Extraordinary. The man is pathologically incapable of putting the party before himself. It’s a sense of entitlement bordering on mental illness.
One of the most disturbing social trends that has come up lately is, by far, the so called “body positive” movement. Although the “body positive” movement started as a reaction to an unattainable level of thinness being celebrated as an ideal, it has become a pernicious movement that will ultimately cause great swathes of preventable human misery. Where once, women who were a healthy size UK12/UK10 rightly objected to being told they were too fat in favour of women were a size UK6, now the poster girls for the “Body Positive” movement are size UK20/22/24 and higher.
If you are morbidly overweight then in 99.9% of cases there are only two possible explainations; either you are suffering from a serious eating disorder or you are a glutton. But, Sara, don’t you know that some people have problems which mean they have a tendancy to gain weight? Yes, I do. I have one. For most of this year I have been deeply ill with the autoimmune disease Hashimoto’s Hypothyroidism, which until it was diagnosed and treated was severe enough to be debilitating. I gained weight, but I was still not morbidly obese because I do not eat more than I need. Now that I’m on an appropriate course of treatment I’ve lost the weight. Conditions that make people irreversibly overweight are simply not that common.
Eating Disorders
If someone uses alcohol to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and call them an alcoholic. If someone uses drugs to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and call them an addict. If someone starves themselves to deal with their emotional problems – we stage an intervention and called them an anorexic. If someone eats themselves to obesity to deal with emotional problems – we’re not allowed to say anything because they’re special, fat, snowflakes, who unlike everyone else aren’t allowed to feel bad or take responsibility for their poor choice of coping mechanisms. I don’t think having a binge eating disorder or food addiction is something that should ever be acceptable, just as we don’t accept alcoholism or drug addiction. We have a word for being who facilitate alcoholics and drug addicts and it’s ‘enabler.’
Gluttony
If someone is greedy and has more wealth than they are perceived to need, column after column in the Daily Mail is dedicated to their folly complete with sneering comments underneath. “No one *needs* more than one house.” In fact, we argue endlessly on how we are going to redistribute the extra wealth these people have. Yet, if people eat more than they need, we say nothing. I’m a capitalist but I’m not a consumerist. It’s not inherently good to spend for the sake of spending and it’s not inherently good to eat for the sake of eating. By all means, if that’s what you want then feel free to eat all you want but don’t blame anyone else for it. And please, don’t insult our intellegence by supporting an entire movement designed to absolve yourself of responsibility for your own moral weakness.
The solution to both these contributing factors contains at least some measure of personal responsibility, if not all. A factor that has mysteriously disappeared from the obesity debate almost entirely. The entire ‘body positive’ movement has become a sad way of silencing people who dare to use a factual and accurate adjective. The consequences of this emotional fragility will be the misery and ill health of so many people, not to mention the strain on the already crumbling NHS. I don’t think fat people are inherently bad but I do think being fat is an inherently bad state of being. The “body positive” movement represents the worst of societal double standards. It operates on the grounds that the best way of not encouraging anorexia is to encourage being ‘plus size.’ That’s simply not true. I, for one, refuse to swap encouraging one eating disorder with encouraging another.
Somebody. Stop. This. Man.
I love the suggestion that the party constitution is sacrosanct. For years Lord Rennard aggregated his power and warped the constitution of the party to suit himself. Now Rock The Boat are using that same constitution to object to what they consider to be an inappropriate appointment to the FE. How come 200/50,000 members can call a conference on a whim? Because the constitution says they can. Basically. Alas, Lord Greaves exposes himself, once more, as a man who thinks a Chief Executive predating on candidates is ‘relatively minor.’
My favourite line this time is the ‘Alice in Wonderland’ line. Yes, it’s everyone else’s fault… None of this would have happened if the Lords, in their infinate wisdom, hadn’t elected someone so objectionable to the post in first place. This whole scandal is the fault of anyone except precious, fat, snowflake Chris Rennard, himself. The Rennard Conference was inevitable, really. Let me do the math for you all, once more.
Rennard = innocent + Rennard accusers = being credible =/= a satisfactory resolution to the matter.
That was never going to cut the mustard, was it? Lord Rennard may have no case to answer to the police but he sure as hell has a case to answer to the members of the party he claims to love. I’m 100% this move will fail. The reformers in the party never win.
In this article on CapX, Matt Ridley perfectly articulates why I, as a Libertarian, never initially saw myself as ‘on the right.’
From the Levellers of the 1650s to the Chartists of the 1830s, via the Boston tea party, the radicals on the “left” of British and American politics consistently demanded free trade and free markets as well as free speech and political reform. Richard Cobden, the great champion of free trade responsible more than anybody else for that extraordinary spell between 1840 and 1865 when Britain set the world an example and unilaterally dismantled the tariffs that entangled the globe, was a passionate pacifist, deeply committed to the cause of the poor, who was heckled as a dangerous radical when he first spoke in the House of Commons and who refused a title from a monarch he disapproved of. Hardly a conservative.
The rest of the article is well worth a read.
As someone who thinks being a LibDem is a less of political party and more of a collective mental illness this comment from Tony Greaves is a gift. Any doubt that the Lords are out of touch with the members should be dispatched forthwith.
The suggestion that just because someone is competent and talented that they get a free pass for their bad behaviour and should be trusted with a position of power is spectacularly offensive. That’s only a step away from rich, successful, smart people should be able to treat the little people however they want.
It’s been less than a year that Lord Rennard was at the centre of a major scandal. I’ll admit that Lord Rennard was not found guilty to criminal burden of proof. It is worth noting, however, that being unpleasant, creepy or vile is not illegal…
Lord Rennard upset enough women (who were found to be ‘credible’ by the investigation) that they felt the need to go to Channel 4 after they had unsatisfactorily tried to deal with the matter within the party. Like so much internal party dispute this unsatisfactory handling of the matter has only led to more upset.
He should have at least had the decency to let the wound heal a little bit more before putting himself forward to a position of power. (If your behaviour is deemed so unnacceptable that a group of people start a movement to eradict it you really should get the hint…) This shows poor judgement, a lack of sentivity, a lack of self-awareness and a level of self-entitlement that defies belief.
What I love most is the last line. In Tony Greaves minds it appears that activists objecting to an unelected group of people appointing someone to an otherwise elected ruling body of an organisation is tantamount to sanctioning ‘fuhrerprincip’ – it’s the irony that you don’t get anywhere else.