Douche of the Week

Monday 4 June 2012 - Filed under Uncategorized

We don’t honor the douche of the week very often, mostly because on your average week, it’s a tough call as to who’s douchier. But this week it’s no fucking contest as to who the biggest douche is. Michael Tomasky of Newsweek, take it away.

There’s only one way to say something like this, and it’s loud and proud and without apology: I wholeheartedly support Mike Bloomberg’s war on sugar. It’s unassailable as policy. Refined sugar is without question the worst foodstuff in the world for human health, and high-fructose corn syrup is little better. We are a fat country getting fatter and fatter, and these mountains of refined sugar that people ingest are a big part of the reason. The costs to the health-care system are enormous, so the public interest here is ridiculously obvious. Obesity is a killer. Are we to do nothing, in the name of the “liberty” that entitles millions of people to kill themselves however they please, whatever their diabetes treatments costs their insurers? We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the public good, God bless him, I say.

It’s a policy designed to guide people toward a certain kind of behavior. This talk of “freedom” is absurd. No one’s freedom is being taken away. When the rule goes into effect, probably by September, assuming the city’s board of health votes it through (it’s appointed by the mayor), New Yorkers will still be able to buy these beverages. And those who really feel that they will perish unless they have 32 ounces of Mountain Dew Code Red can simply buy two. Nothing is being banned, and no one’s being arrested.

Are bacon-cheeseburgers next? As a practical matter, no. Sodas are an easy target because there is nothing, nothing, nutritionally redeeming about them. But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.

[. . .]

One day, if the country comes to its senses, we’ll reverse the obesity trend and, just as we now chuckle at the prevalence of smoking on Mad Men, we’ll say, “Can you believe people used to peddle this treacle in 64-ounce doses?” We will not only have done something about obesity. We’ll have won an important victory over Libertarianism Gone Wild, a far bigger threat to society than even Sunkist Orange.

At what point beyond 16 ounces, if I might dare ask, does soda stop being just a drink and transforms in to a liberty cup full of the drink of death? At what point between 4 and 8 ounces does a burger become an instrument of death brought forth by the libertarian hordes?

Fuck you, Mike Tomasky. If you don’t want a big soda because they are so sick, order a fucking small, you piece of shit.

2012-06-04  »  madlibertarianguy