obesity in america

[swatter555]

Jean Baudrillard wrote this this in 1983

I would like to talk about an anomaly, that fascinating obesity such as you find all over the U.S., that kind of monstrous conformity to empty space, of deformity by excess of conformity that translates the hyperdimension of a sociality at once saturated and empty, where the scene of the social as well as that of the body are left behind.

This strange obesity is no longer that of a protective layer of fat nor the neurotic one of depression. It is neither the compensatory obesity of the underdeveloped, nor the alimentary one of the overnourished. Paradoxically, it is a mode of diappearance for the body. The secret rule that delimits the sphere of the body has disappeared. The secret form of the mirror, by thw which the body watches over itself and its image, is abolished, yielding to the unrestrained redundancy of a living organism. No more limits, no more transcendence: it is as the body were no longer opposed to the world, but sought to digest space in its own appearance.

These people are fascinating for their total oblivion of seduction. Furthermore, they no longer worry about it; thye have no complexes about how they live, insouciant, as if there was not even an ego ideal left for them. They are not ridiculou and they know it. They claim a sort of truth, and in fact they do display something of the system, of its empty inflation. They are its nihilist expression ... hypertrophied cellular tissue, proliferating in all directions. A fetal obesity, primal and placental: as if they were pregnant with their own bodies but could not be delivered of them. The body grows and grows without being able to deliver itself.

... It is not the obesity of a few individuals that is at stake, but that of a whole system, the obscenity of a whole culture. It is when a body loses its rule and its stage or scene that it reaches this obscene form of obesity. It is when the social body loses its law, its scene and its stakes that it also reaches the pure and obscene form we know it to be, its visible, all too visible, form, the ostentation, its investment and overinvestment of all spaces by the social - the spectral and transparent character of the whole remaining unchanged.

This obesity too is spectral - in no way heavy, it floats in the good conscience of sociality: it incarnates the formless form, the amorphous morphology of the social body: the ideal individual paradigm of reconciliation, of the closed and self-managed niche. These are no longer bodies, strictly speaking, but specimens of a certain cencerous inorganicity that now lie in wait for us everywhere.

I bet this guy loves the sound of his own voice. I hate having to re-read stuff because an intellectual would rather sound smart than communicate in an effective manner.

[roscowgo]

On the flip side, no one needs to be made fun of for being fat. That accomplishes nothing.

i disagree. as harsh as it sounds, insults are a form of motivation.

So this would be a good time and a wonderful thing to motivate you by calling you a raving smacktard?

[DirtyD86]

On the flip side, no one needs to be made fun of for being fat. That accomplishes nothing.

i disagree. as harsh as it sounds, insults are a form of motivation.

So this would be a good time and a wonderful thing to motivate you by calling you a raving smacktard?

you must be one of the fatties

[TechTMW]

Jean Baudrillard wrote this this in 1983

I bet this guy loves the sound of his own voice. I hate having to re-read stuff because an intellectual would rather sound smart than communicate in an effective manner.

Um.. He's French ... and a Philosopher... You do the math

[Nibblet99]

On the flip side, no one needs to be made fun of for being fat. That accomplishes nothing.

i disagree. as harsh as it sounds, insults are a form of motivation.

So this would be a good time and a wonderful thing to motivate you by calling you a raving smacktard?

you must be one of the fatties

Insults can work 2 ways, if someone takes pride in something and its insulted, generally the outcome is motivation to improve it.

If someone has no existing proactive motivation, an insult will more often then not compound the issue.

Without meaning to be harsh, I doubt many obese people take pride in being slimmer than some others. What you do manage to do is destroy any remaining self esteem they have.

In this issue, people need to be treated like goats, they need to be lead. They need to find an aspect of weight control that they enjoy, it maybe a simple sport like golf or badminton, or it may be that they get into the whole idea of counting calories. The trick is finding that one thing to build off

[fireguzzi]

im praying for nuclear holocaust

Yeah, that'll help.
You must have gotten beat up by fat kids.

fat kids cant fight worth a sh**

Do you fight a lot of fat kids?

ive fought several. not to stereotype them all, but in my experience they are slow as hell and tire quickly. the only thing they have working in their advantage is the fact that they can hit hard, and have plenty of padding on their bodies to absorb the impact of a punch. this is entirely off subject tho, lets get back on track

This is not off topic becuase it seems that from the very begining you are trying pretty hard to sound ignorant, and this is just another step in proving it.

It must have made you feel pretty good to fight several fat kids, who are slower then you. I just make that assumtion becuase you say you have fought several. Not one or two but several.

After this and some of your other posts I have read

if you think a picture of angelina jolie is "stupid" i have no choice but to think you are a homosexual.

I have come to the conclusion that you are completly ignorant, and intolerant of other people that are not like you.

and you never answered my question I asked you a long time ago.

I said that becuase I was misled by your avatar, I had no idea that it was Angelina jolie in that picture.

But if you think someone is gay becuase they think a picture of Angelina is stupid then you are a little close minded.

And so what if I was gay? Would you have a problem with that? It came across sounding that way to me.

Here is a little more of your ignorance....

you must be one of the fatties

Thats a valid point concerning the obeisity problem.

as harsh as it sounds, insults are a form of motivation.

Insults are a good way to destroy self esteem and MAYBE make someone do something about the way they look JUST to be socially accepted by ignorant people like you. Wich is not a real cure to the problem. It just makes it all that much worse becuase now they are trying to impress idiots who have nothing constructive to offer them.

[Loonette]

First off, this topic involved kids. Insulting kids for the behaviors that were instilled in them by their parents is awful. It's not like kids go out to do the grocery shopping. The kids aren't the ones putting the most unhealthy foods possible into the hot lunch programs.

And Sweet Tooth was absolutely right - phys ed programs are being cut because of Bush's "no child left behind" act. Nothing more. My kids' school just added another 1/2 hour to the school day, so that each year there will be more time to study for these ultra useless high-stakes standardized tests. Phys ed programs aren't being cut because of safety nazis, which CNF2002 has suggested, but because of time issues. If my kids' school hadn't added the extra 1/2 hour, guess what would have been eliminated? Recess!!

The fact is humans get themselves addicted to all sorts of coping mechanisms - obesity just happens to be one that is very visual to the rest of the world. I work with a young woman who is a cutter. She slices up her arms, but no one else can really see it. What about cigarette smokers?! Shouldn't we be worried about them?! Oh, but if a smoker looks pretty, then who the heck cares.

If folks want to get rid of the addictions of their kids, then they'll have to dig deeper into their own messed up lives. Growing up with alcoholic parents, I can tell you... until the parents fix their own lives, the kids get to suffer right along with them. Shaming a child can only aid in them feeling worse and worse, thus turning them more and more to their addictions. And until they are grown and out of the care (or neglect) of their parents, their options are going to be limited.

The schools could help with a better food program, but until we quit feeding our kids leftover government cheese and corn dogs, the food issue will always be bad. We've tried to get better food into our schools, but we're told that we already have the best public food program available. Our playground equipment is falling apart, but our village has a pretty good set of free sports available to the town kids (spring and fall soccer, winter basketball, and summer baseball). Aside of that though - it really is up to families to figure out the best way to live. Obviously some folks are lost. And that's sad.

One more note - I wish that there wouldn't be such generalizations around here, painting modern parents as a bunch of idiots who don't know how to raise kids (by the way, if we're so bad at raising kids, then do we get to blame our parents - and their parents?!). CNF2002 - if you do have kids (which I hope not), please... instead of telling us all how we're doing it wrong, let us know how you've managed so perfectly in raising your kids. This isn't the first thread where you've bashed parents - so please, share your expertise with us so we can finally fix the world's problems.

Cheers,
Loonette

[bok]

i disagree. as harsh as it sounds, insults are a form of motivation.

my flip response to this:

it sure motivated the Columbine kids

[GrandGT]

you're all fat.

[GrandGT]

did it work?