Running with scissors.

This is a conversation I had in response to a review I placed on stumble upon. I find that quite often if I buck the trend as far as what I thumb up or down people feel the need to message me personally. I used to post them separately on my webpage but that got time consuming, this place is as good as any.

The review in question can be found here.

The author of the statements quoted can be found here.

And I want to thank him for the effort and conversation, even if he is a little misguided.

He begins...

“what in the world does wishing to be young and not fat have anything to do with the military?”

Nothing. What I said was that making it seem like potential injury is somehow cool on the assumption that it’s merely a risk is the same logic used to make uniformed idiots feel safe, as I explained in the article. The fact is someone usually will be shot in war, and someone will eventually break their neck on the playground. Safety innovations are not something to be made fun of, especially if it is your child that has to live out his life in a chair as a result of some guys rosy nostalgia, and cavalier attitude towards life.

The difference between you and me is I don’t need to actually have experienced that horror to have compassion for my fellow man.

“Today we live in a world were kids are becoming more and more obese, why?”

Probably the presence of HFCS and other industrial toxins in the diet, and the general social apathy of the populace, which I might add is contributed to by the cavalier attitude with regard to health issues this very article is based on. Look at diabetes rates, it’s not merely lack of exercise. Your world view is simplistic and incorrect.

“they're eating mcdonalds all the time and sitting around playing videogames. Playgrounds are built to encourage physical activity which is healthy.”

They eat McDonalds because it's cheap and parents don’t have time to fix real meals because the economy is so bad that both parents have to work full time on top of the fact that we demand so much of our children via school that they have almost no down time. And when they do we don’t let them go anywhere unless it’s to wear a short skirt and wave pom poms for the pleasure of balding middle age coaches, or beat each other up at some mindless ball tossing ritual based on sexual tension.

You know nothing of our society. You’re as blind and indoctrinated as the rest of them. But your children won't be. They'll get one too many passes with the metal wand on the way to history class and start asking the dangerous questions. Like, what does football have to do with math, what does patriotism have to do with chemistry, and what happens if we all say no more all at once?

“its not some sort of indirect way of recruiting kids into the military or something crazy like that”

You misunderstand the purpose of education in industrialized societies. What part of pledging allegiance to a flag and mandatory attendance being superfluous to knowledge acquisition is hard for you to grasp?

“limiting the ways kids CAN excerisize during recess or whatever (some schools actually tried eliminating recess) will only increase the amount of fat, lazy, obese people who do nothing but sit in front of the TV all day being indoctrinated by TV programming.”

Like putting children on human hamster wheels is any less mentally demeaning than plopping them in front of the propaganda box. For one, laziness is not a bad thing, and two fat is largely a dietary and genetic issue which stems directly from public tolerance of social abuses such as toxins in the food supply and the ultra high cost of non-toxic foods. We’re sheep because school trains us to be that way, and when we grow up we line up for our feed no matter what’s in it.

“and i see you like BDSM and yet you're complaining about abuse?”

Uhh, what part of “consenting adult” is unclear?

50$ says you don't even consider my position thanks to social inertia, and a million says I don't care one way or the other what you think since I got this grand opportunity to tear down the ideas you defend.

Thank you for the material, feel free to comment below :)