I have a problem. I can’t tell liberals apart anymore. Well, I can to a certain degree. This column doesn’t have the drum-beat of Keynesianism like a Krugman column or the vacant flippancy of a Collins column or the “citizen-of-the-world” do-goodery of a Kristof column or the breathtaking irrelevance of a Dowd column. (I’m convinced that she’s trying to get fired.) But still, this column has me asking “what the hell is the point of this nonsense?”
The Biggest Losers
By CHARLES M. BLOW
Published: March 11, 2011
Should the government have a significant role in reducing childhood obesity?
Acceptable answers: a) no. b) God, no. c) Go to hell, fatty.
That’s the question the Pew Research Center began asking poll respondents a few weeks ago. Nearly 60 percent said yes. Only about 40 percent said no.
What about people who told you to go to hell and insulted their weight? I couldn’t have been the only one.
This is a remarkable change in public sentiment from 2005 when the Harvard School of Public Health asked a similar question and got almost the exact opposite result.
Of course, polling is tricky business. Changing the vernacular can produce divergent results as interpretations of the wording vary widely, so this “similar question” might not be very similar at all. That said, I still would have told them to go to hell and insulted them.
So what happened in the intervening years?
Interesting question. Let’s give some context. In 2005, Barack Obama was an Illinois State Senator. Sarah Palin was merely contemplating a run for Governor. Hurricane Katrina pummeled the gulf coast, giving Kanye West the opportunity to be a tremendous jackass for the first time (it would not be the last.) Pope John Paul II had just died. Saddam Hussein was still alive. People were still gaming on the original Xbox, and the term “iPad” was thought to be a brand of feminine hygiene products.
So I suppose the short answer is: “a lot.”
One major occurrence has been the push by the president and first lady to combat the problem.
It takes a particular breed of small-mindedness to call the meddling do-goodery of a bored, unelected nanny-statist a “major occurrence.”
Their initiatives promote commonsense approaches like increased breast-feeding,
Thanks for making this uncomfortable for all of us by listing this first.
better diets and more exercise. Who could argue with that?
Yo!
The right, that’s who.
Proudly.
True to form, anything the Obamas support, no matter how innocuous or admirable,
What’s innocuous or admirable about an bored, unelected housewife attempting to regulate diets and usurp the rights of parents to determine the minutiae of their childrens’ lives?
the right reflexively rejects,
Except when he continues Bush-era promises on Gitmo detainee trials, Afghanistan policy, and extension of the Bush tax cuts (which he had to be dragged to kicking and screaming).
But yes, on the whole, the reflexive cynicism has served me well. Keep in mind his supporters are people who still think that Cash for Clunkers was an economically sound idea.
sometimes in malicious tones. Rush Limbaugh went so far as to comment on the first lady’s own weight as part of his criticism last month.
He’s entirely right. If you want to rail against childhood obesity by demanding a slow rollback of children’s freedom to eat as they and their parents please, you’d better be rail-thin. Michelle Obama is not fat, but she’s not thin either. The point isn’t that she’s out of shape. The point is that no one likes being told what to eat by someone with a higher BMI. On the other hand, she is perfectly qualified to fight anorexia and bulimia.
(I have to bite my tongue and bind my fingers to keep from pointing out the obvious hypocrisy.)
Might want to recheck the binding.
Saying that you’re holding back on taking a crack at Rush Limbaugh’s weight is exactly the same thing as taking a crack at Rush Limbaugh’s weight. I know because I use this backhander all the time. Usually when I can’t quite craft how I want to barb my prose and I’m feeling a little lazy. (It does happen; I can’t be “on” all the time.)
So with that as background, one can see why the Pew poll found that only 49 percent of whites, 45 percent of the elderly, 41 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of those who agree with the Tea Party movement also agreed with the majority on this question.
I’m confused. Is the criticism that conservatives are actually conservatives?
“Their Nanny State is trying to control our Kitchens!”
Is this your voice or “theirs?” If “theirs,” whose in particular? I’m not dense; I get what you’re trying to do here, but the obliqueness of the language just feels shoddy.
(Oh, like how the right’s Daddy State
SAT Prep:
Nanny : Daddy :: Statism : _______
A: ?
has tried for decades to control our bedrooms? I get it, but I digress.)
Yes, you very much digress. That sideswipe really only means something to people that agree with you. What exactly are you referring to? Abortion is legal and will remain so even if Roe v. Wade is repealed. Likewise with Sodomy and its Supreme Court validation. Gay marriage has absolutely nothing to do with what happens in the bedroom; it has to do with what happens at the county courthouse. Social conservatives (with whom I only nominally associate with) preach abstinence as a choice, not a mandate. It’s social liberals who promulgate the merits of giving taxpayer-funded condoms to kindergartners and then act shocked when thirteen year-olds start getting knocked up.
Yet do-gooders in various states and municipalities have banned everything from cigarettes to salt in the name of public health. The green police have bullied neighbors into sorting their garbage, changing their lightbulbs, keeping compost heaps, only flushing the toilet every third use, and generally lowering their standard of living. Likewise they’ve bullied companies into lower profitability because of a feel-good lie about saving the world.
The right objects even though, as the accompanying chart illustrates,
I’ll link to it, but you’re not missing much. http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/03/12/opinion/12blog_subg.html?ref=opinion
many of the more conservative states, particularly in the South, are also the ones that struggle the most with obesity.
Oh Jesus. This is going to be a blast. The chart shows that only half of the 22 conservative states that you pointed out are below the average in childhood obesity statistics. You also left out traditionally conservative states like Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia solely because 2008 was a lopsided win for Democrats. These states were almost certainly among those with below-average childhood obesity.
Now many would rightly argue that the data don’t delineate to what degree conservatives expressly contribute to the problem. And they’d argue that large percentages of minorities — who have higher obesity rates and are more Democratic — in many of those states could skew the numbers.
Valid points, all.
Fair points, but they don’t erase the anomaly.
What they do is point out that the anomaly is meaningless because you’ve failed to actually look critically at a disorganized jumble of poorly aggregated data.
Even when you strip away all minorities and only compare obesity rates among whites,
Is race the only demography that you normalized for? What about income level? Individual political persuasion? Regional comparisons? Did it not occur to you that all of these states are generally poorer than the national average? This is amateur hour.
Here’s a free lesson, Mr. Blow (fyi, if you had a doctorate, “Dr. Blow” would be on the all-time top 5 list of villains names for a spy parody gay porno.) If you actually want to find reasonable conclusions from this data, juxtapose regionally comparable states with divergent political stances. Semi-conservative New Hampshire versus Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. Highly conservative Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming against more liberal Colorado and New Mexico. Light-pink Indiana and Ohio against deep-blue Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
the highest rates are still
This is supposed to be the Times’ quantitative writer. Despite all of the lazy journalism and not providing the race-neutralized rates, he’s still obligated to present something that impresses the mathematically illiterate.
in West Virginia, Mississippi, Kentucky, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee.
So the best methodology you’ve got is to simply exclude minorities? Not only is that piss-poor analysis, it’s also kind of racist.
Even so, they’d say, there is no way to know how many of those whites are conservative.
Yes there is! There absolutely is. You just don’t care to find out because it would mean looking at more data, which you’re clearly not very good at in the first place.
Yes, but — since John McCain averaged 71 percent of the white vote in those states in 2008 — it is safe to assume that many are.
Yes, but you’re lazily substituting suppositions and poorly-conceived aggregates for statistical analysis.
Anyway, this really shouldn’t be a partisan issue.
WHAT?!?! You’ve spent the last 2 paragraphs and s multimedia data report crying that Republicans are hopelessly obese, despite it not being what the data shows at all! Now you’re saying that political persuasion is meaningless in this whole thing? I could have told you that from even a cursory look at the data.
This should be an all-hands-on-deck issue,
Jesus. No. You can’t provide data against the national average and then present it as an absolutely dire situation of national importance. Even if obesity went down 15% in every state in the Union, this column would be composed in exactly the same way.
including the hands of the government.
Go to hell, fatty.
And red states, many of which are now the biggest losers in the fight against childhood obesity, have the most to gain.
No, the biggest losers are those of us that have masochistically stuck with it until the end of this shallow, meaningless column with suspect analysis and poor writing. This was the biggest turd I’ve read since Mark Morford. Hang your head in shame. You are fucking terrible at your job.
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