Posts by giovanni tiso
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
So yes, there would seem to be something to worry about.
It's still not a condition, which is what saying it's a health problem means. Words being words and such. Didn't we agree as late as one page ago that this kind of distinction is sort of important? It either is or it isn't.
Do I think the rise in the rates of such lifestyle and nutrition-linked diseases as type 2 diabetes is a problem? Yes, I totally do. Should we do something about it? Absolutely. With all due haste. I just disagree on the thing we are doing and the social messages it sends.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
It doesn't give you pause for thought that a large number of public health researchers think otherwise?
Of course it gives me pause. They have their arguments, I have mine. There are very solid reasons, as Russell noted above, why we don't let medical researchers write social policy, although they should certainly help inform it. And frankly I would have far less of a problem with the sugar tax if we were also doing all the other things that researchers and public health advocates have been suggesting for years, chief of which is giving poor people more money.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Nobody ever died of smoking.
You are descending into actual idiocy.
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Obesity is not a health problem. You can argue it can lead to health problems - and it's far from uncontroversial - but not that it's a health problem in itself. Nobody has ever died of obese.
And guess what: calling it a health problem is precisely the kind of language myself and a few others are saying we really ought to avoid, lest we tell people their bodies are wrong. Which has lots of consequences of its own.
So, you know: troll yourself.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Obesity is a huge health problem.
It is?
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Although it wouldn’t be easy
That's just about my biggest problem with the sugar tax. That it's so easy. There's nothing so easy as taxing consumption, especially the consumption of things that poor people consume. A British journalist even went as far as touting the regressiveness of the tax as one of its chief virtues, given that type 2 diabetes is also regressive (in that it disproportionately affects poor people). In the same article, he noted without a hint of irony that other things could be tried as well and maybe further cutting benefits wouldn't help.
But that's precisely the political environment in which the sugar tax thrives, one in which tut-tutting paternalism is the only viable response - in the name of the fact that we have to do something - to an epidemic caused by corporate greed. The sugar tax was introduced in the UK at the same time as sweeping benefit cuts which, given what we know about incomes and nutrition, are guaranteed to lead to poorer diets and more health problems. And this is why we can't look at the measure in isolation. It's not just the sugar tax. It's the sugar tax and the far more obvious and workable things we won't do to alleviate poverty and improve health outcomes in a vast and growing sector of the population. Such as (in New Zealand) extending the in work tax credit to beneficiaries. Or, yes, regulating the industry: there is no reason why saying you can't put more than X amount of sugar in a bottle of flavoured water should be controversial or difficult, if we have the evidence to back that up. Do we really think people are going to buy corn syrup on the black market and spike their drinks with it?
A sugar tax could achieve some of its stated aims, I'm really not in a position to say otherwise. But it will almost certainly achieve another aim which I personally consider more harmful: reinforce the idea that poor health is a result of bad habits and choice. Which in turn leads down the road of refusing care to people who - in spite of us helping them by making bad drinks more expensive - insist on making those choices.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Which is true. But also cannot be a reason to do nothing.
This drives me actually batty. The request to tone down the fat hate is not tantamount to doing nothing. It's tantamount to toning down the fat hate.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to william blake,
The Office for Budget Responsibility expects firms to start stripping out excess sugar.
They also expect the tax to be passed on entirely to the consumer. Which they regard as a good thing.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to Danielle,
I think APP was really not prog rock, but yeah, they kept the "thematic album" aspect and it turns out it didn't mesh well with their huge evangelical Christianity-induced problem with women. More to the point, I really don't recall this being considered at all remarkable at the time.
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Hard News: Fix up, young men, in reply to B Jones,
Dadrock is full of misogyny and you don't even notice it, it's just part of the wallpaper.
One of my favourite/unfavourites is the Alan Parsons Project's album Eve, which as far as misogynist lyrics go is pretty revolting. Except I didn't know until I learned to speak enough English. I think about it now every time someone has a go at hip hop lyrics.