Tag: gerry brownlee

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Fatties destroying the New Zealand Defence Force

Oh, sweet merciful mother of God:

The Defence Force has announced it will restrict sugary fizzy drinks and deep fried food as it emerges more than a quarter of its personnel are ‘obese’.

This story frustrates me so. I’ve criticised the use of BMI as a “health” metric for years, and the response is always the same: “Oh, but it’s a good measurement for populations as a whole.”

It simply makes no sense. If a metric doesn’t tell you anything useful about someone on an individual basis, what can it possibly tell you on a population-wide basis?

It might provide some information on how the population’s average-weight-divided-by-square-of-height is changing over time, but that’s equally meaningless in terms of “health”. Different ethnic groups have different body shapes (and different health issues). Older populations have different body sizes to younger populations (and different health issues). Why not measure those things when we’re talking about how healthcare costs are changing over time?

And what the apologists ignore is this: BMI is most frequently used against individuals. Immigration, access to certain types of healthcare, forcing fat people to buy two plane tickets: they target individuals for demeaning, inadequate, even harmful treatment, every time.

The supreme irony is that I’ve often challenged BMI-is-good-for-populations by saying “but how can it be a good measurement if you can’t even say for certain whether a high-BMI population is [a group of lazy fatties] or [a group of weightlifters]?”

And there is sneering and eye-rolling about how unlikely it is that NZ’s population-wide BMI is going up because more of us are weightlifting.

Well, here you go: a quarter of our military personnel are obese, compared to a third of the NZ population overall (according to the Ministry of Health, which also thinks BMI is good for anything). That’s a much smaller gap than you’d assume if you remember that the military is meant to be younger and fitter and the general population older and More Evil less fit.

(Of course, our military, especially our Army, is also a lot browner than the general population – remember what I said about different ethnic groups and different body shapes?)

We can either assume that our military training has really gone off the rails, or – hold onto your hats – that BMI, as an individual measurement, as a group measurement, is totally worthless for determining anything at all.

And next time you see an article screaming blue about how our “obesity rates” are “out of control”, don’t picture a gross, headless fat person holding a burger. Picture Richie McCaw, whose BMI, at 30, means he’s being counted as one of the terrible fat people destroying our health system.

~

PS: And of course, Stuff just couldn’t resist including a picture of Minister of Defence Gerry Brownlee, because get it, LOL, he’s fat.

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Improve your lexicon: fat politicians

I’m on a never-ending quest to improve my vocabulary – both by expanding it, and by getting rid of some of the more objectionable, oppressive language which we all use without thinking.

But change can be difficult. The best solution I’ve found is to brainstorm alternative words in advance and think good and hard about them. Hence, these weekly posts – as much a tool for me as for anyone else!

I’m not perfect. Sometimes we can easily see why one word is objectionable, but the alternatives which immediately spring to mind may also have bad connotations which we’re not aware of. I may screw up during this process, but I’ll do my best to fix it when I do. All any of us can do is keep trying and keep learning.

ETA: Swear to god, I had this post scheduled before I saw the article which inspired this morning’s post! The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

Anyone who’s known me for any length of time knows how much it irks me when people attack rightwing politicians like Gerry Brownlee or Paula Bennett by going straight for the fat jokes.

I have so many objections to this kind of thing. Fat stigma is a real thing which causes serious harm to people. And politicians like Brownlee and Bennett are so easy to criticise for things which actually are bad, instead of their body size!

The thing is, it’s not just their body size. In our society, which takes a faaaaaairly negative view of fat people, fatness is a code for all kinds of terrible character traits – as Cynara Geissler puts it, “visual shorthand for lazy, undisciplined, incapable and out of control”.

And because many of those traits – laziness, greediness, out of control – align with what we assume about fat people, it becomes far too easy to see, say, Gerry Brownlee’s size as proof of his arrogance, bullishness, pushy-ness, and power-grabbing.

Yet they’re also attributes we might associate with, say, the Prime Minister – except he’s not fat. But fortunately our culture also associates many of those traits with being of Jewish descent, which at best makes it a little cringe-inducing the way many cartoonists whack a great big hooked nose on him in their caricatures.

That’s not a coincidence. After all, only 100 years ago diabetes – which we now associate very firmly with fat people who make “poor lifestyle choices” – was considered “a Jewish disease”.

This examining-our-unconscious-linguistic-biases thing is quite the rollercoaster ride, isn’t it?

And if none of those reasons convince you, I offer this: calling people “fatty” is so primary school, isn’t it? Let’s call people proper grown-up names, if we must.

So, alternatives to “fat” (or whatever other clever word you were going to use which means “fat”) which are perfect for rightwing politicians who oppress the vulnerable:

arrogant, vindictive, bigoted, anti-democratic, bullying,
dogwhistling, boorish, ungallant, uncaring, despotic
oppressive, individualistic, exploitative, sneering, self-serving

If you’ve got any suggestions of words to cover, pop them in a comment or tweet me!

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QOTD: Pratchett on privilege

The parents of two pupils from St Bede’s College got a court injunction so their sons could row in a competition. The school had cut them from the team after they were given formal warnings by Police and Aviation Security about jumping on the baggage conveyor at Christchurch Auckland Airport.

Which just brought to mind a quote from the Terry Pratchett novel Night Watch:

“That’s the way it was. Privilege, which just means private law. Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.”

In a post-9/11 world where you aren’t even allowed to joke in the line for passenger screening, the rules clearly don’t apply to the sons of rowing commitee chairmen from decile 9 integrated schools.

Or Cabinet Ministers.

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Political donations and conflicts of interest

Danyl has some thought-provoking comments about the Herald’s analysis of electoral donations:

MPs and other political insiders get really upset if you suggest to them that this is all basically political corruption. Partly this is down to their massive egos. MPs don’t think it’s strange that corporations just give them huge sums of money. Are they not extraordinary individuals? Have they not been chosen by destiny to lead the nation? Related to that is cognitive dissonance. The system around political donations might look totally corrupt, but MPs all know that they personally are not corrupt – how dare anyone suggest that? – so Tallys must just be giving free money to the MPs that happen to sit on the Select Committee that oversees and regulates their industry because they personally believe in those individual MPs.

A lot of it looks pretty dodgy, especially National’s apparent funnelling of larger anonymous donations through party HQ, and the Talleys’ enthusiastic support of people making the laws which affect the Talleys’ business.

But it also led me to reflect on some of the criticisms – from the left and right alike – of Andrew Little and Carmel Sepuloni’s decision that she give up the social development portfolio temporarily while her mother faces charges of benefit fraud.

The same kind of arguments that Danyl outlines were in play – everyone knows Sepuloni is a person of integrity! How can she be held responsible for the actions of her mother? No one would dare accuse her of impropriety!

This is on the one hand rubbish – just look (or don’t!) at how furiously Cameron Slater, of all people, defended Sepuloni, with the exact same arguments. Wouldn’t you know it, just a few days later we got a well-timed story about Sepuloni asking the Minister questions about benefit fraud. Slater’s fury probably has a lot less to do with Due And Fair Process and a lot more to do with whatever additional attack lines he had queued up.

And on the other hand, it’s rubbish again, because that’s not how conflicts of interest work. People in positions of influence don’t get to walk around saying “I’m making decisions about something I have a personal stake in, but I’m a good person so it’s not a problem!” or “But I haven’t done anything corrupt yet so I can’t have a conflict of interest!”

It’s all there in the name: when your interests are in conflict, you have a problem. And the unfortunate reality of our society is that people are judged by what their family members do – otherwise stories about Hone Harawira’s nephew’s conviction or John Key’s daughter’s art would never get the headlines they get. And those aren’t issues where you can make any kind of case that the famous person “involved” has done anything dodgy.

But it does look dodgy as hell when Talleys are pouring money into the primary production select committee. It does look dodgy as hell when Amy Adams as Minister for the Environment is overseeing freshwater management changes which just happen to massively increase the value of her land, or Gerry Brownlee denies there’s a problem with rental prices soaring in Christchurch, where he happens to own four properties.

And it would have been child’s play for the right to make it look dodgy as hell for Sepuloni to stay on as social development spokesperson. They already had the ratf*cking machine up and running and ready to go.

We can’t give our people a free pass just because they’re our people and we know they’d never do anything wrong. And the good ones who have integrity – like Carmel Sepuloni – don’t expect us to.

It’s a temporary situation for Sepuloni, and she’s continuing to do damn fine work in the meantime. The issue of political donations – and how much our political system is influenced by the people with the most money to spare – is going to be far more difficult to change.