Weight for it . . .

I spend my mornings catching up with various things. And thinking. The older I become it feels like the fewer and fewer insights I have. I think I’m transitioning into Joe Biden as each day pushes me further and further down the Grand Canyon of Confusion.

I am, I think, a human male. Although no professional biologists were present at my birth so my sex and species were only assigned by amateurs. It’s entirely possible I’m an armadillo. I couldn’t tell you what gender I am because I have spent precisely zero seconds thinking about it. I have, however, spent a lot of time thinking about ‘gender’ as a concept and have come to the conclusion it’s one of those concepts like phlogiston - of no real utility or validity.

Asking myself what gender I am would be like asking myself how my phlogiston levels are doing that day.

Yet an astonishing amount of time and effort is currently being devoted to the whole concept of gender. More and more I find myself asking “why”?

It’s not just gender - everything seems up for grabs in a world that has gone off the deep end. The feely-safey movement has taken hold in all sorts of ways. Whilst there’s no official ‘religion’, as such, it all feels very religious in character.

I recently watched Mauler’s 6 hour long review of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Mauler, with his usual wit and insight, destroys the movie scene by scene. I know that for these sorts of movies one usually has to switch the noggin off, but for Doc Strange 2 you have to remove your brain and send it somewhere safe to prevent system failure.

I am a huge fan of Marvel phase 1 to 3 as well as being a huge fan of Doctor Strange. I used to buy Thor, Doctor Strange and Hulk comics when I was but a young armadillo. Seeing these characters on screen was awesome, even though not all their movies have been.

This latest Doc Strange film was pretty. Lots of flash bang wallops and great visuals - but the actual story and writing was astonishingly bad and nonsensical. Yes, I know the whole premise of a world in which, for example, Thunder Gods twat things with a magic hammer might itself be described as somewhat nonsensical - but the plot and writing of the latest Doc Strange movie had more holes and inconsistencies in it than a CDC sponsored covid announcement.

I’m beginning to think governments around the world hired the same scriptwriters.

So much effort seems to be expended on ensuring that people feel ‘safe’; safe from covid, safe from climate change, safe from white supremacy, safe from misinformation, safe from toxic masculinity, safe from themselves, safe from Ben Shapiro, . . .

Safe from those terrible opinions that howwibble and wacist white supwemacists have.

Who the hell, I wonder, is writing this script?

I hope this pic is genuine. I hope someone in the label design department was yanking our chains with this. But even if it is a photoshop, and it almost certainly is, it does say rather a lot about current trends

It’s impossible to know what’s real and what’s parody these days - and that in itself is a worrying thing.

And when you realise that in the UK causing offence is taken very seriously, it doesn’t seem quite like it’s just a bunch of over-sensitive wingnuts on Twitter

Of course, the police turned a blind eye to the rape of thousands of children in the UK because arresting the people responsible might have increased racial tensions. They take saying something hurtful to someone seriously. They don’t appear to take the actual rape of children quite so seriously.

This mandated and coerced ‘compassion’ we’re all supposed to have in the name of ‘safety’ and being ‘nice’ is just a Trojan Horse. It’s the pretty makeup on an ugly and dangerous trend. We often talk about “clown world”, but what sort of clown are we talking about?

The stranglehold on “information” that governments are manoeuvring for is of the utmost concern. We’ve already seen ample evidence that governments have a quiet word with the ‘private’ Big Tech companies to ensure that a consistent message is portrayed. We’ve seen the concept of “misinformation” being heavily promoted and any brief perusal of Twitter should be enough to convince you that many people now are wholly supportive of the notion that “misinformation” should be censored and that the people posting it should be kicked off the platforms they use.

As has been often pointed out, the existence of ‘misinformation’ implies the existence of some ‘correct’ information. And, of course, the best people to sanction this sacred information are governments.

I recently saw this email from the Babylon Bee. It was a request for support, but the content is utterly chilling.

. . . my friend and colleague Kristen Waggoner stood strong in the face of a student mob at Yale Law School. As General Counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom, she was a member of a panel of speakers invited to discuss how attorneys across the ideological spectrum can come together and support free speech.

Future lawyers, judges, legislators, and corporate executives filled the room. But they chose to bang on walls and call Kristen and others names instead of listening to a different point of view.

This wasn't just a protest. It was students at the nation's top-ranked law school using bullying tactics to shut down an event - ironically - on the importance of free speech. Kristen and the other panellist had to be escorted to safety by police.

This religious disease, this anti-free speech virus, is not just confined to the professionally offended users of Twitter. This was Yale Law School. Let that sink in for a moment. This new intolerance, this new religious inquisition, is the real pandemic. And it should worry us all - greatly.

Look at the number of opinions that, whilst not technically proscribed, are or have been de facto proscribed (or soon to be so) if they are deemed to be either ‘hateful’ or ‘misinformation’

• criticism of BLM

• criticism of covid policy and measures

• criticism of the ‘vaccines’

• criticism of gender ideology

• criticism of climate paranoia

• criticism of DIE programs

• criticism of border controls

• criticism of overweight people

It’s not so much that any of these things (and others) are legally proscribed (yet), but we all know that we have to be very careful indeed in how we express ourselves publicly on these matters - and that isn’t right. Of course all this is being promoted by governments. They get to be the ‘good guys’, to piss their platitudes over everyone, whilst rubbing their hands with glee (and in the case of at least one UK MP, rubbing their genitals during a parliamentary session, if the reports are accurate) at the level of self-governance they’ve been able to achieve.

But, but, but, they sanctimoniously whine, people need to be protected, don’t you know?

Protected from what? From crippling energy price rises? From looming poverty and real hardship? From a continual erosion of our rights and privileges?

Out of our hands, mate. That’s those things like Poo-tin and the CronyVirus wot dun it.

But we can “protect” you from misinformation.

Gee, thanks.

And now the explanation you’ve all been weighting for since the title. One, just one, of the very wonky trends that have emerged with baffling speed and ferocity over the last decade has been the notion that a body shape that can most accurately be described as “beached whale” is beautiful and desirable and nothing to be ashamed of.

I’m not quite in the beached whale category yet, more of a beached porpoise, and, yes, I’m fucking ashamed of myself. I have yet to get to the point where my shame overpowers my laziness and gluttony, but I’m close to that point.

There’s nothing attractive or desirable in being too overweight. Except if you have a fetish for those things - in which case, more power to your pizza. For the majority of us, however, there’s nothing at all to celebrate in nearly passing out when you bend down to tie your shoelaces.

I would also note in passing that whilst it’s easy to find celebratory pictures of any quantity of female lard squeezed into a bikini these days, it’s not quite so common to find similar quantities of man lard constricted by speedos being held up as exemplars of “masculine beauty”. Curious that, isn’t it?

The point here is that all of this push towards seeing very overweight people as “healthy” and “beautiful” when they are anything but, has come about because we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings. Lardbuckets, like me, apparently need to be protected from hurtful comments.

I don’t want to be protected from them. I want more of them. Then maybe my shame level will exceed my indolence level.

The ‘body-positivity’ movement serves as a microcosm, or perhaps a macrocosm, of the things that are going wrong. The pushing of a particular point of view as “canon” and silencing and berating any and all who cannot manage to force-feed themselves the nonsense is characteristic of all these current trends.

Mind you, the body-positivity movement does provide at least one legitimate use of the term “taking up space”.

The feely-safey religion needs a reformation. Just like my lard-arsed body.

And I’ll end with a dad joke. Nothing at all to do with anything - but it made me howl with laughter.

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