Targets

Those two brilliant professors Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have come up with a new study!
Many of our readers will remember Christakis and Fowler as the two loons who tried to launch a “secondhand fat” scare last year. That’s right, they say that “fat and skinny” friendships are ruled out by science: hanging around with fat people makes you fat, so you should ostracize hefty folks from your life, or risk losing your life when you become obese. This extends to speaking with round people over the phone! (We understand the photo at left was taken shortly after an obese telemarketer had called Fowler: he is now slimming down and, at the frightened and teary insistence of Christakis, has ordered his staff to screen all his calls according to Body Mass Index.)

What these two jokers really discovered with their cuckoo questionnaires, if anything, is that likes may attract to some extent. Now they have a new revelation! Smokers and non-smokers may also be subject to like attraction. The authors re-hash their fat and skinny nonsense in suggesting that tobacco abstainers must shun smokers for fear of contracting the unholy habit. Of course, once again they present their “findings” as “science,” in a journal that has, in its degenerate taste for low comedy statistics, become a parody of its once august self. This is sick humor, pathetic, and cruel by design. It’s simply self-fulfilling prophecy, and propaganda, for the Healthist mandate to “de-normalize” health heretics. To the Healthist perspective inciting social division is “progress.” Accompanying the new smoking study is an editorial by Doctor Steven Schroeder with a predictable title of Healthist self-congratulation: “Stranded in the Periphery – The Increasing Marginalization of Smokers”.

Long ago – when the good humor of the times could be personified by an iconic lean and round pair of lovable comedians – we enjoyed our diversity, disparaged the petty and arch sorts who sought to incite alarm and division, and valued the principle of mutual respect highly. These are the very precious things Healthism seeks zealously to destroy. Several of the usual socially divisive culprits are in evidence here. Funding for this tripe came from the National Institutes of Health, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and Big Pharma’s own Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Christakis hails from Harvard, Fowler from the University of California at San Diego, and the smarmily gloating Steven Schroeder from the University of California at San Francisco, the hateful home of anti-smoking Charlatan in Chief Stanton Glantz.

Mainstream media coverage, as is to be expected, is largely uncritical. We link here to a stridently goose-stepping ABC News article which gives passing notice to the commonsensical incredulity of smokers’ rights activist Maryetta Ables amidst an overriding tone of Healthist deference and approval. ABC quotes a notably disingenuous comment from a New York doctor named Steven Bernstein: “Stigmatize the smoke, not the smoker – these are still individuals we love, we work with.” Bernstein does not describe how he wishes to propagate loving stigmatization, he just goes ahead and shows how, characterizing his dearly beloved smokers as generally either drunk or crazy, and opining that “we need to target these populations.”

You see, sadistic Doctor Bernstein is rock certain his “tough love” is something smoker pigs surely need, and must want. Bernstein’s love objects are targets, in line with the view of all rapists, who know their victims really want it. Do you? We don’t know a single smoker who wants Healthist love. Not one of the dignified and self-respecting tobacco fanciers we know merits or will accept an ounce of humiliation and degradation. When justice is served, those rewards shall come to the deserving, the Healthists themselves. We are going to see that they get them in full measure. Until the day they do, believe us, we shall not stop fighting.

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