lot. Getting in the habit of it because nobody sees it in order to criticise it? Probably a lot.
>>11479 The thread has got to the point where I'm not bothering to view the last few posts so it's hard to tell which side you're taking. Who has the privilege, the ones who are warned they'll die early if they don't make a change or the ones who aren't?
>>11484 Yes, in a place where that's a factor the people with melanin have a privilege. Sorry man I'm drunk and like I said lost the thread of this conversation a while ago, I'm not really sure what either of us are arguing for.
That isn't directly measurable, it would be like asking how much more water an opaque container of unknown volume could hold that is constantly having random unknown amounts of water poured in and out of it for the last 50 years.
>>11487 Melanin? Or privilege? Because if it's privilege then disabled white people must be equally privileged to able-bodied white people, but that's clearly not the way it's meant.
>>11500 So instead of fighting for yours and supporting others who are doing the same, you turn around and want everyone to have a shite time because you are a meek twat taking 9 inches from some greedy boss? Let me guess, minimum wage should be abolished, right?
Nurses = the public sector. Firemen = the public sector. This reductionism is absurd, there are all sorts of jobs in the public sector.
Nurses get shit pay for how hard they work, but it's OK pay in the grander scheme of things. Thing is there, are a lot of other people who do very valuable work in the public sector, and earning barely over minium wage for it. Which in turn leads to a drain of talent- Why would you work for peanuts in jobs that otherwise rightly command 20k+ in the private sector? Why do you think the management tends to be so shocking in public sector services, if not for the fact anyone who's actually competent will land a much better job elsewhere?
The whole austerity narrative was fair enough, but we're past that now and it's plain to see that it's basically just an ideological starvation of the public sector regardless of whether or not that's going to have positive or negative consequences. They just enjoy tightening the vice on those bloody unionised, Labour voting scum.
>>11500 Speaking of public sector strife, I'm keeping on this because it annoys me: Remember the wank about how the post-office strike, southern strike and airline strike and whatever were going to ruin Christmas in a a politically motivated strike attempting to bring down the government, so the government should step in and biff the trade unions on the nose again? Remember that second Winter of Discontent? No?
Yeah, exactly. Because it was nothing. Because the press lied. They want to see trade unions fucked some more even though they're already below George Galloway in terms of power held. They'll lie again, they'll do it for more mild labour disputes in the hope of getting our already stringently regulated trade unions to piss off entirely. I'm incredibly unhappy about it, from a press-honesty standpoint as much as anything else.
>>11509 >if not for the fact anyone who's actually competent will land a much better job elsewhere?
I think there's a legitimate case to be made that a secondary reason is political ideology, vaguely encompassed in the Blair era obsession with statistics. Rather than develop on this, I'll just stick with the strike angle: I've always been drawn to the idea of service deliverers going on a sort of "paper strike". i.e. they won't fill in stupid self-assessment forms or other data-generating exercises secondary to their real job, but they'll continue to show up to work and provide the frontline services they're actually paid to perform.
Not work to rule, where they tediously follow the exact write-up of the job they're paid to perform (often disrupting services): Doing their actual day job and skipping the rules about target-sheets that get in their way. Obviously I don't mean fill in zero paperwork, but there's a pretty clear difference between marking your students' essays and going through a mini struggle session on form 25A about what you think your own failings are and how you'll improve them for review by the staff department. (Don't worry, it's not actionable, you just have to do it!)
Either we'd see the crucial importance of many apparent middle-class-job-creation exercises, or a lot of managers would start looking very flustered indeed as they're all forced to sit at their desks playing solitare while occasionally grabbing the phone and feigning conversation. Now wouldn't that release quite a burden from the public purse: Free Doctors, Teachers and Nurses...
>>11527 It's okay lad. Soon the press will be regulated, and so will the internet. I'm happy as long as everyone else gets fucked with - especially poor people who vote for these sort of things.
