But what I've seen in the US has made me think differently. Most people who get fat eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like transgender, guns, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make fast food illegal again and force people into rehab? Should we require weight tests for homeless people to receive government help like CAAP payments?
People should be allowed to use drugs and be drug addicts. But if you're so drugged up that you shit in the street and attack other people, you should go to jail, just like a non-drug user who shits in the street or attacks people.
We shouldn’t treat the addictions all that differently.
This is where your analogy falls apart.
Most fat people are able to live like normal adults. They do not get fired from their jobs and lose their homes because they're camped out on the street eating McDonald's all day.
Many of them do willingly get help or treatment. There is a multi-billion dollar industry of helping people lose weight.
For starters there are the massive astro-turf campaigns that make a lot of noise. Beyond this, food regulation is catnip for the culture wars.
> Taxes on sugar‐sweetened beverages reduce consumption, but a strong public backlash holds that they compromise consumers’ liberty, freedom, and autonomy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6916313/#:~:tex....
Recall when there was a hint that Biden would limit hamburgers? (This idea was a bad extrapolation, nobody was proposing it as law - but nonetheless the mere mentioned brewed a holy-shit storm of foaming at the mouth outrage): - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/conservatives-beef-with-bi... - https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/politifact/202... - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/04/26/republicans...
Where? Not in the US it’s not & it’s much more common to do so in the rest of the world too.
Try buying proper raw milk cheese in the US for example.
Michael Bloomberg has entered the chat.
As an almost absolute rule, "nobody is saying" is false. Lots of crazies are saying it. Sometimes they're well respected politicians.
"But Bloomberg never did that!" Right, he did the first _step_ by targeting the sale of "large" sodas. But if you look at his actions on tobacco for ADULTS and the larger War On Drugs, it starts with selling, then buying, then possessing.
There are authoritarians who want to ban anything and everything you can imagine (plus many more). They start with what's popular and then move on to what is, crying "What about the children?!?!" and "Do you just want people to die?!?!" the whole time.
But what I've seen in the US has made me think differently. Most people who get guns eventually end up not being able to live like normal adults. And no one willingly goes to get help or treatment.
The problem will stick around because politicians care more about how things look. They'll say the numbers are wrong, or focus on wedge issues like LBGTQ or drugs, but they're not going to do anything on hard issues like this one.
Does anyone have ideas on what we should do? Should we make guns illegal and force people into rehab? Should we require background checks for homeless people to receive government help?
From a less snarky perspective, something absurd like 2/3rds of all gun deaths are suicide*. Which pretty definitively skews towards affecting one's own body over others.
EDIT: 54% in 2021, according to Pew Research [1]
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-...
We do need gun control but it is an absurdly tiny issue compared to drugs. Barely anyone dies in mass shootings with legally purchased guns, it’s up there with lightning strikes
We do need drug control but it is an absurdly tiny issue compared to cancer. Barely anyone dies in mass overdoses with legally purchased drugs, it’s up there with lightning strikes
