Compulsory anhedonia

Frank Davis is disgusted by an article in the Independent, as am I.

Trigger warning: if you are usually upset by references to government overreach, the hypocrisy of the élite scum and the nanny state in general, you may want to go outside and fire a few rounds from a pump-action shotgun before reading further.

I will not quote the authoritarian filth in the government and quangocracy because they deserve no further publicity and I did promise to try to do something about my blood pressure. It’s all in the newspaper if you’re that way inclined:

Restaurants, cafés and pubs have reportedly been ordered to make their food and drink healthier or face being named and shamed for contributing to the obesity crisis.

My points in brief are these:

MPs enjoy a subsidised bar which is the only one in the country where smoking is still permitted. All of their lavish restaurants are subsidised. Specially-made sweets (‘House of Commons Fudge’ and ‘House of Lords Humbugs’, if I remember rightly) and unique Sobranie cigarettes in elegant boxes, gold-blocked and unsullied by antismoking advertising, adorn their subsidised gift shops. Anyone who tolerates scolding, nagging, hectoring and nannying from such self-seeking hypocrites as these is in my view far too tolerant.

Furthermore, anyone who tolerates the existence at all of such outrageous pseudoquangos as ‘Public Heath England’, never mind crediting the hoity-toity bossy bullying of their ‘chief executives’ (I can’t help wondering how much more than the prime minister this one is paid), is in my view tolerant to the point of clearly hazardous excess about which Something really ought to be Done.

However, I suspect that the point of diminishing returns has long since been passed, and that these measures will backfire.

Exhibit A: those silly little ‘traffic light’ anti-food markings which the unemployable middle class have forced upon supermarkets. Expected result: well-trained, docile sheep picks up package, sees that not all boxes are green, obediently puts it back and looks for one on which they are. Actual result: all goats know that in theory the most delicious item in the whole supermarket must be the one on which all five boxes are red, and search hopefully for it (it is called Baklava, and is usually available from Messrs. LidL).

Therefore, if a restaurant serves generous portions of fine food which discerning people like to eat, then though it may be named, it can hardly be shamed.

Listing those restaurants which boldly defy the government’s compulsory anhedonia (this is an expensive psychiatric word meaning ‘inability to experience pleasure’; I’m not sure I like it, so I’ve only hired it) will invoke a sort of culinary Streisand effect; by trying to put them out of business, the parasites will ensure that they hardly ever have a free table.

I look forward to the simplicity of calling visitors’ attention to the official recommendations rather than letting them waste time with ‘Trip Advisor’.

Follow *only* the yellow brick road

Longrider:

…why don’t we ban contact sports, motor sport, running, jumping, walking, or, indeed any activity that might, possibly, result in injury that will need treatment by our glorious socialised healthcare provider?

We will. And the ranks of the mighty public-sector unions will be swelled by the new army of enforcers.

There has been talk (I’m damned if I’ll rummage for hours in the fascists’ loathsome websites for a link, frankly) of not allowing anyone off the public highway at all –  and thus into places from which they might have to be expensively rescued – until they have been on an approved course, have bought approved insurance, and have submitted to being ‘guided’ in approved groups by an approved official.

And this is about walking. Everything else that Longrider mentions is already doomed.

Another indication of the official attitude to being out without one’s minder is the fact that despite receiving regular new covers, now featuring cheap stock-shots of po-faced self-righteous path-wreckers on mountain-bikes, Ordnance Survey maps have not been redrawn or updated for decades, and some are now dangerously out of date.

Perhaps the idea is to wean the public off the idea that they are allowed to know what is between the roads programmed into their satnavs, in case they might have the temerity to suppose that they are permitted to go there.