That is not only irrelevant it is also offensive. Your right to throw a punch ends at my nose. In the same way you don’t have a right to sexually harass people. That is not fascism, that is called living in a just society.

> Father: You see, son, we live in a liberal democratic society. The Democrats created sexual harassment law, which tells us what we can and cannot say in the workplace, and what we can and cannot do in the workplace.

> Kyle: But isn’t that fascism?

> Father: No, because we don’t call it fascism.

The implications of such governmental power are twofold: First, I’m not the type to tout out the slippery slope analogy, but the question of where it will end must be answered with a qualitative line drawn somewhere to protect myriad things many people consider personal freedom of choice.

The second is the assumption that the government not only can be trusted to know best, but act in our own best interest without undue inappropriate influence. If they have any rightful authority to do social engineering of any kind “for our own good” it assumes they have both the resources and ethics to consistently make decisions based on well-established professional opinion, and the ability to make them in spite of either special interests or even worse — as your accompanying image suggests — popular sentiment.

Therefore, I suggest that the ends may be noble, but the means questionable, and would posit alternative approaches such as education that take a few generations, but place the ultimate decision in the hands of the individual, not the state. And perhaps the means need not even be deliberate, as the flow of information has never been more free and available. Better yet, and to avoid state-funded propaganda for better or worse, perhaps all that need be done is concentrate education toward developing the skills to discern and comprehend such information available from all sources, popular and dissenting.

Two quick points: first, I think one should be careful of introducing martial metaphors into discussions of health, for reasons Sontag so eloquently described. Inevitably, it becomes impossible to separate the enemy as an entity from the body which “houses” the entity, and the enemy tends to become the person him or herself. Given the unbelievable stigma fat people encounter, I think there is even more reason to consciously eschew military metaphors with regard to fatness.

Second, as I’ve tried to document on MH Blog, it’s important to understand the tenuousness of the causal connections between fatness and poor health. The relationship is extraordinarily complicated, much, much more so than dominant narratives and representations typically allow for. Some fat people are, as best we can tell, quite healthy, and some are not. Risk factors are not equivalent to illness, and the relationship between fatness and poor health is nowhere near as certain as is often presumed.